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Playing Machiavelli in the Middle East in “Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator”

As long as I’m on a kick of writing about old DOS strategy games too good to be left languishing in abandonware limbo, I’ll throw in one more: 1990’s Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator.

Conflict MEPS: Title screen

Conflict MEPS: Title screen

Conflict took the wrenching, intractable problems of the modern Middle East and turned them into a cracking little strategy game.

The basic premise was simple. You, the player, start the game as a newly-elected Prime Minister of Israel in the distant future of 1997 (!). In this role, you have to guide your country in its relations with the other nations of the region, particularly those which share a land border with Israel — Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt.

Your goal: to bring down the governments of all four of those states.

Conflict MEPS: User interface

Conflict MEPS: User interface

As you may have deduced from the description above, Conflict‘s worldview is unapologetically driven by Realpolitik. There is no room in this game for peaceful co-existence between Israel and its neighbors; they may get along for a time, but that is generally only to provide a breathing space in which they can rest and re-arm before going for the jugular once again. The smiles and handshakes only last until one side or the other feels strong again; then the tanks and fighter-bombers come out.

As PM, you have three basic sets of tools at your disposal for dealing with your neighbors:

  • Diplomatic: You have diplomatic relationships with all the region’s nations; not just your immediate neighbors, but also more distant countries like Libya, Iraq and Iran. You can use these relationships to make friendly or hostile overtures, with the hopes of improving your relationship if you don’t want to fight that country just yet or souring it if you do.
  • Covert: You also have relationships with various “opposition parties” in each country. (I put “opposition parties” in scare quotes there, because it’s not like these groups are out to win any elections. They want to overthrow the goverment and take control of it for themselves.) Few of these groups are strong enough to directly challenge their nation’s government on their own. However, with sufficient supplies of Israeli arms and cash, who knows?
  • Military: A big part of your responsibility as PM is managing the size and disposition of Israel’s military resources. Israel is a small nation, with a small military budget; you can only afford to buy so many M1 Abrams tanks or F-111 fighter bombers per month, making building up your military a long-term process. And a war with one of the big regional powers like Egypt or Syria can burn through all that hardware fast. Still, in a dangerous world, having a strong military is a sound investment; and when it comes to toppling your neighbors, invading them and seizing their capital city is the gold standard.

The strategy of the game comes in how you balance each of these factors month by month in your relations with other nations in the region. Maybe you notice Lebanon has become unstable all on its own, so you choose to just maintain friendly diplomatic relations with their government while quietly arming the opposition. But meanwhile, Syria has started building up its tank forces, so you start investing in anti-tank helicopters so you’re ready in case they make a move against you; but that means Egypt, with whom you have friendly relations, sees you building up your own forces and starts to wonder if you’re the one with designs against them, so they start their own military expansion, just in case…

Conflict MEPS: Give the gift of tanks

Conflict MEPS: Give the gift of tanks

Beyond the three core gameplay elements above, the game also throws in some additional mechanics to liven things up and keep them interesting. Weapons, for instance, can be purchased from any of four sources — the U.S., the U.S.S.R, Britain, and France — and none of these vendors will offer you the really good stuff at the outset; you have to demonstrate you’re a good customer by buying plenty of their bargain-bin items first. And of course, buying from one vendor can affect your relations with the others; if you spend years buying nothing but Russian hardware, the Americans and British will eventually shut you out of their marketplaces, and vice versa. (The French, on the other hand, will happily trade with anyone.) This can make life difficult if, say, your primary source of weapons decides that your invasion of Jordan is unjustifiable and hits you with an arms embargo.

Conflict MEPS: Nuke shopping

Conflict MEPS: Nuke shopping

The game also lets you invest, if you wish, in a program to develop nuclear weapons. These programs are expensive, and can take years to show results — a long time in a game where each turn is a month long. And money you funnel towards nukes is money you can’t spend on conventional weapons, which weakens your military posture. But if you manage to actually build one, your position in the game changes overnight — nobody’s going to invade a country with nuclear weapons. Except a country with nuclear weapons of its own, of course. And your opponents can invest in their own nuclear programs, just as you can.  If your intelligence services spot another country working on a nuke program, you can use your air force to try and bomb it out of existence before it bears fruit, a la Operation Opera. But the success of such a raid is not guaranteed, and a failed raid can leave you with a furious neighbor on the verge of having its own nuclear arsenal. (And, of course, your neighbors can try to bomb your reactors, too.)

Conflict MEPS: Fine, here's your freaking homeland

Conflict MEPS: Fine, here’s your freaking homeland

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, you have to deal with the Palestinians and the United Nations as well. The “Palestinian Problem” will periodically flare up, requiring deployment of troops in the West Bank to tamp it down — troops who thus can’t be available to defend your borders or fight your wars. And the U.N. constantly wants you to sign agreements to limit the size of your military and make concessions to the Palestinians — agreements that can buy you better relations with the world, but at the cost of reducing your freedom of action in the region.

The beauty of Conflict is the way a simple design and set of rules interact to create real, compelling stories each time you play. Maybe in one game you build up a public image as a man of peace, giving the Palestinians their homeland and conspicuously abstaining from military action, while quietly overthrowing all your neighbors via covert action. In another, you might find yourself locked in a stalemated, years-long war with Egypt, only to be delivered just before your own government falls by a sudden invasion of your enemy by the Libyans. Or maybe you’re the PM whose nuclear ambitions drive an atomic arms race that ends with every capital in the region a pile of radioactive ash. Each game provides a different experience, a different story.

Which isn’t to say that Conflict is perfect. Like most games of its era, its interface can be opaque and hard to learn at first, though unlike many of its peers it at least provides colorful graphics and an interface that works equally well with keyboard or mouse. And its design is obviously highly stylized, meaning that it provides more of a Middle Eastern-flavored Machiavellian fantasy than an educational look as the region as it actually is or was.

Still, it plays fast, offers lots of interesting choices, and is generally a blast to play. It’s a game I still play today, 25 years after my father bought a copy for me to play on a computer that had less processing power than the smartphone in your pocket. That’s the true test of a game design — the technology used to implement it may age and fade, but does the design itself stay compelling? Conflict did, and does.

UPDATE (November 7, 2019): Thanks to the wizards at the Internet Archive, you can now play Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator right in your Web browser.


Choreographing Armageddon in “Bravo Romeo Delta”

As long as I’m writing about interesting DOS strategy games that have fallen into abandonware, I’ll say a few words for one that appears to more or less have been forgotten by even the Internet: Bravo Romeo Delta.

Bravo Romeo Delta title screen

Bravo Romeo Delta title screen

It’s a simulation of World War III, or at least of one very specific World War III that thankfully never happened: a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

(The name comes from a bit of Cold War military lingo; for many years the US’s strategic plan for fighting a nuclear war concentrated on blunting an attack by Soviet ground forces, retarding their ability to reconstitute those forces by building weapons and other military materiel, and disrupting the will of the Soviet people to fight on. In standard military fashion, this list of objectives eventually became an acronym, BRD, which in the phonetic alphabet Western militaries use to avoid communications confusion would be spelled out “Bravo Romeo Delta.”)

The history of Bravo Romeo Delta is difficult to reconstruct today. Very little information is available about it online, save that it was published in the early ’90s, there was also a version of the game for the Commodore Amiga, and that it sold poorly enough that a few years later the developers of the Amiga version were looking to sell the rights and source code for the game to anyone willing to buy them. Whether the Amiga version or the MS-DOS version came first is unclear, as is whether the developers of the Amiga version (Frankenstein Software) also did the MS-DOS version or handed it off to another company to port instead.

It looks like there was at least enough interest in the game to warrant a follow-up/expansion, as the version I have is subtitled “Version 1.1: Commonwealth Commander.” In the original version of the game, you apparently played as the commander of America’s nuclear forces; in version 1.1, you play as his Russian counterpart. (The “Commonwealth” in “Commonwealth Commander” refers to the collective name the various member states of the old Soviet Union settled on for themselves after the USSR collapsed, the Commonwealth of Independent States.)

The objective of a game of Bravo Romeo Delta is pretty simple: you, as the commander of all your nation’s nuclear forces, have to put together a series of nuclear strikes strong enough that it prompts your enemy to surrender, while avoiding making it so strong that it prompts the enemy to drop his entire nuclear arsenal on your head. You are, in other words, fighting what the books call a “limited nuclear war,” not a complete, throw-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-at-’em Armageddon.

(Interestingly, from what I’ve read of the original version, it sounds like both it and the “Commonwealth Commander” version start with the USSR firing the first nuclear shot. I can’t confirm this since I’ve only played the CC version, but if it’s true, it’s ahistorical; for many decades, NATO doctrine for a war with the Soviets revolved around the idea that the West would be the first side to reach for its nukes, because doing so would be the only way NATO could stop the Soviets’ much larger conventional army and air force from rolling over Western Europe.)

Bravo Romeo Delta: nice knowing ya, DC

Bravo Romeo Delta: nice knowing ya, DC

Which isn’t to say that Armageddon can’t happen in Bravo Romeo Delta. In fact, it happens quite often. It’s the main way you can lose a game; you miscalculate, throw a little too many warheads at a few too sensitive targets, and the computer player on the other side says “screw it” and hits you with everything it’s got. Then you have no choice but to hit him with everything you’ve got in a desperate bid to flatten his missiles and bombers and submarines before they can hit you; and boom, it’s Armageddon.

If Bravo Romeo Delta really did sell poorly, I can’t say I’m surprised; the interface is extremely spare, even for a game from the MS-DOS era. Practically no concessions have been made to make the game easy to approach or understand. Everything is driven with a few keyboard keys, and hitting the wrong key at the wrong time can result in an order being given that the game gives you no way to rescind. The result is a hardcore nuclear war simulation that would only ever have been of interest to people steeped in the subject matter.

But if you, like me, are one of those people? Then oh, man, this game will fascinate you.

While its interface leaves a lot to be desired, Bravo Romeo Delta doesn’t skimp on realism. The complete range of Cold War nuclear weapons is at your fingertips, from air-dropped bombs to cruise missiles to sub-launched and ground-based ICBMs, with each one modeled to represent accurately its destructive power, range and reliability. And a huge database of potential targets is provided for both sides — not just cities, but bomber and submarine bases, radar stations and interceptor squadrons, industrial facilities and political power centers. This is a game where you don’t say “I’m going to strike their missiles before they can launch them,” you say “I’m going to throw four submarine-launched SS-N-20 missiles at the Malmstrom Air Force Base missile fields in Montana.”

Part of the challenge of the game is just developing a strategy that rides that fine line between too little force and too much. Not that you have much choice, at the opening; when the game starts, you have approval from the political Powers That Be to use only thirty warheads in total. (Only!) But as enemy warheads start to fly, the politicians quickly start raising that figure; it’s the rare game where it takes more than a couple rounds of thermonuclear back-and-forth before the restrictions completely come off. At that point, the only thing holding you back is your strategic calculation of how much force is too much. (And your conscience, if you have one.)

Especially in the beginning, when your resources are limited, selecting targets and finding the right weapons to hit them with is a delicate matter. Not every nuclear weapon in your arsenal is suitable for every target; targets have varying degrees of “hardness”, indicating how much blast force they have been built to withstand, and the harder the target the more clever you have to be to actually destroy it when you hit it. Some targets, like NORAD headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain in Wyoming, are so hardened that only a few of your weapons could possibly take it out. So, if your opening gambit involves hitting NORAD first in a decapitation strike, how many of those 30 warheads do you allocate for that task? Do you launch just one or two bunker-busters and hope for the best while maximizing the number you have available for other targets, or do you plaster the Mountain with five or ten or twenty to try and be certain?

Bravo Romeo Delta: scratch one bomber

Bravo Romeo Delta: scratch one imperialist bomber, Comrade

Beyond that, however, is another complicating factor: just because you order a particular weapon fired at a particular target, there’s no guarantees that it will actually arrive there. The other side is acting too, and they can neutralize your strikes before they land: bombers can be shot down, missile submarines sunk, missile fields nuked. This puts pressure on you to dedicate at least some of your attacks to so-called “counterforce” targets; a fighter that you destroy on the ground can never shoot down any of your bombers, an attack sub that sinks in Norfolk harbor because you blew up Naval Station Norfolk before the sub could warm up its reactor and get to sea will never sink one of your missile subs, and so forth. But put too much explosive megatonnage into counterforce targets, and you can prompt the Armageddon you’re trying to avoid.

And then there’s the small problem that the enemy is looking at your military resources as potential counterforce targets, too. Most of your subs start off idling in their bases; most of your bombers start off sitting on the ground. All of these “sitting ducks” are just as tempting to the Americans as their sitting ducks are to you. You can limit the amount of damage they can do by pushing up the alert status of particular units — a submarine sitting in port, for instance, can be told to put to sea, where it will be safe from any attack on its base. But warming up a nuclear submarine’s reactor so it can start sailing is a process that can take hours, so your order won’t be carried out right away. And the enemy has satellites that can observe such things as the comings and goings of nuclear submarines; if you suddenly try to “flush” all your submarines out to sea, or order your bombers off the ground and into “airborne alert” status, they may take it as a sign of an imminent major attack and move pre-emptively to hit you with the Armageddon blow before all those sitting ducks can fly away.

Bravo Romeo Delta: "System reliability: 50%"

Bravo Romeo Delta: “System reliability: 50%”

There’s one final wrinkle to deal with, too: reliability. Like I said above, one of the things the game tracks for each weapon in your arsenal is a failure rate. I don’t know what these look like for American weapons in the original version of the game, but for Soviet weapons, they are depressingly high. The Soviet nuclear force in the game contains a huge variety of different kinds of weapons, but only a few of them offer anything like the kind of reliability you’d generally want from a weapon of mass destruction. Submarine-based missiles, for example can have failure rates on the order of 50-60%, meaning that for every two missiles you order fired, probably only one of them is actually going to make it all the way to the target. Land-based missiles are more reliable, but not infallibly so; they “only” fail about 20-30% of the time. Even the best weapons you have suffer failure rates of 15%. All of which means that you need to throw more warheads at the enemy, to make sure at least some of them will reach their targets; but then the more you throw, the more likely everything becomes to tip over into Armageddon, so…

So yeah: if you’re into making hard strategic decisions, and aren’t put off by having to learn a huge array of acronyms and nuclear weapon names, Bravo Romeo Delta has a lot to offer, even if it is all wrapped up in one of the most impenetrable interfaces I’ve ever encountered. Playing it a few times will give you a new appreciation for how absurd the whole idea of “limited nuclear war” really was — how hard it would have been to stop such a war, once started, from snowballing into the end of the world. Which will make you thankful that nobody ever had to try.

UPDATE (March 12, 2019): In a minor miracle of technology, thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive, you can now play Bravo Romeo Delta in your Web browser.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.


I ♥ Steelcase

SteelcaseSince 96% of the Internet is people bitching about companies that gave them poor customer service, I figured I may as well take a minute to tell you about a company that’s done right by me: Steelcase.

Longtime Readers™ will remember that, four years ago, I was in the market for a new chair for my home office. I ended up buying a Steelcase Leap. It wasn’t cheap — you can get them used, but I bought mine new, which cost around $900 — but I was impressed by how comfortable it was, and how much attention to ergonomics Steelcase appeared to have put into it. So, reflecting on how I was going to be sitting in whatever I bought for 8+ hours every weekday, and that therefore cheaping out on this was probably inadvisable, I bit the bullet and bought the thing.

Time passed, and I was very happy with the purchase. But I noticed one day recently that the little steel cylinder that juts out of the bottom of the Leap, where the gas cylinder that controls the chair’s height adjustment goes, had fallen down much lower than it was when I first got the chair. In fact, it was so low that it was dragging along the carpet when I moved the chair around. Which was a problem: no matter how nice the chair was to sit in, if it was going to start tearing up my carpet, it was going to have to go. Nightmare visions of having to pay $900 for a new chair just a few years after paying for the last one danced in my head.

I called the retailer I’d bought the chair through, the Healthy Back Store (who are also amazing, and who you should talk to if you’re looking for ergonomic furniture in the DC metro area), and they walked me through some adjustments to the chair that can often fix problems like these. They didn’t fix my problem, though, so the next step was for them to reach out to Steelcase for support.

Steelcase’s solution was pleasingly simple: no questions asked, they shipped, at their own expense, a completely new Leap chair right to my door. It’s even the same color as the one I bought four years ago.

They didn’t even ask for the old one back! So there was no muss, no fuss, no hauling a giant piece of office furniture down to a UPS store or something. Just a delivery guy showing up at my door with the solution to my problem. All I had to do was open the box and roll the new chair down the hall to my office.

Lots of companies would have made this a root-canal-painful process. So yeah, I’m a very satisfied Steelcase customer today.


In politics, the one thing you can’t run away from is yourself

Alison Lundergan Grimes

https://twitter.com/jalefkowit/status/529870657249873920

https://twitter.com/jalefkowit/status/529873251552747522

I don’t have a whole lot to say about the results of yesterday’s midterm elections (other than “ouch,” maybe), but I did want to take a moment to talk about a type of unforced error that Democrats are sadly prone to making. Our case study for this cycle was graciously provided by Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat currently held by radioactive man-turtle Mitch McConnell.

Grimes was in a bit of a bind, politically speaking; she was, after all, running as a Democrat in a state where President Obama’s approval ratings haven’t cracked 40% in years. So she had something of an uphill climb to make if she wanted to reach victory.

But in politics, how you make that climb is important. People pay attention to such things. And Grimes chose to make hers in the worst way possible.

Her strategy was pretty simple: to deny up and down that she had any connection to Barack Obama whatsoever. And by any connection, I mean any. In the most famous example, when asked point-blank by the editorial board of the Louisville Courier-Journal whether or not she personally had voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012, she refused to say.

Here’s the problem with that strategy: it’s transparent. Anyone with a lick of sense can see straight through it.

I mean, come on. You’re a Democratic Party candidate for the United States Senate; you were a delegate to both the 2008 and 2012 Democratic Party conventions; your father used to be the chairman of the state Democratic Party. And you want us to believe there’s some chance that you didn’t vote for the Democratic candidate for President? Especially when that candidate was to become America’s first black President — an historically transformative figure?

Give me a break.

The problem with strategies like this is that they are, in a word, cowardly. They make it look like you’re so afraid of acknowledging an unhelpful truth about yourself that you’re willing to say anything, no matter how dumb, to avoid having to do so.

They make you look like you have something to hide. (Why? Because trying to hide something is literally the exact thing that you are doing!) And people don’t trust people who look like they’re hiding something. It’s a basic, elemental test of character, and you are failing it.

There are ways to handle the problem of being a Democrat in a state where the Democratic President is unpopular without looking like a liar or an idiot. Kentuckians may not like Obama, but they are much less hostile towards kynect, the state health insurance exchange that Obama’s policies brought them. “I’m not an Obama Democrat, I’m a kynect Democrat” may sound like a contradiction in terms to Washington ears, but it could perhaps have served as a useful way to encapsulate the sentiment that she’s both a Democrat and a Kentuckian. Instead, though, Grimes chose to go with an answer that for all intents and purposes was “I am not a Democrat,” full stop. Which was the wrong answer, seeing as how there was that little D after her name on the ballot and all.

In politics, you can color who you are, you can shade who you are, you can filter who you are. But you can’t completely disassociate yourself from who you are. It’s an impossibility. You have to embrace it, warts and all; have to find a way to frame the warts so that they make sense to the people who you want to vote for you.

Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was a master of this. He left behind him a trail of scandals that would have instantly sunk the career of many a lesser politician. But he eventually developed a public persona that had room to explain these flaws: skirt-chasing, ne’er-do-well Uncle Billy, always ready with a wink and a smile and a good story. “There goes Uncle Billy again,” the family would cluck at Thanksgiving dinner over gossip about his latest escapade. But it would never occur to them to not invite him to Thanksgiving dinner, because Uncle Billy was too much fun to have around.

You have to, at least to some degree, be who you actually are. If your only message is to point at a mirror and say “that’s not me,” you come across as someone who’s either a liar or an idiot. And generally speaking, while people don’t like to vote for somebody they disagree with, the only thing they like less is voting for someone they think is a liar or an idiot.


An appreciation: “Command H.Q.”

Command HQ (box art)We live in a golden age of retro-gaming. With the emergence of services like GOG and the addition of titles from the ’80s and ’90s to Steam, as well as the tireless efforts of the Internet Archive, many classic games from the past that had seemed lost forever due to the rapid evolution of the home PC as a platform are available once more to be experienced and enjoyed.

While there’s been an enormous amount of progress in this field over the last five years, however, there are still some classic games that are unavailable to play in any legal fashion. There’s many reasons why this might be the case; the ownership of the title might be ambiguous due to it passing through many corporate mergers, or it may contain material like music or video footage that requires separate licensing agreements too onerous or expensive for archivists to obtain. Whatever the reason, though, it’s a loss for our collective memory.

To push back against that loss, I’d like to take a moment to tell you about one of my favorite games of all time, a game that is sadly still stuck in “abandonware” limbo: 1990’s Command H.Q.

Designed by legendary game designer Dani Bunten Berry, whose portfolio also included the warmly remembered M.U.L.E. and The Seven Cities of Gold, Command H.Q. was an ambitious effort. It aimed let the player fight either side of four major wars: World War I, World War II, World War III (a hypothetical war between NATO and the then-still-in-existence Warsaw Pact), and “World War IV” (a hypothetical war between two randomly generated world empires).

This was a big goal, because World War I was a very different conflict than World War III would have been. But Berry & company met their goal by crafting a game design that was both simple and subtle; Command H.Q. is a classic example of the game that is “easy to learn, but hard to master.”

Part of the genius of their design was the way they approached the differences between the wars the game simulated. They formed, in effect, a sort of rolling tutorial. In the first scenario, World War I, there are only three types of units for the player to use: infantry divisions, naval cruisers, and submarines. Each subsequent scenario adds a few more unit types, however, so by World War III you’re pushing around armored divisions, aircraft carriers, satellites (and satellite-killer missiles), and nukes. But if you started out with the relative simplicity of the WWI scenario and played from there, it never gets overwhelming; each new bit of complexity is provided in an easy-to-swallow, bite-size chunk.

Command H.Q. also shone in the quality of its graphic presentation. Despite being limited to EGA graphics, which provided a palette of only 16 colors, it provides a rich, vibrant world map and clearly delineated, easy-to-understand unit icons.

Command H.Q.: world map (1942 scenario)

Command H.Q.: world map (1942 scenario)

Each black dot on the map is a city or military base, meaning it’s a strategic point for the two sides to fight over. Blue icons are Allied/UN/NATO units; red are Central Powers/Axis/Warsaw Pact. You can see how, at a glance, it’s easy to see the disposition of forces for both sides around the world. (Though the player can only see enemy units that are within sight of one of their units or cities; so, since this picture was taken with me playing Blue, there could be other Red units lurking in the heart of Germany or the vast reaches of the Pacific.)

By default, the map displayed is a topographical map, showing the various types of terrain and climate in different places — green for temperate, dark green for jungle, yellow for desert, gray for mountains, white for Arctic. This is important information, because in Command H.Q. units that move across hostile territory take “attrition” (losses) as they do so; this means that, if you send a division marching across the Sahara or the Rockies, it will come out on the other side weakened and vulnerable. (Indeed, if its trek is too long, it may not come out at all.) This creates natural strategic obstacles that the player has to contend with; Russia, for instance, is protected from invasion by Japan in the east by the formidable deserts, mountains, and tundra of Siberia. Which is not to say such an invasion is impossible; it’s just very difficult, as it would have been in real life.

However, if you want to see the political division of the world rather than its topographical features, Command H.Q. provided a switch that let you do that too.

Command H.Q.: political map (1986 scenario)

Command H.Q.: political map (1986 scenario)

And — this is the bit that was really mind-blowing, in 1990 — if you right-clicked anywhere on the map, it would zoom in to show you the particular area you’d clicked on in more detail:

Command H.Q.: the Eastern Front, zoomed in

Command H.Q.: the Eastern Front, zoomed in (1942 scenario)

Now you can see what I meant about the unit icons being colorful and easy to understand — you can tell right away what’s going on here; a tank-heavy Red (German, in this scenario) army is going up against an infantry-heavy Blue (Russian) army.

All of these illustrations may make the game appear pretty simple; but clear and simple are different things, and in many ways Command H.Q. was actually quite forward-thinking for its time. These included:

  • Moving units around was just a matter of clicking on a unit, then clicking on where you wanted it to go. The game would figure out how to get it there for you. This highlights another thing about Command H.Q. that was revolutionary in 1990: it was designed from the ground up around the idea that the player was using a mouse. That hardly seems revolutionary today, of course, but in 1990, in the world of PC gaming, it was a huge assumption; 1990 was in the heyday of MS-DOS, before Microsoft Windows became anything more than a toy, and as a result it was the rare PC owner who had a mouse hooked up to their computer. Command H.Q. offered ways to work around not having a mouse, if you needed them (the big one was that it would let you use a joystick), but the game was clearly designed around the mouse in ways that few games of its era were. In this respect, it may have been too far ahead of its time.
  • Unlike nearly all strategy games of its era, Command H.Q. was played in “real time.” In other words, there was no concept of “turns” or “phases”; when you started a game a clock started running, and either player could make as many moves in each second or minute as they wished. This would become the signature of the “real time strategy” genre that would explode in popularity over the next decade, but Command H.Q. was doing it in 1990, on PCs with lowly 4.77 MHz processors.
  • Long before the Internet became a thing ordinary people had access to, Command H.Q. offered online multiplayer out of the box. All you and a friend needed to go to war with each other was two modems or a null modem adapter.

And beyond all that, there were a host of little touches that showed the designers’ spirit and sense of humor. No matter which side you were on, for instance, when you started a new war, a banner would be displayed at the bottom of the screen reading “ENEMY PROVOCATION FORCED US TO FIGHT!” Which is a pretty accurate rendition of the lies nation-states tell themselves when they go to war in the modern era; even Hitler’s Germans believed that they had been pushed into war by Britain and Poland.

The first PC war game to be widely acclaimed as a game for ordinary people — a “beer and pretzels” game, as the industry terminology goes — was SSI’s 1994 hit, Panzer General. But in my opinion, Command H.Q. got there first. It was a game you could pick up and play without needing a master’s degree in military history, but it was also smart enough to teach you lessons about why the wars of the 20th century played out the way they did. And most importantly, if you at all like strategy games, it was fun. Fun enough that, here in 2014, nearly a quarter-century after it was released, I’m still playing it.

So it makes me sad to see it lost in the murky fog of abandonware. People should be able to pay $5 or $10 or whatever and play it today. It didn’t find the audience it probably should have when it was released, but it’s an important part of gaming history — not least, as a monument to the genius of Dani Bunten Berry, one of the true giants of the early gaming industry — and it deserves to be out there to be found and appreciated.

UPDATE (June 12, 2015): To my surprise, I discovered today that you can buy Command H.Q. on Steam! It’s a steal at its listed price of $7.99, but even better at Steam’s current summer-sale price of $3.49. Glad to see this classic has found its way back onto the shelves.


A recipe: Jason’s Ratatouille

One thing that even Longtime Readers™ may not know about me is how much I like to cook.

I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. Even back in junior high school, I was the one boy in my Home Economics class who actually enjoyed being there. When we were cooking, at least, to me Home Ec was basically a chemistry class where you could eat the results of the experiments.  What’s not to like about that?

Anyway, I bring this up because I’ve got a recipe I’m going to share with you. It’s a recipe that comes with some sentimental attachments, which is why I’ve put so much time into it.

You see, my mother was a pretty good cook. She had a few dishes that became particular family favorites. One of these was ratatouille, a French vegetable casserole that she could cook the hell out of.

Unfortunately, after she passed away in 2005 I realized that she had never told me her recipe. And it wasn’t written down anywhere that I could ever find, either. So I had no idea what she had done that made her ratatouille so good. I probably never will.

For a long time, I figured that this was just a link to her that I’d lost forever. But earlier this year, the memory started nagging at me. I wanted to figure it out, to try and restore this connection.

So I’ve spent the last several months tinkering with ratatouille recipes, gathered from all over the place, trying to come up with one that seemed at minimum like a credible homage to my mother’s recipe. I never did find one that met that standard right off the page. But eventually, after lots of experimenting and trial and error, I came up with one that did. (I’m indebted to the author of this recipe, which I used as a starting point.) So I’m posting it here to share with you — both to honor my mother’s memory, and because I think it’s pretty yummy all on its own.

Beyond the fact that its taste reminds me of the ratatouille my Mom used to make, I like this recipe because it’s easy and flexible. It doesn’t require a lot of extensive prep work or expensive, hard-to-find ingredients. You can go from start to having it ready to serve in under an hour. There’s lots of room to make substitutions in the ingredients, if a particular one is unavailable or out of season or just doesn’t fit your tastes. (The only one that’s absolutely key is the eggplant; it gives it the chewy texture that’s so nice.) It works as well as an entrée as it does as a side dish, and it re-heats nicely as leftovers if you make too much. Like I said, easy; flexible.

So without further ado, I present my recipe for ratatouille, inspired by my mother’s. I call it Jason’s Ratatouille because, no matter how close I have come to her recipe, it’s still an echo, an imitation. But it’s an imitation that’s made with love; and maybe that’s enough.

RatatouilleJASON’S RATATOUILLE

Serves 2

Ingredients

  • 2 small eggplant, diced
  • 1 yellow onion, chopped
  • 1-2 zucchini, chopped
  • 1-2 summer squash, chopped
  • 1 green bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 can tomato sauce
  • 2 cups mozzarella cheese, shredded
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon dried basil
  • 1 tablespoon dried parsley
  • A dash of kosher salt

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F; coat a 9″ x 13″ (3.7 quart) baking dish or casserole with cooking spray.
  2. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Once it’s warm, add in the garlic, onion and eggplant. Cook for 8 minutes to soften the vegetables, stirring occasionally.
  3. Stir in the zucchini, summer squash, bell pepper, basil, parsley and kosher salt. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cook for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  4. Spread the cooked vegetables from the pot into a layer in the baking dish. Cover vegetables with tomato sauce; cover tomato sauce with mozzarella cheese.
  5. Place in oven and bake for 25-30 minutes.

That’s it! You now have a dish of warm, bubbly, cheerful ratatouille. Enjoy.


Say yes to “Hollywood Said No”

Hollywood Said No!I don’t usually use this space to recommend specific things you should check out anymore, but in this case I’ll make an exception.

Longtime Readers™ will be aware that, like most comedy nerds, I’m a huge fan of Mr. Show,the pioneering HBO sketch comedy show created and helmed by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross back in the ’90s. Mr. Show never really found the audience it deserved, which is a crime. But other comics recognized its brilliance, and it became one of the most influential comedy programs of the modern era.

Anyway, when Mr. Show ended after four seasons, Odenkirk and Cross spent the next few years trying to bring the Mr. Show sensibility to the big screen. The result was several film projects that all died in varying stages of completion. One, Run Ronnie Run, actually made it to a (straight to DVD, but still) release, but was kneecapped creatively by behind-the-scenes infighting that pushed Bob and David away from the creative direction of their own movie. Others died at earlier stages of the process, failing to attract enough studio money or interest to go from a draft script to a complete movie. After going through this dispiriting cycle a few times, the Mr. Show ensemble eventually gave up on trying to make a movie and went their separate ways.

Which was where the story ended, until last year, when Bob and David (along with Mr. Show alumnus Briah Posehn) dusted off two of the scripts they had written back in those days and released them as a book, Hollywood Said NO! Orphaned Film Scripts, Bastard Scenes, and Abandoned Darlings from the Creators of Mr. Show. The bulk of Hollywood Said NO! is scripts for two of the proposed Mr. Show films: Hooray for America!, a dark satire about an underemployed comedian who becomes the unwitting front man for a plot by multinational corporation Globo-Chem to hollow out the Earth and use the dirt to build the first-ever exclusive, gated planet for the rich; and Bob and David Make a Movie, a more sketch-oriented comic tour through the absurdities of trying to do business in Hollywood.

All of which is cool. But I’m not here to tell you to buy the book. I’m here to tell you to buy the audiobook, because it takes Hollywood Said No! to a completely different level.

See, when the time came to turn Hollywood Said No! into an audiobook, Odenkirk, Cross and Posehn did something really cool: instead of just reading the book into a microphone, they actually reunited much of the cast of Mr. Show to perform the two scripts as if they were radio plays.  So you’ll be listening to David play a character, and then someone else will start talking and you’ll realize it’s a Mr. Show vet like Jay Johnston, or Scott Aukerman, or Paul F. Tompkins, or John Ellis. They even went to the trouble of adding in sound effects and ambient audio to give different scenes a different feel. It’s all very well done, and very funny.

So, if you liked Mr. Show, what you’ve got in this audiobook is something like nearly four hours of new, never-before-heard Mr. Show material to enjoy. It’s brilliant, go buy it, the end.

(The audiobook edition of Hollywood Said No! is available just about anywhere audiobooks are sold, including as a download from iTunes, eMusic, and Audible.com.)


No, Scott Adams isn’t right

Right way, wrong wayI noticed in my feeds today a post by Dave Winer titled “Scott Adams is right“:

I want to heartily endorse this Scott Adams piece, especially the part about politics.

I hadn’t seen the post by Adams (best known as the creator of Dilbert), so I clicked through to see what exactly Dave was endorsing. Here’s the nut:

Allow me to go through some examples of what we might regard as human intelligence and I’ll show you why it is nothing but illusions.

Politics: When it comes to politics, humans are joiners, not thinkers. The reason a computer can’t have a political conversation is because politics is not a subset of intelligence. It is dogma, bias, inertia, fear, and a whole lot of misunderstanding. If you wanted to program a computer to duplicate human intelligence in politics you would have to make the computer an idiot that agreed with whatever group it belonged regardless of the facts or logic of the situation.

If you insisted on making your computer rational, all it would ever say is stuff such as “I don’t have enough information to make a decision. Let’s legalize weed in Colorado and see what happens. If it works there, I favor legalizing it everywhere.” In other words, you can program a computer to recommend gathering relevant information before making political decisions, which is totally reasonable and intelligent, but 99% of humans would vehemently disagree with that approach. Intelligent opinions from machines would fail the Turing test because irrational humans wouldn’t recognize it as intelligent.

This line of thinking is straightforward, persuasive, and wrong.

It’s wrong because it sets up an arbitrary divide between rationality (understood as “decisionmaking based solely on data”) and every other form of human decisionmaking, which it dismisses as “dogma, bias, inertia, fear, and a whole lot of misunderstanding.” In other words, there’s decisionmaking based on data, which is Good, and decisionmaking that is influenced by anything other than data, which is Bad.

But this misses a fundamental point about human decisionmaking, especially in realms like politics, which is that it is a values-neutral project. I’ve written before on why this isn’t the case. The Data never stand 100% on their own, because the same set of data can look positive to me and negative to you if you and I hold opposing sets of values.

To understand what I mean, take Adams’ example of legalizing pot. Assume for a moment that “let’s legalize weed in Colorado and see what happens” is what we do, and eventually we get back data from Colorado showing that weed use is way up and prison overcrowding is way down. Assume also that these data are absolutely reliable — i.e. let’s not get sidetracked on questions about how they were gathered. For the purposes of this exercise, they are 100% accurate, reliable, true.

But are they describing a situation in Colorado that’s gotten better, or worse?

Your answer to that question will depend entirely on the values that you hold. If you believe that pot use is morally neutral and imprisoning people for morally neutral offenses is bad, you will look at these data and say that things have gotten better. Colorado isn’t locking people up for smoking pot anymore, hooray! But, if you believe that pot use is morally negative, that it represents a form of self-harm, you will look at the same data and come away alarmed. Look at how many more people in Colorado are hurting themselves, now that the legal deterrents have been removed! To you, things in Colorado have gone backward, not forward. But the data haven’t changed one bit.

My assumption is that Adams would look at this thought exercise and respond by saying that it doesn’t speak to his point, because the first person in our example is being rational, while the second one is being irrational. But that only makes sense if you take the first person’s values as “objective” and the second person’s as “dogma” or “bias” or “misunderstanding.” Values are never objective; they are reactions to the circumstances through which a particular person has lived, and as such they cannot be decoupled from human experience.

But just because values are not objective doesn’t mean they are not rational. Consider how people with similar life experiences — similar genetic gifts and curses, raised in similar households, exposed to similar external stimuli — will tend to develop similar values. People born into privilege tend to become Republicans; people born into poverty, Democrats. If values were irrational, you’d expect them to be randomly distributed, but they aren’t; they cluster around particular sets of life circumstances, which implies that they are rational reactions to those circumstances.

Which is why I think that Adams is wrong: you can’t divide decisions into “purely data-driven, and therefore Good” and “influenced by other factors, and therefore Bad” categories, because there is no such thing as a purely data-driven decision. To make a decision, the decisionmaker needs to have some pre-existing sense of what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong; absent that, there is no reason other than random selection to choose one alternative over another. Remove values from the equation and all alternatives become equal; you might as well throw darts at a dartboard.

This is actually just as true for decisions made by computers as it is by decisions made by humans. We tend to think of computers as having the ability to be purely objective where humans cannot, but that is a misunderstanding of how they work. A computer, by itself, can’t make decisions at all. It requires a programmer — which is to say, a human — to program it with sets of rules and heuristics it can use to evaluate different options. And the human who writes those rules will do so in a way that reflects her own values, or the values of whomever is paying her to write them. The computer appears objective only because all those humans whose values informed its decision processes can hide themselves behind it.

(So, you ask, what happens when computers gain the ability to program themselves, without any human intervention required? That’s a very interesting question! But as of today it’s completely within the realm of science fiction, so there are limited benefits to spending time speculating about it.)

Adams’ hypothetical objective computer actually makes this point quite eloquently, if accidentally:

If you insisted on making your computer rational, all it would ever say is stuff such as “I don’t have enough information to make a decision. Let’s legalize weed in Colorado and see what happens. If it works there, I favor legalizing it everywhere.”

The accidental point being: what does “if it works” mean, exactly? If pot use goes up, does that mean it’s working or not working? If prison populations go down, does that mean it’s working or not working? You can’t answer the question without bringing a set of values to the table. It’s impossible.

Data can tell you how fast you are going, and what direction you are going in, but it can’t by itself tell you if you are going forward or back. But “are we going forward or back?” is the fundamental question that underlies every political decision. So wishing for objectivity in such things is wishing for the impossible.


The Amazon endgame

Last Man StandingOver the weekend, the New York Times ran a very good article on the increasingly strained relationship between bookselling giant Amazon and book publishers:

Amazon offers a vast array of goods. It is easy to order from. It is inexpensive. Everything arrives promptly. Customers love it. To no one’s surprise, Amazon is now one of the 10 biggest retailers in the United States, edging out the 99-year-old Safeway grocery chain.

Things are cheap for a reason, however. Inspired by Walmart, Amazon takes a famously hard line toward the people who make the stuff it sells…

“Amazon is not evil, but it is ruthlessly, ruthlessly efficient,” said Andrew Rhomberg, founder of JellyBooks, an e-book discovery site. “As consumers, we love Amazon’s efficiency and low prices,” he said. “But as suppliers, it is a toad that is hard to swallow.”

The particular dispute between Amazon and publisher Hachette has garnered a lot of press, but the NYT piece covers one angle of it that I haven’t seen raised elsewhere: Amazon’s concerted campaign to win authors over to cutting their cord with traditional publishers and just having Amazon publish them instead.

It describes how well this approach is working for one author, Vincent Zandri:

Mr. Zandri, an author of mystery and suspense tales, is published by Thomas & Mercer, one of Amazon Publishing’s many book imprints. He is edited by Amazon editors and promoted by Amazon publicists to Amazon customers, nearly all of whom read his books in electronic form on Amazon’s e-readers, Amazon’s tablets and, soon, Amazon’s phones…

It is the 21st-century equivalent of living in a company town, but Mr. Zandri, 50, is far from a downtrodden worker.

A few years ago he was reduced to returning bottles and cans for grocery money. Now his Amazon earnings pay for lengthy stays in Italy and Paris, as well as expeditions to the real Amazon. “I go wherever I want, do whatever I want and live however I want,” he said recently at a bar in Mill Valley, Calif., a San Francisco suburb where he was relaxing after a jaunt to Nepal.

In an environment where many writers are increasingly struggling just to make ends meet, it’s encouraging to hear of Mr. Zandri’s success. But his story also illustrates some things about Amazon that make me wonder how long that success will last.

One thing I’ve always admired about Amazon is that they are one of the very few companies in the world that can actually be said to have a strategy. Unlike the vast majority of companies in the modern economy, Amazon isn’t just chasing whatever they need to do to bump their stock price next quarter. Like the Cylons in the reimagined version of Battlestar Galactica, they Have A Plan. Amazon thinks in the long term; they identify markets they want to be in, figure out how to break into those markets and then build on that foothold to establish a dominant position, and then ruthlessly execute.

Part of what elevates the way they do this to the level of strategy is that they know who they are trying to beat, and do what it takes to win over other players in that marketplace to their side of their dispute with that target. Playing other participants in the market against each other fragments their power and prevents them from concentrating that power against Amazon. It’s a classic strategy: divide and conquer. But that classic strategy only works for one reason: because none of the other players are capable of recognizing that it’s being used against them until their collective power has waned so much that even concentration could no longer save them. They don’t see the train coming until it’s too late to get out of the way.

(Indeed, this is why the dispute with Hachette has garnered so much attention — because, in a rare failure of execution, Amazon failed to lock authors in on their side before taking on publishers. The result has been that these groups have started pooling their market power, which makes them strong enough together to put up a spirited resistance.)

When I say Amazon plays a long game, understand this: today’s dispute with publishers is just one step in a campaign to execute on this strategy in the book market that they have been running now for twenty years. And as long as they have the money to do so, they will continue executing on it for twenty more years, or thirty, or forty, or however long it takes before they reach the strategy’s ultimate goal: a totally vertically integrated book marketplace, with every part of the process owned by Amazon.

“Um, so what?” you ask. “All I know is that the more power Amazon gets, the cheaper it gets for me to buy books. And that’s a good thing, right?”

Sure it is — right now. But to understand why it won’t be that way forever, you have to stop thinking like everybody else and start thinking the way Amazon does. You have to start thinking long-term.

The point of vertical integration, from the integrator’s perspective, has nothing to do with low prices for customers. What it’s about is maximizing profit by squeezing every dime out of every step of the business process. In a vertically integrated industry, money that used to be one participant’s profit now becomes an efficiency to be transferred up the chain. And it works, because the greater the degree to which the market is integrated, the fewer places there are for participants to go. If Andrew Carnegie controls all the nation’s steel mills, and you, Mister Iron Mine Owner, don’t like the prices Carnegie is willing to pay for iron ore, what are you supposed to do about it? You can do nothing, because there is only one customer in the market for your product. You take what that customer is willing to pay, or you get nothing. And eventually, when the customer’s demands become too great, you either sell your mines to them or go out of business and see them buy up your old assets — thus completing another step of the vertical integration process.

And what happens when all the competitors have been driven out of business or absorbed into the monolith? What remains as the last available source from which more dimes can be squeezed? What remains is the customer, and those last dimes are the ones being thrown away through those low prices you’ve been enjoying. So the prices go up — and, like all the players who fell before the monolith before, your only choice is to accept them or get out of the marketplace. You have no power in the transaction worthy of the name.

That is the Amazon endgame — a market where they hold all the cards. The low prices and famous customer service are just means to that end. Amazon doesn’t offer you all these bennies out of the goodness of their hearts. They offer them to you because, right now, they need you; because the only way they can take on the other participants in any market is to start by owning such a large portion of that market’s sales that they have significant leverage to apply against them. Nobody cares if they start getting threats from a company that accounts for 1% of their sales; but make that 25%, or 50%, or 75%, and the beads of sweat start to form. So they need your purchasing power at the moment, and they’re willing to treat you as well as it takes to get it, and to keep it.
But what happens when Amazon doesn’t need you anymore? I’ll tell you what happens: the nice treatment stops. You become just another revenue stream to be optimized.  This is how every story of vertical integration ends.

This is the warning I would give both authors like Mr. Zandri and everyday book customers like you and me. Living in Amazon’s gilded cage is attractive today, because Amazon goes to great lengths to make it so. They spare no expense. But they only do so because they need you in order to defeat someone else. And once that someone else is defeated, keeping the walls of your cage painted gold will no longer be a priority for them. All they will need to know is that you are in the cage, and they have the only key.


Titanfall: too little of a good thing

TitanfallTitanfall may be the most widely anticipated video game of 2014. The first game from Respawn Entertainment, the studio founded by the people who used to run the mega-popular Call of Duty franchise, Titanfall is also an exclusive title for Microsoft’s new-ish XBox One console — meaning that its creators would be able to throw much more computing power at it than has been usual for titles that had to run on the relatively constrained XBox 360, allowing, in theory, for graphics way beyond the norm. So lots of people were looking forward to seeing what it could do.

Well, now it’s here! So how is it? The answer is…  it’s complicated.

On one level, Titanfall is a pretty standard first-person shooter. You’re dropped into a big map with a gun, and run around shooting other players who are trying to shoot them with their own guns. But then you run into a Titan — a robot, two or three times as tall as a human, festooned with cannons and missile launchers and looking to make your life miserable.You have some weapons that can help you take on a Titan by yourself. But a few minutes later, the game offers you your own Titan, which takes all that intimidating power you were just running away from and puts it in your hands, for as long as you can keep it from being overwhelmed with damage. You spend the entire round this way, jumping between the speed and agility of fighting on foot and the steamrolling power of fighting in a Titan.

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: the game makes a hell of a first impression. The graphics are amazing, the gameplay is fluid and finely balanced, everything comes together so tightly that you’re convinced you’re experiencing a masterpiece. It all works, for a while.

The problem is that “a while,” in this case, is not very long. Once you’ve played for a few hours, you start to notice something: there’s not a whole lot of game in there. The base game comes with fifteen maps, but there’s not a lot of difference between them — they’re all vaguely generic sci-fi-ish environments, metal walls and long corridors. They’re well laid out, but there just aren’t enough of them; match lengths are short, so you’ll quickly have cycled through them all many times. They’ve started rolling out DLC add-on packs, but those only add a couple of new maps each, which makes their $9.99 asking price hard to swallow. (For comparison, maybe the best multiplayer game ever made, the original Battlefield 1942, shipped with more than twenty maps, ranging from jungles to deserts to rubble-strewn cities, and each add-on map pack added more than five more.)

Titanfall tries to inject some variety by offering several different game modes, such as Attrition (straightforward deathmatch), Hardpoint (capture and hold points on the map), Capture the Flag, and so forth. The problem with these is that I can never find anyone playing them. The only game mode that I have consistently been matched with other players to play is Attrition; on all the other ones the matchmaker just sits there, showing a little spinning progress wheel and periodically bumping you to another (also empty) server. So while modes other than Attrition may be fun, I couldn’t tell you myself, because I have yet to find a way to play them.

The most frequent complaint lodged against the game by the gaming media has been its lack of a traditional single player campaign to complement the multiplayer. Me, I’m not turned off by the idea of a multiplayer-only game; the aforementioned Battlefield 1942 was also multiplayer-only, and I happily played that one for years. And many other games’ single player campaigns are so obviously afterthoughts that they could just as easily have been skipped.

But the thing is, Titanfall‘s designers didn’t have the guts to actually omit a single player campaign completely. Instead, they provided something that’s called a single player campaign, but really it’s just a bunch of multiplayer games strung together with voice-overs. The result isn’t particularly compelling. Even worse, since campaign levels are multiplayer rounds, you have to be able to find other players online wanting to play the same level in order to play them — and the matchmaker has as much trouble finding these people as it does finding people who want to play multiplayer modes other than Attrition. The cherry on the top of all this is that the only way to unlock some Titans is to complete the single player campaign; given how hard it is to find other players, and the fact that you can’t play through a level until you do, this feels a bit like adding insult to injury.

All of which probably makes it sound like Titanfall is a worse game than it actually is. There are a lot of really good, really well-done things to enjoy in this package, and the out-of-the-box experience is amazing, and it takes a fair bit of time for the annoyances to start outweighing the good bits. I’m still playing, if not with the “this is the Game of the Decade” feeling I had in those first couple of hours. But the small amount of content and the non-trivial number of problems make this a game that feels like a missed opportunity.


Tech needs to decide which master it’s going to serve, contd.

Quantimetric Self Sensing Prototype, 1996Following up on yesterday’s post about tech we use being turned against us, let’s consider another example: the “quantified self.

The basic idea here is simple: people are unhealthy, and part of the reason why is because they don’t realize how many unhealthy choices they make every day; they drive instead of walking, eat junk food instead of healthy food, and otherwise poison themselves. So wouldn’t it be neat if technology could help them recognize those unhealthy choices?

This is the line of thinking that has launched a bunch of new companies over the last few years, such as FitBit, Basis and Withings, as well as products from more established fitness-tech companies like Nike and Garmin. The details of the products vary from device to device, but the basics are all the same: they sell you some piece of wearable hardware, and that hardware monitors various statistics about your body while you wear it in order to report back to you later how your body is doing. And this in turn prods you to do better: seeing how few steps you take every day makes you think you should walk more, seeing your heart rate spike during a workout tells you you’re pushing too hard.

All of which is good! We’re a nation of fatasses (your humble author included), so anything that gets us to take better care of ourselves is commendable. Right?

Right — as long as that’s all it’s doing. But is it really? Or is that plastic band on your wrist trying to serve multiple masters as well?

The short answer is that nobody really knows. Mother Jones took a look at the privacy policies of many of these companies a few months ago, and found that they generally don’t explicitly prohibit those companies from selling the data they collect about you to third parties. The companies insist that they don’t do this — or, in the case of Fitbit, that they sell access anonymized, aggregate data only, not individual users’ records — but of course that’s just a corporate decision, one they could change whenever they decide it’s convenient to do so. And even if the privacy policies did forbid them from selling your data, they could solve that problem by just pushing out a new policy sometime down the road with the offending provision removed, and a statement that continuing to use your product means you agree to the change.

But who would want such information, you ask? My God, who wouldn’t want such information? It’s a treasure trove of incredibly intimate data about you — not just where you’ve been, but how your body is functioning. Your health insurance company would love to have access to those data, as it would make it much easier for them to predict when you’re about to have a major health crisis, so they could be sure to cancel your policy or jack up your premiums before that happens.

This isn’t even a theoretical situation; in the realm of auto insurance, it’s already happening. My car insurance company, Progressive, offers a discount if you’ll agree to let them plug a tracking device into your car, so they can monitor your driving habits. It’s pitched as a benefit — ooh, a discount! — but of course the rationale is that they can fine-tune your risk profile much more accurately if they have a detailed record of every mile you drive.

My guess is that the fitness-tracking industry will move towards selling your data in the same way — by positioning it first as a way to get a discount on your health insurance. That’s how it will start. But once you consent to being constantly monitored by your insurance company, where does it end? How long until the insurance company starts dynamically adjusting your premiums based on how many steps you took that month, or how many times you walked into a McDonald’s? And beyond insurance companies, what about advertisers? Will I eventually start seeing ads for weight loss programs because my FitBit told some ad network that I skipped the gym the last couple of weeks?

That’s what I mean by a device that’s trying to serve two masters. There are plenty of companies which would love to have all that data — and their pockets are deep enough to pay the device makers a lot more to get it than you could ever pay them to keep it private.

All of which is why — despite being generally in sympathy with the stated goals of the Quantified Self people — I have yet to buy a FitBit or other such fitness tracking device. It feels like doing so is just buying bullets for a gun that will be fired back at me at some unknown point in the future. As with my car, I want my fitness tracker to serve my interests, not someone else’s.


Tech needs to decide which master it’s going to serve

Google self-driving car, design renderingGoogle announced this week that their self-driving car project has reached a new milestone, with prototypes in use that leave out all the traditional controls humans use to drive cars — no steering wheel, no pedals, etc. And the press went predictably gaga over it, oohing and aahing at the novelty.

Me, I’m less enthusiastic. The reason is simple: control. When I drive my car, I’m the one who decides where it goes, and how fast, and what route it takes to get there. In a self-driving car, someone else would be making those decisions for me.

The pitch is that ceding this control makes the whole experience more convenient. Who wants to futz with wheels and pedals, Google asks. Wouldn’t it be easier to just sit down and be magically whisked to wherever you want to go? Wouldn’t that be neat?

It actually probably would be neat, at least at first. But I can’t silence the nagging voice in my head that warns me about what would come next, if I give up my right to choose my own route. If Google’s the one planning the trip, how long until I find my trips start taking me consistently past businesses that advertise with Google? Maybe the car will even wave a digital coupon in my face as we approach them, to entice me to stop.

Or take the thought a step further. What if, instead of taking me on a tour of nearby Google advertisers, the car starts plotting routes for me that take me away from businesses that don’t advertise with Google? What if it refuses to take me to one of those at all, or forces me to wade through a long confirmation process before it will deign to take me there? “I know you said McDonald’s, user, but our valued partner, Burger King, has a location nearby as well! Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a hot and juicy Whopper™? Are you sure?

These misgivings aren’t limited to Google, either. I have them about most tech companies these days. Even Amazon, who have long been one of my favorite companies for their laser-like focus on excellent customer service, has started putting their own interests before those of their customers. And Amazon is a company I actually pay money to! Imagine how little a business that gives away its services for free will care about what I want, compared to what its advertisers or partners or shareholders want.

All of which was annoying when we were talking about things that were optional, but the deeper tech burrows its way into our lives, the further beyond “annoying” it goes. Tech is now central to the way we live — and, as the Google car shows, it’s only going to get more so. So if it’s built on a rotten foundation — on a foundation that requires us to give up big chunks of our value system to use and enjoy it — that’s a problem, and a big one.

This, I think, is the first sign that an existential crisis is looming for the tech business. Ever since the personal computer revolution in the 1970s and ’80s, tech has sold itself with the language of personal empowerment — the promise that it was selling tools that would let you be the best you you could be. Back in those days, that promise was actually true; the products were clumsy, expensive, and hard to use, but those who made the commitment found that they could amplify their personal potential dramatically. And that was true because the tech was built to serve the user, who funded its existence by buying it.

Increasingly, though, this just isn’t true anymore. In the 2010s, the user isn’t the one who’s bankrolling the products she uses every day. It’s someone else — an advertiser, most often — who’s doing that. And since companies listen most closely to the stakeholders whose money keeps the lights on, it’s inevitable in an advertising-driven company that, when the interests of advertisers and the advertised-to clash, the advertisers will win.

As someone wiser than me once said, “no man can serve two masters.” And I want the things I use, the things I own, to serve me, not someone else.

If the future of driving is a future where that’s impossible, I guess I’ll walk, thanks.


The Heartbleed Bug is about more than just passwords

Heartbleed24 hours after posting my “Heartbleed Bug for non-nerds” FAQ, I’m finally starting to see some coverage of the issue aimed at the general public in the press. Which is great! The general public needs to know about this. It’s a critical, urgent security issue for millions (billions?) of people.

The problem is that this coverage isn’t really getting at the things that are most worrisome about Heartbleed. They’re focusing instead on a very small slice of it: the potential compromise of user passwords. And that undersells the amount of damage that Heartbleed has done, and gives you a misleading picture of how much you should be worried about it.

My theory is that the stories are following this angle because “Web site hacked, everybody change your passwords” is by now a story that is familiar in every newsroom. It’s so common that when reporters are presented with a new security vulnerability like Heartbleed, their knees jerk and they reflexively start writing stories about how you need to change your passwords.

The problem is that Heartbleed is not like those other vulnerabilities. Heartbleed is much worse.

The reason is retrospective. Regardless of whether or not you change your password today, everything you have done on a Heartbleed-vulnerable server between December 31, 2011 and whenever that server gets patched has been vulnerable to eavesdropping. If an attacker took advantage of the bug during that period, in other words, they potentially had access not just to your password, but to everything you saw and did on that server. If you downloaded a PDF of a bank statement, they could potentially get a copy of that PDF. If you submitted your credit card information in an order form, they could have potentially grabbed that card info. If you read your email through a “secure” Web interface, they may have been reading it right along with you — and downloading a copy for their own personal reference library.

Everything you did on that server, you effectively did in public. For more than two years.

And the thing is, there’s nothing you, or anyone else, can do to un-ring that bell. If your information leaked, it leaked, and that’s that. Changing your password is only closing the barn door after some horses have bolted, to prevent any more from getting away.

This is the Heartbleed bomb that is still waiting to go off in the public mind, I think. People are realizing that Heartbleed was a Big Deal, and that they’re at risk of having had their passwords compromised, but what they aren’t realizing is that for two-plus years their passwords were more or less irrelevant. If they had information on a Heartbleed-vulnerable server, and they ever accessed that information, an attacker armed with knowledge of the bug could get at their information without ever needing their password. It would have flowed to them as easily as if the login form never even existed in the first place.

(This is also why another common response to Heartbleed — urging people to start using two-factor authentication — is kind of beside the point. Two-factor authentication is in general much better than a password by itself, and you should definitely use it wherever you can; but if the server’s encryption keys are compromised, it doesn’t matter how secure your login process is, since an attacker can just sidestep it altogether. It’s like building a massive fortress gate and then forgetting to build an actual wall on either side of it.)

I think the reason why this angle is under-reported at the moment is just because reporters in the general media are still getting their arms around this story and aren’t tech-savvy enough to have figured it out yet, and tech companies that were vulnerable to Heartbleed have little incentive to raise the issue; because there’s nothing anyone can do to undo the damage, it’s better from their perspective to just focus on the password issue and hope that people don’t look much beyond that. But it’s a major, major, major problem, and one that people really need to understand better.

Should you change your passwords on Heartbleed-vulnerable sites? Once they’re fixed, absolutely you should. But passwords are only the beginning of the story of Heartbleed’s risk to you, not the end of it.


The Heartbleed Bug: what non-nerds need to know

HeartbleedIf you work with or around nerds, you may have noticed them running around screaming over the last 24 hours about something called “the Heartbleed Bug.” But odds are they’ve been too busy frantically trying to fix things to explain to you exactly what that is, and whether you, a non-technical person, should be worried about it.

The short answer is: yes. You should be very worried about it.

The Heartbleed Bug is extremely bad. It undermines the very core of the systems we’ve used to provide privacy and security on the Internet for the last twenty years. Even if all you do online is buy things or read e-mail, the odds are very good that Heartbleed is going to bite you. This is not hyperbole; the risk to you is very real, and very immediate.

Because the bug was only made public very recently, most of the coverage of it so far has been aimed at techies, explaining to them what they need to do to patch it up. But there hasn’t been a good explanation for everyday Internet users as to why they should care about Heartbleed, and what risks it poses for them. So that’s why I’m writing this post — to try and provide that. If you’re a professional nerd, this post isn’t aimed at you; we won’t be discussing the exact ins and outs of the bug itself here. What we’ll be doing instead is explaining three things in plain English: what the Heartbleed Bug is, how it probably affects you, and what you should do to protect yourself.

What the Heartbleed Bug is

If you and I want to have a conversation online, and we want to make sure that nobody can eavesdrop on that conversation, we need an encryption mechanism — a way for me to turn my messages into a secret code that only you can decipher. That way, if someone grabs my message on its way from me to you, all they will see is unreadable gibberish; but when you receive it, you can decode it and read what I wanted you to read.

When the Internet first started to take off, no such mechanism existed for online communications. This made a whole bunch of things people wanted to do very badly extremely difficult. Take online shopping, for one; if you’re going to put your credit card information into a Web site, you want to be sure that the only people who can read it are you and the people at the Web site. If that guarantee doesn’t exist, you’re going to be very wary of making that purchase.

Over time, a set of standards emerged to enable encrypted communications online. The first one was called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which emerged nearly twenty years ago. Over time, SSL evolved into a more comprehensive standard called Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Today, after two decades of use and improvement, SSL and TLS secure a breathtaking volume of online communications. If you’ve ever connected to a secure Web site and seen the little padlock icon in your browser, for instance, you’ve used them; the padlock is how your browser tells you that your communication with that site has been successfully secured via SSL/TLS. But SSL/TLS isn’t just for encrypting Web pages — it’s a general-purpose encryption technology that’s used almost everywhere a secure connection is needed.

Since all those programs (like my Web site) need to learn how to “speak” SSL/TLS to be able to talk to all the other ones (like your browser), someone has to write programming code to teach them that. And as is common in cases where lots of people have the exact same problem, plug-in solutions eventually emerged, so that those people could just grab something off the shelf rather than having to write all that code from scratch for each new program.

The most popular of these plug-in solutions has long been a set of open-source tools called OpenSSL. Because it is free, reliable, and distributed under a license that makes it easy to roll into other products, OpenSSL has since its introduction in 1998 become the provider of SSL/TLS functionality for a gigantic range of online tools and services. Apache and Nginx, for example, are two popular Web server software packages that between them power something like two-thirds of the Web; they both use OpenSSL to serve secure pages to you. But it’s found in lots of other places as well: email software, instant messaging clients, even devices like smartphones, routers and printers.

The Heartbleed Bug is a bug in this very popular software. Boiled down to its essence, what it means is that, under certain circumstances, it’s possible for an attacker to reach across the Internet into a machine running OpenSSL and grab copies of all sorts of sensitive information — up to and including copies of that machine’s encryption keys.  And that’s a Big Deal, because what makes your encrypted communication with someone else secure is the fact that only the two of you have the key. The key is what lets you take the encrypted gibberish and translate it back into the original, readable message. So if someone else can get their hands on a server’s keys, all “secure” communications between that site and anyone else are suddenly readable by that person.

So that’s half of why Heartbleed is so bad. Here’s the other half: it turns out that this bug has been sitting in the OpenSSL software since December of 2011. So ever since then, for more than two years, all those systems using OpenSSL for their security — e-commerce sites, banks, government sites, mobile apps, devices, etc. — were silently wide open to anyone who knew about the bug.

It is this combination of extremely wide deployment and extremely long exposure that makes the Heartbleed Bug such a big threat.

How the Heartbleed Bug affects you

If you’re not a developer or other technical person, the primary way the Heartbleed Bug will affect you will be through the potential compromise of your usernames and passwords for various online sites and services.

Think about all the sites you log into regularly for a moment. Most of them, I’m sure, take care when they ask you to type in your password to do so on a secure (“https://”) Web page. This prevents bad people from being able to read your password; since it’s encrypted, only the people who have the encryption keys — namely your browser and the Web site operators — can read what you’ve typed in.

Or at least, that’s how things are supposed to work. The Heartbleed Bug complicates things, though, because suddenly that “secure” Web page you’ve been using to log in these last few years turns out to not have been secure at all. An attacker who knew about Heartbleed could, in theory, read your password as easily as if you’d written it on a postcard and mailed it to them.

Oops!

But wait, it gets worse. Because most people don’t use different passwords for every site and service they use — you’re supposed to, but nobody does — once you’ve got their password for one site, it’s likely you can use it (in combination with their email address) to access their accounts on other sites. If the person uses the same password for everything,  getting the password for (say) their Gmail account also lets you into (say) their bank account, and vice versa.

A secondary risk, beyond losing control of your passwords, is that sensitive content that you accessed online may have been viewable by third parties. When you log into your bank’s Web site and download a PDF copy of last month’s statement, your whole session is supposed to be secure; but if it’s OpenSSL that was doing the securing, it’s possible someone else could have grabbed a copy of that statement too. When you punched your credit card information into an e-commerce site, it may have been viewable too. Email that was supposed to be transferred to you securely could have been read. And so forth.

What you should do to protect yourself

The first thing you should do is change all your passwords. Any password you have used since December 31, 2011, should be assumed to have been compromised.

There’s no way to know if any particular username and password that you use has been exposed due to the Heartbleed Bug. But because it was possible to break into so many sites and services through it for so long, betting that every single site you visited over the last two-plus years managed to avoid getting broken into is, to be frank, a sucker’s bet. The only way to be 100% certain that your accounts are safe is to treat every password you used during that period as if you were sure it has been compromised, throwing them away and creating new ones.

Before you complain that this sounds like a lot of work to do just to head off a theoretical risk, let me assure you that this risk is not theoretical. We know that attackers can use Heartbleed to get access to user passwords and other sensitive information, because security researchers were able to demonstrate doing just that on Yahoo! Mail before that company patched its servers to eliminate the bug. So this is not a hypothetical threat, it’s very real, and you should treat it as such.

The second thing you should do is ask the people who run the secure online services you depend on what they are doing to secure themselves from the Heartbleed Bug.

Changing your passwords is just a stop-gap, not a fix. The only way for the information leakage to really stop is for someone to go into all those sites and services that use OpenSSL and patch that software so that the Heartbleed bug isn’t there anymore. That means that the ultimate responsibility for protecting your personal information rests with the administrators of those sites and services — only they can remove the risk to you completely. If they don’t do that, the Heartbleed vulnerability will still be there, so a bad guy could swoop in and grab your new password just as easily as they did your old one.

(For this reason, you may want to wait a day or two before doing that mass password reset described in step 1 above; that will give the sites you use time to get their systems fixed, so you don’t create a new password only to have it immediately exposed.)

While most of the buzz so far about Heartbleed has been around the risk it poses to big-time online services — Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, and so forth — these are actually the ones who are most likely to get their systems secured quickly; lots of very smart people work at those companies, and they all know they’d be out of business in a month if the world stopped trusting their security. They’ll be burning the midnight oil to get Heartbleed expunged from their systems.

Don’t worry so much about them, then. Worry, instead, about all the smaller online systems you depend on. Most people have lots of these in their lives: the intranet on their network at work; the online time tracker service they use; the Web forum where they argue about My Little Pony episodes. These are the sites that are going to be slow about updating to fix Heartbleed, either because the people running them don’t understand the problem, don’t have the technical chops to fix it, or just don’t think it’s worth their time and effort to do so. You want to know which sites are taking that attitude towards Heartbleed, so you can run away from them as fast as you possibly can.

To that end, you should feel absolutely comfortable aggressively asking your friendly office network administrator, tiny software vendor, Web forum admin, or really anyone who manages a system that does anything over a secure (look for the padlock!) connection if they know about Heartbleed, if their systems were exposed to it, and what they’re doing to deal with that. Don’t take no for an answer! The security of your personal information is important; if you’re doing business with someone who doesn’t see things that way, dump them and do business with someone who does.

Finally, you should keep an eye on your financial accounts, email accounts, and other repositories of sensitive personal information for a while.

While the biggest risk from Heartbleed is that a bad guy used it to grab a server’s encryption keys, there’s the lesser-but-still-serious risk that they managed to grab supposedly encrypted content as well. (Things like that PDF bank statement, or the contents of your email.) For this reason, you’ll want to keep an eye on accounts that could potentially have been compromised in such a fashion, to make sure that (for instance) there’s no weird charges on your credit card bill next month because someone used Heartbleed to swipe your credit card information off your favorite e-commerce site. This is a lower priority, since you probably should be monitoring these accounts anyway, but I mention it under the “better safe than sorry” policy.

Conclusion

So that’s the Heartbleed Bug: it’s very bad, you’re at risk, you should act now to protect yourself.

And then, once that’s done, explain all this to someone else who’s not an alpha nerd — so they can go protect themselves too.

P.S. Why’s it called “Heartbleed,” you ask? It’s because the bug lives in the part of the OpenSSL software that manages the ongoing connection between the server and the software that’s connected to it — the “heartbeat.” With the bug in place, this heartbeat leaks information, and the name follows from that.

UPDATE (April 10, 2014): A follow-up post on this subject — “The Heartbleed Bug is about more than just passwords.”


The madness of gun culture

I’m going to start this post with a disclaimer.

I like guns. I like both using them (shooting recreationally is a lot of fun, you should try it sometime) and considering them as artifacts of craftsmanship — like any well-crafted tool, a well-crafted firearm can be a fascinating thing to examine. I support the principle of a right to private ownership of firearms, and while I don’t own any myself at the moment, that’s more an artifact of my not having an urgent need for one; I only shoot for fun, so the only money I could justify spending on a gun would be money I didn’t need for something more important, and right now there are lots of things in my life demanding money that are more important. I imagine I’ll own at least one at some point in the future, though, if only to save on having to pay rental fees at the shooting range.

So why do I bother saying all that? Because I don’t want you to write off the thing I’m about to say next as just the raving of another liberal who doesn’t understand or appreciate guns. And that thing is:

I don’t really get “gun culture.” In fact, not only do I not get it, I find it baffling.

See, I don’t have a problem with guns themselves, but the way we talk about them as a society is just deeply, deeply weird. It literally makes no sense.

All you have to do to see what I’m talking about is attend a gun show. (Here in DC, they hold a huge one six times a year.) It’s like stepping into another dimension. Outside the convention hall, you are in the real world, where your risk of getting killed by an assailant is half of what it was twenty years ago; but walk into the show and you enter a strange Bizarro World, where the rule of law has completely broken down and desperate citizens must fend for themselves. The rhetoric you’ll hear at such gatherings, both from people selling guns and those buying them, will make you question whether those people walked in from the same dimension you did. Nowhere is safe! Nobody can help you! Only your gun stands between you and the hordes at the gates!

Don’t think this rhetoric is only found at gun shows, though. The people and institutions that revolve around the gun industry are saturated with it. The NRA’s literature is saturated with it. In many ways it’s the same model as FOX News; it provides a little bubble reality that, if you are so inclined, you can crawl into and live in and never come out of. Outside the bubble, things are mostly safer than they have been in a long time; but inside the bubble, it’s Mad Max time.

Which leads people inside the bubble to believe some pretty crazy things. Like a post I saw yesterday at hard-core pro-gun site The Truth About Guns, for instance, which argues with a straight face that you should carry a gun with you into the shower:

Aside from sleeping, showering is the most vulnerable time for home dwellers. When you’re in the shower the sound of the water will drown out almost any noise (including your barking dog). Your eyesight will not be the same as it normally is and your time in the rain locker can be timed by a surreptitious home invader.

It’s no secret that rapists have been known to stalk their female targets by observing the light in the window of their bathrooms at night. Rapists will note the length of time and how long the water stays running, giving them a perfect opportunity to enter the dwelling and lie in wait for the unsuspecting woman to exit the bathroom. Like rapists, burglars have also caught on to this technique, too. Bringing your gun into the shower isn’t crazy by any means. It just makes sense.

Putting aside the fact that the post’s author can’t even scrounge up an anecdote to support his contention that getting attacked in the shower is a thing that actually happens, much less any data, there’s a deeper flaw in his reasoning.

Think about it for a second. You’re in the shower, shampoo and water in your eyes, unaware of the assailant’s presence. In other words, he has the drop on you. If he has a gun, he can just shoot you through the shower door or curtain and kill you before you even realize he is there, and it’s Game Over.

But let’s say, for purposes of argument, that the assailant did you a favor and left home without a gun, so he’s coming at you with a knife or lead pipe or something. Now you know you’re in trouble, so you reach for your gun. But by the time you realize he’s there, he’s already practically on top of you — there’s not a lot of distance between a shower curtain and the person showering, typically — so he can get between you and the gun, or wrestle your arm away from it, or otherwise prevent you from getting your hands on it. And if it’s in a container, like the one shown above, you have to first get the container open before you can even try to pick it up. Opening a container while someone is beating you with a lead pipe could be difficult, not to mention unpleasant.

But let’s go a step further, and wave away all those difficulties as well. The gun magically appears in your hand the moment you realize you are being attacked. Hooray! Except that just having a gun in your hand, all by itself, doesn’t do anything to protect you. It only protects you if you use the gun to shoot the bad guy. Which means that you — naked, surprised, shampoo in your eyes, receiving blows to the head with a lead pipe — have to aim the gun, and pull the trigger, before the assailant can knock you down or get the gun out of your hand.

Do you seriously believe the odds of that happening are any good?

The deep flaw in this suggestion is that it treats the gun as if it were a magic self-defense totem; as if just having it there will somehow protect you. Obviously, it would not. A gun can only protect you to the degree that you are capable of using it to protect you. And this scenario — a fight at close quarters, with you caught by surprise — is one where a gun, even in the hands of a trained shooter, would be of about as little use as it possibly could be. The ideal scenario for defending yourself with a gun is one where your assailant is some distance away, out of arm’s reach. Once he gets that close, you’d be better off with almost any other self-defense weapon; a knife, a hammer, anything.

(And then there’s the other question — what happens if the person outside the shower isn’t an assailant? In this scenario, things are moving fast; you don’t have a lot of time to think. You see a shadow coming at you, you have time to grab your gun and — mirabile dictu! — despite the surprise and the shampoo in your eyes you manage to put two rounds into its center of mass. Then you step out of the shower and discover that the “assailant” was actually your wife, coming to surprise you with a little shower-time marital amusement. Oops.)

But to the person in the gun culture bubble, none of this matters. None of this matters because to them, the gun is magic. The gun protects you from evil in the same way garlic protects you from vampires. It’s a totem, a fetish; a magic wand that wards off the creatures that lurk in the night.

None of which corresponds to how guns behave in the real world, of course. In the real world, a gun is a thing that is hard to use right and easy to use wrong; and if you use it wrong, your mistake can have disastrous consequences. But viewing it as a totem lets you ignore all that. You can ignore the need for training, the need to maintain the weapon and store it in a secure place, the need really for any kind of respect for the deadly potential of the thing. You can just scatter guns all around your house, in the same way you might scatter air fresheners. Never mind that an assailant might pick up one of those weapons and use it against you — or an unattended child might pick it up and accidentally use it against herself.

And this is what gets me the most about this culture, I suppose. The lack of respect. A deadly weapon demands respect. You have a right to pick one up, sure — but by exercising that right, you are taking on some pretty serious responsibilities too. You are literally taking the power of life and death into your hands. You don’t get to skip out on that just by deciding to believe that a gun is something which in reality it is not.

If you’re not comfortable with that, maybe you should do us all a favor and just switch to taking baths.


Creation is a beautiful torture

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman. Photograph by Miller Mobley.

As I imagine many of you were, I was taken aback to learn this morning of the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, apparently from a heroin overdose, at the too-young age of 46. He was one of the great actors of his generation, so his loss will be keenly felt by all who love film and theatre.

I was surprised though, as I saw people I knew pay tribute to him on social media, to see how many of them expressed surprise at why someone like him would turn to drugs. He was successful, famous, widely renowned as one of the greatest in his profession, the argument went; what would someone with all those blessings need to run from?

I don’t claim to have any particular insight into Mr. Hoffman’s psyche, but a quote from a 2008 New York Times Magazine profile of him resonated with me as at least a partial explanation:

For me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.

I think any creative person will understand what he was getting at. When you first start thinking about making something, doing something, the vision of it in your head is pure, perfect; you see not the thing itself, but the Platonic ideal of the thing, the thing as it should be. And then you spend some amount of time getting your hands grubby, rooting around in the mud and clay of everyday human experience, trying to bring that thing to life — only to discover, once you’ve finally finished, that the product of your labors is flawed. It’s not perfect. It’s not the vision that shimmered in your head, but an imperfect interpretation of it; a translation by someone who doesn’t really speak the language.

This is the inevitable end state of all creative endeavors. If you care about the work — really care about it — you quickly find that no matter how hard you work, how hard you try, inevitably the final result disappoints you. The only real questions are in what way and by how much.

I experience this all the time in my own work. I have high standards for what’s good and what isn’t, and even the projects that complete with happy clients and happy users usually leave me thinking of a couple of small things that I could have done better. This might sound like perfectionism, but I don’t think that’s it; it’s more just the frustration of having seen the perfect version of it in my head, and then not having the talent, the ability, to realize it. (And I’m just a schmuck who builds Web sites! Hoffman’s work was scrutinized to a degree mine will never be.)

The thing is, though, nobody has that talent. We’re all human beings, imperfect ourselves, and our imperfection inevitably seeps through into our works. Or as Kant put it, “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” The vision in your head is of the straight thing, but the only wood you have to build with is that crooked timber. The best you can do is never good enough. But understanding that intellectually is one thing, while understanding it in your heart and gut is something else entirely. So learning how to cope with that feeling and move past it without letting it erode your self-esteem becomes a valuable survival skill.

I have to think this struggle must be especially frustrating for actors who work in film. On the stage, you give a new performance each night, so if tonight’s performance doesn’t feel right, you can tell yourself that tomorrow’s will be better. But film is permanent, immutable; at some point the director says “print” and your performance gets frozen in amber. Which means that you, the actor, lose something most other creative people have: the thought (even if it’s usually just an illusion) that someday you can go back and fix it. Authors can issue revised editions of their books; musicians can publish remixes of their songs; but for the film actor, once the performance is done, it’s done.

(Which isn’t to say that the film itself will never be revisited; the director might come back and fiddle with the film someday, but even in that case all the power in the situation is hers, not yours. Nobody’s going to ask you to come out and shoot new scenes for that. And of course, time passes, so perhaps you you don’t look quite the same now as you did then — making it impossible to step back into the role even if you want to, unless you have access to a time machine.)

Hoffman was right; it’s torture. Or it can be torture, at least, if you don’t learn how to live with it. So for someone like him — someone who is universally spoken of as caring about his work even more than the average artist — I can totally see how that person might find himself reaching for anything that might promise relief, even if that relief is fleeting and ultimately self-destructive.

The main thing about torture, after all, is how much you want it to stop.


Against line-chart liberalism

Daydreaming Bookkeeper (by Norman Rockwell)

All the buzz in the mediasphere this week has been about the just-announced departure of Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein from that storied institution in order to turn his “Wonkblog” into a full-fledged independent news operation of its own.  Yesterday’s announcement that Slate economics columnist Matt Yglesias is joining the new venture has only stoked the buzz further. (Klein and Yglesias are friends whose association goes back to the early days of the liberal blogosphere, so in a sense this is a little bit like hearing that someone’s getting the old band back together.)

I hold no brief personally against either Klein or Yglesias, and I wish them personally all the best of luck with the new venture. But I do hold a brief personally against what has emerged as both men’s signature style — not so much in how they have used it, actually, as in how I’ve seen it seep into the work of communicators with progressive campaigns and advocacy groups.

For lack of a better term, I think of this style as “line-chart liberalism.” I call it that because I have literally been in meetings where people have said that, if only they could find the right chart — if only they could find the right set of data to present — the message they believe those data communicate would inevitably penetrate the mass consciousness.

This never works, but I’ve never seen anyone try to address why. So I thought I’d take a moment to explain why I oppose it, in the (vain, I know, but bear with me) hope that maybe it will convince some of those folks to alter course in the future.

The most fundamental element of this approach to communications is that it is data-driven. It makes its point with data, rather than with appeals to emotion. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing; opinion-mongers who can make use of valid, provable data and basic methods of statistical analysis are to be commended, not shamed. They are a necessary corrective to the standard form of establishment opinion, which is to wave one’s hands in the air while making sweeping pronouncements based entirely on what a cab driver told you or what you overheard your daughter’s friends talking about when you were driving them home from the Justin Bieber concert. Arguments that are grounded in data are a cut above arguments that are grounded in nothing at all.

The standard knock on this approach is that it turns its practitioners into “technocrats” — bloodless pedants whose view of the struggles of humanity is obscured by an accountant’s green eyeshade. My critique of the form is slightly different. It’s not that it misses the argument for the data; it’s that it thinks the data, all on its own, is the argument. Present The Data, this approach says, and you have fulfilled your mission of educating the people. The Data speak for themselves; the role of an intermediary is merely to determine which of The Data are significant, which deserve to have a spotlight thrown upon them.

One reason why I disagree with this is because of a core assumption that is embedded deep within it, namely that public policy is at root a values-neutral project. In this worldview, there is an objective Good that we all strive towards, and our progress as a society can be measured by the velocity towards which we approach that objective Good. We can determine this velocity by taking measurements — by gathering Data. These data will then tell us if we are on or off course, in much the same way that star sightings can do for a mariner lost at sea.

This works for the mariner, because the stars are objective. It is not a matter of opinion where in the sky the North Star is. But “good,” in terms of public policy, is most definitely not objective. My definition of what is Good is informed by my background, my experiences, my ideology; my values. And your definition of what is Good is informed by yours. Your North Star, in other words, is in a different place than mine is — which makes trying to navigate by taking sightings of it a perilous proposition.

Say, for example, we’re looking at data about income inequality. For purposes of discussion, assume that these data are rigorously accurate — they have been gathered and presented without bias. Now assume that they show income inequality is rising fast. As a progressive, I would look at those data and say they indicate something bad is happening, that they reflect a draining of wealth from those who need it most to those who need it least. A conservative, on the other hand, might look at the same data and say that they indicate something good — that those who have worked the most energetically and productively are reaping a greater share of the rewards of the economy than those who have not.

These conclusions are diametrically opposed to each other, but they both rest on the same foundation of unimpeachably accurate data. The difference is the core assumptions about how the world works that I and my hypothetical conservative debating partner bring to how we see them. So the data, by itself, makes no argument; an argument only forms when those data are combined with a worldview, a Weltanschauung.

The bigger problem, though, is that assuming that data can tell its own story ignores something fundamental that we know about how communications between humans works. People aren’t motivated by facts; they are motivated by narrativesby stories. Telling each other stories are how we affect each others’ worldviews, for everything from the most critical subjects to the most trivial.

Four organs of communication

Image from “Don’t Be Such A Scientist” by Randy Olson. Published by Island Press, 2009.

My friend Randy Olson, who has been working for years helping scientists learn how to get the general public interested in and excited by their findings, has written about this extensively. One way he helps scientists (who are not generally known for their storytelling skills) understand the concept is through what he calls the Four Organs Theory of Communications:

When it comes to connecting with the entire audience, you have four bodily organs that are important: your head, your heart, your gut, and your sex organs. The object is to move the process down out of your head, into your heart with sincerity, into your gut with humor, and, ideally, if you’re sexy enough, into your lower organs with sex appeal.

The problem with line-chart liberalism is that it stops at the head, never even attempting to get any further down. And that is fatal for a communicator, because the head is the least effective organ at driving people to take action. The head is analytical; it wants to study messages, to pick them apart the way a freshman biology student dissects a frog. Messages that get past the head and into the lower organs get closer to the impulses that drive people to move, rather than to just think about the pros and cons of moving. Appeals that stop at the head never get that opportunity.

This is what frustrates me about line-chart liberalism.  That sentiment makes the deadly assumption that a chart, all by itself, can tell a story. It can, but only to people who know how to read it — people who have been educated to read and understand visual interpretations of data. If you are not one of those people — if you’re one of the vast majority, in other words — putting your story in the form of a chart is like distributing your would-be Top 40 hit in the form of sheet music. Which approach do you think is going to be more likely to send your song up the charts: showing people the sheet music, or playing the damn song?

The answer probably seems obvious, and yet so many communicators resist ferociously the idea of moving past data to narrative. I’m not sure why. I fear that part of the reason, sad to say, is simple elitism. We who have been trained to understand data, who can read the charts and understand what they are saying, feel that stepping back from that knowledge to simpler, earthier forms of communication somehow demeans us, drags us down to a less exalted level. We want to live in a world where everybody thinks the way we do, and that desire seeps into our work, poisoning it.

This is a feeling that communicators and advocates have to move past to be effective. You have to reach out to people as they are, not as you would wish them to be. And framing your message with charts and data alone just does not accomplish that. Charts and data can support a narrative, but they cannot replace it. If you try to force them into doing so, you just cut yourself off from most of the people you are hoping to reach.

So this is my plea to you, dear progressive communicator: think hard about how you approach your work, about how you construct the messages you are trying to change minds with. Line-chart liberalism may be trendy, but it is also a dead end.


Now is the worst possible time to buy a new game console

StopGather ’round the fire, kids, and Grandpa Jason will tell you something he’s learned from his long, wasted years as a gamer.

This holiday season saw the launch of a brand new generation of game consoles. Now that the XBox One and PlayStation 4 are out, you might be thinking it’s time to turn in your old Xbox 360 or PS3 and pick up one of the New Shinies.

Don’t!

The worst possible time to buy a new game console is right when it first comes out. There is literally no upside to doing so.

Why? A few reasons:

  • Price. New consoles are as expensive at launch as they will ever be during their lifecycle. As time goes on, they will only get cheaper; they usually drop to 50% or less of their launch price before their lifecycle ends. In other words, you’re paying a stiff novelty tax if you buy a console when it first comes out.
  • Reliability. New consoles frequently have hardware bugs and glitches that aren’t really fully ironed out yet, like the XBox 360’s infamous “red ring of death.” There’s generally a revised version of the hardware released a year or two after launch that takes care of all these problems. So why pay for the privilege of being a beta tester? Let some other schmuck do that for you.
  • Poor game library. New consoles typically ship with a few high-profile launch titles, but other than those, there’s nothing to play on them. It takes time for game developers to learn how to develop for new hardware, so the first year of a new console’s life is typically a wasteland of poorly-implemented ports from older systems and ambitious titles designed specifically for the new hardware that don’t really work quite right. Why buy a new console if it’s just going to gather dust while you wait for something good to come out for it?

What’s more, if you take all those issues and look at them from the other side, you discover that right now is the best possible time to buy an old game console. Last-generation systems are super cheap right now, because retailers want to clear out their unsold stock. Their hardware has gone through several generations of tweaks and revisions, so all the problems they had at launch are long since resolved. And there’s an absolutely huge library of great games available for them — many of which you can pick up for pennies now, by buying used through channels like eBay from junior high school ADD cases who are frantically dumping their whole libraries to raise enough money to buy a New Shiny.

The only reason I can think of to buy a new-generation console today is because you absolutely positively cannot wait a few months. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, but what the hell? We’re talking about video games here, not dialysis machines. Nobody ever died because they had to wait six months to play the latest Call of Duty.

So: if you’re an impatient person with poor impulse control and more money than you know what to do with, go ahead and splash out on the New Shiny. Everyone else, your money is better spent enjoying the cream of the last generation while you wait for the next generation to get its act together.


The slow-motion crisis in America’s nuclear force

OopsSo last week it came out that cheating on proficiency tests is widespread among officers in the U.S. Air Force’s nuclear command:

The case involving 34 officers with the 341st Missile Wing stemmed from a drug possession investigation at multiple air bases in the United States and overseas. Two of those caught up in the cheating episode have been linked to the other probe, officials said.

Sixteen officers were ultimately found to have actually cheated on the monthly proficiency exam while the rest knew the answers had been shared with others and did not report the violation, the Pentagon said.

This would be less worrisome if it were an isolated incident, but it isn’t. There has been a steady drumbeat of horror stories out of the nuclear force — mostly the Air Force’s part of the nuclear force, the Global Strike Command — for a while now.

The tale of the tape:

And that’s just in the last 12 months! It doesn’t include other incidents going back even further, like the 2007 incident where a B-52 bomber was mistakenly loaded with live nuclear warheads. (It took 36 hours in that case for anyone to even notice that the live warheads were missing. During all that time they sat unsecured in the plane on the tarmac at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.)

The initial response to the cheating incident has been to blame the Air Force’s requirement that officers achieve a perfect score on the tests in question; this is supposed to have created an environment where officers felt pressure to pass at any cost. But to my mind, that’s a dodge. The reason why officers are expected to achieve a perfect score on these tests is because they are entrusted with the operation of nuclear weapons. There isn’t a lot of margin for error in that line of work.

Why officers in the nuclear force are held to a high standard — and why that’s a problem today

The expectation of high performance by officers in the nuclear command is nothing new. It goes back to the Global Strike Command’s predecessor organization, the Strategic Air Command, and the notorious perfectionism of the man who turned SAC into one of the Cold War’s most fearsomely efficient weapons, General Curtis LeMay. LeMay expected excellence from his officers, and he ran them mercilessly until he got it. So it’s not like it can’t be done.

The deeper, underlying reason for these incidents is more fundamental. LeMay was able to wring extraordinary performance out of SAC’s officers because, in his time, SAC was a prestige post. It was the front line of defense in the nation’s most strategically important conflict, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Even when other wars cropped up, like Korea and Vietnam, they were viewed by the Powers That Be as sideshows, distractions from the Big Mission of deterring Soviet aggression.

This is important, because career military officers know that the way to earn promotions and work their way up the command ladder is to be part of the missions the service views as crucial. Generals naturally put the people they consider their best men and women onto the missions whose success is the most critical — the ones where talent and good judgement are most sorely needed. Taking on one of those missions, and excelling at it, is a great way for a junior officer to demonstrate that he or she really is one of The Best. And building a reputation as one of The Best can provide an ambitious officer with a big boost over their peers as they scramble up the greasy pole of promotion.

This meant that, as long as the Cold War went on, SAC attracted a steady stream of the Air Force’s best and brightest. And those it attracted were willing to put in the work to live up to LeMay’s high standards, because they knew that by doing so — by demonstrating that they could do so — they were marking themselves out as the general officers of the future.

Then, of course, the Cold War ended, and 9/11 happened, and everything changed. Suddenly the nuclear force wasn’t the main thing holding back the nation’s #1 enemy anymore; it was a weapon aimed at nobody, a force without a mission. The enemies of the 21st century were ragged militias holing up in caves, not Evil Empires with nukes of their own. So the way for ambitious young officers to stand out was no longer to sign up for tours in the underground missile command posts; it was to be somewhere where they could make a contribution to the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, like flying light tactical aircraft, organizing the flow of supplies to the front by airlift, or building the next generation of unmanned drones. Those were the jobs that could accelerate a career. Tending missiles that no one knew quite what to do with anymore meant being put on the sidelines.

The result has been twofold. First, the stream of talented officers that used to go into the nuclear force chooses today to go into other commands, if they can. Second, those officers who are put into the missile force suffer from low morale, because they know that the posting is a dead-end career-wise. The generals of tomorrow are not sitting in Global Strike Command’s B-52s or Minuteman silos, and the people who are sitting in those places know that. So they’re less eager to live up to high standards of discipline and performance, because from that perspective, what’s the point?

Solving the problem: we need fewer nuclear weapons, better maintained

The problem, of course, is that there is a point. Nuclear weapons are incredibly dangerous things to work with, or work around. A mistake involving them could kill lots of innocent people or start a war that we never intended to fight. So the solution can’t be to relax the disciplinary standards. Nuclear weapons will always require an extraordinarily high standard of safety, whether living up to that standard is glamorous or not.

Really, the only solution I can think of is a radical downsizing of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. If we can’t make serving in the nuclear force something that the best officers naturally want to do — and I seriously doubt that pay raises for missileers are going to do that, since people motivated primarily by money tend not to make a career in the military in the first place — we can at least cut down the number of people needed to tend those aging weapons. A smaller force would be easier to police for performance problems, wouldn’t be as big a bucket for other commands to dump their problem officers into, and would cut down on the risk of accidents just by reducing the number of interactions officers have with nuclear weapons in a given time period.

Ever since the 1950s, the American nuclear force has been structured in what became known as the “nuclear triad.” This refers to a force structure with three main elements:  warheads dropped from manned bombers, warheads delivered by land-based missiles, and warheads delivered by missiles launched from submarines. This concept of the triad has become an fundamental part of American strategic thinking regarding nuclear weapons; if one or even two legs of the triad get knocked out by an enemy, the argument goes, the other legs will still be there to strike back. In this way the different types of delivery systems help protect against each others’ vulnerabilities.

The problem with this, however, is that the legs of the triad are not all of equal length. Some of them are much more vulnerable than the others. Probably the safest, and therefore the most dependable in a crisis, is the Navy’s nuclear missile submarines; they are hard to detect, making it difficult for enemies to find and sink them, and can deliver their warheads anywhere around the world thanks to their long range of sailing and of their missiles. The second most survivable is the Air Force’s manned bombers; while surface-to-air missiles have made dropping bombs from directly overhead World War II-style a suicide mission, modern bombers can use cruise missiles to strike targets from a great distance, and it’s hard to knock them out on the ground because they can be moved from airfield to airfield as needed. The most vulnerable leg of the triad is probably the Air Force’s ground-based missiles; they strike from a distance too, but they can’t be moved around to avoid an enemy’s missiles, and unlike a bomber they can’t be called back after launch or put into a holding pattern while diplomats negotiate.

(And even worse, unlike the other two, the ground-based missiles are sort of hard-wired to only attack Russia. That’s great if Russia is the country we’re at war with, not so much if it’s somebody else.)

Unfortunately, from an interservice-rivalry perspective, this means that if you were going to cut down from the triad to a single delivery mechanism, you’d pick the Navy’s submarines and cut the Air Force out of the nuclear mission entirely, which would result in ferocious opposition from the Air Force and its partisans on Capitol Hill. So, while that would be the most rational thing to do, it’s probably not possible. But there really is no reason, in 2014, not to at least get rid of the land-based missiles, which are (not to put too fine a point on it, but) relics of a bygone age. There’s just no good strategic rationale for keeping them. They don’t make us appreciably safer than we would be without them — bombers and subs would still be able to inflict overwhelming damage on any conceivable opponent. And since they require delicate handling to operate safely, there’s an argument to be made that they make us less safe, at least as long as maintaining and operating them isn’t the sort of mission that attracts the Air Force’s best and brightest anymore. They just present opportunities for someone to screw up and cause a disaster. Getting rid of them removes that risk, costs us very little, and gives us moral standing to demand that Russia (the only nation with anywhere near as large a nuclear arsenal as ours) cut back on their own land-based missiles too.

So here’s your first step towards a saner, safer nuclear force structure for the United States: get rid of the ballistic missiles. It’s not a complete solution, but at least it’s a start.


Balls of steel: playing pinball on an Android tablet

Zen Pinball - Sorcerer's Lair table

“Sorcerer’s Lair,” the free table included with Zen Pinball HD

I recently bought one of Google’s Nexus 7 Android tablets. Partly because the increasing popularity of tablets made me think that professionally I should have some experience with using such a device, but mostly because I’m a nerd with an insufficient number of barriers between me and my credit cards. So I’ve been exploring the device, looking for examples of apps that really shine on a device with this form factor.

One of the few I’ve found that really stand out is pinball games. I’ve always loved real, physical pinball machines; there’s something about their tactile response and the challenge of fighting elemental forces like gravity and resistance that I enjoy. Video games don’t have to deal with those forces, which lets them do things that no pinball machine can; but that very freedom can also make them feel hollow, disconnected from the real world. Pinball is real. And that reality makes it fun.

Unfortunately, with the decline of the American arcade and other venues where pinball tables once stood, finding a pinball machine to play can be difficult these days. As a mass-market entertainment, they’re effectively dead. There’s still places where a dusty, poorly maintained table can be found in a corner, or where enthusiasts tend to a meticulously groomed collection of machines saved from the dumpster, but these are few and far between.

All of that has led to many attempts to preserve pinball as a game by liberating it from physical tables and creating pinball as a video game that runs on a video gaming platform — a PC or a console or a portable gaming device. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, this has not turned out well, because the standard form factor of the displays on these systems is wider than it is tall, which is the exact opposite of the dimensions of taller-than-they-are-wide pinball tables. The result is that pinball translates to them poorly; unlike a real pinball table, where you can see the whole playfield just by standing before it, video pinball games have to scroll and swing the camera around so you can see the ball as it bounces around the playfield. That tends to either be disorienting or frustrating, depending on how violently the developers chose to make those camera moves.

So video pinball tends to suck. But not on a tablet, it turns out! Because tablets can be rotated into a portrait mode, which lets the developer show you the whole playfield at once, just like you were standing in front of a real pinball table. (As can smartphones, of course, but the larger screen of the tablet makes it preferable to the smaller phone screen — you can make out more detail on the table.) So all those weird camera angles and swoopy pans across the table go away, and it’s just you and the game again. The way pinball is supposed to be.

I tried out two popular Android pinball games on the Nexus 7. I had trouble finding good reviews to help me find the one I would like best, so I thought I’d write up my experiences here on the off chance it would help other pinball fans.

The first game I tried is the more established of the two, Zen Pinball HD by Zen Studios. It concentrates on flashy visual effects, sophisticated tables with features that go beyond the things you could do on a real, physical table, and multiplayer features that let you compete with your friends for high scores and achievements. It comes with one free table, Sorcerer’s Lair, with other tables available as in-app purchases.

The second game was a newer contender, The Pinball Arcade by Farsight Studios. Unlike Zen, whose tables were all created expressly for the game, The Pinball Arcade’s big selling point is that it recreates real, highly regarded tables from pinball’s arcade heyday, including classics from Williams, Bally, Stern and Gottlieb. Like Zen, it comes with one table (Williams’ Tales of the Arabian Nights, from 1996), with many more unlockable through in-app purchases.

(Note that both these games are available on many other platforms besides Android, though for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom Zen appears on different platforms under different names. For example, the XBox 360 version, which I’ve played a little, is branded as “Pinball FX2.“)

Given the differences between the objectives these two titles are reaching for, I expected going in that The Pinball Arcade would be the one I would enjoy most. I like real pinball machines, after all; I was looking for a game that would remind me of playing them, not one that was struggling to overcome their supposed limitations. So Farsight’s goal of bringing classic tables from history to your tablet seemed like an obvious winner.

After playing both for a while, though, I was surprised to discover myself gravitating more and more towards Zen. The reason was pretty simple: The Pinball Arcade may have hyper-accurate tables, but the actual experience of playing them is disappointingly weak. Ball physics feel mushy and muted; clipping issues sometimes result in a ball passing right through a paddle; so many lights go off across the playfield that it’s hard to keep track of where the ball is. It’s real pinball, but not fun pinball, at least for me.

Zen, on the other hand, is great fun. While the tables aren’t drawn from real-world examples, they’re thoughtfully designed and attractively presented. They occasionally depart from the things a physical table in the real world could do — X-Wings and TIE fighters zoom around the playfield on a Star Wars table, for instance — but generally speaking they don’t try to make pinball into something that it is not. And they get the details of how it feels to play pinball right; the kinetic motion of the ball, the satisfying experience of hitting it with just the right part of the paddle to send it flying into a narrow lane. It all works, in a way that The Pinball Arcade does not.

This is not to say that Zen is perfect; there are some places in which The Pinball Arcade is clearly superior. One is in the selection of tables available for purchase; The Pinball Arcade has dozens, while Zen’s selection is both much smaller and dominated by themed tables created via marketing partnerships with other companies (Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics, mostly). If you want a table based on a Marvel character or storyline, Zen will delight you. If you just want a table that isn’t also an exercise in brand extension, there’s fewer than ten to choose from. That’s disappointing — especially because tables that you can get for editions of Zen on other platforms, like the XBox 360 version I mentioned above, are bafflingly not available to play on Android. The Pinball Arcade also lets you try new tables for free for a limited period before buying them, while Zen only lets you view a feature list and video of the game in action.

While Zen’s selection of tables is smaller, though, it beats The Pinball Arcade’s in one important way: pricing. Zen tables are purchased individually, with prices ranging from $0.99 to a couple of bucks; this is a clear and easy-to-understand pricing model. Tables for The Pinball Arcade, on the other hand, are confusingly grouped together into “packs” — even though most “packs” only contain two tables, and some have only one. And then, even more confusingly, the “packs” are grouped into “seasons” which can be purchased en masse at prices up to $30. That’s probably great for completists who want to buy lots of tables at once, but if you’re just looking to buy a single table you enjoyed the free trial of, figuring out what you need to buy to get it can be frustrating.

So: if I were going to recommend a pinball title for Android tablets, right now it would be Zen Pinball HD. It doesn’t have the heritage that The Pinball Arcade does, but it does have the fun that the other title lacks. And fun is presumably what you are coming to a pinball game looking for.

UPDATE (February 18): In the interest of fairness, I should mention that in my further exploration of both pinball titles since this was written I have discovered one Pinball Arcade table that is at least as good, if not better than anything in Zen’s table library: 1995’s Theatre of Magic, designed by John Popadiuk for Williams. It’s an exquisitely well-balanced table that manages to offer lots of fun objectives and mini-games without ever becoming inscrutable or overwhelming, and Pinball Arcade’s recreation of it is so good it makes me wish I could have played the real table in an arcade. You can get it with three other tables for a couple of bucks by buying Season 1’s “Launch Tables” pack.


Presenting the best of Just Well Mixed, 2013 Edition

Best of the WorstOh look, it’s 2014, which means it’s time to round up the best posts made to this blog in 2013. As usual, “best” is determined by the standard JWM method, which involves calculating the post’s number of hits, the quality of comment threads it spawned here and elsewhere, and the phase of the moon when the post was posted, and then throwing all that shit out and picking the ones I liked best. It’s not scientific, but it feels good.

So, without further ado, here’s the list:

Rick Reilly’s Lance Armstrong problem is all of journalism’s problem (January 22, 2013)
The style of reporting usually called “access journalism” is neither: neither access, nor journalism

I kind of hate Twitter (February 1, 2013)
Taken together, all of these factors create an environment where even reasonable, thoughful people behave like douchebags. They don’t do so because they are douchebags, necessarily. They do so because Twitter as a medium is optimized for douchebaggery

Stephen A. Douglas, the politician who was too smart for his own good (March 6, 2013)
Intelligence, in and of itself, is no guarantee of wisdom. Smart people tend to fall into different types of snares than stupid people; but fall into snares they do, and with distressing frequency. Self-destruction is not the exclusive province of the dumb

How winners win: John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations (March 14, 2013)
A culture focused on a particular set of essential principles, Boyd believed, would give the organization that followed it an edge when confronting any organization that did not. He called this set of principles the “organizational climate for operational success”

WordPress is secure, until you combine it with people (May 9, 2013)
WordPress suffers from a problem that many software products do: it expects its users to be something they are not

The free coffee test, or Lefkowitz’s Law of Corporate Financial Health (May 22, 2013)
The financial health of a company can be inferred from the quality, variety and cost to the employee of the snacks and beverages it offers its employees

SLIDESHOW: 20 Cats Who Suck At Reducing Tensions In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (July 10, 2013)
Screw blogging! It’s about time I made a play for some of those sweet, sweet BuzzFeed/HuffPo pageviews. So here’s a slideshow

STOVL, the F-35, and how we’re even more f’ed than David Axe suggests (August 15, 2013)
The F-35 is an extremely troubled program. But its troubles are just the tip of the iceberg

Native advertising: you can’t rent your credibility, you can only sell it (September 17, 2013)
The reason native advertising works is because readers don’t understand that it is advertising

BREAKING: Everything Hacked (October 30, 2013)
Everything. The whole enchirito. All of it


Download my NaNoWriMo novel: “Day of the Kangaroo Man”

NaNoWriMo logoI didn’t do a lot of writing in this space last month, because I was participating in National Novel Writing Month, aka “NaNoWriMo.” NaNoWriMo is an annual exercise in creative writing: participants have the month of November to write a novel, with “novel” being defined as “a fictional story 50,000 words or more in length.” At the end of the month you upload your story’s text and, if you have at least 50,000 words, you win! It’s a challenge that hundreds of thousands of people take up every year; for 2013, I decided to take it up with them.

It’s all pretty simple, in theory. The hard part, of course, is writing 50,000 words in the time alotted. I made it by the skin of my teeth — I crossed the 50,000 word mark at around 10:30 PM on November 30. But a last-minute victory is still a victory, right?

Anyway, I thought I would share the fruits of my labor with those of you who read Just Well Mixed, so here you go: a free, downloadable PDF copy of my NaNoWriMo 2013 novel, DAY OF THE KANGAROO MAN.

Enjoy:

DAY OF THE KANGAROO MAN is a comic adventure novel about Marvin Wendt, an ordinary man who discovers one day that he has developed extraordinary powers. His conscience tells him that he should use those powers to promote justice, but he quickly discovers that he’s not very good at being a superhero — certainly not anywhere near as good as Captain Amazing, the city’s beloved #1 hero. Then, as he’s contemplating whether or not to hang up his costume and go back to his job as an insurance claims adjuster, he stumbles across a nefarious plot that threatens the future of the entire city.

Can Marvin get his act together in time to stop it? Can he live up to the standard set by Captain Amazing? Can he convince anyone that it’s OK he sewed a pouch onto his Kangaroo Man costume, even though only female kangaroos have pouches, because it’s not really a pouch but a “tactical pocket”? You’ll have to read the novel to find out.

I haven’t done a lot of editing to the manuscript, so this version is pretty close to the way the story stood when I finished the novel on November 30. I’m sure it could use some polishing up, but hopefully it’s at least fun to read. Of course, you, dear reader, will be the final judge of that.

Anyway — I hope you enjoy the book, at least as much as I enjoyed writing it!


BREAKING: Everything Hacked

Citizens react calmly to news that ATMs now dispense slips of construction paper with Guy Fawkes masks printed on them instead of money

Citizens react calmly and responsibly to news that ATMs now dispense slips of “Fireball Fuchsia” color construction paper with Guy Fawkes masks printed on them instead of money

WASHINGTON — Leaders of government, finance, industry and technology from around the world announced at a hastily-called press conference today that everything had been hacked.

“You heard me,” Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker told assembled reporters as the sounds of wild rioting echoed from the streets outside. “Everything. The whole enchirito. All of it.”

While the full scope of the compromise has yet to be determined, knowledgeable sources estimate that the hacked devices and services include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Gmail, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, wireless routers, bank and credit card accounts, automatic teller machines, water and sewer flow control systems, power networks, nuclear and coal power plants, wind turbines, street lights, traffic lights, subways, Amtrak, land-line and cellular telephone networks, air traffic control systems, commercial and military aircraft guidance systems, GPS receivers, automobile turn signals, wireless car keys, pacemakers, hearing aids, MRI scanners, EKG machines, HVAC systems, grocery store loyalty card accounts, hotel room door keys, Disney World MagicBands, Starbucks cards, refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers, stoves and ovens, food processors, televisions, TiVos, XBoxes, PlayStations, Bluetooth headsets, electric shavers, electric toothbrushes, WaterPiks, coffee machines, toasters and toaster ovens, hair dryers and Klout scores.

“We’re pretty much 100% boned,” Secretary Pritzker added before being interrupted by a brick thrown through a nearby window.

Silicon Valley leaders expressed bewilderment as to how such a massive failure of electronic security systems could have taken place.

“All of those systems were secured with state-of-the-art security techniques,” said one expert in computer security, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid the howling mobs that had strung most of his colleagues up from lampposts. “Each and every one of them required every user to memorize a long string of nonsense characters, liberally interspersed with inappropriately placed numbers and punctuation marks, in order to log in. And each one told those users to make sure to use a different long string of nonsense characters for each site, service, device or account, because if everybody used the same one everywhere it would be absurdly easy for an attacker who managed to break into one service to use credentials stolen from there to break into many more.”

The expert scoffed at the suggestion, frequently voiced this morning by bands of marauding rioters as they took breaks from burning down buildings, that making the security of the world economy dependent on a system that imposed such a large cognitive burden on ordinary users — and which opened itself up to compromise every time even one user failed to live up to that burden — was dangerously irresponsible.

“All you people had to do for the system to be 100% secure was memorize two hundred and thirty-six different passwords,” he explained. “And remember which one goes with which account. And never send them over unencrypted channels like e-mail. And never make use of a memory aid like a piece of paper stuck to the wall with your passwords written on it. And change them all every thirty days without ever re-using one you used in the past.”

“I guess that was just too hard for you idiots,” he concluded before grabbing his “go bag” and racing for the door.

While experts are still scrambling to determine the extent of the damage, they unanimously recommend that users immediately change any passwords associated with any online account or other Internet-connected device or service, especially if it is possible to do so while frantically boarding up your house to defend against the rampaging hordes that have sprung up to protest the sudden collapse of modern civilization. Stockpiling anti-virus software, canned food and ammunition is also encouraged.

“And be sure to mix a few Molotov cocktails before retreating into your hastily-erected bunker with whatever members of your family are still alive,” Secretary Pritzker reminded listeners. “Safety first.”


A bunch of capsule reviews of Android games, because why not

I’ve been getting into the Android gaming scene lately, and while there’s plenty of interesting-looking games available on that platform these days, there’s a dispiriting lack of decent reviews of them to help you sort the wheat from the chaff. So to help others avoid the same stumbling block, I thought I’d take a few minutes and share my impressions of a bunch of different Android games with you.

Try to contain your excitement.

If you’re one of the brainwashed lemmings fine people who use an Apple device, you’ll probably be able to find many of these in Apple’s App Store as well. Since I don’t have an Apple device, though, I can’t tell you how the iOS version compares to the Android version.

Reviews are presented in alphabetical order by the title of the game.

And so, without further ado…


Bloons TD 5Bloons TD 5
By: Ninja Kiwi
Price: $2.99

An OK tower defense game with a cute visual aesthetic, marred by wildly inconsistent difficulty from level to level and awkward controls for placing your towers onto the playfield. Probably only worth it if you’re a tower defense fanatic and you’re tired of playing Kingdom Rush (see below).

Worth playing? For tower defense die-hards only.


Candy Crush SagaCandy Crush Saga
By: King.com
Price: Free to download, with in-app purchases

The game that your office receptionist won’t stop talking about!

I liked it better back when it was called Puzzle Quest.

Which I liked better when it was called Bejeweled.

Which I liked better when it was called… oh, never mind.

Worth playing? Only if you’ve never played a match-three game before.


Kingdom RushKingdom Rush
By: Ironhide Game Studio
Price: $0.99, with in-app purchases

A very good translation of the standard tower defense format to mobile. Levels ramp up in difficulty gently but noticeably, so that you’re always presented with a decent but not skull-splitting challenge. In-app purchases are available, but not needed to progress through the game at a reasonable pace. Visuals and sound are spare, but not so much as to detract from the enjoyment of the game.

Worth playing? Yes.


Knights of Pen and PaperKnights of Pen and Paper
By: Paradox Interactive
Price: $2.99, with in-app purchases

A fun send-up of the tropes of “classic” role-playing games. Assemble a team of adventurers with such renowned heroes as Your Little Brother and The Pizza Guy, and then lead them through a variety of quests to fetch things and kill other things in order to save a kingdom of some sort. RPG in-jokes abound, if you’re into that sort of thing. Quests can be a bit grindy, but thankfully not extremely so. Trendy retro pixel-art visuals and sounds complete the package.

Worth playing? Yes.


Middle Manager of JusticeMiddle Manager of Justice
By: Double Fine Productions
Price: Free to download, with in-app purchases

Manage a superhero temp agency; your job is to assemble teams of superheroes from the available talent on your books and send them out to put Bad Guys behind bars. Eventually an overarching plot emerges that ties the various missions together. The game’s writing is funny, though not as funny as it appears at times to think it is. Switching between office mode, where you train, equip, etc. your heroes, and battles out in the field keeps it from feeling too repetitive, though there’s a bit of a grind near the end. In-app purchases are available, but unobtrusive. Visuals are appropriately comic-booky and add to the overall atmosphere.

Worth playing? Yes.


The RoomThe Room
By: Fireproof Games
Price: $1.99

A fiendishly clever puzzle game (with no affiliation whatsoever with Tommy Wiseau, thank God). You are presented with… well, it’s a cabinet, or a safe, or a box, or something. Your task is to figure out how to open it. Which is harder than it sounds, because the furniture in question is festooned with hidden devices that must be found and overcome. The game makes excellent use of the touchscreen to mimic the feel of working with physical objects; dials must be rotated, switches must be flipped, and so on. Puzzles range from moderately to seriously hard, with a help function to help you if you get truly stumped. Nearly all puzzles are fun brain-teasers, with the exception of two that require tilting your device, which the tutorial never mentions as a valid mechanic. Visuals and sound are atmospheric and haunting. One of the best games available on mobile platforms today.

Worth playing? Yes — if you can get only one game on this list, “The Room” is the one to get.


Star CommandStar Command
By: Star Command, LLC
Price: $2.99

A cute but shallow space-’em-up. You take command of a starship that totally does not in any way infringe on the intellectual property of Gene Roddenberry, and head out into the galaxy to meet and defeat various aliens. A broader plot gradually emerges in which you must eventually step up to save all humanity, etc. Starship management focuses on directing crew members to appropriate places on board to meet threats as they arise; weapons must be manned, corridors defended against boarders, etc. Your crew and equipment are limited by the resources you can gather from winning battles, which in theory should create challenge as you have to balance between adding one more engineer versus upgrading your plasma cannon. In practice, though, even the toughest enemy ships turn out to be so weak that they can barely dent your shields; this is a major flaw that sucks all the tension out of the game. The visuals are of the hip-if-a-bit-overdone-these-days pixel-art variety, and the sound is OK.

Worth playing? For sci-fi obsessives only.


Virtua Tennis ChallengeVirtua Tennis Challenge
By: Sega of America
Price: $4.99

A very good translation of Sega’s excellent Virtua Tennis series of arcade and console games. As with other games in the series, this one isn’t a hard-core tennis sim; it’s more a fun arcade-style game whose aim is to present the feel of tennis. At this it succeeds grandly — play feels appropriately nimble and kinetic. Graphics and sound are top-notch for a mobile game. Biggest drawbacks are a slighly clunky control scheme that can occasionally leave you fuming when your player scrambles off in an unintended direction, and a higher-than-average price point (though still, five bucks, come on). Fans of real-life tennis who want more fine-grained control over their player’s tactics may find it on the thin side, but the more casually interested player will enjoy its action-oriented style.

Worth playing? Yes.