Ours was thought to be a lost cause, back in the day. Thankfully, tourist groups are just as lax among the supposedly enlightened species as they were back on Earth. We've managed to sneak enough humans off of the preserve planet to expand our outside population when we need additional or replacement agents. The fact that immortality can be gotten for cheap handles everything else.
Working on planets from the lower strata of interstellar society is strange to say the least. They have an Earth-like quality, though they have far less surveillance, since they actually managed to realize that it's impractical on the large scale. This works for us: Not only are the surroundings of a technology level with which we're familiar, but we can work without being detected, so that the Occupants, as we've come to call them, won't know that any of us have gotten loose.
We've all memorized the Five Century Plan. The duration is the worst part, but we have to make sure that it goes right the first time; the Occupants will make sure that we won't get a second chance, one way or the other. As it happens, it's more like four different plans, each a fail-safe against the others. I kind of hope that we get to the last part, though: Normally, I'd be opposed to genocide, but it'd be an eye for an eye, and they did take Earth from us, after all.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Entertainment Plans: March 2015
In case anyone was wondering, I haven't made any Pokémon progress at all lately. What little time I've spent on the handheld has been on Pokémon shuffle, largely because of its whole heart recharge system. It's a fine little match-3 game, but I'm not writing to talk about that today.
I realized that, even for my personal entertainment, I won't get anything done unless I specifically set out to to it. These aren't exactly great aspirations, but I figured that I'd post them here, for what it's worth. For one thing, I'm hoping to make March be the month that I finally re-play Myst. For another, I'm hoping to watch some anime. I haven't watched anime in ages. I've got one on loan, and I'm hoping to watch any one of a short list of other anime. (Maybe I'll post details once I decide what to watch.) Furthermore, in addition to those, I saw the first few episodes of Gankutsuou AGES ago, and saw them again slightly fewer ages ago, but I figure that I can set aside some time and actually watch the whole thing. (For the curious, Gankutsuou is currently available, both subbed and dubbed, on Funimation's YouTube channel.)
Oh, and I suppose that I'll have to make some more progress on Pokémon, too. ;)
I realized that, even for my personal entertainment, I won't get anything done unless I specifically set out to to it. These aren't exactly great aspirations, but I figured that I'd post them here, for what it's worth. For one thing, I'm hoping to make March be the month that I finally re-play Myst. For another, I'm hoping to watch some anime. I haven't watched anime in ages. I've got one on loan, and I'm hoping to watch any one of a short list of other anime. (Maybe I'll post details once I decide what to watch.) Furthermore, in addition to those, I saw the first few episodes of Gankutsuou AGES ago, and saw them again slightly fewer ages ago, but I figure that I can set aside some time and actually watch the whole thing. (For the curious, Gankutsuou is currently available, both subbed and dubbed, on Funimation's YouTube channel.)
Oh, and I suppose that I'll have to make some more progress on Pokémon, too. ;)
Friday, February 20, 2015
Sudden Short Story 70
"You're behind schedule," came the voice over the commlink.
"This from the 'time traveler'," Breaker said sarcastically, with his subvocals. "Relax, I had to be fashionably late."
"Grid, what's your status?"
"Brilliant," said Grid, "That quantum rig's brilliant. I already own everything. I'm working on the loop footage for the cameras on the path to the master bedroom. Just say when."
"Don't forget to do the other sensors. White hats are always on duty for these affairs. Octopus, be ready, I don't want any of the outside guards coming in if this goes foul."
"They won't even know what happened," she replied. Noise cancelers were as much a godsend to assassins as chameleon suits.
"Grid, give me a status on Breaker."
"He's schmoozing with the guests," said Grid, only mildly annoyed at the degree of micromanagement. He couldn't complain too much - his job was safest of all, really, being off-site. "I think that he's trying to extend his network of ... personal contacts."
"Confidence is a virtue in your line of work, Breaker, but there can be too much of a good thing. Schweitzer is as paranoid as ever. You need to have finished your transport before he checks his room. Please make haste with the lady and resume your duties."
It took almost a minute before Breaker walked away. "Relax," he said, "This gave me half an alibi. I'm off to the washroom, aren't I? Grid, did you get the guards by the corridor?"
"I got them. Both had cyber-eyes, but one didn't have a cyber-occipital, so I'm editing you out of their optical streams live. Hop to it, I can't keep this up forever, even with the q-box."
Once Breaker got to the master bedroom, he easily found the secret switch that opened the secret passage. It was an old mechanical, so it was mostly a matter of knowing for sure that it existed. Within the secret passage, finding the other secret switch was just as easy, though it would've fooled anyone with worse intel - who would suspect a secret door within a secret passage? It wasn't a door, though: The panel revealed a palm reader, though Grid had hacked it to interpret any palm as Schweitzer's.
"I don't believe it," commented Breaker, perhaps not on subvocals.
"I don't recall writing your belief into the contract either way," retorted their boss for this job. "Get in, but be ready. There may be guards on the other end, though I doubt it."
Breaker got into something that he thought passed for a fighting pose, then activated the transporter. Before he knew it, he was in a darkly-lit facility of indiscernible purpose. "There's nobody here," he reported, once he'd turned on the satellite link. It was only just barely powerful enough to get a signal out, but it was necessary, since the facility was off of every grid possible.
"As I suspected," said their boss, "he doesn't want anyone to know that this place exists, so he hasn't even hired guards. Now, get the package to the time nexus and get out."
Breaker found the area containing the time nexus easily enough. "Boss, it's moving around quite a bit. How am I supposed to get the package to it?"
"That's why I put it on a line," came the reply, "It's bound to this location gravitationally, so it and the planet move at the slightest perturbation. The relative velocity doesn't matter, though, so swing the package around in a circle at high speed and try to get the circle to intersect the nexus."
"Tell me again why we have to do this?" asked Breaker, as he got the package up to speed. "Why couldn't you just do it yourself?"
"To alter a timeline in the past, one must be outside of it."
"Yeah, but once I change it, how will you get back in? When you jump in, won't you be a new arrival rather than a native? Surely that's gonna create some problems for you."
"You are working with the faulty assumption that I ever left my home timeline in the first place."
The package intersected the nexus, and an empty loop of string emerged from the other side.
"This from the 'time traveler'," Breaker said sarcastically, with his subvocals. "Relax, I had to be fashionably late."
"Grid, what's your status?"
"Brilliant," said Grid, "That quantum rig's brilliant. I already own everything. I'm working on the loop footage for the cameras on the path to the master bedroom. Just say when."
"Don't forget to do the other sensors. White hats are always on duty for these affairs. Octopus, be ready, I don't want any of the outside guards coming in if this goes foul."
"They won't even know what happened," she replied. Noise cancelers were as much a godsend to assassins as chameleon suits.
"Grid, give me a status on Breaker."
"He's schmoozing with the guests," said Grid, only mildly annoyed at the degree of micromanagement. He couldn't complain too much - his job was safest of all, really, being off-site. "I think that he's trying to extend his network of ... personal contacts."
"Confidence is a virtue in your line of work, Breaker, but there can be too much of a good thing. Schweitzer is as paranoid as ever. You need to have finished your transport before he checks his room. Please make haste with the lady and resume your duties."
It took almost a minute before Breaker walked away. "Relax," he said, "This gave me half an alibi. I'm off to the washroom, aren't I? Grid, did you get the guards by the corridor?"
"I got them. Both had cyber-eyes, but one didn't have a cyber-occipital, so I'm editing you out of their optical streams live. Hop to it, I can't keep this up forever, even with the q-box."
Once Breaker got to the master bedroom, he easily found the secret switch that opened the secret passage. It was an old mechanical, so it was mostly a matter of knowing for sure that it existed. Within the secret passage, finding the other secret switch was just as easy, though it would've fooled anyone with worse intel - who would suspect a secret door within a secret passage? It wasn't a door, though: The panel revealed a palm reader, though Grid had hacked it to interpret any palm as Schweitzer's.
"I don't believe it," commented Breaker, perhaps not on subvocals.
"I don't recall writing your belief into the contract either way," retorted their boss for this job. "Get in, but be ready. There may be guards on the other end, though I doubt it."
Breaker got into something that he thought passed for a fighting pose, then activated the transporter. Before he knew it, he was in a darkly-lit facility of indiscernible purpose. "There's nobody here," he reported, once he'd turned on the satellite link. It was only just barely powerful enough to get a signal out, but it was necessary, since the facility was off of every grid possible.
"As I suspected," said their boss, "he doesn't want anyone to know that this place exists, so he hasn't even hired guards. Now, get the package to the time nexus and get out."
Breaker found the area containing the time nexus easily enough. "Boss, it's moving around quite a bit. How am I supposed to get the package to it?"
"That's why I put it on a line," came the reply, "It's bound to this location gravitationally, so it and the planet move at the slightest perturbation. The relative velocity doesn't matter, though, so swing the package around in a circle at high speed and try to get the circle to intersect the nexus."
"Tell me again why we have to do this?" asked Breaker, as he got the package up to speed. "Why couldn't you just do it yourself?"
"To alter a timeline in the past, one must be outside of it."
"Yeah, but once I change it, how will you get back in? When you jump in, won't you be a new arrival rather than a native? Surely that's gonna create some problems for you."
"You are working with the faulty assumption that I ever left my home timeline in the first place."
The package intersected the nexus, and an empty loop of string emerged from the other side.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
New Year's Resolutions 2015
I never got around to finalizing my resolution list for this year, so here it is.
- 4 blog posts per month - This is still hard, so I'm not increasing it.
- Flash Fiction Friday, the 3rd Friday of each month (with that Saturday as a backup), starting in February - I totally forgot this month, but I had a scheduling conflict, anyway.
- Finish first stage of research into Greek mythology - This means something specific to me, but I'm being vague here.
- Follow my exercise schedule - The schedule itself might change, as needed, but I've got one currently, and so far I'm managing to keep to it.
- Beat Myst again - OK, I forgot last year, but I definitely want to do it this year.
- I'm also hoping to beat at least 1 other game in this series. They're not exactly long, but I've got to get around to doing them.
- Beat Pokémon OR/AS - This means beating the Elite 4, but I have, like, no progress on this so far. -_-
On Helping Others Find Sites
I was recently reading yet another article on how a site's livelihood - in this case, MetaFilter's - was threatened because a search engine - in this case, Google - made a secret change to its secret algorithms. Every once in a while, an article like this crosses my path, though I have to wonder how many I don't see because I don't see the tweet, or because nobody in my timeline tweeted or retweeted it because they didn't know about it because it doesn't show up on search engines. Also, even though I said "search engine" twice, this also applies to social networking sites, though in different ways. On the one hand, I'm glad that my livelihood doesn't depend on a website (I'm not even currently running any), but on the other hand, it's because of that that it's easy to forget how big of a deal this is to some people.
I recently tweeted that people should use at least three search engines - unless they can get exactly half of their searches into each of two - and the point of this, really, is to avoid letting anyone get a monopoly. Google has a higher "household name" stat than anyone else. Bing is getting traffic from people too lazy to use anything other than IE. Yahoo is now getting traffic from people comfortable with using FireFox's default engine. Last I checked, Ask.com was still trying to trick people installing Java or Flash or something into changing their browser's default to Ask.com. Even this trickery is understandable, given how much sway Google holds, but even if some other search engine takes the lead, that just changes who the default is. Ever since search engines got good - prioritizing sites by relevance instead of just listing them - our behavior has changed.
Search engines, ads, and social media sites are said to "drive traffic" - or not, as the case may be - to any given site. However, this is sometimes fraught with pitfalls, too, as is the case with facebook. I'll recap, for those who haven't heard: A while ago (last year or the year before, I forget), it was revealed that facebook was sometimes hiding updates by people/groups/pages from people who followed those people/groups/pages, unless those people/groups/pages paid money to make sure that all of their followers got to see it. Of course, since facebook is charging the content creators, most users don't know that stuff is being hidden from them; they're not told that there's a missing update, so they don't know that there's a hole in their timelines. As it happens, just the other day, someone made a comic summarizing this topic again.
People have been communicating with each other over the internet for as long as it has existed - that's kind of the point of it, after all. Social networking sites have been around longer than the name, and even longer than really old ones like friendster, but they were called "forums". Even before that, though, there were instant messaging services, chatrooms, and even Usenet groups. Websites exited, too, once they were invented, but the most common ways that people found out about sites was by being told about them, either by their fellow users (even, believe it or not, offline) or by other sites. (This is back when webrings were still seen on a regular basis.)
I think that we need to make a point of doing this more, as it has waned. That's not to say that we need to sign up for Usenet groups or idle in chatrooms all day, but we should make a point of telling each other about good sites, and asking each other instead of relying on search engines. I don't know exactly the best way to do it, but here are some tips:
I recently tweeted that people should use at least three search engines - unless they can get exactly half of their searches into each of two - and the point of this, really, is to avoid letting anyone get a monopoly. Google has a higher "household name" stat than anyone else. Bing is getting traffic from people too lazy to use anything other than IE. Yahoo is now getting traffic from people comfortable with using FireFox's default engine. Last I checked, Ask.com was still trying to trick people installing Java or Flash or something into changing their browser's default to Ask.com. Even this trickery is understandable, given how much sway Google holds, but even if some other search engine takes the lead, that just changes who the default is. Ever since search engines got good - prioritizing sites by relevance instead of just listing them - our behavior has changed.
Search engines, ads, and social media sites are said to "drive traffic" - or not, as the case may be - to any given site. However, this is sometimes fraught with pitfalls, too, as is the case with facebook. I'll recap, for those who haven't heard: A while ago (last year or the year before, I forget), it was revealed that facebook was sometimes hiding updates by people/groups/pages from people who followed those people/groups/pages, unless those people/groups/pages paid money to make sure that all of their followers got to see it. Of course, since facebook is charging the content creators, most users don't know that stuff is being hidden from them; they're not told that there's a missing update, so they don't know that there's a hole in their timelines. As it happens, just the other day, someone made a comic summarizing this topic again.
People have been communicating with each other over the internet for as long as it has existed - that's kind of the point of it, after all. Social networking sites have been around longer than the name, and even longer than really old ones like friendster, but they were called "forums". Even before that, though, there were instant messaging services, chatrooms, and even Usenet groups. Websites exited, too, once they were invented, but the most common ways that people found out about sites was by being told about them, either by their fellow users (even, believe it or not, offline) or by other sites. (This is back when webrings were still seen on a regular basis.)
I think that we need to make a point of doing this more, as it has waned. That's not to say that we need to sign up for Usenet groups or idle in chatrooms all day, but we should make a point of telling each other about good sites, and asking each other instead of relying on search engines. I don't know exactly the best way to do it, but here are some tips:
- Don't assume that someone interested in a topic already knows about <site>.
- If someone asks you about good sites/the best site for something, don't tell them to <search engine> it.
- Every now and then, <search engine> for <topic>, then skip the first three pages of results, and see if you find any diamonds in the rough. (If you do, then tell people about them.)
- Every now and then, go through your bookmarks and see if there's a site that you haven't visited in a while. If it's still there and still good, then tell people about it.
- It's going to be a very long time before people get weaned off of search engines. Be patient with this.
An Initial Review of Civilization V
Recently, there was a free weekend on Steam for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, and I took a crack at it. I enjoyed it, even though I didn't finish it. However, it occurred to me that I'd never actually played a game in the Civilization series. All of the Civilization titles were 75% off on Steam that weekend, so I went ahead and picked up Sid Meier's Civilization V.
I've finally finished my first game of it.
I really quite enjoyed the game. There's a lot to it, but because of the way that civilizations progress, it's not all dumped out at once. Also, it's turn-based, so I'm not rushed while trying to learn it. I did play it on the easy difficulty, but that gave me a chance to make some mistakes during my first play-through.
I can't wait to play on the normal setting, and probably on a bigger map.
One thing that I noticed in the design of the game is that, even if one isn't going for a given type of victory, it still behooves one to progress that area, so nothing gets abandoned. For instance, even if one isn't going for domination victory, it's still a good idea to have a strong enough standing army to defend against invaders. Likewise, Culture is useful both to make someone else's Culture Victory harder and because it unlocks special abilities.
It's a short review, I know, but if you want an in-depth look at the mechanics - well, it's been out since 2010, so I'm sure that you can find reviews and wikis on it.
I've finally finished my first game of it.
I really quite enjoyed the game. There's a lot to it, but because of the way that civilizations progress, it's not all dumped out at once. Also, it's turn-based, so I'm not rushed while trying to learn it. I did play it on the easy difficulty, but that gave me a chance to make some mistakes during my first play-through.
I can't wait to play on the normal setting, and probably on a bigger map.
One thing that I noticed in the design of the game is that, even if one isn't going for a given type of victory, it still behooves one to progress that area, so nothing gets abandoned. For instance, even if one isn't going for domination victory, it's still a good idea to have a strong enough standing army to defend against invaders. Likewise, Culture is useful both to make someone else's Culture Victory harder and because it unlocks special abilities.
It's a short review, I know, but if you want an in-depth look at the mechanics - well, it's been out since 2010, so I'm sure that you can find reviews and wikis on it.
Friday, January 30, 2015
On the Average Results of Savage Worlds Dice
Something occurred to me the other day, regarding the average results of dice in Savage Worlds. For those who don't know, in Savage Worlds, each die (with the possible exception of damage dice - I forget) can explode. For those who don't know what that means, if a die rolls its highest result, that result is kept and then added to a new roll of that die.
Obviously, the minimum result of any roll (except 1d4-2) is a 1, and the maximum result is an arbitrarily large number. However, what's the average result of any die roll?
Consider a 1d6 roll, the most common roll in Savage Worlds.
Let x be the average result, which we seek.
We're re-using x on the right, since the average roll being added to 6 in the best case is, itself, the average case of a new die roll. Thus, we can use basic algebra to solve for x:
In this specific case, the result is x = 21/5 = 4.2. However, I've left the sum to reveal the generalized form. For a die of size k, the average result is
While I don't think that this is new knowledge, I also suspect that tables are commonly referenced, so I thought that I'd put this generalized form out there.
EDIT: I had a botched example result; I was thinking of the d8 case.
EDIT: I discovered that the fancy math stuff is rendering weirdly on Blogger. I'll fix it later; for now, you can click on it if it's illegible: The page where you land will have it (correctly) in about the middle.
Obviously, the minimum result of any roll (except 1d4-2) is a 1, and the maximum result is an arbitrarily large number. However, what's the average result of any die roll?
Consider a 1d6 roll, the most common roll in Savage Worlds.
Let x be the average result, which we seek.
We're re-using x on the right, since the average roll being added to 6 in the best case is, itself, the average case of a new die roll. Thus, we can use basic algebra to solve for x:
In this specific case, the result is x = 21/5 = 4.2. However, I've left the sum to reveal the generalized form. For a die of size k, the average result is
While I don't think that this is new knowledge, I also suspect that tables are commonly referenced, so I thought that I'd put this generalized form out there.
EDIT: I had a botched example result; I was thinking of the d8 case.
EDIT: I discovered that the fancy math stuff is rendering weirdly on Blogger. I'll fix it later; for now, you can click on it if it's illegible: The page where you land will have it (correctly) in about the middle.
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