Suboptimist

Letter’s from Middle-earth.

It turns out that unlike, say, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online is a bitch and a half to theorycraft. An entire cottage industrycottage industry, where people research and cite eachother’s research, has formed to figure out on our own what Turbine, Inc won’t tell us: the numbers behind the gameplay/damage/healing mechanics. I haven’t finished reading through all of it, but it’s easy to glean that at least at this point in the game’s existence, damage is tied to player-character “initial stats,” i.e. agility, might, etc., as opposed to gear-based stats like +damage and +crit. Where the game system really shines, however, is in the stat buffs the party gains from skill chains. I’ll shut up about that now. Even I’m not sure what I just said.

I guess the gist of what I’m trying to say is that I like Lord of the Rings Online. It’s an interesting take on the MMO genre. Mechanically, it’s nothing new, but the quest-driven gameplay and the incentives given throughout the game for players to stop and smell the frakking roses rather than race to the level cap is a nice change. I’m playing two characters: a hobbit minstrel and a man hunter.

Last night I managed to get a pick-up-group together to explore the Hobbit lowbie zone, the Shire. The Shire is a pretty neat zone. The zone layout is right out of Tolkien’s descriptions. There a bunch of little villages throughout that in typical Turbine fashion have nothing to do game content. A bunch of stuff is there to encourage exploration. Pictures below.

In other, non MMO-related news, I have been hired to work at the Center for American Indian Languages on the Shoshoni documentation/maintenance project. It’s only a few hours a week, but I will probably supplement it with the work at my dad’s firm.

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Edumacation.

I graduated college on Friday.  It would be much more exciting if it were for good, but instead I’ll be at the same school in the same department all over again.  The only difference is that I’ll be taken seriously, and therefore expected to produce better work.  Also, I think this time they’ll be paying me to go to school.

Also, I’m not gonna lie, I can’t think of anything else to say right now.  If I find some pictures or something, I’ll post them.

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I hope you like text.

Let me lead into this post by saying that Baldr, slain by Loki, has risen from the dead. The nations of North rejoice, for the long nights of winter are over. That means a post about gaming. Also, it means a freaking long post. Get ready

I am not sure what it is, but somehow whenever summer approaches World of Warcraft rears its ugly head to taunt me once more. Last summer I went and purchased the Burning Crusade expansion immediately following my last exam, despite swearing before God and Man that I would never, ever touch the filthy substance ever again.

I destroyed the discs last winter, or at least I thought I had. As I went through an old disc carrier, I found them. There they were taunting me, like a cold beer to a recovering alcoholic. I promptly destroyed them…for real this time. This leads to the subject matter of this post: my love affair with Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games.

I come to this having played several MMOs. I probably haven’t played any one for more than 9 months at a time, but I think the number is approaching five. I have come to some conclusions about the effect MMOs have had on my gaming tastes and why some MMOs have appealed to me more than others.

The Reverend and I have had this conversation many times. In his words, it has ruined the single-player gaming experience. While my own assessment is less dire, I see his point. Today I turned on Mass Effect to play through again. I did something awesome. I also had nobody to share it with. That is the beauty of the MMO. Your experiences are shared with others from around the world. When your guild (or linkshell or kinship or corporation…) are down, you’re down. People see the effect you’re having on the digital world, and they even benefit from it. The feeling of playing a game with others is hard to duplicate. Single-player games, while I still love them, aren’t designed this way.

In an aside, yesterday the Reverend and I walked into a game store to realize how disconnected we are with today’s gaming community. The store was filled with kids half our age buying Madden and Halo 3. I have only completed a few titles since I started with MMOs. The Reverend has completed less than I have. There are games on the shelf he and I don’t even recognize. I can’t help but wonder if this disconnect is somehow associated with the rise of MMOs. Daedalus should get on that.

Moving on, certain MMOs have appealed to me more than others. Despite what I said at the beginning of this post, World of Warcraft was really an ideal game for a host of reasons:

· 1) I am familiar with the Warcraft backstory, having played all the single-player titles.

· 2) The backstory is deep and compelling. It’s not some chitzy, generic fantasy tale.

· 3) To a reasonable extent, the gameplay is relevant to the overall story.

Any game can meet points 2 and 3. No other game can (at this point) can meet 1. Now, let me draw a comparison between WoW and another MMO I played, EVE online. EVE is a fun game, no doubt. It has a rich, deep, compelling story. If you were to print all the available lore off the internet, it would probably fill a standard sized novel. That said, EVE doesn’t do anything with it. The game lacks context. Global PVP is unmotivated. Simply put, there is no reason for players to be fighting. In WoW, PVP (as well as PVE) is motivated by a larger storyline of a tenuous armistice between the Horde and the Alliance, with certain areas where things flare up.

People have told me that it’s not necessary for a game to connect everything into the backstory. Well, sure, but something like PVP should be. I mean, in real life, there are things that happen by themselves. But if you work in some military capacity, you’d expect, say, the war in Iraq to play some role in your day to day affairs. MMOs should operate in a similar manner.

So, the question is this: what will I play this summer? Vanguard? Lord of the Rings Online? EVE? RF Online? Just single player games? I don’t know. Right now, I am kicking around LotRO and thinking of maybe trying RF online. I have reservations though. First, LotRO is designed that, strategy aside, you constantly feel like you’re zerging the enemy. RF online? Well…Korean…

EDIT: I’ll be switching themes a lot until I find something I like and is modifiable.

Posted in Frivolity | 1 Comment »

Syntax III: Syntactic Awakening

I’ve finished my last syntax paper. I wish I could come to you saying I’ve finished my last syntax paper ever, but it turns out my tentative schedule next year (my first as a graduate student) will be:

· Child Language Acquisition: I’m taking this because this is what I ultimately want to do with my career. I am in the MA program at the U only partly because I was rejected from everywhere else. I also want to get grounding in phonetics. However, to have any credibility getting into a program with a greater language acquisition/cogsci focus.

· Seminar in Arabic Linguistics &emdash Diglossia: I’m taking this mostly at the encouragement of my adviser. I am also interested in how diglossia in the Arab world is eroding, and how phonology behaves sociolinguistically. Nobody has looked at that in Arabic.

· Syntax III: I really can’t believe I’m doing this to myself. It’s required for my MA, so I may as well get it over with.

Posted in School | 2 Comments »

I’m not so much a pessimist…

As it was foretold, Title of Record is no more. Welcome to the newest incarnation of my 5 years of continued existence on the Internets.

This is called Suboptimist. I spent most of today figuring out an acceptable domain and title. Initially, what I wanted was thearbitrarian.com. The domain was available, but the title was taken. Dammit. I went through several other crappy names, then decided that since I write so much about linguistics, a play on optimality theory would be appropriate. I tried for suboptimal.com. It was taken by an ad park. I was amazed by the obscure linguistic terms that were already taken (postparaxytone?!). Then I remembered that I don’t only write about linguistics. This is the rambling of a University of Utah linguistics student (now in graduate studies) about life, linguistics, freemasonry, and the intricacies of being a grad student at a school that he didn’t choose, but somehow chose him.

Right now, there are spectrographs up top.  I may change that.  I didn’t like the default theme images.

Also, am I missing any important links?

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On Eddington

So, I have already hit a snag in one of the three final papers I need to write. One of them is due in 10 days, and has to be 20 pages. That’s two pages a day. Crap.

I will take this time to briefly discuss a talk in the linguistics department colloquium yesterday featuring David Eddington. Eddington spoke about the scientific method in linguistics. His claim is that experiments are necessary to establish the psychological reality of linguistic elements. I agree with him, but too many of his claims were either too strong or based on a misunderstanding or misapplication of the theoretical and philosophical work in linguistics. The talk culminated in a claim that formal analysis is inherently non-empirical, and therefore unscientific.

For example, he misunderstands what Chomsky’s Ideal Speaker-Listener model is, and what it means. Somehow in the last week, I have become a staunch supporter of Chomskyan linguistics, and it’s really uncomfortable. Eddington is under the assumption that since the Ideal Speaker-Listener doesn’t exist, then it’s a useless construct, missing entirely that the I-model is a metaphor for a set of assumptions about linguistic knowledge humans possess. Eddington would have us throw it out entirely, rather than analyze the assumption in light of new data and experiments. His idea is to short circuit cognitive science.

Perhaps more troubling was his claim that lingusitics can only be scientific when it models linguistic processing or production. Analyses of linguistic structure (whether surface or deep) falls within the realm of mathematics, ethics, and virtue. I would counter that if we have data and evidence that leads us to be able to make an inference about linguistic structure, we have done something scientific and falsifiable.

Posted in Learning, Linguistics | No Comments »

The Central Node re: It’s fate.

When I sit down and think about it, I am amazed at how long The Central Node has been around. Six and a half years, by my count, which in internet terms is really frickin long.

The Node was founded in 2002 around the same time MySpace was showing up and blogs were becoming a common site on the internet. A few of my high school friends (primarily Sam, Dan, Meg, Noah) decided to start an Internet community to break away from the place they were presently being hosted. Why they did it isn’t really relevant.
They established a forum where several angsty high school kids could come and discuss their thoughts with the few of our classmates who read it. I joined in 2003.

As time went on, a few members left, and a few others joined. At one point we had members in three US states and two countries. All of this is great, but we’ve also gotten so far away from what The Central Node was intended for and what the name The Central Node implies. The Central Node implies a collaborative online project. We’ve tried to reinvigorate that several times over the years, but I think we have come to the realization that our interests our two broad and incompatible for a collaborative blog. Therefore, we have decided to retire the project.

The Central Node was fun to brag about, but it’s time to move on. We’re going to keep the web space, but we’ll likely all be registering new domains. This leads me to my final question. What am I going to call my new site, and domain should I aim for?

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Idealizations.

First, a disclaimer:

I do not claim this to be a blog of an academic giving academic views on things. When Noam Chomsky is not doing linguistics, he says language and politics are inexorably linked. He does not say that when he is doing real linguistics. I hold views that I would not likely put forth in an academic environment. This is one of those posts.

In Aspects of the Theory Syntax, Chomsky puts forth the claim that linguistics (within his model of methodological naturalism) is the study of the ideal speaker-listener, which I should say is something I criticize, but that’s an entirely different post:

“Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.” Chomsky (1965), Aspects, p3.

Obviously this is a grand claim. Anyone with a brain is affected by memory limitations. People get distracted, and people make errors (slips of the tongue, etc.). So, obviously this is a silly idea, right? I mean, not even Chomsky is the ideal-speaker listener. The ideal speaker-listener doesn’t exist. The ideal-speaker listener is a theoretical construct. The ideal speaker-listener is a scientific idealization

Why the hell am I talking about this? Believe it or not, I am tying it into the noble Craft. The Craft itself is perfect. Flawless. It’s members are blemishes on the facade of the temple. Our members make errors. We become distracted, bogged down in pettiness. Freemasonry still drags on.

At the end of the day, when the Salt Lake City Masonic Temple is in ruins, the jewels and ornaments of the lodge-room are discarded, when the last demit is read on the lodge floor, one thing remains:

Men who strive to achieve the ideal of Freemasonry clothed in plain white Aprons, ready to labor.

Posted in Masonry | 3 Comments »

Illiberality.

I am always amazed to see how many people who are self-described liberals and “tolerant” people are members of the Facebook group “I judge you when you use poor grammar”, or any other incarnation of thereof. Language is often described as the last human characteristic that is an acceptable basis of discrimination and prejudice. In reality, the variety of English (or any language) a person speaks is largely beyond his or her control. The people whom the enlightened and educated members of these groups are judging are those who speak a dialect of English other than their own. In other words, any variety of English that is not the variety spoken by the urban, intellectual, middle-class and higher ruling elite. Additionally, their choice to discriminate on a linguistic basis runs deeper, revealing prejudice against the poor non-white. Very progressive.

Okay, I’ll get off my high horse for a while. I’ve long been in the market for a smartphone. I’ve been researching for about a year and a half, and I think I may have come to a decision. Let me give you the rundown.

· Samsung Blackjack. This was one of the first phones I considered. After trying it out at a shop, I found it too cumbersome to use. Also, it uses Windows Mobile, which I’ve never been a huge fan of.

· Blackberry (Pearl or Curve). These seemed like a perfect choice for a while, with a plethora of options and plans. Unfortunately, the Pearl has become the new trendy phone. The Curve is well, bland.

· Palm Treo. I am sick of the Palm OS. Enough said.

· Apple iPhone. I’ll admit, I was a skeptic at first, but after trying out my brother’s iPhone, I became convinced that this is the phone for me. I am debating whether to adopt somebody else’s used iPhone or to wait until summer to get a 3G capable model. Whatever I choose, I imagine it will happen before I start school again in the fall.

Posted in Language, Uselessness | 1 Comment »

lolbehaviorism

Portable Apps is pretty amazing, by the way. I need to find a portable LaTeX distribution on my flash drive so I can edit my TeX documents anywhere. That’d be pretty win.

I am trying to figure out what I am going to do if I am rejected from the U’s MA program. Options range from duck farming to professional freemasonry, to the priesthood, to suicide, and every imagineable alternative in between. The other thing I need to do is find a place to live. I don’t think I can stand living at home much longer. Thus, I hope I to get awarded a TAship or an RAship, so for once, the University of Utah will pay me to go to school.

I’m thinking of taking a couple road trips this summer. While I would love to go to Syria or Jordan for the summer; I don’t think I can afford it. I have options. I’ve thought of heading out the San Diego to visit a brother out there. I will likely take a trip to College Station to visit a certain member of the Node. Basically, I want to use the interim between my graduating college and my potential initiation into graduate studies to do something refreshing.

I want to get into comics. I’ve always intended to get into it in greater depth than I have in the past, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I suspect another member of the node could help me out. Then again, I know he likes superhero comics. Perhaps I will ask him.

You Are a Cadbury Creme Egg

You’re the type that stole little brother’s easter basket so that you could have MORE CANDY!

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