.hack//Sign: What happened.

.hack recap: Bear and Mimiru have called together Subaru, the Silver Knight, BT, and Sora to discuss the Tsukasa situation.  Bear wanted Tsukasa's player information, only for that to be shot down for reasons of confidentiality.  BT and Sora have been silent so far.

(I recommend actually buying .hack//Sign since my words don't really do it justice.  One can get either the DVD this episode is on, or the full series as a set.)

.hack//Sign, Episode 3: Folklore, 17:32-End

So, on the one hand, this was never supposed to be it's own post, this was supposed to be part of the last post but then the plant fell and that took a lot of time to deal with.

On the other hand, maybe it's for the best. I started the episode with the question, “What just happened?” now I get to answer that question.

On the third hand, I haven't exactly been doing much in the way of writing this week because my brain hasn't really been in gear, so this could come off as somewhat forced. We'll see.

Bear was trying to get the Crimson Knights, here represented by Subaru and the Silver Knight, to give out confidential player information about Tsukasa. Subaru explained that the CC Corporation would never violated player confidentiality that way, so not only could Bear not get the information, neither could she.

When Bear asked if they could at least find out where Tsukasa's player was, the Silver Knight loudly explained that if it could be done he'd have already done it. The awkward silence that followed was finally broken by BT:

BT: So, you're the knight he beat up?

Silver Knight: It wasn't him. It was a weird monster I've never seen before.

BT: That's too bad.

The first thing that I take away from this is that the Sliver Knight's amnesia cleared up. That's good. I mean, I don't want amnesia at all but I'd prefer temporary amnesia to permanent memory loss. The defeat initially left him unconscious in front of his computer terminal with no memory of what happened. Not long after he does remember details.

The second thing I notice is BT's “That's too bad,” seems, if anything, amused. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.

Worth remembering that Silver Knight has read the manual, and has traveled far and wide within the game, and likely knows about any unusual monsters encountered by any other Crimson Knights. The fact that he can't describe what got him beyond, “a weird monster I've never seen before,” lends credence to the “weird” part of the statement. If it weren't weird he'd have something more to say about it.

-

At this point we get into what happened territory. Mimiru tries to speak up but is repeatedly unable to find the right words, after BT demands that she “Spit it out,” Bear comes to the rescue and says what she was trying to say:

Bear: She means it's possible that he is a victim as well.

Silver Knight: End of conversation.

Bear: Really? I agree with her assumption.

I'm trying to think of whether Bear and Mimiru being on the same page is the reason that he's able to say what she wanted to say, or whether Bear just has that ability even with people he doesn't necessarily agree with. I know that I am, or at least used to be, good at summing up other people's points so that third parties could understand them. Perhaps Bear is as well. But I'm not sure if that's what's going on here so much as Bear and Mimiru are in the exact same position at the moment, so it's as easy for him to say what she means as it is for him to say what he means since they both mean the same thing.

The Sliver Knight's unwillingness to consider Tsukasa a victim is notable. All Tsukasa has done is run away and refused to talk. As he says, the monster is the one who beat him. He really knows nothing on which to base his, “Tsukasa is not a victim,” stance. He seems to just be pissed off and holding a grudge.

Anyway, Subaru asks Bear to explain, and we move into flashback:

We see the end of Episode 2 again:

Bear telling Tsukasa that if the creature is his guardian he should order it away, Tsukasa unable to stop it, Bear charging with his sword, the Guardian launching a spiky counterattack, Mimiru and Tsukasa looking on in horror.

Then it continues. Bear is knocked backward, unharmed. The Guardian's attack is stopped in mid air, the spike falling just short of Maha's hand-paw. (Maha is the floating anthropomorphic cat in a pointy hat) Then the spike retreats back into the Guardian, Macha disappears, taking the Guardian with her, as everyone looks on in awe/shock/wonder.

Flashback ends.

Subaru: A cat...

Bear: Yes, out problem is the cat, not Tsukasa.

Silver Knight: I haven't forgotten.

You will.

In fact, I think that this is the last time Sliver Knight mentions or takes an interest in the cat.

Anyway, moving on:

Sliver Knight: The original reason why we got involved was because of the cat. However, the one person who has information is the character called Tsukasa.

Bear: Thus we are right back where we started.

Subaru: Tsukasa's player information.

Which, as we established the last time, they're not getting their hands on.

Mimiru: I really think we better hurry.

Just to add to the urgency behind this, all Bear, Mimiru and BT know is that Tsukasa can't log off. Which means that Tsukasa hasn't been doing any work maintaining the body back in the real world. Which means that, without other information, the default assumption probably has to be that Tsukasa's player is on the verge of death by dehydration at this point in time.

Bear: Such a thing should never happen but if this issue isn't resolved soon, there will be more victims.

Subaru: At least, these incidents can be prevented by access limitation.

Subaru's thinking here is completely reasonable, and completely wrong. It's like BT's thinking when discussing whether it's possible to be stuck in the game.

Bear: Check the log. You can at least do that, right?

Subaru: Yes.

Bear: Find out the truth with your own eyes.

Bear doesn't tell her that Tsukasa is trapped in the game, he doesn't go on about the impossible things happening, he just asks her to look for herself. He gives her his member address so she can contact him if she wants to talk.

Sora, who had previously been pretty much ignoring the conversation (laying way off to the side) is in the center of the group in a flash to ask to get the address as well, and asks for that of Mimiru as well. While those two are having a back and forth BT changes the topic:

BT: The Crimson Knights gather various information, right?

Subaru: Not that much, though.

BT: Any news on someone obtaining a hidden item?

BT's been interested in this thing since the beginning of the episode, but she doesn't even know what it's called. The asking gets immediate reactions from Sora, Silver Knight, and Subaru.

Subaru pretends she doesn't know what BT is talking about, saying that they haven't had any hidden item events in a while.

BT: You must be playing dumb. It's not that... that thing...what is it called?

Sora: The Key of the Twilight.

Subaru *sighs*

BT: Is that its name?

Sora: Hey, that's cheating!

BT: The Key of the Twilight, sounds significant.

Once again, "The Key of the Twilight" is an English term that Japanese people use based on a a largely German email in which, the term “Key of the Twilight,” doesn't actually appear.

One of the downsides of seeing a translated version is that you don't always pick up on the linguistic quirks of the original. As near as I can tell, based on listening to the Japanese but not actually understanding it, BT translates the name into Japanese upon hearing it. Sora says, “Key of the Twilight,” In English. But the entire sentence translated as “The Key of the Twilight, sounds significant.” is in Japanese.

So I think that BT is one of the few people to actually bother translating the name into her own language.

Regardless, the scene ends with BT finally learning the folklore item's name,

-

The episode ends in a wordless scene where Tuskasa watches a sunset with his Guardian.

-

[Previous][Index][Next]

Birthdays - plural, because why have just one?

I was born on the third day of August.  This year, as with every year, that fell on August third, yesterday.

I was born, and I did not know this so I had to look it up*, on the first Saturday in August.  Which this year falls on August 4th, today.

I was born on the third day after the second full moon after the summer solstice.  Which this year falls on August 4th, that's boring, I've already got an August 4th.

I was born on 10 K'ib'.  This year that falls on August 21st, and some years (not this year) it falls twice.

I was born on 14 Xul.  This year that fell on July 27th.

And, weirdly, as I pick calendars for their disconnection with our own, I'm getting a fair number of August 4ths.

I was born on 16 Dhū al-Qiʿda, which this year falls on October 2nd I'm told.  That's more like the variation I was expecting with certain other things.

Which is sort of the point of this.  "Falls on" implies a certain randomness because there is a certain randomness.  Solar calendars will tend to group things together so sticking with them will never get me far off from August 3rd, but with the right calendar any day could be one's birthday.  And with so many calendars already out there, there are several days for which one can make the argument, "It's my birthday."

Today might be one of your birthdays, without you even knowing it.

When were you born?  Don't feel restricted to the 6 ways I answered the question for myself above.

-

I'd actually like to convert to Venusian or Martian dates (solar calendar, nothing complicated) but I have no idea how to do that.  It certainly should be possible.

And then there's a question of, there are 12 months in the year, if we're going with day of the month, why not 12 birthdays a year?

-

* That's true of everything after this point, which given that I'm not going for perfection here means some of these things might be wrong.

Fuck it, we're rescheduling my birthday

Ok, so in the time since I wrote out the title for this post things turned around enough that it ended, well will have ended (future perfect, it's a tense), on a high note.  There's not a lot that watching Sneakers on a big projector won't take the edge off.

That said, enough of the day was spent crappily that I stand by my initial thought which is that the first try went wrong, clearly we're not ready yet, let's try again another day.

I don't know when yet, but clearly today wasn't the right day.  So sometime in the near future maybe give this thing a second try.

-

I did want to give thanks for the person whose secret identity I now know.  For more than half the day your part in it was the only thing that went right, and there were sort of layers of surprise and gratitude as I figured out just what happened.  So thanks for that.

.hack//Sign: Lets all get together

.hack recap: Bear has come to the conclusion it may be necessary to talk to the Crimson Knights about Tsukasa's situation, Subaru is looking for more information, BT has latched onto finding out about a special hidden item, Mimiru has given up on giving up, and other stuff as well.

(I recommend actually buying .hack//Sign since my words don't really do it justice.  One can get either the DVD this episode is on, or the full series as a set.)

.hack//Sign, Episode 3: Folklore, 16:05-17:32

Remember where Tuskasa first met the Crimson knights? Blue and pink skies, a well, funny looking windmill? It's ok if you don't.

Anyway, it is here that we find BT waiting. A shadow appears behind her, when she turns no one is there, when she brushes it off Sora starts talking. Then she brushes him off.

He thinks that's a rude way to act since he assume she invited him, she assumes he invited her, and while they're having a back and forth over that Subaru and Silver Knight appear.

Silver Knight: What are you two babbling about?

Yes, Cullen wannabe, everyone else's discussion must be babble or prattle or something like that. No way they could possibly matter. Think I'm overstating his jerkishness? Very next sentence:

Who told you to talk to each other?

Because apparently speaking to one another without permission is a hideous sin.

Sora: It just happened.

Silver Knight: Why you... *begins to draw sword*

Subaru: *stops silver knight with a gesture*

BT: *looks at interaction between Subaru and Silver Knight with interest*

Ok, so I'm no BT fan and Sora is just a jerk, but Silver Knight seems intent on out-jerking everyone in this encounter. He's going to draw his sword and start a fight because two people who happened to be in the same place at the same time started speaking to each other without his permission?

Is it any wonder that Subaru thinks she has to remind this guy that he's an ordinary player not some mythical (by which I mean nonexistent) special class of system support staff that stands above the regular folk?

Also, remember our introduction to the Crimson Knights, which happened at this very place? They're supposed to value courage, civility and tolerance*, which part of that involves pulling a sword on someone because they just answered your completely uncalled for question in a way you don't like?

Anyway, at this point Mimiru shouts out for everyone to come over to the base of the windmill, where she and Bear are waiting.

-

And now we find out why Bear wanted to bring the Crimson Knights in.

Subaru: The player's information?

Bear: You can communicate with the system administration staff. It should

If I should seem to get distracted or lose my place or something like that at this point it probably has something to do with the hanging plant across the room from me suddenly crashing to the ground and me spending the next half hour to hour dealing with the fallout from that.

If you've never had that happen to you, let me tell you, it will change your entire plan for the day.

I have no idea if that happening will have an effect upon the rest of the post, I haven't written it yet, but I was writing a post during the day, there was a crash, I had to disentange the plant from things that hadn't even been on the floor in the first place, things were uprooted, notably roots, I had to find containers to put water in so I could put the parts of the plant that were no longer parts of the plant into those, I had to locate rope to tie a backup in case the hook that's supposed to hold the plant up fails again, I had to run around trying to find stuff a lot. I had to move a chair so I could be high enough to tie off the rope.

When so much as one part of the sky falls it's a major hassle.

Oh, and I never picked back up on the “ during the day” thing. It's night now. Not dusk, not twilight, certainly not sunset. It is NIGHT.

Back to .hack:

Subaru: The player's information?

Bear: You can communicate with the system administration staff. It shouldn't be too difficult, right?

Subaru: That's impossible.

Score one for Bear making bad assumptions. “Shouldn't be too difficult” and “Impossible” are worlds apart.

Why is it impossible?

Subaru: A player's personal information is highly confidential. There's no way the sys admin would reveal it even if I requested it.

The subtitles don't place emphasis, and so we're free to read that as seems best and I read, “Even if I requested it,” as saying that she's not going to request it. She won't ask and they wouldn't tell because she and they both believe in the confidentiality. The dub is different, it's, “even to me,” thus placing the emphasis on who would be doing the requesting. Yes, Subaru has a closer relationship with system administration than most players, but that still doesn't get her confidential information.

Either way, I have to say that I'm liking the CC Corp here. My understanding is that if I continued the story into the games and OVA they'd turn out to be evil or, at the very least, like the Mayor who refuses to acknowledge that there's a shark in the water and so ends up with blood on his hands because he's more concerned with tourist dollars than the public's safety. But right here, right now, in this TV show, I like them.

They're never on screen, we hear about them only second hand, but what I like is that they seem to have this moral framework, and they stick with it. Even as the impossibilities stack up and they see things get more out of their control than should be physically possible, they never budge from this stance. At no point do they decide, “Screw it, things have gotten too far out of hand for us to be fettered by minor moral qualms, let's just use the confidential information.”

Tsukasa's information is confidential and damn it, it's staying that way. That's how CC Corp rolls and I'm in favor of that. Yes, Bear can be trusted and telling him wouldn't have harmed anything, but they can't know that and they can't operate on that kind of faith. Keeping their players safe means keeping the information confidential and they will do that even in the face of the impossible.

Or maybe it's not even at a level of keeping the players safe, maybe it's just maintaining trust. They promised the information would be confidential and damn it they're going to keep that promise.

Whatever the reasoning, I like the fact that the CC Corporation doesn't budge from this position. A player's personal information is confidential and that's final.

Bear: I understand it's not easy. But can we at least track where he was accessing from?

Silver Knight: If it could be done, I would have done it by now.

Silver Knight doesn't end there, he'll state the obvious in patronizing tones as well until such time as Subaru says his name which shuts him up. (She does say it in a, “Back off,” kind of way.)

And the obvious that he states sort of serves as a reminder that the people here are coming at this from different angles. Bear wants to track down Tsukasa's player because he's worried about that person. If Tsukasa has been online all this time, what's going on with the player? Is the player currently dying of dehydration? What?

(The player is in a coma in a hospital bed.)

Silver Knight doesn't know that Tsukasa can't log out, for him it's just a question of simplicity. Trying to track down Tsukasa on the net isn't exactly the easiest thing ever. They haven't found him yet. On the other hand talking to a player offline should be simple. Make a phone call, send a letter, knock on their door.

People tend to be tied to a physical address in the real world, if you know that address tracking them down should be easier than chasing them through the game.

-

There's a pause in the conversation so I'm going to stop here. The plan was to follow this through to the end, but the plant thing really ate up a lot of time.

-

* For whatever reason I want to map this onto the Harry Potter houses but I note that only one of those is considered a house worthy virtue in Harry Potter. Gryffindor values courage. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Ravenclaw is civility and Hufflepuff is tolerance. Slytherin gets left out here. (Don't they always? The poor things.)

Of course that's just making stuff up, an argument can be made that Hufflepuff is tolerance, but Ravenclaw being civility is just playing on stereotypes of bookish people.

Though, regardless, if it were true it would mean that Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw would be the ones to root for.

And if one is going to follow this pure BS mapping to its logical conclusion Silver Knight is bringing in the Slytherin with his ambition to be more than an ordinary player, but like the book Slytherin he seems to have completely overlooked the other virtues of the house (cleverness resourcefulness) and someone convinced himself that the way one becomes better than everyone else is just by declaring themselves to be so and expecting others to go along with it.

And when they don't, out comes the wand... I mean sword.

-

[Previous][Index][Next]

May 2012

General Stories/Ideas for Stories:
My Zombie Apocalypse Team, Part 4ish: Assessing the underground - Best description of what this is all about is probably Part Alpha from the previous month.  This is a conversation had in downtime.

Magical School Story, vague idea - So the idea is for a place where people go to learn the arts of magic and whatnot while fighting evil on the side like you do in stories like this, but the functioning of the school is really what's most important.  The fight against bad administration is much more significant than the fight against the more traditional evil of the book.

The Return to Narnia, and defending Edmund - The children realize they've returned to Narnia, Susan sets limits, the narrator is attacked with an apple.

General Twilight based stuff:
She said she wasn't hungry - Jessica fights through Edward's vampire glamour to stop him from forcing Bella into something she doesn't want to do.

Snarky Twilight stuff:
Snarky Twilight - The Encounter in Port Angeles - Bella wanders off into a non-existant warehouse district to face some nameless thugs.  She tries to explain to them that a narrator who has traveled time and space is more likely to walk away from a fight then nameless jerks, but in the end has to fight them off anyway.  Edward is a jerk, Bella tells him about the sun.

General Left Behind based stuff:
A review of the Left Behind Series - Not a story, a review.

NRA: My arm is tired - For pages in Nicolae: Rise of the Antichrist, Rayford Steele is driving a car while each of his three passengers lays a hand on him for reassurance.  This is my take on Chloe's response.

Captain Tribulation - Someone proposed Captain Tribulation, analogous to Captain Planet.  I proposed the powers for the rings, and the theme song.

From my slow trek through .hack//Sign:
What Just happened? - Episode three begins by conspicuously not addressing how episode 2 ended.  Subaru and the Sliver Knight discuss the Crimson Knights, which gives me an opportunity to ask who gets to decide what the organization is about.  Bear and BT discuss the unaddressed incident, Tsukasa, and the folklore that gives episode 3 its name.

From my slow trek through Deus Ex:
Deus Ex Training - Part 8: Ana and Stealth - We meet Anna Navarre, and go through one section of training that I can actually believe might function as part of a realistic training mission.

Other fiction related stuff:
It produces a pile of DVDs and yet still I call it taping - I listed off, with short summaries, the self recorded DVDs in a certain area of my house.  I think I might want to make a post like this again with the ones in a different area.  If I did it enough I'd create a catalog of all that I have.  Think of it as sort of a bunch of one paragraph reviews if you like.  Or don't, if you wouldn't like.

Noninteracting Magisteria and the Bechdel Test - I first noticed it in Firefly, and wrote this post when seeing it happen again in Avengers.  Men are put in roles where they interact with other men.  Women aren't put in roles where they interact with other women.  The result is fewer female to female conversations than we'd expect based on the gender breakdown of the cast alone.

People have since noticed similar things happening in unrelated works.  Not sure how I feel about that.  On the one hand, Yay, I didn't waste my time writing a post about an isolated quirk in two Joss Whedon works.  On the other hand, it's actually a thing and the world would be better if it were just an isolated quirk.  So no yay.

Canon of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - A silly look at that collection of fiction.  Originally written in a thread about rejecting the legitimacy of parts of larger works (a practice known as Fan Discontinuity) so certain things are notably absent from discussion.

Thoughts and dialog on the Star Trek Voyager episode that doesn't exist - Yes, that episode.  Speculation about the infinite improbability drive being involved, some Snarky Twilight style dialog, and a big reminder that Evolution Does Not Work That Way.

Godzilla versus The Sea Monster - I have a habit of writing when I'm tired even though I know that I make much less sense then, and this is one that I wrote late into the night just so I could be done with it.  I was told that most of the time my fear of being incoherent is unfounded, this was pointed out as an exception.  Read at your own peril.  It's about Godzilla versus the Sea Monster.

Mirror's Edge and my playing of it - A non spoiler post about playing the game.  In it I talk about the game, the difference between two dimensional and four dimensional combat, when it is appropriate to humanize the opponents, the productive uses of saving, cheats, and console commands, and stuff.

Since that was the last post of the month, the spoiler posts got pushed to last month.  But I'll list them here anyway the first was just me going through the plot point by point.  The second was a "What I would do differently" post.

Other Stuff:
This was the month of the vote of no confidence against then-University of Southern Maine President Selma Botman.  Several things on that:

Botman Update - My initial response to the results of the no confidence vote, one of my first posts about the situation Botman directly.  It includes an incomplete list of the reasons that she was bad for the university and, generally, a not-nice person.  (Also where I said that instead of the term "Botmangate" it would be better to use more words and proposed as an alternative what eventually became the tags for these posts.) 

Updated Botman Update - Later the same day as the details of Selma Botman's interpretation of the vote began to unravel. 

More Botman: Press Release - Not actually something I wrote, just a press release I reprinted.  Unlike almost everything that was reported, everything in this one appears to be true. 

Botman, Chess, and Context - In which I talk about Selma Botman's seemingly deliberate misreading of the rules by taking one of them out of context and reading it in isolation and completely disregarding everything else.  I compare it to misreading the rules of chess by making a similar dishonest stripping of context, and also, briefly, to the importance of context in the interpretation of fiction. 

The USM vote of no confidence against Selma Botman - The facts of the no confidence vote against then-President Botman without my traditional reams of commentary. 

She has since stepped down, and by down I mean sideways, and by sideways I mean I might need to write another post on the topic because there's some serious sketchiness on her end.  On the other hand, from the perspective of the University of Southern Maine it looks all good at the moment, or at least when last I checked.

Is ze even alive anymore? - About depression, dropping off the face of the earth, not noticing when people die, and wondering if people might be dead.
The nonexistence of the word Diahemeral, and what's been going on the past week or so - End of the semester I was sick, I was depressed, I accidentally invented a word, and I didn't have a working brain.  This is about all of that.

March 2012 - An index much like this one, but covering a different plot of time.

Am I being unreasonable here? - I ask for a second opinion about a situation involving optics, feelings, and foodstamps.

Quicksave, Cheating, and the Sanctity of Singleplayer - As a result of some stuff surrounding the game Mirror's Edge I once again encountered a seemingly unending argument online in gaming communities.  Short version is that some people do not feel satisfied unless everyone is prevented from doing things they don't like, even alone in the comfort of their own homes.

-

[April]-[June]

[Navigation]

Deus Ex: Main Menu and Character Creation

[This is part of a series of posts about the game Deus Ex, which, for the record, I recommend buying.]

[The series began with this post.]

We've finished training, and that dumps us back at the main menu, so lets take a look at that:

We've got a spinning logo in the background an a list of options.  It should come as no surprise that I like the second on the list "Save Game", Deus Ex also has a quicksave feature.  I didn't actually use quicksave for the "rewind"s two posts ago, I used ordinary saving.  But you can kind of see why I like saving.  I can go back and do that in six very different ways.  And I can keep on going back.  If I want to, right now, I can go right back to that moment and try my hand at that bot again.  The only way I get that in Mirror's Edge is if a true checkpoint (not a subcheckpoint) is exactly where I want it.

Anyway, what we want for now is new game, which will bring us to difficulty selection.  (Only difference made is how much damage you take) and then character creation.

In character creation the first thing is to create a new name.  The existing name is highlighted and ready to be replaced.  There's a good reason for this.  The existing name is a very, very silly name.

You see the character you play has the code name J.C. Denton, and the default real name for him?  JC Denton.  Which means that if you use the defaults, and I do, things get very screwy any time code name and real name are mentioned anywhere near each other.

You will seriously end up with, and I'm not making this up:

"Hey JC, / Guess I'll have to get used to calling you "J.C." around the office." 

"JC Denton will be joining us today [...] His assigned cover name for the duration of his service will be "J.C. Denton"" 

"J.C. Denton or "JC" or whatever he calls himself" 

"J.C. Denton, also known as "JC Denton."" 

"J.C. "JC" Denton"

Which leaves one with the strange impression that the entire world is downright obsessed with whether or not one uses periods to separate initials.

I think this was a mistake.  I think there should have been a default real name that was not the same as the code name.  I assume the reason that there wasn't was to avoid pushing one real name, and to avoid confusion for the people who didn't pay attention and wouldn't have known that Default Real Name referred to them.

I think that could have been dealt with.  The field could have been left blank initially and then, if not filled in, had the Default Real Name applied.  That would avoid pushing anything.  To notify people, "Hey, this is your name," there would be multiple possibilities.  One would just be to have a pop up saying, "Since you didn't choose a real name your real name is [Default Real Name]" or, since they'd know what the default real name was ahead of time, the could have actually recorded lines to let you know what it was, which would only play if you left it unchanged.

Before I get to that, I'm going to propose such a name.  I think Adam Smith would have worked.  It's generic in its elements, neither Adam nor Smith stand out as remarkable for an American to be called, but in combination it gives the sort of vibe one might like for a conspiracy game.

Don't use that myself, I stick with defaults and enter a world where everyone is obsessed with whether or not periods are used to separate initials, but I think it would have worked as a way to avoid the silliness of "J.C. 'JC' Denton."

And if it were done, then you could have a check to see if it was changed, and if not set a flag that would change a couple of conversations, "Hey Adam-  I mean J.C., I might as well start using your codename."

"Adam, actually.  JC's just an old code name that stuck around...."

Morpheus could have started by listing both code name and real name.

And, after that, anyone who still didn't know that the "Adam Smith" from the text files was the player character really brought it on themselves.

-

So that's my, if the player character is going to have two different names have them, by default, be different rant.

Here's why he has the two different names in the first place:

The Deus Ex design team was not made of people who agreed on everything.  It is possible that such a thing could create something like Deus Ex, but unlikely.  The Deus Ex design team was made up of people who had strong convictions and would argue on behalf of those convictions.

It was made of people who had strong ideas of what was important that didn't always agree with what other people on the team thought was important.  Deus Ex is a series of compromises.

Some people thought that it was vitally important that the player get to chose their own name.  They are and speak on behalf of a type of gamer I am not and do not even understand.  People like me only know that this is an important thing if people like them are telling us because to us it isn't important.  I stick with the default, as noted above.

I don't care about customizing a character.  Other people do.

So on the one side we had the people who do care about that, and on the other side we had people saying, "We can't tell the story we want to tell if no one ever says his name.  People need to be able to address this guy, and we can't record that dialog unless the name is set in stone ahead of time.

And so there was this major ideological divide.  On the one hand people said that the player had to be the one to pick the name, on the other hand people said that the player couldn't be the one to pick the name.

And so a compromise was struck.  Any name could be used in text.  Any name at all.  The player could pick that name.  But only one could be used in dialog, and that would be the code name that the player character was assigned by his workplace.

Was it the best compromise ever?  Probably not.  Does it make sense when his brother is in pain and calls out his code name rather than real name?  Only if UNATCO has really impressive conditioning.  But it's what worked.

My only objection is that by default they made them the same.  If they'd made them different, say my suggestion of Adam Smith, the excerpts above would look like this by default:

"Hey Adam, / Guess I'll have to get used to calling you "J.C." around the office." 

"Adam Smith will be joining us today [...] His assigned cover name for the duration of his service will be "J.C. Denton"" 

"J.C. Denton or "Adam" or whatever he calls himself" 

"J.C. Denton, also known as "Adam Smith."" 

"J.C. "Adam" Denton"

Which leads to an impression of a more reasonable, less punctuation obsessed, world.

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In addition to real name you can also choose the player's appearance, and honestly I'm just going to skip that for now because I'm having trouble with pictures and I'm not good at description.  You have five options which cover a limited range of skin and hair color.

Also worth noting that the original plan was for JC Denton to be able to be a female character.  That was dropped.  The remnants of that are one bit of concept art and the fact that the character is identified in code as JCDentonMale, which only makes sense if there might have been some other form of JC Denton that wasn't male.  The name JC was chosen in part because it could be a male or female name.

(So Adam Smith might not be the ideal default real name after all, if we imagine a world in which JCDentonFemale was still an option.)

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You also have a some skill points (5000) that you can assign right off the bat.  The pistols skill is set to trained by default but it isn't locked in yet, so you can drop it down to untrained to gain additional points to work with.  Depending on your perspective, fortunately or unfortunately a bug will kick the skill back up to trained regardless, so it becomes less legitimate trade-off and more exploit.

But before I get into that I want to talk about the descriptions, you can read them all here.*  There are four levels of every skill, untrained, trained, advanced, master.  Trained and advanced have exactly what you'd expect (agent is a bit better, agent is moderately better) but master always has this over the top description which I find delightful.

And so it makes it so that the gap between untrained and master, in terms of description, is huge and it seriously feels like if there were a sword fighting skill the description would be Untrained: An agent knows which end to hold.  Master: An agent can take on the Dread Pirate Roberts left handed.

Here are two actual untrained master pairs:

Medicine
UNTRAINED: An agent can use medkits.
MASTER: An agent can perform a heart bypass with household materials. 

Swimming
UNTRAINED: An agent can swim normally.
MASTER: An agent moves like a dolphin underwater.

Here is the complete list of master descriptions:

MASTER: An agent is an elite hacker that few systems can withstand.
MASTER: An agent encounters almost no security systems of any challenge.
MASTER: An agent wears suits and armor like a second skin.
MASTER: An agent can defeat almost any mechanical lock.
MASTER: An agent can perform a heart bypass with household materials.
MASTER: An agent moves like a dolphin underwater.
MASTER: An agent is an expert at all forms of demolition.
MASTER: An agent is a walking tank when equipped with heavy weaponry.
MASTER: An agent can render most opponents unconscious or dead with a single blow.
MASTER: An agent is lethally precise with pistols.
MASTER: An agent can take down a target a mile away with one shot.

Ok, so skills.

The first thing about skills is that skillpoints are a limited resource.  You can be some of the things above, but you can't be all of them.  And once you've upgraded a skill, actually upgraded it as opposed to just looked at where you'd stand if you did but not actually gone through with the purchase, there's no going back.

That's part of how Deus Ex works.  Save all you want to try it a thousand different ways, but in the course of a single playthrough when you make a decision you have to live with it.  What you choose to do will open some doors and close others, and will change your options going forward.

Another thing that the skillpoints can show us about Deus Ex is that there's the option to concentrate or go for coverage.  You can start the game as a master of one skill (it would have to be one of the cheapest skills) or you could start with as many as six things trained, but nothing advanced.

These things are both open to you.  (And many options in between.)  As is neither.  One person played through the game without upgrading a single skill, using a single weapon, using a single item, or using a single augmentation.

But you can't go both ways at once.  You can't have everything.

And this extends beyond skills.  You can spread things out, you can concentrate resources, but you can't have everything.

In certain cases skills, items and augmentations will all address the same things, and this again presents you with the option of coverage or concentration.  You can use skills to address one set of things and augmentations and items to address another, or you can choose to put them to work on the same thing thus allowing you to do one thing really well while leaving other areas not well covered.

You've got choices all over.

Things like skills are at the heart of an important part of Deus Ex, that being resource management.  You can't escape it in Deus Ex.  If you choose to ignore the resource management elements, you're trading the time spent on those for extra difficulty for yourself in the game.  You're managing resources.

Anyway, once you've chosen your skills, you move on to the intro movie, which we'll cover next time.

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* You may notice, if you poke around on that site, that I've had involvement with that site.  Writing some articles for it, partnering with the guy running it.  One of the things on my list of things to do when less depressed and more able to branch beyond where I am now is to get back in contact with him.  We were friends, be nice to be that again.  Right now though, I don't have the energy to reach out.

There's a whole bunch of people I ought to reach out to.  Ought to have reached out to ages ago.

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Unproduced projects and the fear of writing what I don't know

So, at the moment I'm going to try to focus on writing those ghost stories I mentioned.  Because the ghost anthology is actually getting near the point where it has enough stories.  (Speaking of which, here's a Ghost story I didn't mention that I wrote to see if I could actually do a story start to finish.)  One of the things that means I'll be putting on hold temporarily is the mermaid story mentioned in the same post.

Its a story in which an apparent male transitions into female she actually was.  Who happens to be a lesbian.

I seem to have a bunch of those stories, to the point that when such a story comes up in my mind I feel like, "Another one?"  And it can sometimes be easy to forget that none of them exist outside of my head.  Except one.  Today someone viewed that story and somehow I think it was by mistake because I don't think they came here looking for modern transgender teenage lesbian Jesus.  (Resurrection.  In the Garden.)

And here's the thing, what holds me back from writing any of these stories isn't what I don't know about Transgender issues (though perhaps it should be) it's what I don't know about everything else.

The story I just mentioned.  If I wrote much more of it it would make immediately clear for all to see how little I know about actual christian theology, and high school, and dating, and relationships, and stuff.

There's another that would show how little I know about indie music, and dating, and relationships, and stuff.

There's another that would show how much I've forgotten about Greek mythology, and how little I know about coed campsites, and dating, and relationships, and stuff.

The mermaid one would show how little I know about sea life, and high school, and dating, and relationships, and stuff.

There's another that would show how much I lack the competence to write Adamsian space adventure.  And demonstrate how little I know about child rearing, and high school, and dating, and relationships, and stuff.

Now it's not exactly the same character jumping up and down in my head saying, "Give me a fucking plot already," but sometimes it feels that way.

And someone at this point might be wondering, "Didn't you go to high school?" yeah, but I wasn't exactly aware and oriented times three.

And there is a temptation to say that, say (second story), writing doesn't need to be held to a high standard because it's basically Twilight if you replace, "Vampires" with "female musicians," and "abusive" with "supportive" and it's not like that kind of thing gets held to any kind of high standard.  I mean it's not as if someone would make a blog devoted to pointing out the flaws in something like... oh, wait.

But the fact that there are indie musicians and christian theologians and people who went to coed camps and marine biologists out there, not to mention people who know how good Adamsian space adventure is supposed to be, always makes me wary of starting a story like this.

It's easy to write Left Behind or Twilight based fiction, there's no fear about not living up to the reality because the reality is kind of crap.  But when I know that I might be taking a shuttle bus with an indie musician two days a week every week for a semester after I write what amounts to a light fantasy where I appropriated their world as the setting, that kind of makes me wary.

And so nothing ever gets written.

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For anyone who was wondering plots, story ideas in more detail:

College student reveals to his friends that he's a she, they appear to take it well, decide to spend an upcoming break on a road trip to go see one of the friend's favorite bands and sort of follow it from stop to stop back toward home since that's where it's heading, with main character spending the entire time presenting as female.

At the first see-the-band stop, the friends viciously out main character at a concert, abandon her three states away from home. Band is small time enough it has to clean up venue itself, lead singer finds main character crying on the ground.  When the lead singer gets brought up to speed her first thought is to buy a bus ticket and send protagonist home, but she's not sure of the protagonist's emotional state being up for traveling alone, so instead offers to let her tag along with the band since they're heading that way anyway.

Over the course of the trip protagonist bonds with the whole band, and eventually ends up tentatively starting a relationship with lead singer.

Comes home a bit late (but called ahead to make sure professors knew that it was a transportation problem causing missed classes) finishes off semester presenting as female, goes off with the band full time after that (as technical assistant and glass armonica player) with the intention of coming back to finish college and get a degree at some point in the future.

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High school student discovers he, for protagonist still thinks of himself this way at this point though the gender never really fit, is the child of the Greek Goddess of Dew and is quickly inducted into a world of intrigue and whatnot and this popped into my head while watching Percy Jackson and my brain rejecting pretty much every element of it so it might not be the best thought out thing ever.

Two best friends will end up being daughter of Athena, who has mutually shared attraction, and daughter of Aphrodite, who is completely willing to help protagonist try on dresses and not tell anyone about it.

Over the course of the story the many and powerful uses of the ability to create moisture ex nihilo on a surface will be explored, mythological beings will completely fail to understand the concept of gender dysphoria (gods are shapeshifers, they're whatever gender they want) it will turn out that protagonist's problem is that he wasn't born trans, she was born cis and the gender change was to hide her from her late mother's adversaries.  (The Goddess of Dew was crushed in the previous conflict.)

And in final confrontation protagonist will get shapeshifty enough to revert at long last to female form, claim matrilinial decent from Nyx as a way of one upping a boasting son of Zeus, and finally take her place as a female demigod.

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Adamsian space thingy, let's see, how did that go?

Boy falls in love with lesbian.  Lesbian falls in love with boy.  "Close my eyes and pretend you're a girl" doesn't work in the least.  Relationship stands no chance in the face of sexuality because, "I love your personality," simply isn't enough for that kind of relationship.  Both get very sad.  Boy builds a space ship powered by golf balls and Coca Cola bottles (the old ones that were green and glass.)

Goes on adventures that would ideally be as funny as those of Ford and Arthur.

Adopts light purple largely humanoid child (about ten years old maybe) with two tails.

More adventures.

Boy and purple girl get stuck inside the event horizon of a black hole (these things happen) Boy panics, despairs.  Purple girl turns on every reality bending system on the ship and wishes upon the star (black hole) nearest them.

Boy wakes up as a girl, back in home town.  Former-Boy finds that this does not bother her in the least.  Forges information to return to high school.  Eventually starts dating lesbian.  Truth comes out, Lesbian thinks it was stupid not to open with it from the beginning.  (Her suggested opening lines: "I'm alive.  I'm back.  I'm hot.")  Former-boy says was worried about messing up second chance.

Eventually they decide to slip the bonds of earth and travel space together.

Find that the ship has embedded itself in the ground not far away, some adventure to get everything necessary to leave, leave earth, eventually reunite with purple girl and form family unit.

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Or something like that.