Fugu Talk

Despite its pitch as “Gray’s Anatomy in Space”, I started watching episodes of Defying Gravity on the PlayStation Store. (I was looking for Dollhouse, but oddly, that’s listed under Crime instead of Sci-Fi). Defying Gravity is not bad – I like the characters and story arc, could do without the cutesy music, yes, reminiscent of Gray’s Anatomy. But it’s no Firefly. So it’s fitting that when I searched for “defying gravity” on YouTube, I found this homage to Firefly.

Comic Con 2010 was my second, and once again, I’m impressed at how well the organizers run the show. Badge pick-up was a breeze – at every point where I wasn’t clear about where to go, a show staffer appeared to guide people in the right direction. And the serpentine line into Ballroom 20 makes me wonder if there’s a mathematician in charge.

I only attended for a day, but stayed fifteen hours, sitting in on two panels in the morning, traversing the expo floor in the afternoon (picking up a couple of graphic novels from the CBLDF booth), and watching films in the evening until 2am. The highlight for me was the live showing of this week’s Eureka episode, introduced by creator Jaime Paglia and with surprise appearances by cast members Salli Richardson Whitfield, James Callis, and Will Wheaton. They got lots of fan love. It was a good episode, too.

Unfortunately, the event was marred the next day by an assault – according to news reports, an altercation ensued when one attendee complained another was sitting too close, and one stabbed the other near the eye with a pen. Fortunately, the injury apparently wasn’t serious (although it easily could have been), and to keep things in perspective, the guy wielding the pen was wearing a Harry Potter t-shirt (and I have to wonder if the pen was one of those light-saber pens they were handing out at the Clone Wars booth). Out of a four-day event with 126,000 attendees, that still compares favorably to Laker fans rioting (something to keep in mind as Comic Con considers moving to LA).

The ABC Player on my iPad is by far the leading consumer of my iPad hours – I’ve been catching up on episodes of Lost, Flash Forward, V, Modern Family…But do they have to have that ABC badge constantly on-screen? Admittedly it’s smaller than most of the logos on television, but on a bright background it’s still very noticeable. And it’s the ABC Player – it only features ABC shows. By the time I select a show and hit Play, I’ve got the message.

I miss Buffy. It was the only show I got together with friends to watch. Now I’m reduced to glimpses of Buffy alumni, even those who were only on for the last season, like Felicia Day (although she was the love interest in Dr. Horrible). Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not stalking the Whedon women – I watch Bones, too, and I saw Slither. But a Girls of Whedonverse calendar wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’d better stop talking now. Anyway, here’s Felicia…

In A Long Way to Go, Alice Taylor laments the lack of women listed in Gamasutra’s The Game Developer 50, provides a number of women who could have been included, and suggests splitting the format into 25 men and 25 women. That last idea is an example of going a step too far (although featuring a Top 50 Women list is not a bad idea – then we can debate whether any of them should be in the global Top 50). But it shouldn’t detract from the basic point. Why no women?

To find out why, you really just need to look at the responses, particularly from Gamasutra. We-profile-women-in-other-features is like saying we gave a woman director an Oscar, so everything’s fine in Hollywood. And the defense that those honored were selected specifically for accomplishments last year sounds like a last-minute defense picked out of the air – the inclusion of Jason Della Rocca is essentially a lifetime achievement award (unless they’re rewarding him for stepping down) And then there’s the usual capper – we-work-with-a-lot-of-women-so-we’re-clearly-not-prejudiced. That’s like saying “I’m not prejudiced, some of my best friends are…”

The only way to solve the problem is to admit the problem. Here, I’ll start – when I first read the list on Gamasutra, I didn’t notice that it included no women until I saw Alice’s blog. I’m a guy in a male-dominated industry, I hang out with other guys in the industry, and I’m influenced (programmed, really), by the media (those in the media, you can’t say you’re having a cultural impact and then say you’re not, when it’s convenient). So call me a sexist, I won’t deny it. But I recognize the problem. Put the shoe on the other foot. While I may not be alert as I should be to the ill-representation of women, as an Asian-American, it’s maddening for me to see TV California towns with just one Asian, or a white-populated San Francisco, or Hawaii shows where the leads are all white, or even a sci-fi series set in a future where everyone speaks Chinese but no one is actually Chinese. This happens not because of a lack of talent or we-don’t-have-the-right-role-for-that-type-of-person – it happens because the people in that industry from the top to the bottom will by default select people like themselves, whether it’s scriptwriting, casting, or greenlighting.

I’ll close with one more recent example. Last year I watched the Huntington Beach centennial documentary on HBTV, which was a real snoozer until they unexpectedly waded into serious waters and described the Japanese-American internment of WWII as a “difficult question” of their loyalties “that could not be answered” and only described them as “Japanese residents”, not mentioning that everyone of Japanese descent on the west coast was interned. When I complained to city hall, the response I got was that a “diverse” panel had approved it, and the CD’s had been sent to the local schools! (I can only hope they slept through it). I thought maybe I overreacted, saw it a second time, thought it was even worse than I initially realized, sent another complaint and this time they said they’d ask a Japanese-American member of the Orange County Human Relations Commission to look at it. Six or seven months later, they finally stopped showing the piece and distributing the DVD’s. I would have preferred that they acknowledged the inadequacy of that segment and just included some additional info with the piece directing viewers to resources such as the Japanese American National Museum. But I understand the desire to cover up an embarrassing mistake. Still, I would have appreciated a “Our bad, thanks for pointing it out”, or even better, taking the issue more seriously the first time and doing a little research and introspection.

One thing I liked about The Sarah Connor Chronicles is the brief history lesson on chess computers and the reference to Deep Blue (and also the idea that a chess computer would dominate mankind – take that, Tron and Colossus!) So I dug up my old Epinion review on Feng-Hsiung Hsu’s book “Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion”:

I’ve never been a particularly good chess player – when I played on my high school chess team, my rating peaked at just above 1700, which is, well, decent. But ever since I played and lost to my first chess computer, I’ve aspired to writing a great chess program.

I never got around to it, only writing a series of Othello programs on various platforms, but the dream is still there. So I’m quite taken with Feng-Hsiung Hsu’s twelve-year quest to build a chess computer capable of beating the world chess champion.

There are really two major contests in this autobiographical account – the well-publicized final match between Deep Blue and world champion chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and the early political tension between the original Deep Thought team at Carnegie-Mellon University and the more established computer chess group led by Hans Berliner at the same institution.

Hsu’s irritation with these two major rivals comes through clearly, but he does attempt to at least sound understanding of their respective positions. The emotional level of disagreement and surprisingly petty behavior (during and after the match, Kasparov insinuated that the Deep Blue team cheated) highlight the fact that this was not just a game to Kasparov and not just an academic exercise to the CMU researchers. All the participants had the pride and work of a lifetime at stake, no less than that of athletes seeking a championship ring or Olympic medal.

Chess and technology enthusiasts should find the level of computer hardware and chess detail interesting, although others may find it tedious. Hsu fails to provide any substantial discussion of other computer chess research, which could lead the reader into thinking all the interesting developments occurred during Deep Thought/Deep Blue’s development, when in fact, computer chess has been a rich topic for decades. For example, one surprising omission – International Master David Levy defeated Deep Thought in an early game, but Hsu doesn’t note that Levy is a well-known computer chess authority and would know how to exploit typical weaknesses of chess programs as well as anyone.

Considering he’s not a native English speaker, Hsu’s writing is passable, and his vocabulary is impressive, although the style is somewhat stilted. There is at least one misspelling/typo (the Sports Illustrated “swim suite” edition), but the most distracting aspect of the writing is structural – Hsu recounts some events out of sequence, referring to them back and forth, so I felt a little bit like the time warping traveller in Slaughterhouse Five. For example, Hsu recounts a 1995 international computer chess tournament in Hong Kong before discussing a 1994 tournament in the next chapter.

Compounding this confusion is the succession of names for the various incarnations of the hardware – Deep Thought, Deep Thought II, Deep Blue, Deep Blue Prototype, Deep Blue Jr. It’s hard to remember the differences between them (it’s still not clear to me how Deep Blue Jr. is different from Deep Blue, aside from being “scaled down”), and I had to flip back the pages a few times to keep track of which version of the hardware was playing at what tournament and when against whom.

The naming issue does provide the most humorous anecdote in this tale – when the project was adopted by IBM, corporate insisted on changing the name from Deep Thought, largely because of the trademark issue (Deep Thought was named after the unhelpful computer in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), but also because a surprising number of people, including a nun, kept referring to the computer as Deep Throat.

In an attempt to explain his ambition and tendency to bump heads, Hsu intersperses his narrative with some background on his early school years in Taiwan, required service in the Taiwanese army, and his activities at Carnegie-Mellon, but it’s really unnecessary. His personal style comes through loud and clear throughout the rest of the story and there’s no need to explain – some people just have the combination of talent and contrariness to create something like Deep Blue, and in this case, the world had the fortune to watch Hsu and Deep Blue bump heads with a no less intense personality, Garry Kasparov.

Before I go to sleep, I try to recount my accomplishments for the day. Sort of a personal scrum meeting. Also, it helps avoid insomnia. I won’t inflict that on you readers in the form of daily blogs (that’s what Facebook statuses are for), but it’s been a busy month, so I’ll list the highlights:

• Got an iPad. I considered waiting until my birthday (that’s how I rationalized getting my first MacBook Pro), but I felt I should get a move on in updating my iPhone apps. Besides, they were in stock at the Apple Store.
• Updated HyperBowl for the iPad. Not too bad – it took a couple of days, got rejected because now it needs to support multiple orientations (at least upside-down), resubmitted, and got accepted.
• Filed my taxes. I actually start in December, filling it in and itemizing deductions over the months until I can’t stand it anymore. I always leave some money on the table in return for keeping some last bit of sanity. It’s a fair trade, I think.
• Celebrated my birthday by spending a couple of days in San Clemente to relax. Instead of visiting the beach, I raided the local used book store, Mathom House Books. Picked up a dozen sci-fi novels.
• Updated the individual HyperBowl lane apps for the iPad.
• Dropped by the doc for a periodic blood test. Whereupon they called me up and said they got the results and I needed to come in immediately. Whereupon they said, never mind, sorry about that.
• Watched the season DVD set of Breaking Bad.
• Watched the season 2 Blue-Ray set of Sarah Connor Chronicles.
• Updated Fugu Bowl for the iPad.
• Brought my car in for an oil change. Good news is I only drove a thousand miles since my last oil change five months ago. Bad news is I still ended up spending three hundred dollars.
• Caught up on Flash Forward on the iPad using the ABC Player.
• Caught up on Lost on the iPad using the ABC Player.
• Did some major work on Blue Mars. You’ll see it in the next beta release.

Now I need to get going on the next set of iPad releases. But first, I’m going to start catching up on Caprica episodes…

In the midst of a rant conflating drug cartels with job loss, KTLA’s version of the angry white man radio show had this response to the argument that requiring local police to actively enforce immigration laws will reduce reporting of crime by illegal immigrants:

“Illegal alien criminals victimize mostly illegal aliens so illegal aliens should be glad to see illegal aliens driven from their neighborhood, particularly the criminals.”

This is from memory, so the wording might not be exact, but I’m pretty sure the idiocy is intact. I generally don’t find radio talk shows appealing so I only caught this because KTLA invited these deep thinkers to give their opinions on the broadcast news, and lest you think it an aberration, KTLA has been promoting the radio show with an excerpt about “illegal-lovin” something or other. It’s not even a complete sentence, which is out-of-context even for an out-of-context business, but I guess they just wanted to emphasize the fun words. At least they haven’t followed the CNN path of making them news anchors. Yet.

I’m a proponent of trip reports. They force you to think about what you saw at the conference, the company gets more for their money if you disseminate the information, and it will allay your coworkers’ suspicions that you spent the whole time partying.

Since I’m self-employed and paid my own way, and I didn’t really spend much time at GDC, it’s not quite so useful for me to give a trip report, but I’ll do it anyway.

First, let’s get the conference part out of the way. I primarily went there to network and had a nice dinner in Chinatown with developers from my client (Avatar Reality, the developer of the virtual world Blue Mars) and a croissant with the head of the charity Get Well Gamers.

I only went to the expo for a few hours, and I will repeat my annual complaint that CMP is really milking the event, selling only a three-day expo pass for $250, and it was an unpleasant surprise to find they were not accepting IGDA discounts for on-site registration (the people at the desk didn’t seem to know what IGDA was). I stopped by the IGDA booth and they seemed surprised, too. I generally don’t consider splurging for the whole conference package because, 1) I tend to fall asleep in talks and 2) again they’re milking it, charging separately for the “Mobile Summit”, etc. I remember in my dot-com days that Java One was expensive, too, but once you paid for it, you got the whole conference.

The expo seemed smaller than the last time I went two years ago, and I wouldn’t say there’s a lot new, except two of the middleware packages I use, Unity and Scaleform had more sizeable presences than two years ago, and their reps looked really busy. At the Unity booth, I had a nice talk with the dimeRocker folks and fellow Unity developer Jonathan Czeck of Graveck (it’s always fun talking to other engineers – with marketing, it’s a toss-up, sometimes they’re cool, sometimes they stand there looking bored until someone with an expensive suit shows up). Aside from that, noticed there were a lot of companies offering virtual currency solutions and a pretty cool VR input device that resembled a giant hamster ball.

Aside from that, I eschewed the parties (my return flight seemed to full of hung-over game developers) and checked out the town. Some observations: City Lights Bookstore is a pretty nice bookstore – it doesn’t seem to have any computer books, but there’s a decent sci-fi section. The Crocker Galleria isn’t what it used to be, apparently hit hard by the doldrums of the Financial District. Beard Papa Sweets are tasty. So was the chocolate place next door. Considering the frequency of rain in San Francisco, you’d think some place around the Moscone would sell umbrellas. Smoking is prevalent – get caught walking behind a smoker and you’ll get a lungful. The Museum of Crafts and Folk Art is small, but it’s got a cool gift shop (some carving are from an astrophysics grad student in Arizona). Food in San Francisco is expensive. The Filoli Gardens is amazing. Joy Luck Place in San Mateo has excellent dim sum (I hear Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook goes there). HyperBowl is back in the Metreon and in excellent condition, although it costs $5 per play. Every block in San Francisco, you’ll see Asian faces – yet in Monk, one of my favorite San Francisco shows, I only recall seeing Asians as a laundress and Chinatown gang members. I don’t know if I saw any Chinatown gang members, but I did see a lot of tourists and touristy shops. I have to admit, I bought some touristy stuff – a fan and an abacus. It’s research (think iPhone/iPad app  – I’m serious!).

Some friends of mine were joking about the inanity of the Census letter alerting us to the upcoming Census letter. I’ve seen dumber – just off the top of my head, I recall the MIT student loan office sending me a letter saying they didn’t have my mailing address (and yet I got it), a half-hearted apology (quarter-hearted would be more accurate) from Healthnet saying they “lost” my check into another account and terminated my insurance because I wrote my name “illegably”…and then they addressed me as “Ralph”. And recently, there was the series of letters from the City of Huntington Beach emphasizing the public safety importance of maintaining consistent street address names, so they were going to rename my street and expect all the utility, mapping, government, postal and financial institutions to adjust their databases.

Nonetheless, I filled out and returned the census form when it arrived, because all these people on TV, like the mayor of LA and Ed Begley, JR., say it’s important to make sure resources go where they need to go. But they don’t really explain how that works, and in particular they don’t explain why they ask the questions they ask, many of which are legally forbidden in job interviews.

I especially am tired of answering the which-race-are-you question (and the really weirdly specific are-you-hispanic-and-which-kind). It reminds of my interrogations over the years – “Where are you from? No, before that. No, before that. I mean, where are you really from?”, “How long have you been in this country?” (I used to answer with my age, but then they just respond, “wow, that’s a really long time”, which is starting to make me feel old), and in Oregon recently I got a couple of “Welcome to America!”s.

And I don’t see the point. It’s not as if the census asks what languages I speak (or don’t speak) and will apportion language services accordingly to my area (although what Huntington Beach really needs are better Chinese restaurants, at least something without “Panda” or “Wok” in the name). Maybe they’re just making assumptions based on the race selection. Like that woman at the bottom of the MIT steps who saw me and walked all the way up to hand me an English-as-a-Second-Language flyer. Or the Boston locals who asked me if I spoke English (what am I supposed to say – “No. I don’t speak English”. But at least they asked).

I looked at the IGDA diversity survey recently and thought, while well-intentioned, it looked like it had been done by a college intern (I think it actually was). Now, I think that work is right up there with the professionals’. So, what happened to this “post-racial society” I heard of?