TOM FRANCIS
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Understanding Your Brain

My last post about happiness was about why success isn’t a good way to be happy, and three things that are.

In the comments, Johannes Spielmann said this:

Johannes: Great article!

For a more nuanced (and scientifically proven) view on the topic, have a look at this Google Tech Talk by David Rock.

The video he links, the one I’m about to embed, has changed the way I think. It’s like being given the owner’s manual to your brain after 29 years of muddling along with the default settings. It’s not only spectacularly improved my understanding of how people behave and why we feel what we feel, it’s actually made me more consistently happy. Continued

Tweak Fortress

Not for the first time, a post I was writing – a sort of ideal TF2 patch notes – appeared on 1Blog before I could finish it. In fact, this time Chris even wrote a sequel before I was done with mine.

I agree with all the ideas Chris and his commenters propose. There are lots of small, uncontroversial improvements you could make to TF2, and I know Valve agree with at least a couple of the ones mentioned on 1Blog. The reason they haven’t been done yet is not that they’re potentially problematic, it’s just a question of time and priorities.

But I say these perfectly reasonable ideas don’t go too far enough! I got thinking seriously about my ideal patch notes when Valve admitted the Demoman is “a little out of whack”, then I finally got Kritzed under ideal circumstances, and later started to come up against more teams that field four or five Engineers on Defense.

This is an attempt to fix all the main things that bother me in TF2 with five changes. The last one’s just a good idea I stole from the Steam forums.

• Backburner: +50 health bonus removed.

  Update! They just did this!

  – Two sub-classes that look almost identical but have crucially different health values violates the clarity and immediacy that is the soul of TF2.

  – The Airblast ability is fun. You shouldn’t bribe players not to use it.

  – Pyros with this unlock automatically beat Pyros without it, even in a straight fight. That’s bad Unlockology.

• Sticky Bombs: Cannot be detonated until shortly after they affix to a surface. Neutralised if they take damage before arming.

  – The Sticky Launcher shouldn’t be an effective direct-combat weapon – it’s already superb for traps, jumps and defense.

  – The Demoman’s role shouldn’t overlap with the Soldier’s.

  – Engies should be able to defend their stuff from Stickies if they’re only coming in once every couple of seconds.

  – I hate that there’s no visual or audio indication of when you’re allowed to detonate a Sticky you just fired. They should light up and go bling! whether this change is made or not.

• Sentry: Will not attack a target if another Sentry is closer.

  – Most frustrating rounds result from impenetrable nests of three or more Sentries.

  – Sentry counter-tactics aren’t effective when other Sentries are covering the first.

  – Sentry clustering makes Engineers more viable the more of them there are.

  – Currently a computer-controlled class does more of the killing than most of the player-controlled ones.

  – This is silly.

Best shot ever, by Joe of Massive Crits, via Chris.

• Kritzkrieg: When activated, charge does not drain over time, but is instead drained by each shot the target fires.

  – Time-based charge drain encourages a rush mentality, which isn’t effective when the charge offers no protection.

  – It also penalises reloading classes, leaving only the same two who also make the best Ubercharge targets.

  – Currently an Ubercharge is more effective in almost every possible situation, and the 10% faster charge rate is insignificant.

• Heavy: No longer knocked back by Sentry fire.

  – The Heavy is unpopular despite being both powerful and fun, because he’s useless against Sentries at most ranges.

  – Even when Ubered.

• Wrench: Swinging with right mouse button will repair a Sentry, but never upgrade it.

  – Father_G on the Steam forums had this idea.

  – I like it.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Two

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be. Sometimes, after listening, you still won’t have any idea. Other times it’ll be obvious.

This was inspired partly by trying to clear out my downloads folder – I shoved all the unknown MP3s onto my player and listened to them on my way into work, never having any idea what kind of thing was coming next, only that I had for some reason deemed it download-worthy. It took me a long time to remember what the hell this was, and I still have no idea where I got it.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Three

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be. This one should be interesting – for some people one part of it is going to be very obvious, for some the other part is going to be very obvious, a few will immediately recognise both, and a few will have no idea about either.

As ever, listen before reading any comments if you don’t want it spoiled, and speculate away if you have an idea.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Six

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. Sometimes it’s voice, sometimes music, once it was just a noise. This one’s not super-obscure, but it’s ages since I actually listened to it, and to this day I find myself humming it when someone says the word ‘online’. It is dorky in the extreme.

Update! It’s not supposed to be all crackly and fucked up. But it’s sounding that way for some. See the comments for a link to the video.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Seven

A regular feature in which I attempt to share the mystifying, alarming process of digging through my unhelpfully named MP3s by uploading one of the files I found that way and not telling you what it is.

In this case, while you can tell pretty quickly what it is, I still have no idea where I got it, who it’s by, or why I would have such a thing. I think I’ll try moving the logo to beneath the text to impair eye-drift to potential spoilers in the comments.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume One

Sound is sort of a menace on the internet – we browse at work, we browse when we’re tired, we browse when other people in the house are asleep, and sometimes we browse shortly after watching a video whose sound was really really quiet, so we’ve turned up the volume really, really loud. And there are some sites, people and link-sources that you can’t trust not to point you to something loud, obscene, offensive, terrifying or Rick Astley. Even the venerable Waxy.org is guilty: Andy once posted one of those links where everything seems normal, then a giant zombie face appears and screams at the top of your speaker’s volume.

I would like James to be trustworthy. I hope that it already is for a small portion of the people reading this. So I’d like to leverage, possibly confirm, and possibly expand such a trust by occasionally posting sound files with absolutely no explanation. I think it would be nice to sometimes hear something without any clue what it’s going to be, only that someone thought it was worth sharing, and do so knowing that it’s not going to be a nasty shock.

They will sometimes be speech, sometimes just sound, sometimes music, but when they’re music, the music itself won’t be why I’m posting it. Music is too divisive, I want these things to be interesting or entertaining independent of your tastes. Sometimes you’ll find out what they are when you listen, sometimes they’ll leave you with no clue. I’ll wait a few days then explain what they were in the comments, so don’t read the comments before listening.

I hope you’ll also trust that I would not find embedding a Rick Roll at the end of this post even vaguely amusing.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Four

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. A very, very short one this time, and hopefully mysterious. I’ll reveal its identity and why it’s interesting in the comments tomorrow, but beat me to it if you can.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Five

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. It’s an attempt to share the strange experience of rummaging through my old download folders, listening to forgotten MP3s with uninformative filenames. All I know about them is that I must have liked them at some point.

Volume Four was the shortest I’ve ever posted, this one is the longest – don’t click play if you’re in a hurry.

True PC Gaming Interview

True PC Gaming interviewed me about a bunch of things – both development and general opinions. Here’s one!

What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?

Big companies move slowly, particularly public ones who keep having to point to the past to justify their strategy. To anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s been obvious for a long time that the customer isn’t just king anymore – he’s God. He can do whatever the hell he likes. No-one has the technology to stop him from taking whatever he wants.

Developers that are quick to adapt have focused on making the player want to support them, rather than pissing him off with increasingly intrusive attempts to restrict his access. Slower companies are still trying to get back to a time when people were forced to pay for software, and however safe that might seem, plans that involve angering a God usually aren’t sustainable.

Link.

Trivia: My Firefox Extensions

But actually, this basically turns Firefox into the Google Browser, a program in which your Google account is your master login for all others, and your personal information is now completely detached from your home PC, and is entirely online and accessible anywhere. I am naive, and much more easily excited than concerned.

Firefox’s Extension window is one of the slickest pieces of programming I’ve ever seen. When you open it, Update buttons appear next to anything that has a new version out, and you can click them all straight away and they’ll all update simultaneously, in seconds, without asking you anything or making you click okay or waiting for each other to finish first or looking things up or conflicting or breaking or failing to find things. Extensions are user-created content; it’s extraordinary to see the host program supporting them so dotingly. Even Steam is years off being this clever.

Trash Television

Dealing with the categories for this mini-redesign, I realised I hadn’t mentioned television in ages. Here’s a quick round-up of things you’re mostly probably not watching and mostly probably shouldn’t be.

Lost: Season one: I like everything about this show except Jack.
Season two: I like everything about this show except Jack and Kate.
Season three: I like everything about this show except Jack, Kate and Sawyer.
Season four: I like everything about this show except Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Ben.
Season five: I like everything about this show except Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Ben, Locke, Sun, Juliet, Charlotte and the plot.

Damages: Something about the style, tone and performances is still gripping, but every part of the plot this season is inferior. The main one’s a really tired cliché, Timothy Olyphant’s feels arbitrary and improbable, and the callback to the last season hinges on someone we saw shot still being alive – don’t ever, ever do that.

24: These tropes are still fun no matter how many times they’re repeated. Jack having to achieve the impossible in service of the terrorists is a classic. I notice Fake Hillary Clinton is the first president of 24-land to act in any way presidential – the others seemed to think their advisors outranked them.

The Fringe: This ought to be trashy fun, but something about it really doesn’t work. I think it’s that it takes itself so goddamn seriously, and the lead actress, while talented, is so scowlingly concerned that she sucks the joy from the surrounding nonsense.

Lie To Me: Smug but entertaining. Tim Roth as a human lie-detector. The science is both more convincing and interesting than guff like CSI, and more relevant than the hilarious nonsense of Numbers, but of course still wildly exaggerated. The decision to back up some of their claims with quick flashes of famously ashamed, guilty or angry people showing shame, anger or guilt is a great trick.

Flight of the Conchords: Caught bits of this a few times when jetlagged in the States and it never clicked, but this new series has just been sublime. The Conchords are a real band and a fictional one, and this is a mockumentary made by the real one about the fictional one, with the story of their bad, meek indie performances sometimes told via the medium of their smart, genre-hopping real songs. This is their manly answer to the Black Eyed Peas’ famously dismal My Humps:

Total Biscuit Plays Gunpoint

If anyone else does video stuff with games and wants to feature Gunpoint, mail pentadact+guntube@gmail.com and link me your channel!

TORN APART AND DEVOURED BY LIONS Review

An insurance salesman’s prediction turns his life around.

Refreshingly unmopey, nonjudgmental and un-non-funny. This is an exploration of the positive impact a prediction could have: not by implying a long and happy life, but by implying a death so exotic you have to assume things are going to get more interesting from here.

That’s really all there is to it, but it’s witty, fun, breezy and explores its concept with an infectious curiosity. The author is clearly a funny guy with a great writing voice, and he lets a little of it seep into every character. In a short story, that doesn’t hurt.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

Top of GameTab: Wikipedia Edits From Sony IP

The most-clicked story in gaming right now is that someone from an IP address registered to Sony is editing Wikipedia to claim that Halo 3 will look no better than Halo 2. I love that these guys attribute everything everyone at a company ever does to one imaginary person named Sony, and take its every action as company policy. But they’re missing a much better story – check the IP’s edit history, this one‘s his finest hour:

Revision as of 14:26, 1 April 2007
*”[[Tomb Raider: Anniversary]]” – for PlayStation 2, PC and PSP. Not on the Xbox 360, IN YOUR FACE MIKE!