I recently played an adventure game in which you play character A and have to lock character B in a room, and then in the next chapter you play character B and have to escape. It was a slightly unsettling shift in perspective: I'd been playing character A and identifying with her, and agreed with her that character B needed to be locked up because he was a danger to himself and others. I didn't want to help him escape.

alextfish plays a lot of Starcraft, and he says you get the same phenomenon in that, but even worse. At least the two characters above were ultimately on the same side, but in Starcraft you play the Terrans and build a base, and then you play the aliens and destroy the base you just built.



A good developer needs to be at least a reasonably good tester; and a good tester needs a certain quality which, in normal life, is usually bad. I might even call it malevolence, or at least scepticism. It goes beyond just the destructive desire to try to break things; you have to try to break things which other people have just created, which they've put time and effort into, which they might have invested a part of themselves in. You have to assume those creations are flawed, and make it your mission to expose the flaws.

I am not very good at writing robust code. The testers find even fairly obvious bugs in my software. And I think this is because, on some subconscious level, I'm being precious about the thing I've just built. I don't want to prod it until it falls apart; I don't want to look for the flaws in it.

To be a better developer I need to apply this perspective-shifting, side-switching trick to my work. I need to look for ways out of the room I just locked; I need to bomb the base I just built.

Tags: games, software, work

I ordered a computer game from Amazon Marketplace as a present for a friend.

The seller, games4u-uk-net, sent me a bootleg copy. The cover was printed in low quality, like from a home printer, and with no logos or branding, and there was a badly-spelled note on the back saying that the game was free software (it's not) and you're paying for the disc and the emulator.

I looked at their feedback page. They had mostly very good feedback, but the few negative ones were a bit suspicious-looking: they didn't sound like honest mistakes, like sending the wrong product. They were from people who'd ordered consoles described as new, and received them in unbranded plain white boxes. All the negative comments were followed up by indignant, not very polite, not very grammatical replies from the seller asking why the buyer had left negative feedback rather than contacting them.

So I decided to be nice and contact them, asked for a citation for the claim that the game was free software, because I hadn't been able to find one, and tried to explain the difference between free software and abandonware, and said if I had wanted abandonware I wouldn't have paid £10 on Amazon for a legitimate version of the game. I said they were misrepresenting what they were selling, and if they're going to sell discs and emulators they ought to make it very clear that's what they're selling.

They replied, reiterated the claim that the game was free software and that they were only charging for the disc and emulator, and claimed outright that the original producers of the game were an outfit called Classic Gaming Presents (who, as far as I can tell, are an abandonware download site: they have the moral high ground over games4u because they a) have a link inviting the real owners of the game to request they take it down, and b) don't misrepresent what they're offering). They also said they would refund me only if I didn't leave negative feedback.

I was particularly appalled by that last bit, and went into righteous-indignation mode, and reported them to Amazon and to the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and told them so[1], and told them I would certainly leave negative feedback now, and did so (including the bit where they tried to buy my silence).

Amazon replied to my complaint with long complicated instructions of what I should do to claim a refund. I didn't get around to doing anything for a couple of days, and then they sent my money back anyway, without me having done any of the stuff in the email, which surprised me.

Interestingly, games4u now seem to have dropped their price by £2, and have also added a comment to the product page, saying "This is NOT the Whit Label vresion. what we sell is the modified software which enables the game to be run on XP and/or VISTA, the game is distributed for free with the software." [sic]

I've written this for the benefit of two groups of people:
* Those who, like me a few weeks ago, naively think that Amazon Marketplace is something more official and vetted than it really is. Be warned. Treat it like you would eBay. Research the sellers.
* Those who cynically accept that receiving bootlegs is an inevitable part of buying stuff online, and who just shrug and play the CD/DVD/game anyway, or stick it in a drawer and forget about it. Stop it. You're enabling them. Complain, get your money back, get them to start being a bit more honest.

[1] The downside of this is They Know Where I Live. I should have used my work address for the original order.

Tags: bootleg, games

"Daddy, Daddy, you know you're always saying pigs might fly? They actually did! I heard it on the news."
"Huh, really?"
"Yeah, they keep saying swine flew."

The Freedom Bill is a bill drafted by the Lib Dems to "restore civil liberties and democratic rights in Britain". It would repeal things like ID cards and the National Identity Register, the restrictions on protesting near Parliament, and 28-day detention.

Its website is here, and there's a petition here you can sign to support it.

Tags: id cards, politics
Current Mood: hopeful

Our church is having a carol service next Sunday evening: Sunday 21st December, 7-8pm. Alex and I are singing in the choir. There will be free mulled wine and mince pies afterwards.

The church is here, in a big blue building called Brickfields, on Cheddars Lane, near Newmarket Road Tesco.

Come along and sing carols :)

Tags: carols
Current Mood: festive

It annoys me when people use Uncle Tom to mean a member of an oppressed group who disloyally sucks up to the privileged group, perhaps to get better treatment from them than his fellows receive. Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin was a good, brave and loyal man: when a fellow-slave escaped to make a better life for herself and her baby, Tom knew where she went, but refused to tell his master, in defiance of a direct order, and was beaten to death for it.

Similarly, I've heard people use Little Lord Fauntleroy to mean a stuck-up, overprivileged young man with no idea about the real world. But the actual Little Lord Fauntleroy is a down-to-earth, fair-minded boy from an ordinary lower middle class home, who discovers one day that, due to the deaths of a series of relatives he didn't know he had, he's inherited a lordship. At first he's horrified, because he's a staunch little republican and egalitarian, and thinks the aristocracy are bad. Later, he uses his influence to make life better and fairer for the poor tenants in the neighbourhood.

You could probably also make a case for Pollyanna, whose name gets used to mean someone who is optimistic to a pernicious and destructive extent, refusing to face up to the existence of problems, as opposed to someone who chooses to improve her life by trying to find the good in everything; but that may be just different value judgements about optimism, rather than factual error.

What others are there?

Tags: books, nanowrimo procrastination

You are cooking dinner for friends, in a fairly casual trays-on-laps-in-front-of-TV context, rather than a formal dinner-party context.

Poll #1295975 Roast dinner
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Is a roast dinner "elaborate"?

(For clarity, I think of a roast dinner as including a roast joint of meat, roast potatoes, at least two kinds of vegetables, and gravy.)

EDIT: By "elaborate" I meant effort for the host, rather than showiness for the guests.

Tags: polls, roast dinner

I've been wearing a poppy in the run-up to Remembrance Day. No one else among my friends and work colleagues seems to be.

You get articles in the Guardian saying that poppies are bad because they glorify war, and we should choose not to wear one, or perhaps wear a white poppy for peace. I don't really get this. The Poppy Appeal uses slogans like "Because the war to end all wars didn't" - isn't that an expression of sadness and regret, and determination that it won't happen again? And "Lest we forget", which I think is either more of the same, or gratitude, but not glorification.

When I was a kid the poppies used to say "Haig Fund" on them. I gather Haig is thought by many to be a nasty piece of work who sacrificed lots of his men's lives unnecessarily, so I can understand people not wanting to wear anything with his name on; but now the inscription is the much more innocuous "Poppy Appeal".

I guess, for of a lot of my friends, it might just be a case of not having noticed it's Poppy Day soon, rather than any kind of deliberate statement. But I'm curious. So, a poll:

Poll #1293597 Poppies
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Have you got a poppy?

Which of these things do you think the poppy says? (not "Which of these do you agree with")

Tags: polls, poppies, war

Went to see Wall-E last night, with alextfish and isa62v4. I'd been very much looking forward to seeing it, and I'd heard it had good reviews, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to. It was quite fun, but I much preferred all the other Disney/Pixar films.

Tags: alextfish, isa62v4, reviews

I think all foreign language courses should devote a significant amount of time to teaching and practising these. I mean the sort of relatively meaningless, idiomatic things you say when someone else is doing most of the talking and you want to indicate that you're still listening and still interested, or to express agreement, surprise, sympathy, etc. Examples in English include:

• Right
• Oh, I know
• You're kidding!
• No way!
• Don't they just?
• Totally
• Gosh
• Really?
• I know what you mean

I speak French to roughly A-level and German to roughly GCSE level, but I just don't know how to say these things in either language. (I mean, I could translate most of the above list literally into both languages, but they almost certainly wouldn't be idiomatic. I want to know what speakers of those languages actually say in those situations.)

As well as needing to know what expressions are idiomatic at all, you need to know what connotations they each have and what dialects they're associated with. A non-native English speaker couldn't know that Totally can make you sound like a valley girl and Oh, I know can make you sound like Sybil Fawlty.

So if I'm talking to a French speaker, and they're doing most of the talking (which is likely, since they, you know, know more French than I do) I don't know what to say, and feel awkward and inarticulate, and just nod and/or say Oui.

(I actually know one such expression in German. A friend who spent a year actually living in Germany used to say Echt? when German speakers talked to him. I think echt means "genuine", so it's the equivalent of English Really? but obviously I couldn't have come up with it from first principles.)

An anecdote: an acquaintance, L, who speaks Spanish to perhaps GCSE level, asked a friend, P, who speaks it very fluently, if he could practise speaking Spanish with him. P obliged, and L went on to tell him about his favourite subjects and how many siblings he has and so on. P, the fluent speaker, was reduced to nodding and going "Mm". It looked to me as though he kept starting to say "Really" or something, and then stopping, and realising that no Spanish equivalent came quickly to hand.

These things need to be taught. An awful lot of real-life conversation consists of one person telling something that happened to them recently or giving their opinion on something, and the other person listening and interjecting occasionally. This isn't a model of conversation that happens in the language classroom. Either the whole class listens while the teacher talks (in which case you're not supposed to interrupt) or you have an equal, two-sided conversation with a classmate about how to get to the station or whatever. Language learners need to do exercises in which one talks and the other listens and interjects; or, failing that, the teacher talks and you interject.

Tags: language