Larry Hosken: New

Book Report: Not Becoming My Mother

2010-03-09T14:55:51

Ruth Reichl's mother was kind of depressed, kind of goofy. Reichl's written some autobiographies with scary parts. The scary parts were dinner parties. Yes, really. When her mother hosted dinner parties, things were dangerous. She was casual about serving her guests moldy food. And spoiled food. And... So how did she turn out this way?

This book tells her mother's story.

When Ruth Reichl's mother was growing up, women didn't have many choices in general. And her mother had plans for her, tried to nudge her to a life... that made her miserable. So when Ruth Reichl's mother raised Ruth Reichl, she tried not to nudge Ruth towards anything. Instead, she tried to shove Ruth away.

So this book isn't one of Reichl's food-centered biographies. Instead, it's stirring family drama. Pretty good.

Puzzle Hunts Are Everywhere, even in Brent Holman's Memories (but not so much in writeups)

2010-03-06T15:28:26

Veteran gamist Brent Holman Facebook-replied to my post yesterday about recaps, the internet, and memetic monoculture. His post deserves a wider audience than my Facebook friends, so I'm posting it here. There's a lot of wisdom in what he writes, reminding us of the difference between book larnin' and experience. And he gently points out that I got his idea backwards and then attributed it to him so... uhm, yeah, that's worth clearing up. Sorry about that.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brent Holman:

This is a thought-provoking post, Larry.
I could look back at the early Games I played and laugh at how easy they seem by today's standards, but that would be pointless: it didn't matter, because we were having fun. Would those same types of puzzles be fun for us now? Possibly, but likely less so than they were at the time. This isn't because the puzzles have changed, it's because we have. When we read about other events, in a small way we deprive ourselves of that type of personal evolution.
Most will agree that we learn best by doing. If someone in Anytown hears about Games and wants to learn more, wouldn't it be ideal if she could find a way to actually play instead of reading a bunch of recaps of other events? A real experience, no matter how simple, seems preferable to a second-hand experience, no matter how fantastic the original might have been.
Granted, with the limited and temporal nature of Games, this isn't always practical or even realistic. Someone needs to step up and run a Game before anyone can play. But it could be argued that the prevalence of event recaps on the web makes prospective GCs that much less likely to throw their hat into the ring for fear of retreading old ground. At the very least, it makes the playing field that much more un-level.
Imagine this scenario: if you don't read up, you've potentially already fallen behind before you've even started. If you do read up, you've potentially lost the joy and wonder of many new discoveries. Which would you choose?
I don't think a monoculture is the real worry. People who get bitten by the Game bug will take things in their own directions, no matter what other people have done in the past or will do in the future. That's just the nature of creativity.
To me, the interesting question is more about where the Game begins than where it ends up. Gamers (current and future) are information-seekers by nature, and the more there is to devour, the more they'll consume. This fundamentally changes the starting point. Technology (which has always been a big part of the Game) has made the truly n00b experience very difficult to come by, except possibly for the extremely disciplined who are willing and able to insulate themselves.
But to clarify a point from the beginning of your post, I wasn't really saying that the new players come in really knowing their stuff. Quite the opposite, in fact. They come in thinking they know their stuff because they've read up on previous events. In many cases it's knowledge without understanding, lessons learned without effort. They only have a history of success (or of reading about success) and not of failure. Any old-timer will tell you that you learn as much about puzzles by trying things that don't work as by trying things that do.
As long as there's information to share, people will share it. And as long as there's shared information, people will seek it out. That just means we're all doing what we're predisposed to do. Trying to stop that cycle would be a fool's errand. It's up to the creators to rise above that challenge and keep things new.
My most treasured Game memories came in the early days, when everything was completely unexpected. My lack of knowledge put me in the perfect frame of mind to be amazed. It's that sense of wonder and the joy of discovery that every Gamer relishes, so I can only hope that wherever any player's experiences begin or wherever they may end up, they'll be able to experience those same feelings again and again. But in some ways it's never quite as good as the first time, so you might want to think twice about trying to get started too far along the curve...

So, yeah. (This is me, Larry, again.) A word is but a pale shadow of the thing. A narrative is not reality. A Game write-up is not the Game.

It's like... you're talking to someone at a party about these hunts. And he says "Wow, that would make a great movie." And you have to say "No wait, hang on. It only sounds like a great movie because I left out this stuff. Because narratives don't really have a way to convey what we do. I left out... I left out... I left out the hour of frustration staring at that pile of flourescent-painted lumber scraps. I left out the argument over how to interpret those hummingbird flight patterns as ternary (and the dreadful moment of realization that the argument had gone on longer than the time it would take to try doing the ternary both ways). I left out the frisson of strange queasy joy and regret I experienced when I found that leftover piece of chocolate in my pocket at 4 AM and realized that I'd been forgetting to eat. I left out the things that make The Game The Game, because the English language is not suited to describing these things. You need... you need... You need to go read Eric Prestemon's puzzle-solving diary and pay attention to the times. And... and..." But by now your fellow party-goer has decided they really need to go talk to their friend over there.

I am a writer because I love language; and yet I know that language has limits. I love these puzzly-hunty things because they put us into a place that language can't describe well. I found out about these games because I found a write-up. You n00bs take note: that write-up didn't make me want to read more write-ups. It made me want to play The Game.

I should link to this from my write-up page.

chris451's comment on Caja

2010-03-09T15:04:03

[Edited to add: If you have questions or concerns about Caja, the Google Caja Discuss group is a good place to ask them.]

Since I switched blogging software, people who think they're commenting on my old blog posts are basically typing into a trash can. I broke the old commenting system. Unfortunately, I left the commenting UI in there. (I do plan to remove that misleading UI... uhm, sometime after I finish running playtests... and after I do my taxes... and... uhm, anyhow...) So chris451 probably thinks that I'm censoring him because I'm part of some evil Caja-Iranian-hacker conspiracy. Because I wrote a post praising Caja's HTML sanitizer. But I'll post his comment here:

chris451 has left a new comment on your post "Link: Caja's HTML sanitizer for Javascript":
This code is being used by iran to launch a fake virus scan window
03/05/2010 08:52 AM 426 virussusggester.txt
12/16/2009 02:43 PM 11,350 suggest_window.html_virussuggester
12/16/2009 02:43 PM 8,551 html-sanitizer-minified.js
12/16/2009 02:43 PM 1,890 json_comp.js
03/05/2010 09:05 AM 0 dir.txt
5 File(s) 22,217 bytes
www.theapt.com/images pops up gina gershon google search
[editor's note: Do not follow this link. Like the guy says, it shows a popup. And it downloads an .exe to your machine.] http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.theapt.com/images/upload/spencer/233_0qYurR.jpg&imgrefurl=http://altonbazar.ir/cxe.php%3Fq%3Dgina-gershon&h=607&w=450&sz=28&tbnid=ZeoYhQlTJepQ1M:&tbnh=136&tbnw=101&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgina%2Bgershon&hl=en&usg=__c84czzYYyYIFlbvefFkWzSaf81o=&ei=-BeRS5DqHIe4NuaiqPQM&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=7&ct=image&ved=0CBUQ9QEwBg
It helps iran who are not freinds of the west.
Posted by chris451 to Larry Hosken: New at 05 March, 2010 07:15

chris451, don't fear Caja, but do avoid that web page.

Caja is a good thing. But Caja is a general-purpose thing.

It's kinda like https; https is for "security", but just because you see that you're connecting to a site via http, that doesn't mean that nothing bad will happen to you. https is more secure than http, but you can use https to connect to an unfriendly site and bad stuff will still happen. https just means that other bad guys can't eavesdrop meanwhile.

If a page's author wants to make their page more secure, Caja will help them to do that. Unfortunately, if a page's author wants to make their malware-downloading page more secure, Caja will help them to securely display a fake Windows UI and download malware to your machine. Caja makes it harder for some other hacker to sneak their code onto that page to do other bad stuff to you. But meanwhille, your machine is still downloading malware. Caja's making one aspect of your transaction more secure... but not the part you care about right then.

[Edited to add: It's not clear to me that Caja's actually being used here. I didn't actually confirm that the malware-downloading site was using Caja. And I never figured out where chris451 was looking when he saw that directory listing. If chris451 had posted this report on the Google Caja Discuss google group, maybe the ensuing discussion would have been useful. There are folks there who know more about this stuff than I do.]

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, with no hidden niches

2010-03-06T15:31:52

There was this conversation at the GC Summit. Brent Holman of Shinteki/the Scoobies said something. It troubles me. Maybe it shouldn't but...

We were talking about making these puzzle-hunty games accessible to nOObs. I guess we were all thinking about phenomena like the Green Game. That's how the culture spreads, right? NOObs play games, then they're not NOObs anymore.

Maybe that's not true anymore. Brent organizes a lot of games, right? And he pointed out: When these people show up, they've read some stuff on the internet, right? They know their codes, they know what to do, they know all this stuff. [Updated: Brent replied to this post to gently let me know that I got his point backwards. And along the way he also shared some genuine wisdom about games and life. Go read what he had to say.]

That makes me worry about monoculture, right?

Part of what makes evolution works is that there are places that are tough to get to. There are islands, hidden valleys. Occasionally a macaw will make it to one of these places, and this colony of macaws will spring up. It's separate from the main macaw population. It's under different pressures, evolves differently. They explore a different part of the possible genetic space. Occasionally some of these weird colonist macaws make their way back to the main population. It's where diversity comes from, it keeps the species strong. If all your macaws live in just one place, if they don't have any kinda-tough-but-not-impossible-to-reach places around them.... If they don't have these weird little niches to go and stew for a while... You lose diversity.

Memes are similar, right? A lot of weird stuff happens on Japanese TV. We in America don't know much of it, because there are these semi-permeable information boundaries. Occasionally something wonderful and strange stumbles through the boundary, and the world gains another "Iron Chef". The language barriers, the copyright hassles—they create these information islands. Strange things thrive there, and occasionally one comes back.

I read about puzzle-hunty activities in different places and they are different.

Ravenchase all Poe-like and artistic.

Hot Springs Arkansas with less find-the-information-in-this-diagram and more cleverly-navigate-this-physical-challenge.

Competitive New York City's Midnight Madness where you can interfere with other teams in ways that fit the game.

What would have happened if those people had read my write up of Justice Unlimited and thought "Oh, so that's how we're supposed to do it."? When we share what we do, we're being generous with our ideas. But we're also influencing people. We inspire them, but we inspire them to react to what we've done.

OK, I'm not terribly worried about a monoculture. For example, I think that D.A.S.H. is an awesome idea.

And within the bay area community... you couldn't even call that a mushy homogenized monoculture. Sunday, I asked a playtester, Peter Kimball, about his previous puzzle-huntish experience. He said he'd playtested one Game, that it was Paparazzi. Imagine if that was the only Game you ever played. "So, this is what it's like? Getting driven around in a limo to a swank nightclub? Awesome!"

And it's not like everybody follows everything that's going on. I think I looked at two puzzles from the recent MIT mystery hunt. I could read more. They nicely put everything up on the internet. There's no, uhm, memetic barrier there. Except for that thick one around my brain. I guess as long as we have those, there will still be variations.

And maybe there are hidden niches after all. You still hear mention of dorm Games at Stanford. They don't invite us old duffers to play, there's no long reports posted, just a microblog mention of a treasure-hunt-like game. Maybe in a few years something new, wonderful, and strange will burst out upon our scene.

Book Report: Strengths Finder 2.0

2010-03-02T03:46:40

Strengths Finder 2.0 is an online personality test disguised as a book. The test administrators charge you to take their test. To make the idea of spending $25 to take a personality test palatable, they throw in a hardcover book.

The schtick is: this test finds your strengths. According to the authors, other personality tests point out where you are on some scale: e.g., extrovert vs introvert. The authors decided to instead focus on strengths; glad-handing or sulking for extroverts and introverts. (Ha. I kid. Oh jeez, did I just rile up people at either end of that personality scale? Moving right along...) Why do they take this approach?

The authors say that other personality tests focus on people's weaknesses.

Huh?

There are a bunch of personality tests out there. You might have heard of Meyers-Briggs, those folks who can describe you with a four-letter ~~word~~ acronym. There are others: True Colors, OCEAN/Big5, What Harry Potter Character are you Most Like? I've taken a bunch of these. None of them focused on my shortcomings... well, I was kind of disappointed to find out that I'm not similar to Hermione Granger, but let's not dwell on that.

Maybe the authors of Strengths Finder think that people focus on the negatives because... well, I think that the authors are psychologists. Don't psychologists study pathological psychology a lot? They probably are used to other personality tests... the Autism-Spectrum quotient, the the NEO PI-R, the "Could I possibly be an Axe Murderer?" quiz.

But most folks don't do that. Most folks' encounters with personality tests are these pop-psych.... ahem. So.

So... as near as I can tell, this test's gimmick is based on a shaky premise.

There are some folks who I wish would read this book. Those are: people who have recently tried their first personality test and who have ascribed great significance to the results. You may have met these people. They are very excited. They have just found out that they are INTJ and what that means, and their places on the axes of personality. They have learned that people are different. They will talk your ear off about it. They can be very tiresome.

A good cure for this is: point them at another personality test. (I kinda like OCEAN/Big5, but I'm not sure that the choice of test matters much.) Just get them to take a second personality test. They take the test. It gives them a similar answer—but in a different way. One test plots your personality on a range between the extremes of Judging vs Perceiving. Another test figures out where you are between Compassion and Outspokenness. Apparently, there's more than one way to draw lines through the vector space of personalities.

Once folks figure out the arbitrary nature of how each measurement slices up the personality space, they calm down a bit.

And they've still learned the important thing: People are different. If you approach someone one way and it goes well, don't assume that the same approach will work well with someone else. It's worth it to learn to watch for people's reactions... because you can't assume that they'll all react the same way to stuff.

Life of Pi: Another Perspective

2010-02-27T04:53:55

You might have noticed that I changed my blogging software recently. Yes, I do go on about it. Sorry.

As part of this, I shut down blogger.com's access to my web site's file system. Otherwise, it might want to update my blog files... and accidentally wipe out the new stuff. It seemed like a sensible precaution. Except that somebody just now tried to leave a comment on one of my old blog posts. They made the comment on blogger.com... which now wants to copy files over, so that my blog can display the new comment. Except that I shut down the access. Whoops.

So as far as this anonymous poster knows, I'm censoring them.

I should fix up my old blog posts so that they no longer have comment forms. That way, it would be clear that there's no point trying to comment. But I'm pretty busy for the next couple of whiles, so that's not going to happen.

Meanwhile, I guess I can avoid the pall of censorship by just copying this blog comment over by hand:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Book Report: Life of Pi":
Life of Pi is a fantastic book. Its written colorfully too. You should read the copy that has amazing illustration. And yes, evrything gets interesting towards the end. How do you not like it? What are you, 10?
Posted by Anonymous to Larry Hosken: New at 25 February, 2010 14:00

Maybe I should have skipped to the end.

Book Report: Between Silk and Cyanide

2010-02-26T01:34:05

It's the autobiography of the codemaster of the SOE an English spy organization during WWII. Wait! Dont' run away! It's not just math and cryptography and war. There's good stuff in here, too. Though the guy's why-does-he-think-that's-funny style is kind of tough to get through at first, he settles down soon, and partway through I knew that this was going to be one of the best books I read this year.

Secret agents went to the continent, where the fighting was. They needed to communicate plans back and forth with controllers back in England. But they mostly communicated by radio, and the Germans could listen in. They wanted to encode their messages. They wanted to communicate, to be connected, to be reminded that there were people who supported them. But that very act of communication endangered them—direction finders tried to track their location by their radio signals; German codebreakers

This book has crypto, but it also has some of the logistics associated with codes. For example, our narrator develops a one-time-pad system. It's perfect cryptographically, but it introduces a logistical challenge—how to get new pads out to agents. You hear about that difficulty with OTPs, and here it is, illustrated.

This book had a lot of interesting stuff in it.

Slapstick. E.g., at one point, our hero's pants fall down.
More poetry than one might expect
Our narrator is Leo Marks, as in "Marks & Co"—he's in one of the families that runs the bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road. The bookstore's even important to the plot in a few places.
Surprise cameo by Jack Benny
His main goal during the war was to prevent agents from being captured. Agents were captured, plenty of them. Captured agents were sent to the concentration camps. Our narrator is Jewish. Spooky.
Women were codebreakers and code makers. As long as there was a war on, I guess women were allowed to be good at math.
Deadly, deadly office politics. You think things are bad where you work. But when two spy organizations for the same country don't get along, agents die.

A good read. Check it out.

Site: Tag Cloud

2010-02-24T14:15:26

Tinkering with blog software is fun. I set up one of those tag clouds. There's not much there yet, but give it time.

Book Report: Brain Storm

2010-02-21T15:55:15

This novel is by Richard Dooling, the same guy who wrote Bet Your Life, one of my favorite books of 2003. This book was pretty good, too. It's a legal thriller—hey, come back! It's a legal thriller with some detective work, but also some lawyerly musings about hate-crime laws. I'm not a fan of hate. But this book raises some tough questions. Like, how do you legally prove that some bigot committed some crime because of their bigotry? Many bigots are assholes in a variety of ways; proving specific motive is hard. Now I've made the book sound deep and serious, but it's funny and raunchy and sometimes it's sweet. I made some wrong guesses about where it would go... which I guess I shouldn't point out, since the book is kind of a mystery, and spoilers are bad. There is a fun retro-computing scene in which the protagonist, a power computer user, does an internet search—by interacting with a specialized application running on his own computer. This book was back from 1998. You kids today, you don't know how easy you have it with your widely-available internet search engines.

"What is a Content Management System?"

2010-02-21T16:05:22

At the GC Summit, Debbie mentioned that the organizers of the excellent DASH treasure hunt game will start using a content management system to keep track of their puzzles. Someone in the audience asked, "What's a content management system?" Debbie didn't think she had a good answer, so she didn't try to answer. I have an answer, and I can point you at another one.

A content management system is a computer program that manages of "content" that [an author|authors] want to make available somehow. It tracks stuff from when you create it, as you collaborate on it, to when you publish it—though you can find content management systems that don't fit that model 100%. If this description sounds vague, then you were paying attention. It's a broad category.

Wikipedia is a content management system that lets thousands of people edit thousands of articles which are then viewed on the web by millions of people over the internet. Wow, that's amazing!
This here blog is a content management system that lets one person (me) edit articles which are then viewed on the web by my mom. (Hi mom!)
Any big book publisher or newspaper has some kind of content management system. Authors write stuff and put it in the system. Editors tweak stuff. Folks lay out pages. Eventually the system sends files to a printer.

So the DASH folks will use a content management system for their web site. That sounds like a good way to let different people in different cities update their city's local information. Especially if the alternative is just, you know, calling up Curtis and asking him to edit their stuff for them. Whatever system they use, it'll be a content management system. It probably won't be much like Wikipedia, or this blog or... But it'll be a content management system.

Different content management systems are different. This makes sense. You'd expect the system underneath a medical-info website to require a few people to edit/approve a new article before publishing it. But for your personal blog, if it forced you to take time to "approve" each blog post after you wrote it, you'd call that program clunky.

There's so much variation between content management systems that ranty computer programmer Steve Yegge used it as part of his main example for "The Nonesuch Beast," his article on the hard slog on getting people to agree on what a product should do, even if at first they all think that they agree. (Most big companies have had a big push to unify on a single content management system; each tries once, fails, and learns that that's a stupid idea.)

The good news is that the DASH folks are all working on the same website. So they can probably mostly agree on what they want from their content management system.