My gripes about BSG

This post sprung from a conversation about Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) on Google+ and I thought it was a fairly coherent articulation of my personal gripes about that show, so I’ll preserve it here, too.

Here it goes:

I actually have a rather elaborate rant-ish argument about BSG: many of you have probably heard some or all of it, skip this post if it’s so.

I have two or three main gripes with BSG.

First, the writers never thought through the hows and the whys of the universe. And this is not just world-building wankery. This is an understanding so vague about how several things work (but mostly Cylons) that it undermines the ability to tell deep, meaningful stories, in my humble opinion. Because it’s a moving target (1).

How can you center a story about “how to tell if someone is really human” if nobody really knows, for real, not even the writers? In the first episodes we see the glowing spine, then it gets completely forgotten. The cylons are indistinguishable from the humans, but they are shown in different occasions to be stronger, more resistant to diseases and radiation, and they can _fucking upload their conscience in real-time across light years of space_. But at the cellular level they are 100% human (I won’t even touch the bullshit “but they are different on molecular levels”). I can expand on this if needed, it makes very little sense… and as such undermines a lot of the plots that could be told.

Secondly, the writers didn’t have any plan beyond the basic initial drive about where to go with the story. And boy it shows. See (1) on this (or watch Babylon5 or The Shield, and weep).

And thirdly, and I’m coming to my “a wizard did it” gripe, the bit that Franck didn’t see because he bailed out of the series before the end.

SPOILER ALERT ABOUT THE END OF BSG
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Do you remember the “mind Six” and the “mind Gaius”? After all was said and done, it turned out they weren’t mysterioius cylon mind-conditioning programs, or nano-mind-viruses, or just mind games, or whatever else. No. They were _Angels of the Lord_. I am not shitting you. And it gets worse.

The _whole_ series is them steering the actions of the protagonists, influencing them here and there to make them adhere with the prophecy involving the first human/cylon child (Athena? Can’t remember). So they in the end bring humanity to the _promised land_, where humanity (the colonists) settles and basically dies out, save for the little child, that grows and has babies with the native other-humans, and becomes the Mitochondrial Eve, the common ancestor of all present-day Earth. And in the “coda”, they (the two angels) show up in modern-day Earth, and make it clear that the cycle is bound to repeat itself (humanity stealing the life-creating-fire from the gods, the new lifeform revolting, and so on), and they’ll see what will happen and get back to work.

So, from my POV, all the drama, all the human issues… all agency is stolen from the protagonists. Nothing they did was _really_ their free choice, and in the end the message is “stop trying to make sense of the world, just embrace the transcendent and have faith, god will provide”.

Which, and this could be the fault of my own tastes and expectations, I fully admit… is bullshit, and undermines every good bit the series had.
A wizard did it.

One could object why should I care, if I didn’t like the series… but no: there was a _lot_ of good in it. The characters, a lot of the acting, the visuals, effects, world bits and style, even the music. And all that non-expressed potential I kept seeing, it’s infuriating.

I remember talking about this with Joshua A. C. Newman: with that setup there were the materials (the shocks, in “Shock: Social Science Fiction” parlance) to tell really interesting stories about humanity, about artificial life, about racism and prejudice, about scarcity and violence and alienation (the issues)… I kept wanting it to express its potential of being a social science fiction story, and instead it kept steering more and more towards some half-hassed fantasy/mystical/religious drama, just set in space.

Luckily, we have Shock: itself, to tell good stories in badly utilized universes (and Sean Nittner’s Apocalypse Galactica).

Full disclosure: I have not seen the entirety of the series. Just S1, part of S2 and several episodes here and there, plus the last 10 or so episodes. I read some clarification on the wikis and I’m pretty amazed they managed to fit together most of their scattered plots.

(1) And if you download the series bible, which is available online, or listen to Ron Moore’s interviews, they candidly admit this: they had no idea.

Enable embedded fonts and advanced layout in Aldiko

Have you ever wondered how it was possible that all of the ePub readers for Android sucked so hard? Turns out the don’t all suck, it’s just their User Interface design that does.

Well, I just discovered that Aldiko Reader, an app that I tried and dismissed a long time ago, is much more resourceful and featureful than it looks: those features are just very well hidden (and absolutely not advertised in the app’s Play Store page… talk about SEO suckage)*.

So without further ado: here how to bring your Aldiko Reader in the new millennium (aka: embedded fonts, good layout and even SVG embedding!). Click on the images for a full sized version!

1 – Install Aldiko Reader (free) from the Play Store (many phones have it preinstalled: check the version though, if it’s older than 2.1.0 you can probably install the newer one in parallel).

2 – Import your spiffy ePub tapping on Files, browsing, selecting them and choosing “Import to aldiko”

 

3 – Now open your book. I know, none of the layout works (that’s my point!), not even the Italics, most likely.

4 – Tap on the page, or the Menu button, then open the Settings, More... menu

5 – Here comes the magic (and the WTF): uncheck the “Advanced Formatting” option (srsly, yes). This actually enables the ePub advanced formatting that the publisher so lovingly programmed in the book.

so this…

becomes this…

6 – Go back to your book and rejoice! Fonts! Colors! Styles! Actual layout! Even SVG illustrations are correctly (and rather beautifully) rendered! The mind just reels, right?

Now, small rant: defaults matter.

I’m sure it you have any interest in UI design you heard this mantra over and over again. It’s because it’s fucking true. Defaults matter. Choosing to not use the publisher’s layout by default is a completely bone-headed choice, UI wise.
Remember: 70% of the users (maybe more) never change the defaults. So they’ll think your reader sucks, because it does not render stuff that even ADE (Adobe Digital Editions) does, on tiny underpowered and OLD devices like my BeBook Mini.

The fact that the settings for this further confuse the matter just makes things worse. Why the hell would a sane person call a setting “Advanced Formatting” (with the text underneath that says “Click to enable publisher’s formatting” or something), when DESELECTING it (to be fair, “clickng it”, like the line suggests) actually activates the true Advanced Formatting?

It’s cool that there is an override to disable fonts and layout: some people’s idea of a good layout sometimes suck, with unreadable fonts and busy pages. But that’s an Accessibility matter, and should certainly not be the default!

* There actually already was a good ebook reader for Android… it’s just not widely available: the Barnes & Noble Nook reader does use embedded fonts in epubs, SVG illustrations and so on, it’s really a pretty good epub reader. Problem is, it’s officially available only on the Nook reader! Now, if you know where to look you can actually find perfectly good installable apks of it, but I can’t consider it a valid alternative for the casual user. It’s not even supposed to be available in my country! And even then, you have to enable “Publisher Defaults” to see the correct layout.

Note: screenshots will follow, later, for each step.

Fixing Titanuim Backup in Revolver 4.0RC1

So let’s say you have an Asus Eepad TF101 transformer, you are tired of the recurring problems (random reboots and so on) with the ICS stock rom,that you don’t want to sacrifice battery life to WakeLock and you are not that confident Asus knows how to fix it… and you decided to take the plunge and install a custom ROM. Like I did.

Well first you need root (can’t help you there, I rooted before letting it upgrade to ICS),  then you need CWM recovery (again,  look it up on xda: use gnufabio’s RecoveryInstaller,  it works), then you install your ROM.  I chose gnufabio’s Revolver because even in Release Candidate state it’s reported to be perfectly stable with guevor’s kernels.

So now we get to the actual meat of the post: after install Titanuim Backup wasn’t working right: it reported all permissions OK but when restoring it would get stuck forever. If you get this error there’s an easy but not obvious fix: reinstall busybox. Really, that’s it. Personally I used an app on Play Store called (duh) BusyBox Installer.

All fixed.  Have fun!

Standard disclaimer applies: if you break something you get to keep the pieces. Read instructions carefully,  think twice, then read again.

My ideal DnD Next

(Repost from g+)

So the buzz these days about the so called “DnD Next” is “So, what would be your ideal Dungeons and Dragons 5E?“

My ideal 5E would be mostly 4E, fixed to avoid becoming pointless after level 16 (1) (probably just cutting the number of levels in half), with a much stronger support for the rapid encounter building for GMs and less wishy washy incoherent babbling in the DMGs, replaced by clear guidelines of play for the GM (think AW moves).
Oh and maybe have Rob Donoghue write the Skill Challenge chapter from the get-go so that this time even people that weren’t playing story games would understand them (2)… and the math would make sense.

Also, expand and streamline the online support, allowing GMs to create and publish the campaign logs and to create and then award both generic and campaign-specific Achievements (we did it and it was silly fun, like “Bad Luck: three ones in a row”, or “SuperSave: crit on a saving throw”).

Something I’m not sure how to fix is the mostly flat to-hit curve (that is, your % of hitting is more or less the same at lvl 1 or lvl 20). Which is silly, when all the numbers around it keep becoming bigger.

I’m not holding my breath, obviously, since WotC has made pretty clear that they want a game “not about anything” because that’s easier to sell, and I like games about something.

(1) We played a 30th level version of our party: we killed Empowered Orcus in LESS than one turn, after dispatching some 3 very high level Soldiers. If our striker had not smashed him, my practically indestructible warden would have pinned it inescapably.

(2) We enjoyed our SC very much, using them for things like huge chases on griffin back while fighting hordes of black-angels, to mine-cart rides through dwarf mines, interpersed with big combats, and so on. But it seems that our enjoyement was a very rare thing among players.

The things I do for you people…

Todd, Timo, Megan, Rob… guess which Jankcast episode I started listening to?

Commedia dell’Arte (clicky clicky!)

(for a bit of context)

Using Adwaita Dark for your linux desktop: fixing the desktop icon color.

I was getting a bit tired of the old grey gradients of the default Gnome3 theme in Fedora 16 (Adwaita) so I poked around and found that there is a hacked Adwaita Dark theme that uses the color scheme you see in a couple of multimedia apps in regular Adwaita for all the desktop (basically, turns everything dark).

You can download it from this website.

It looks pretty spiffy, but it has a small drawback: if you’re using Nautilus icons on the desktop (which is not the default in Gnome3) the icon names have a very dark text. This was probably overlooked because the original author wasn’t using them.

Here is the easy fix: go to your Adwaita Dark theme’s gtk-3.0 folder (probably ~/.themes/Adwaita Dark/ ) and edit gnome-applications.css with your favorite text editor and change the .nautilus-desktop.nautilus-canvas-item selector like this:

.nautilus-desktop.nautilus-canvas-item {
 /* Was Originally:
 * color: @theme_bg_color;
 */ 
/* Fixed version: */
color: @theme_text_color;
/* End of the fix */
text-shadow:1 1 black;
}

Yes, it’s really that easy: one line of CSS!

The theme should update in realtime. If it doesn’t try changing it and back, or logging out. Enjoy!

On Drinking from the Bottle

This stems from a post on Facebook by my friend Chris Hanrahan (owner of the famous Endgame game store in Oakland, California). Chris was asking:

“Why is it socially acceptable to drink a $4.99 beer out of a bottle but not an equitably priced Rose?”

I replied with a long (for fb) couple of commens and he suggested this would make a good blog post. So here it is.

There are several things at work at the same time, I think.
(Warning: possible cultural rift. Here is my take.)

1: Size. A beer bottle is a single-user item (33 or 50cc), a wine bottle isn’t and it is meant to be shared (75cc or 1lt, or more). Drinking from the bottle where other people will pour drinks is considered very uncouth. I bought a 75cl bottle of small brewery beer recently and I would have never thought of drinking it from the bottle. It was meant to be shared, just like wine. Nobody drinks from the bottle of a 75cl Chouffe…

2: Alcoholic volume: a beer that you drink from the bottle is probably a mild lager or pilsner, has 3-4% vol. Wine (to be called wine) has to have around 10%. Beer can be drunk from the bottle because it’s only a small step from a soda. Wine is an alcoholic beverage, only drunks and alcoholics drink directly from the bottle of alcoholic beverages.

And to close, let’s go against the premise: it is acceptable to drink from the bottle only if the beer is the classic “lager/pilsner whatever”. And even then there are probably several fans of czech and german beers now thinking bad things about me.

I would NEVER drink a Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, a Banana Bread, any Stout or Porter (etc. etc.) from the bottle. It’s meant to be poured! Good beers need the space to breathe, they have to make the right amount of foam in the glass after pouring, their aroma and perfume need to expand… drinking a good beer from the bottle is really missing more than half of the experience.

Drinking from the bottle is for teens and tweens with Coronas, Heinekens and Adelscotts. Hopefully they’ll grow out of it ^___-

So there.

And now you know, too.