War of the Ring

Last night, Philaros, Matt, and Gabe came up to play a game of War of the Ring. After a harrowing journey, the Fellowship succumbed to an Orc patrol on the very footsteps of Mount Doom, even as Borromir fought off the invasion of Minas Tirith. I like it when a game summary sounds more like a story. The game has a lot of rules, many of which feel somewhat fiddly to implement. The overall game is intuitive and fun, but many of the details feel a little forced. Nevertheless, it's one I'll probably play many times. I can't help but think it could be streamlined a bit. We need a little less puzzling over cards and a little more sweeping strategy and epic struggle type goodness.

What's a Ballast Cover? Another Reason to Hire a Real Tech Writer

Remove fixture; place the lens and ballast cover off to the side. If required remove appropriate knockout(s) for power supply entry.

I should have been playing War of the Ring, but instead I spent three hours installing a light fixture. All in all, I'm pretty impressed with the design of this fixture. For one thing, I don't have to fiddle around with screws and bolts to get inside the thing. So why did I spend an hour fiddling with screws and bolts? Because the manual sucks. Probably every electrician in the world knows what a "ballast cover" is, but I still haven't the faintest. I guess it's the part that snaps away from the housing when you apply pressure near the notches. Now if only the manual had included a sentence like "apply pressure at the notches to remove the ballast cover from the housing."

American Fluorescent Corporation, regular shmos like me are buying your product. We're driving down to Loews on a Sunday. We aren't electricians. Please write your manual so we can understand it!

ano

A quick blog: another discworld MUD map of Ankh-Moorpock.

War of the Ring

A few weeks ago, I launched a vexed rant about the pricing of games, particularly the advent of premium games with lots of plastic pieces and huge maps. Well my brother-in-law bought me War of the Ring for my birthday, so I guess I no longer have anything to complain about. Birthdays are good! (I also got a paella pan which, I have established, makes a mighty fine paella)

I love maps. I love games. I'm not that fond of MUDS, but any game that can boast a map like this get an automatic five stars in my book. Also note that this is only one city out of the entire world!

Update:

Here's a link to some outside terrain. This place is HUGE!
Also, more maps and again, more.

I'd really like to know how the terrain maps are generated. I presume it's done programmatically from a bitmap or something similar.

Your Product is a Conversation

Here's what I've been reading lately: Cluetrain and Hughtrain. Cluetrain is an insane rant which nevertheless manages to sneak in some real wisdom. Hughtrain is an insane rant that's nevertheless quite entertaining and contains funny pictures and has potty words.

The insight here is that the Internet is turning markets into conversations. My first question, as a tech writer, is "where does documentation come into the conversation?" And the answer as it turns out is four posts down. Documentation is what extends your product into the conversation.

Think about it this way: at what point does your customer enter into the product conversation? For a lot of them it's the first time that something's broken: they need to go to your web site to get a driver, or they search a message board to resolve and issue. For other customers it's before they buy. It's when a user goes to epinions to read a review; it's when a big company does an evaluation and a pilot. It might be in the greater context of a solution offering, which is really a conversation about how to solve a problem.

What does this mean for the tech writer? It means that the documentation is part of the user experience, and should be treated as such. Every manual, whitepaper, and UA doc you write is going to be someone's first conversation with your product. I have to admit I find that thought humbling, but also invigorating.

The automatic self-cleaning cat litter box that really works

Litter Robot: "Try the Litter-Robot in your home and experience the freedom from litter scooping."

You really have to take a look at this thing. It looks like a cross between a kitty cat-scan and bathysphere.

What Keeps me Awake

The question that keeps me awake at night is "what is my value proposition?" Yeah, I'm lying away pondering what is essentially a marketing question. How far the mighty (proud) have fallen.

When you're working a good job for good pay, you can take your own value as a given. When you have to go out and explain it to someone, and expect them to part with their money, it is not. Today I am grappling with the question: "why should I hire you when I can get a Technical Writer II from the staffing agency on the cheap?"

"Because I'm a better writer" isn't a good enough answer, and "because I'm prepared to sell out" isn't a good enough answer. The answer might be "because I can be passionate about the technology, and because I can be right."

In other news, I may have some contract work coming in to help pay the bills, huzzah!

Orgchart

I didn't carry many things out of my office (cube) when they laid me off. One of the things I did rescue were my postit cartoons. I've been drawing these for years. My cube was packed with them. I'd been meaning to bring them home and scan them for the blog. This one is, I suppose, the perfect one to begin with.

Groping my way...

I ran across the following sentence in a job posting today: "The ideal candidate for this position is an editor who is eager to create a world-class documentation system that is an essential part of its associated product line, not merely a bunch of auxiliary text in which semicolons are used properly." (emphasis mine) The pretty much sums up what I've been thinking about (nay, obsessing about) for the last two weeks.

Time was, all that was required to be successful as a writer in the tech world was the ability to write credible prose, and a mildly competent interest in the technology. Customers were thrilled to encounter a writer who could actually discuss and understand the technology they were writing about. No more. Nowadays the writer who can't offer something beyond the usual is fodder for the staffing agencies.

This has always been my way of approaching documentation, I just didn't know it. Documentation is how your product talks to the customer. Eventually, every customer is going to want that conversation. Eventually, every product is going to be a conversation.

RSS Feed

BTW, if you were looking for it, my RSS feed is now linked on the top of the page. Cheers!

Blog Business Summit

What if they gave a Blog Business Summit and I was so busy playing online games that I didn't even know about it until the day after it was over, and it was in my home town?

I'd be cryin', that's what. The lesson is, keep up with the world, it keeps changin'.

John Kerry Tells Democrat Activists Party Should Moderate Abortion Image

John Kerry Tells Democrat Activists Party Should Moderate Abortion Image

Former presidential candidate John Kerry surprised key Democratic Party activists in a meeting shortly after Thanksgiving where he said the party needs to do more to moderate its image on abortion and reach out to pro-life voters.
That comment surprised and shocked many in the room, according to a new Newsweek report.

GamingReport.com :: Where Gamers get their News

GamingReport.com :: Where Gamers get their News

Biggest Fizzle of 2004: We can all devoutly hope that it's Pimp: the Backhanding, a massively tasteless new stand-alone card game announced on December 15 (just under the wire for 2004) by White Wolf of all people. That's right, the company that brought women, sensitivity to story and theme, and environmentally-conscious werewolves into an all-male, wargame-focused, Midwest-Republican hobby is setting fire to a decade-plus of their progressive corporate tradition with a game using stereotyped African-American slang to celebrate the violent abuse of women. Oh, I'm sorry, a game ironically commenting on using stereotyped African-American slang to celebrate the violent abuse of women. Happy Martin Luther King Day, net-punks.

Kenneth Hite is telling it like it is.

anthony.liekens.net >> Main >> Huygens Test

Amateur Huygens Composites

Composite of a 360-degrees view during descent, using 11 of the raw images. the raw images were corrected in brightness, scale and perspective and then stitched together. Missing areas on dark bottom and sky were completed with two-color-gradients. No information was added. Colors in the colored version were adjusted according to the ESA/NASA's colored surface view.

Integration Guide for Microsoft Office 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services

by Anthony Dowler

This is totally amateur, but as I was putting together a list of my publications now that I'm out of work (oh yeah, news update: I got laid off) I found this. There's something really weird about finding your name somewhere you didn't expect it. When you're writing white papers, you are curiously disconnected from where the papers actually end up. Very few of them, it turns out, actually get publicly published. Of the 50 odd papers I've written for Microsoft, only 10 are on the public Web site, and only two actually have my name on them. I have no idea where the rest of them ended up. Some are probably on content CD's, or internal shares where they can be printed out and given to customers. Others probably sat on a hard drive somewhere until a re-org wiped them out.

Seattle's Central Area neighborhood is changing again, to mixed reviews

The Seattle Times: Living: Seattle's Central Area neighborhood is changing again, to mixed reviews

Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail. Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald's there.
--Microserfs

Some interesting things going on today. Can't say more right now.

A Chapter from Tufte.

It is a primciple that shines impartially on the just and unjust that once you have a point of view all history will back you up. --Van Wyck Brooks

New Chapter from Beautiful Evidence

Bellingham Weekly: Cover Stories

My short short story Advent of the Monster has just been published in the Fiction 101 section of the Bellingham Weekly. Several of the other stories are extremely good and well worth reading.

The Hand of Ankhnaten - Episodes 4-6

Pulp Project1557 is a wiki-based collaboration to gather information and resources for pulp RPGs. I posted writeups of the first three episodes of my pulp heroes D20 campaign a while back. So today I finally got around to writing up a Pulp Heroes Episodes 4-6 summary. Enjoy!

The Struggling Unpublished Writer Plods On

Fantastic Stories

First published in 1961, Fantastic Stories is responsible for publishing such innovative authors as Spider Robinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Roger Zelazny. In the tradition of cutting-edge fiction, Fantastic Stories continues to bring its readers the best Fantasy and Science Fiction around by writers such as Allen Steele, Edo Van Belkom, Richard Parks, Alan Dean Foster, William E. Eakin, Ed Gorman, Gerard Houarner, Linda Addison, Jean Rabe, Patrick Thomas, Sarah Hoyt, Tom Piccirilli, John Gregory Betancourt, Mike Resnick, Paul Di Filippo and Chris Bunch. ****FANTASTIC STORIES IS CURRENTLY CLOSED TO ALL SUBMISSIONS****

Another speculative fiction magazine closes its doors to new writers. Every author that they mention with pride here was an unpublished writer once.

Integrity in the Game Business?

Yesterday I went down to the game store to check out War of the Ring. I'd read the reviews and checked the game out online and decided it looked pretty good. The problem is the price tag. I just can't afford to shell out 60 bucks for a game that I'm only going to get to play a few times a year. Now I'd happily shell out even $40 for the same game with little cardboard tiles instead of high quality plastic miniatures. This gets me to thinking, are games getting too expensive? At what point are the game makers providing a premium product, and at what point are they just taking too much of our money? There was at least one new board game at the store retailing for $100.

here's another example: Tom Wham's Planet Busters. This is a game that was originally published as a free insert to Dragon Magazine. Take a look at the contents:

• 4 5" x 6" Sphere of Influence cards (1 for each player)
  
• 4 3" x 4"cut-and-fold racks for counters (attach to Sphere of Influence Cards)
  
• 1 24 pages rules booklet
  
• 2 10 sided dice
  
• 120 2" x 2" die cut chipboard playing pieces, or counters.
  
• 1 cloth bag to hold your chipboard playing pieces

This game consists of a few square feet of cardboard. You even have to punch out and fold the counter holders yourself, just like in the original. All they did was make the "sphere of influence" bigger, bulk up the rules, and toss in a cloth bag. Guess what, I already have a cloth bag. Yeah, Planet Busters is a great game. I played it to death when I was about 16, in fact, I can reproduce all the pieces from memory including artwork.

Planet Busters should really be a cheap, throwaway purchase. Why spend $30 on it when you can buy a cheapass game for 10 bucks, and it's almost guaranteed to be fun, or how about Pirates of the Spanish Main, where $4 buys you everything you need to start playing? Kung-fu Fighting is a great card game that sells for $20.

To be fair, War of the Ring is obviously a high quality product. Maybe if there are gamers willing to shell out the cash for the big ticket games, the rest of us will just have to lump it. On the other hand, at what point does it become a matter of integrity to publish good games that people can afford to play?

Curry Spice May Fight Alzheimer's

Curry Spice May Fight Alzheimer's

Is the Cat Dead?

Schroedinger was a great mathematician, but he wasn't much of a philosopher. His bit regading the cat was interesting enough, but when it comes right down to it, everyone's really just thinking "why doesn't he just open the box and look?" No, the real mystery, the box that we'd really like to look into is the soul. Thanks to Denormalize for the phrase.

There is a small man in my head. My observations have led me to the conclusion that there is probably a small man, or maybe or a woman, in everyone’s head. I can’t prove this. Nevertheless, it fits the phenomenon.

“The world changes completed every five or six years, but nobody notices.” A famous writer said that, and I believe him. The world, I have observed, is full of utterly astounding things that nobody takes notice of. History is a never-ending parade of events that were completely unforeseen. Yet the writing of history, I have observed, consists in explaining why these events were bound to happen. In retrospect, we ought not have been surprised by them at all. Or so we are told.

The Japanese have an entire mode of poetry dedicated to chronicling everyday things. The poets, through discipline and a careful, observant habit of mind, discovered that even the most mundane of objects reveal new sides of themselves every time they are observed. About potato bugs, poems of beauty have been written.

Why is it the norm that in a world full of wonders we regularly judge that nothing of interest is going on at all? It is as though we were receiving our impressions already half-judged. It is as though someone were sifting our experiences, tidying out what is surprising, attaching ready made conclusions of the most predictable and banal sort. Indeed, our eyes perceive a world that defies boredom, yet our minds receive a message that is more often than not dull.

I have examined these pre-judgments. I have paid attention to them. I have observed behind them a sort of intelligence. They betray, in their pattern, a personality. Oh, I know that he imagines himself lord of his domain, the guardian of the mind, the captain of the body. But I see in him the sensibilities of a clerk, and a supercilious one at that.

I have been, you might say, stalking him. Though he watches over my senses, my thoughts are hidden from him. I can fool him. I can examine what he has been sending me and find the secret messages he does not want me to uncover. When I have enough evidence, I will strike.