As if the return of dedicated servers and mods on the PC version wasn’t enough to be excited about, it looks like the folks at Treyarch are really trying to bring a little innovation to the next CoD title. Yesterday they unveiled a new multiplayer mode called a “Wager Match” that puts some interesting twists on the usual free-for-all game mode.
Check it out:
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the FFA mode preferring to play on a team, but these variations on it do sound like they could be a lot of fun. Even if they don’t win me over to FFA gameplay it’s still great to see Treyarch trying to bring something new to the fans.
It pretty much goes without saying that I’m a cusser — that much is obvious just from the title and tagline of this blog — it’s one of the few vices I have. It’s a habit I’m not at all ashamed of and which I take a certain amount of enjoyment in engaging in. So does Stephen Fry it would appear as he discusses in this clip from the celebration of his 50th Birthday in 2007:
For the record, I do swear to make up for a stunningly small vocabulary. It’s the only way I can sound anything close to eloquent. Fuck.
Yes it’s another adventure in ADD discussions as ***Dave and I spend two hours intending to talk about one thing and wandering so far off topic that we needed a GPS to get back on track!I was really excited about this one as I felt like we had plenty to talk about this time out and boy did we. The range covered is wide and wandering as is our wont.
This time out we touch on the topics of Tipping (as in for a service, not cows) , Dr. Laura’s N-word rant and the subsequent squashing of her First Amendment rights, the N-word the C-word and the R-word, Sarah Palin’s defense of Dr. Laura and hypocrisy on the Right in general, the first ever SEB Weather Forecast for Denver and Detroit, Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be A Dick” talk and the on-going discussion in the atheist/skeptic blogosphere on how we should promote skepticism, dickishness in general and how everything we’ve talked about up to that point ties into the whole “don’t be a dick” discussion, how I’m occasionally an asshole, the South Carolina gas pump story, how ***Dave is irrational about his belief in God but that’s OK, and so very much more.
I honestly think that this is the best podcast we’ve done so far as even with as far-ranging as we manage to be we still ended up tying it all together in the end. At times it even sounds like we actually know what we’re doing. I even managed to find a bit of appropriate music for the opening!
Hopefully you’ll enjoy listening to it as much as ***Dave and I enjoy recording it. As always you can either play it using the Flash player in this entry or you can download it by clicking here. Please feel free to leave your thoughts/criticisms in the comments.
Edited to add: I thought I should mention that this episode contains more than the usual amount of swearing given the nature of some of what we’re discussing. So you should probably consider it Not Safe For Work unless you work alone or are self-employed.
One of the great things about Christians is the loving tolerance they have for everyone including those who hold differing and/or opposing viewpoints. Take, for example, the friendly message one True Believer™ gas station owner in South Carolina felt compelled to put on his pump’s display screen. When you fill up you’re told the following:
ONE NATION UNDER GOD AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT. LEAVE!
Ah, there’s nothing quite like using anti-atheist bigotry to drive sales of gasoline! Never mind the fact that the original Pledge didn’t contain the words “under God” or the fact that the original National Motto was “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one) thus making both of them more inclusive than they are today. No, who needs inclusiveness when divisive faux patriotism is so much more profitable?
I’m always amused by the Conservative compulsion to tell people who don’t agree with them to leave the country. Considering how much they like to spout off about freedom and liberty and how Liberals supposedly want to take both away from you it seems odd to me that they’re so quick to tell us that we should pack up and leave if we’re not happy with how things are. You know, as opposed to exercising our freedom and liberty to try and change things. When they don’t like the status quo they’ll scream and holler about how they have a right to challenge it, but if a Liberal wants to challenge the status quo… Well that obviously means we hate America and we should go live in the caves with Al-Qaeda and the other terrorists.
At the last The Amazing Meeting skeptic conference scientist/blogger Phil Plait gave a talk that has come to be known as the “Don’t Be a Dick” speech. In it he bemoans the fact that there are some skeptics out there who are less than… tactful… when it comes to addressing the idiots overly-credulous members of the general populace. Needless to say it has prompted quite a bit of discussion on the skeptic/atheist blogs out there. The video of the talk was made available about a month ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to watching it until today.
As I sat watching the video it became clear to me that I was one of the people he was complaining about. Phil has since said that he feels that he was misunderstood by some of the folks who have responded to his talk so he tried to be more specific about what he considers being dick-ish:
Perhaps I should have been more clear on what I mean by being a dick. I thought I had been clear, but a lot of people seem to think that I meant anyone who gets upset, or angry, or argues with emotion. I wouldn’t include satire in that category, or comedic work, or even necessarily using insults; tone and attitude count here. Think of it this way: when someone argues that way do you think to yourself, “What a dick”? I don’t; at least not necessarily. I think that way when the person belittles their opponent, uses obviously inflammatory language, or overly aggressively gets in their face.
Y’know. Being a dick.
Yep, done that on more than a few occasions and I don’t regret it at all. The reason why is simple: It’s what they needed to hear.
At the start of the video Phil rhetorically asks the audience how many people had their mind changed by someone calling them an idiot or a retard. In the video you can see that a few people actually raise their hands and he brushes them off as “probably kidding.” I can only assume the brush off occurs because it doesn’t jive with the point of his speech, which is that being a dick to someone will never change their mind. Yet there are many people out there, and I am one of them, who will honestly say that they have had their mind’s changed by being told what an idiot they are. There’s been more than a few topics on which I had wrong beliefs and was acting like an idiot until someone pointed out what an idiot I was being about the subject.
Phil says all that does is make people defensive and resort to knee-jerk rationalizations and that is often true, I’m certainly guilty of it, but that doesn’t mean they won’t stop to consider the accusation of idiocy later when they have cooled down and are no longer in the midst of the argument. Not everyone will, but people who are anything like I am probably will and prompting that self-reflection can be the beginning of change.
Which isn’t to suggest that it’s always a good way to convince people of the wrongness of their beliefs or that it’s a tactic that will work on everyone you come across. It’s not even necessarily the first, second, or third approach you should take in any given situation, but to say that it never works is to deny reality. Some people need a swift metaphorical kick to the ass.
It should go without saying that the context of any given situation plays a hand in determining how much of a dick one should be. It’s probably not the best approach when in the middle of a formal dinner party, though I doubt that would stop Tim Minchin, and work is probably better saved for doing actual work. If the person you’re addressing shows any signs of being open to discussion then dickishness could indeed be counter-productive. The truth is that even us dicks aren’t dicks all the time. Anyone who has met PZ Myers first hand — often one of the first people pointed to as an example of a skep-dick — will tell you he’s hardly the spittle flecked raving monster in real life that his detractors paint him to be. For that matter, neither am I. Despite what I may have named my blog. We can be more than reasonable and pleasant, and often are, but we can also be dicks when the situation calls for it. Which it sometimes does.
Of course there are some people out there for which no amount of ass-kicking will change their mind. But then nor will any amount of accommodating them with nicey-nicey non-confrontational presentations of the facts. Phil makes the mistake of assuming that it’s always the objective of the “dick” to change the mind of the target of their dickiness. I can’t speak for anyone else, but often times the person I’m in the middle of ridiculing is not the person I’m trying to reach. My real targets are the people who are watching the spectacle.
Phil is quite right when he says that the dream that someday all of humanity will reach some form of critical thinking Nirvana where all forms of pseudo-science and woo-woo are but faded memories will probably never happen. Critical thinking, as he points out, is hard and not the way we’re wired to think. Logically this means that there will always be some people who will believe even the stupidest of ideas no matter what facts and evidence you’re able to provide or how nice you are to them. We have a term for those people. We call them Lost Causes. As the satiric poster I included says: “It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.” I suppose if you wanted to be cynical about it, and I’ve never been afraid to be cynical, you could call these people “useful idiots.”
So yes, I’m a dick from time to time. Especially to the obvious lost causes who show up spoiling for a fight. If the chances of changing their mind are pretty much nil then I’m not sure I see the point in being nice about it. I’m definitely not going to hold back against the ones that are being dickish themselves. I don’t claim that being a dick is the only approach one should take or even that it’s the best, but I do feel that it has its place.
Phil metaphorically argues in his video that swinging wildly at a nail with a hammer will only destroy the wall. I say that when the wall is what’s preventing the truth from getting inside then destroying it should be the goal. I mean, why the fuck would you want to nail it closed any more than it already is?
If the third time is the charm then the fourth must be absolutely dashing, right? Perhaps not, but that isn’t stopping ***Dave and I from continuing to blather endlessly on topics we have no business commenting on.
Of course that means its now time for a little audience participation! YAY!
Got a topic you want us to touch on however pathetically we are able to do so? Been itching to ask one or both of us a deeply personal/philosophical/intellectual question? Just want to see how easy it is to make us sound like we don’t have a clue what the hell we’re doing?
Then leave a comment on this thread or drop me an email and make use of your First Amendment right before it’s taken away from you by special interests upset that you’re fond of spewing the N-word eleventy-billion times on national radio.
Wait, that was “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger. What the hell, she can ask us questions too if she wants. Perhaps she’d like us to explain how the First Amendment really works. Though I am sure you folks have MUCH more interesting and/or entertaining topics you’d like to pose so don’t be shy!
With all the driving back and forth to Lansing I’ve been doing lately I decided to start carrying my digital camera with me. The decision came about in part due to a rather stunningly lovely morning drive to Charlotte, which is just south of Lansing, which showed off a particularly nice part of the Michigan countryside. I already carry the little 1MP Kodak — it was the first digital camera we ever bought — in the glove box in case of accidents. That was all I had on hand that morning and so the pictures are somewhat small, but not bad I thought. The next day, after thinking about it, I packed up the 4MP Canon PowerShot we have just in case I came across anything interesting.
Here’s a few of the results. The first three pictures are from the lower-res Kodak:
A random stretch of Michigan road.
A different random stretch of Michigan Road.
Yet more random Michigan roadness.
The camera didn’t really capture the amazing aspect of the morning light as I saw it, but I still thought they looked pretty good for a crappy little digital Instamatic-style camera. The next couple were taken the next day using my Canon PowerShot A80:
About to drive into a weird fog bank.
Graffiti on a power transformer box in downtown Lansing.
Driving into the fog bank was pretty weird. The day had started off brightly sunny all the way up until just before I hit Lansing when the road ahead was suddenly obscured with a wall of gray. Once we passed into it the mood became very gloomy almost immediately and it was hard to remember how beautiful the day had been just moments before. It was foggy like that all the way into Lansing, but it had lifted by noon.
I saw the graffiti on a power transformer box sitting between two buildings next to the parking structure I’ve been parking in all week long. I have no idea what it’s supposed to be, but I have seen other similar “faces” spray painted elsewhere around town. The building I’m working in is ten stories high and I can see one of the faces painted on the back door of a business the next block over, too far to get a shot with the camera, and the others I’ve seen in passing while driving.
The state Capitol building is just a block over from where I’m working, but you can’t see it from inside so I’ll probably take the time tomorrow to snap a photo of it as I leave for the day. I do have some interesting views of other buildings downtown including the Comerica bank building, one of the oldest in Lansing, that is a very cool bit of architecture with at least one amusing item on a fifth floor balcony. I’ve not taken a shot of that yet as I’m worried about hauling a camera out in the middle of a department full of potentially confidential information.
Though that didn’t stop me from using my phone’s camera to take a quick grainy snap of a science experiment I found growing in one VP’s office:
That's an impressive mold colony you have going there!
Yeah, someone’s been out on vacation perhaps a little too long.
Yep, it’s another birthday in what has been a long line of them so far. It seems as I get older I become more and more introspective as the next birthday gets closer. I feel like when the day arrives I should have some insight into life, or at least into my life, and yet it always arrives without any great revelations. I feel no wiser today then I did a year ago even though simple logic would suggest that I must have learned a thing or two along the way and, by pure chance if nothing else, there has to be something of some significance in the past year I’ve picked up.
If there was it fails to come to mind now, though I suspect that one of the aspects of wisdom is you don’t often recognize it until you have to apply it to something. It’s a good bet I’ve learned a number of profound lessons in the past year alone, but until I have some occasion in which to put them to good use I’ll probably remain ignorant of my new knowledge. Which is an interesting concept: To be ignorant of knowledge one has gained until it is needed. I know it’s an accurate description because I’m often surprised by what I know about a subject when it comes up. Especially stuff I don’t have any good reason to know much about beyond simple curiosity. Which isn’t to say I don’t have my moments of stunning ignorance as well, but those aren’t as fun to think about.
So today will be celebrated by heading off to Lansing, Michigan to do another day’s work in my current two-month or so long contract job. Once I get home tonight my buddy Bob will come over to take me out for dinner. Anne is hoping to get out of work early to join us if at all possible. Then I’ll come home, go to bed, get up tomorrow and carry on with the job. No birthday cakes or presents this year, just business as usual with a dinner out with a long time friend afterward.
Which isn’t to suggest that I haven’t been the recipient of massive generosity. Many of you were gracious enough to donate when I put my hat out and asked and I cannot begin to express my gratitude in words. Thanks to you surviving until my first full paycheck from this job arrives on Friday will not be a problem as the deficit we were running is just about taken care of. Thank you, again, for the help. I hope that I will soon be in a position where I won’t have to ask for it again.
As far as birthdays go, all things considered, this one is shaping up to be pretty good. I am still breathing, we still have a roof over our heads, and there is the promise of better things tomorrow. Everything else is, if you’ll pardon the pun, icing on the cake.
As much as I hate to do this I’m once again standing here with my hat out hoping some of you folks have a couple of bucks you can toss in. I am currently employed doing PC refreshes for a chain of banks, but it only pays $13 an hour and will only last through the month of September. Plus the folks who decided on which areas we’d be working in seem to think that Lansing and Royal Oak are local to Ann Arbor. That means that this week I’ve been making 150 mile round trips to Lansing to do my job and even in a Honda Civic that’s about 2 and a half trips on a single $27 tank of gas. Last week I only managed to get 16 hours as I had to take two days off to fight a cold so the paycheck was only about $183 after taxes.
Now this week I’ve managed to get in a full 40 hours and I should be getting a decent amount back on mileage, but I’m also looking at a deficit of close to $400 in bills with next month’s rent due in 11 days. We’ve been juggling bills pretty well lately, but the month of August is always rough. I still need to renew the tags on both my cars as my birthday is next Wednesday and I’m going to be using the $70 in birthday money I got from family so far to help pay for that. Looking ahead to this week’s work schedule it’s not clear that I’ll manage another solid 40 hours. At the moment I’ve got around $126 in the checking account that has to last me until next Friday and I still need to buy more gas for the trips to Lansing this week.
So here I am again asking you guys for your generosity. Times are rough for everyone so if you can’t afford to part with any money I completely understand and I don’t want anyone feeling obligated to donate. But if you’ve got a spare buck or two and feel like I’ve given you some mildly amusing and/or informative reading material then I’d be very grateful if you could lend a hand. Some of you have already donated more than once and I can’t begin to tell you how eternally grateful I am for your assistance. I’m very sorry that I have to ask again.
Long time readers already know I’m a huge fan of the Call of Duty series of first person shooters. So it should probably be no surprise that I’m looking forward to the next iteration in the series coming from developer Treyarch.
Actually it might be a surprise given the fact that I have a massive Love/Hate relationship with the last CoD title: Modern Warfare 2. In my review of that game I praised the improvements to the game over its predecessor while also bemoaning what I considered to be huge steps backwards in the decision to not support dedicated servers or allow for kick votes on troublesome players and cheaters. It didn’t help that it was only a matter of hours from the game’s release till there was a fully functional aimbot/wallhack cheat for it which would take weeks before the Valve Anti-Cheat system would get around to detecting let alone actually banning anyone for. This was such a huge problem for the PC version of the game that I did something unprecedented (for me) and wrote an entry prior to the review in which I ranted about how Infinity Ward had fucked over “Call of Duty” fans who play on the PC. I believe I titled that entry:
Infinity Ward has fucked over “Call of Duty” fans who play on the PC.
It goes without saying that I was a tad bit pissed off at the time that I wrote it. Rereading it now I have to say that I stand by almost everything I said in that entry and the review that followed it. MW2 is a great game as evidenced by the fact that, according to my Steam profile, I’ve racked up over 590.1 hours of play time in the game (compared to a mere 68.6 hours in Borderlands which is another great game). In that time I’ve discovered another reason why the lack of dedicated servers is a problem for the game.
The way multiplayer is handled is that the game tries to figure out who has the best PC/connection and makes them the host. Depending on how many games are in your general area of the Net this could mean you get stuck with a shitty connection between you and the host which will make the game pretty much unplayable. If you end up being made host you have a huge advantage over most of the other players as your machine is the one that has final say on where the bullets land. Both of these factors together results in a situation where some nights you’ll have a great gaming experience and many nights you won’t without lots of quitting and trying to find a better game to join. With dedicated servers you could see which ones offer the best pings for you and play with other people who are also getting good pings making for a more level playing field. Having said all of that, I will say that the amount of cheating seems to have decreased since the game was released. I”d like to say that is because of increased policing by IW and Valve, but the truth is other popular FPS games have come out and siphoned off some of the cheaters.
It would be very cynical of me to suggest that the real reason Infinity Ward decided not to support dedicated servers and, by extension, player modifications is because they had planned to sell Map Packs for $15 a pop after the game was released. It would be very cynical of me, but it would also probably be the truth. IW has released two such packs so far which total up to half the cost of the original game itself for a mere 10 additional maps of which several are ports from Call of Duty 4. As you can probably guess the price point is a matter of some contention among fans, but that hasn’t stopped IW from selling a shit load of map packs and raking in millions in the process. I got a review copy of the game, but I have purchased both map packs because I do play it quite a bit.
So why, you may be wondering after all of that exposition on all that is wrong with MW2, am I looking forward to the next CoD game? Haven’t I learned my lesson and sworn off the franchise in a fit of pique?
There are a number of reasons the biggest of them being that Treyarch are not Infinity Ward. The developer was brought in by Activision for Call of Duty 2: Big Red One which was the series’ first entry to be console-only. It was a sort of sequel/spin-off of the PC’s CoD2. They also developed Call of Duty 3 which was also only available on consoles. Neither game was particularly well received and word has it this resulted in some bitter feelings at Infinity Ward that a successful franchise they had started was being tarnished by a different company. Thus one of the great gaming rivalries was started and among fans Treyarch has often been considered the lesser of the two developers.
When Treyarch took on Call of Duty: World at War, which followed in the footsteps of the ridiculously successful Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, they ended up licensing the latter game’s engine from IW. Arguably a smart move as it allowed the multiplayer half of the game to offer a very similar experience to CoD4 only set back in World War II. CoD:WaW was pretty successful though most fans still seem to consider it the lesser game compared to CoD4. Personally I thought it was just as good as CoD4 in most respects and I played the living hell out of it just as I had CoD4. Whatever faults Treyarch’s earlier attempts at CoD may have had, World at War showed they were progressing as a developer. Of course having the CoD4 engine didn’t hurt.
The point I’m trying, and failing, to get to is this: Other than having licensed the CoD4 engine, the folks at Treyarch are their own team making their own decisions about their game. Infinity Ward wouldn’t have helped Treyarch if they’d been asked as they don’t exactly have the warm fuzzies for the company. That means that whatever stupid decisions Infinity Ward may have made won’t necessarily be made by the folks at Treyarch.
For example, they’ve already announced that Black Ops will see the return of the ability to lean around corners (not in MW2), the ability to mod the game, and — most importantly — dedicated servers. Additionally they’re expanding the “Create a Class” function from the previous games to include not only the ability to change your weapon load outs and options, but also make cosmetic changes such as decals and custom text on the weapons as well as modifying what the red dot in a sight looks like. There’s some question on how modifiable the game will be, but Treyarch has confirmed that some form of mod tools will be made available after release.
Then, of course, there is this:
Oh yeah, that looks pretty damned sweet! RC car that you can drive up behind the baddies and explode? I am SO THERE!
It also looks like Treyarch is really coming into their own as a CoD developer which is probably lucky for Activision considering that most of the top talent that produced the sales record breaking Modern Warfare 2 up and quit after Activision unceremoniously fired two of IW’s founders. There’s still lots of people left at IW and the “official” word is that it’ll be business as usual and they plan to have their next CoD title break even more records, but that remains to be seen. Given that a part of Treyarch’s advancement is undoubtedly due to licensing Infinity Ward’s game engine it’ll be interesting to see if they’re able to step up and take the reigns if what’s left of IW falters. There’s the possibility that this could be the last great entry in the franchise. Or it could be the start of a whole new CoD empire.
Either way, I’m seriously looking forward to this game.
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