Eloise's thoughts and fancies

I'm in a minority here, but I didn't really like this film - I thought some of the landscape shots were the best things in it.

I've been trying to work out why and on reflection, it's because it was neither one thing nor another, and that made it more bitty than appealing.

The film could have been a series of vignettes about Wolverine's history. I'm not sure that would have worked for 90-120 minutes, but it might have done, and it would probably have been interesting to see (it would also probably have been incredibly expensive to film, but that's another story). Another alternative, and I think my favoured one, they could have done a romance type story, Wolverine living happily with his girlfriend, getting into fights from time to time, ending with her being killed and him accepting the adamantium implants and rising from the tank, claws out. Wolverine is born... and a crackingly iconic end image. Another one would have been to ignore all the soppy romantic bits and just go for a big action movie. It would have probably appealed well to the core fan base.

What we got was something that tried, to different extents all of these. OK, the vignettes only lasted about 3 minutes, and worked for that length of time. Then there was about 40 minutes of the romance, but with no fights, then about 90 minutes of the action movie. The side of me that wanted the romance was unsatisfied because it wasn't really established, developed and told in depth - it was always introduction. The side of me that wanted the action movie wasn't satisfied because there was all this slow filler on the front. Both sides came away unsatisfied.

One of my companions in particular, who hates Wolverine as a character because he's an indestructible jerk liked this because, for the first time, she felt he was a sympathetic character. I have some sympathy for this attitude - it's true after all - but in a world of goodie-two-shoes superheroes: and all the X-men are really clean-cut, boring, Superman style goodie-two-shoes apart from Wolverine, I guess I have some sympathy for the cigar-smoking, bike-riding, smart-arse anyway, and this didn't do that much to add to that, particularly since the film was structured so poorly.

Here we have a picture of me, bizarrely, taking part in a gang mining session. I still don't really like mining, but when there's a little while before downtime, or I'm tired and don't want to run combat missions because I'll die if I do, then mining is a pretty good way to pass an hour and earn some money.

I'm still a really bad miner mind! But, ganged up with someone with lots of leadership, some nice mining gang assist skills, and an Orca (the big ugly blob with the purple dot on it, near the top of the picture) I can still contribute. But that's not really why I'm writing this.

EVE is still very pretty. It won't change on my say-so, but there are some issues that I would change if I was writing the code.

First, the game has a very limited skill progression - not a skill tree, that's huge, but there is a limit of 5 points on how far you can raise a skill. Some skills offer +10% per point, some offer +5% per point, some offer +1% per job etc. Why not alter the skills so you get 1% per point, and have some skills capped at 50, some at 25, some at 5 etc? The computer does all the number crunching, it surely can't be that hard?

Second, and intimately linked to point one, the learning curve is exponential. It took me about 3 minutes to train from no mining to mining 1. It's going to take me 22 hours to train from mining-3 to mining-4 and over 5 days (nearly 6 actually) to train from mining-4 to mining-5 (if I ever do). If you spread your skill progression over a wider range (at least for some) you can make a more linear scale. Having skills at a certain level (for example to train Battleship to 1 you need Cruiser-3 and Spaceship Command-4) have a "bump" in cost because they are prerequisites for other things is fine, and with a more granular progression just as easily done as in the current system, but you would get bits of progression all the way. Don't think it matters? Mining drones is a fairly cheap skill (and enhances mining without going to Mining-4 or 5). It takes 12 days and 10 hours for me to train to level 5, which gives me a 25% bonus. The 12 days does bother me, but not much... but getting that last 5% will take over 10.5 days of the 12... Why not a skill going to 25 (same total bonus) and around 6 hours per point? Maybe less at the bottom, more at the top; 3 hours for point 1, 12 for point 25 and point 13 is about 6 hours... but still a much shallower curve.

Third, no benefit for practise! Ok, you can't always practise the relevant skill, especially when your learning your first point. But I can (and quite possibly will) spend the necessary 19.5 hours to get to cruiser-3 (from 0) without flying a cruiser at all. No problem there. But why not reward me, once I reach Cruiser-1 and I'm training Cruiser-2, for each hour I spend flying around in a cruiser give me a bonus to my training? It takes about 4,500 skill points to train from Cruiser-1 to Cruiser-2 in the current system. That's not long... less than three hours ... so why not give me 500 skill points per hour I spend flying a cruiser whilst training that skill? I could shave an hour or so off the training... and more with the higher levels. This works just as smoothly with the big numbers too in the current system.

Finally, for this rant, although possibly not the closing entry about EVE, there can be a sense of sterility about the combat. You click on little red crosses, or big red crosses, on some other buttons and the like. You make choices, sure, on both a tactical and sometimes (I suspect increasingly) on a more strategic level but it's still rather sterile. I don't identify with a space-ship as my character, particularly when I take the space-ship and swap it around (I currently own about 10, and swap them around for different jobs) so "my" appearance on screen alters radically, sometimes more than once during the course of a mission. If I compare this to my memories of WoW (which had many other problems) I remember sneaking around the woods, working out the lay of the land, where the bad guys were, spotting them moving through the trees and so on. Although I'm still not keen on WoW, it has a plus there; there's a feeling of identifying with the character, of engagement in her actions. EVE could, I suspect, be a great place for teaching small unit tactics in a way that I never saw in WoW, and it can be fun, but there are moments when it feels like combat by pushing buttons (which it is) that I don't remember feeling in WoW, or back in Shadowbane and Lineage when I played them, despite the fact it was for them too.

First off, a book recommendation. Although I upgraded from CS2 to CS4 extended (and the 3D tools that still somewhat mystify me, but I'm getting there) 99% of the tools are the same, and some of the super-duper extras and improvements are either not much different or in places I don't really use that much. For this reason a CS4 in 24 hours type book proved relatively useless, because not enough had changed to make it interesting.

However, I also bought Photoshop CS4 Down and Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby. Kelby runs Kelby Training and is a Photoshop pro, so there's a nice balance there - he knows what he's talking about, and he's pretty good at presenting it too (it's written in a relaxed, rather punning style in places that I find is good but not everyone will like). Rather than talking you through "here's a tool, what can we do with it?" he presents a number (forty-one to be precise) of effects looks. Most of them were, if not directly, reasonably familiar to me - there are a lot of sports references to US sports logos and TV logos for US sports that I'm not familiar with, but we have similar sorts of things over here. You then get fairly good step-by-step instructions on how to create the look. Sometimes there's some explanation about why that particular tool was used, but usually it's back-handed: "Now you want to blur this effect, so go to the Filters menu, choose Blur, Gaussian Blur and set the radius to about 200 px to soften the edges" but that doesn't stop it sinking in.

There's a fair bit in terms of work-flow that I learnt and that I think I will remember. There's more in terms of tricks that I might use occasionally that I know I won't remember, but I will remember where to look them up when I need them. The image over to the right is one I made, using the instructions, in about an hour. It would have been faster, but in a couple of places I struggled until I went back and read the instructions very, very carefully, but for 3D modelling that's hardly a crime - could you make something like this in Second Life in an hour of first building?

The other thing to mention is a tool called Filter Forge which is now available for the Mac. Filter Forge comes with a load of presets that let you create rocks, metals etc. simply, and also adapt and create your own filters that you can share. You can also easily create seamless textures, and apply the filters to your own textures. It's also got a 30% discount for the next couple of days! I downloaded it on a friend's recommendation (obrigada querida comarde) and was sufficiently impressed to splash out the cash about an hour later. There's a Photoshop plug-in too, that flicks you back and forward to Filter Forge and ports your currently selected texture over for manipulation, which is a very nice idea. The installer routine supplied doesn't work, but it's easy enough to stick the plug-in into the plug-ins folder by holder.

Terminator Salvation is a crying shame of a missed chance.

On some levels it is a quite satisfying movie. Marcus Wright, the so-called second lead (played by Sam Worthington, who acts the pants of Christian Bale as John Connor) has an interesting story line, albeit somewhat predictable, and some nice parts to his development and the salvation of the title. There are some very pretty special effects: a satisfying number of battles between humans and machines, some big bangs, a virtual Arnie-terminator that is amazing (although of course it doesn't have to have a wide range of expressions) and some nicely worked throwaway references to the earlier films. All of those things were satisfying.

BUT they were not enough. One of my regular companions described it as a real colander of a plot. I'm not sure I agree - a colander is mostly substances with some holes. This was more like a broken spider's web of a plot. So many holes it was hard to find the substance! I can be entertained by low-plot movies if I'm in the mood and if I care about the characters and as long as the plot isn't so bad it pulls me out of the immersion. Whilst I might not have been in the mood, I essentially didn't care about any of the characters (and I went in caring about John Connor, it takes some real - although rather undesirable - skill to make me stop caring about him) and some of the plot holes were not so much holes as rewriting the story to make (usually less) sense that jarred me out of living the movie.

The terminator bike stunts were ace. CGI actors, well CGI Arnie anyway, was great. Overall though, disappointed. It feels like they threw a load of disparate elements at a storyboard and then tried, not very hard, to string them together into a film. A little bit of plot first and then fitting the scenes to the plot would have gone a long way to making it work.

John Connor comes out with the "I'll be back" line part way through. If this is how they're going to do it, I find myself hoping he won't be.

However untrue of most, there is a perception that our politicians are in it solely for the cash. I think the country in general (but possibly not some of the MPs) thinks something needs to be done. But, they're arguing about what, wholesale reform and the like. The numbers of politicians in real trouble is pretty small - under 20 still, although a few more have had bad days.

Whilst wholesale reform of our political structures could be good, it's unnecessary and expensive. Why not do something simple, cheap and understandable?

For historical reasons our parliamentary day starts mid-afternoon and runs into the night. This was because all our early politicians were also professional men (usually lawyers, doctors and land owners) and it let them work at their "proper" job, then at their political one. Today, however, we expect our politicians to do that job only, but we still keep the silly hours. Why not change it to a 9-to-5 job. This instantly removes the need for a lot of MPs to have a second home, and thus the expenses claims associated with that. People in other jobs from several hundred miles away from London regularly manage to commute into London after all for this kind of job, so MPs could too. Of course any hard and fast rule will have someone that beats it by a mile, or a minute or so. But lets say we set a 6am train as the cut-off point. If you would have to leave home before 6am, or can't get home after a sitting, you're entitled to claim for a second home. More reasonably, since this will be relatively few people, parliament could build a housing complex (brownfield of course) to offer residences for those MPs that really can't travel daily. Yes, this would still be somewhat expensive, but it would be a small number of flats, much cheaper than buying for them all, and would basically offset the current second homes claims lunacy. If you can catch a train from your nearest station at or after 6am, you're entitled, with receipts to claim a travel allowance up to the cost of a first class season ticket. If you choose to have a second home instead, you can still claim up to a 1st class season ticket towards the costs of the house. No more, and what you spend it on is pretty much up to you.

Parliament occasionally overruns with emergencies - as do other jobs. Like other jobs, on those nights that you can't get home, you're entitled to claim for a hotel for that night. That probably sounds complex, but determining the time of the last train home isn't that hard - I'm sure a quick table of times for various MPs could easily be drawn up, there's only 650 of them or so after all. The time that parliament closes is pretty easy to determine if you work there, no?

It's a small step. It's cheap to implement. It makes MPs work in a pattern that the rest of us understand, both in terms of hours and travel expenses. Why is this hard?

An American shock-jock called Mancow (never heard of him over here) has been vocally saying waterboarding is not torture. Credit to him, he put his money (or his mouth and nose anyway) where his mouth was, and was waterboarded. It's not particularly pleasant viewing, but it is fascinating to watch, and especially to hear his reaction to "not much water really."



And, of course, remember this was voluntary, he knew that it would stop when he'd had enough and that no-one there really wanted to hurt him. How would you feel if you knew it had happened yesterday, would happen again later today, would happen tomorrow, and you were in a prison surrounded by people that are convinced (rightly or wrongly) that you're a terrorist?

I rather think most people have styles of storytelling that they're not fond of. For every fan of the bodice ripper, there's a hater. For every fan of diarised stories, there's a hater. For every fan of high fantasy there's a goblin horde of detractors. And so on.

I have recently finished two books, ironically with very similar settings, written in a style that I particularly dislike. I won't name names here though, because that's rather beside the point. Author A, who wrote the first of these, is an author who has only written one other piece, a short story that I felt was slightly off. Author B has written a whole shelf-full of books in my bookcases, and has just dropped another 1,000+ page tome into my lap (well, actually onto the next shelf, because I've just finished it). The style of both stories was little bitty pieces. A few paragraphs in this thread of the story, then jump over here and a few paragraphs in that thread and so on. I don't object to multi-threaded books, but I like a bit more story with each chunk of each thread, at least a few pages, maybe a whole chapter each time.

However, the book by Author B has come out with a glowing review, the book by Author A with a much more critical one. The honest reason for this is trust. Author B has demonstrated over the tens of thousands of pages of his writing that I've devoured that he writes stories that I love. Author A has not got back catalogue to support him. With Author B I have that trust that he will still deliver a good story, and indeed he did. Author A did have that, and failed to earn it. There were other things that added to this, and built more trust for Author B, and reduced it for Author A. In both books significant characters died (in fact Author B slaughtered several significant characters in a variety of ways). But, with Author B, those deaths were given context, made sensible, and in fact turned from what looked like a sideline discarding of characters in the gutter into a wonderful act of sacrifice and redemption. Author A killed off the Empress of his base of writing. You don't see her death, you hear about it. Nothing is made of it. It feels like we're being cheated, in both of them in fact as the deaths happen. But Author B redeems himself and pays off the story, Author A left me feeling cheated - the death of an Empress shouldn't be a side note dammit!

The same sort of thing applies to all other kinds of story-telling. If you're a fan of a series, you'll cope when they have a bad show - and they all do after all - or even a short-to-medium run of bad shows. You have that trust to carry you over. You know it's just a blip. But if the first few shows are all dodgy... that becomes more worrying. How many bad shows do you give it before you decide it's a bad concept or badly executed?

Solvr is a fairly interesting tool that lets you structure problem solving, and share it around. It's not ultimately secure (it's a random URL, but that's it), and the site warns that it's in alpha development and prone to crashing, but I didn't have any problems when using it for a couple of projects.

I'm not convinced it will be a tool for my personal use - I problem solve reasonably efficiently as it is - but I can see using it with a student for outlining a coding project and breaking it down into chunks, outlining the problems as they occur to her, and offering solutions, or highlighting existing problems and letting her tackle them and suggest approaches to solve them. The ability to collapse and expand groups of problems strikes me as fairly essential - I'm more used to spidergrams for this kind of thing and sprawling in all directions (omnigraffle lets you do this on the computer too, but not co-operatively) and the colour coding changing to green as soon as an idea is presented to solve a particular problem seems to give very strong positive feedback to the process.

There are tools, such as voting, that I haven't used, but that I can see being useful in thrashing out a large project, particularly a large international project where you can let people dive in and play with the problems and ideas very much asynchronously. Not sure it will get my long term use, but I will explore its use with learners and go from there. And thanks to Peter for originally blogging about it and making me curious enough to go and look.

EVE Online has been around for ages, and there's even been a Mac port for a while, but it's relied on having a Intel-based mac and I've just got one (well two actually), so it's new to me.

The first thing that needs to be said about EVE is how pretty it is. Taking bad photos is really hard in EVE, it's that pretty, although taking the really amazing ones is often hard - you're zooming around at high speed and that magic moment is, just like real life, a momentary flash. But sometimes you get lucky, and are sneaking up on a cargo container and get a lovely shot that you can frame well.

As well as being pretty, EVE appeals to me because it's not a level-based, character class-driven game - it's skills and choice based. Your "character" is essentially a space-ship, or a series of space-ships to be more precise, as you swap them around for different tasks. That's a little odd, but not that bad. Then there is this whole skill list (gigantic, complete with trees where you have to have skill x at level y before you can start learning skill z, and even more complex trees of pre-requisites) which is fairly familiar to anyone that plays RPGs. But remember I said it was classless and level-less? It is, it really is. If you choose to be a research scientist, or a fighter, or a miner, or an explorer, or a trader, or manufacturing your own goods for sale you can (and probably more). Well you can when you crank the right skills up. But many of these skills are easy to train a bit, and you probably start with a fair range of them at a lowish level, so you can, within a few hours, be exploring the profession of your choice. If you run through the introductory missions (strongly recommended, and a nice introduction to mission running) you will explore most of these professions a little bit; certainly enough to let you make a choice (I HATE mining for example). But, when you get bored of your current profession, whether long-term "OMG I never want to mine another asteroid in my life" or just "God, I fancy a bit of a change for a while" you can go out and spend a little while training those skills up and pick up a new profession, whether that's for an hour, a day, a week, a month, a lifetime. The skills, in a way that really appeals to the teacher in me, are structured so you can get certificates as you reach certain levels. Some are easy - Propulsion Jammer Operator (basic) requires a couple of levels in one skill. Core Targeting (standard) requires about 5 skills at level 4 or 5. But as you go through, they let you structure your choices somewhat, and they also let the game designers suggest good skill sets for particular ships. Some are obvious - want to run a ECW vessel, there's an ECW certificate - some are less so - Minmatar Assault Ships (my current long term goal) apparently work well as passive shield tanks so I'll be picking those skills up along the way!

I haven't experienced it yet, but there are ways to join into "gangs" and do things together with your mates. There are corporations, player generated ones (think "groups" except you can only be in one) that give you some people to chat to and in my case ask advice of. My corporation also maintains a large coterie of people that make things, so ships are available at material costs, ammo is free, and a load of fairly expensive skill books have been sent my way for free too (thank you guys!). I suspect these gangs will have the normal run of tactics, except your skills and how you fit your ship out define your role. My current main ship (in the picture) can easily be refitted as an medium-range artillery platform, a close-fighter, a tackler (get in close and rather than doing the damage direct, stop them running away so your mates can blow them to bits) and more. She can't really be refitted as an ECW vessel, but there are choices for that too. Bigger ships are more likely to do the tanking roles (stand still and slug it out, delivering big damage) but there's a role or two that I can fill comfortably too, in my first few days. Compare that to WoW where you have to 70th (or probably 80th) level to join a raid and contribute. Very different ethos.

The missions can have a "sameness" about them - I've been sent to recover the same escaped prisoner twice now, within 3 hours; it would be nice if they could keep better hold of their high security prisoners! - but actually there are quite a range and as you do more missions for the same group of people you get access to better missions and a different range of them. And whilst I've rescued the same prisoner twice and so on, there are groups with more agents, and a wider range of missions out there. Missions also have a range of rewards - hard cash, loyalty points and reputation (usually good for the corporation you help, and bad with the pirates you blow up if you aim at combat missions), and as your rep grows, so do the missions you can get. Loyalty points will let you buy things that aren't normally available on the open market (I've got my eye on a nifty frigate, but I have to save up quite a lot more - I've got about 500 lps and I need about 80,000!) so you have this interesting range of rewards for what you do.

How long will EVE keep my attention? I'm not sure, but it is taking my attention; not all of it, I'm still working in Second Life and enjoying that, but it's taking some time and attention too. That mixture of prettiness and letting you choose where you go is fun - I have scraps of paper (real and electronic) with plans for where I'm going scribbled on them. That feels like a good sign to me.