Tea Leaves

Why won’t I be buying The Sims 3? Because, although I sometimes do act like a dog who returns to his vomit, I have finally come to peace with the fact that I no longer have any interest in playing games that require as much effort as my job. So, sorry, no Sims 3 for me.

The other week I made a mistake and read some things on the Internet. In particular, I was sucked in to following a contretemps (read: “flamewar”) with the nickname of “Racefail 2.0″. The premise of the flamewar is that a writer, Patricia Wrede, wrote a book called The Thirteenth Child which was an exemplar of racist writing. The book takes place in a 19th century-America (”Columbia”) where magic is real, where megafauna roam the plains, and where the First Peoples never crossed the land bridge from Asia. The claim of racism, specifically, is that Wrede’s writing is an eliminationist fantasy which has erased the First Peoples from the face of the planet.

Something bothered me about this argument, but I wasn’t really following it very closely, and I hadn’t read the book, so I tossed off some sarcastic one-liners on Twitter about it (something along the lines of “When you’ve written as many books as Lois McMaster Bujold, you get to complain about this.” Bujold had gotten involved in the discussion, and was tarred and feathered by some of the participants along with Wrede). My friends Nat and Laura rightly called me on this as wrong-headed, as appeal to authority doesn’t settle the issue. I resolved to not comment on the issue again until I’d read the book.

I’ve read the book now. And now I know what was bothering me about the discussion: it was led, as near as I can tell, by people who were offended by the premise of The Thirteenth Child, rather than by the book. But premises aren’t books.

Someone finally did it, and I should have known it would be Olympus. Back in 1972, Olympus shook up the 35mm SLR world by introducing the OM-1. Here was an SLR camera that was not as big as a brick. It was small and cute, and came with small and cute lenses. Of course, Olympus has always tried to make small and cute things. The Pen cameras from the 60s, the OM cameras in the 70s and the Stylus point and shoots in the last glory days of 35mm film.

In the digital world they had yet to recapture this magic, until now. Now Olympus stands alone as the first major camera line to finally realize that there are people out there who want a small camera with a decent sensor. They have given us the EP-1, a digital reincarnation of the Pen half frame cameras of yore. And of course, all the camera people can do is whine.

If I have any hobby that does not involve the gratuitous exchange of money for material goods, it is the observation of the dork in his natural habitat. It’s not just that I was educated by dorks at a school that was mostly dorky. Or that I work with dorks in an industry whose products are primarily concerned with parting dorks from their dork cash. The fact is that even without these advantages, I spend all 24 hours of every day in the head of a dork (mine), so there is nothing I know better than what drives the dork psychology.

We had folks over for one of our periodic Chinese dumpling parties. The food came out particularly well this time, and I managed to use my nifty Panasonic LX-3 to take pictures of some parts of the process. So here is an updated and hopefully slightly more useful version of the reference recipe.

Telltale has done it again.

By “it”, of course, I mean “find a humorous property and turn it into a point-and-click adventure game,” and not necessarily “rolling around naked in fat sacks of cash,” although frankly I’m pretty sure they’re doing that as well.

Today over at The Online Photographer Mike Johnston wrote a post suggesting that spending a year using nothing but a Leica and shooting nothing but black and white film could teach you a lot. I think he’s right about one thing. It would teach you a lot, but about what? I think Johnston’s claim was that the exercise would teach you a lot about photography. I think it would teach you a lot about shooting black and white film with a Leica. Which is all well and good, but a different thing than learning about photography.

My recent experience buying a car has taught me a few lessons that I hope I remember next time. I’m going to write them down so I don’t forget.

Let me acknowledge up front that these lessons are colored by my personal hangup about “not getting ripped off”, where “ripped off” is defined as “paid too much for a given new car, by some semi-objective standard.” If you don’t share that hangup, a lot of this won’t apply to you.

Also, many people believe that the best way to avoid paying too much money for a new car is to buy a great used car. I am sure that this is true. However, I’m too stupid about cars to pick a good used car, so someone else will have to help you with that, if that’s how you want to go.

So warned, please read on.

The title of this piece will give astute readers a sense of deja vu. You will recall that more than a year ago, disgusted with the state of writing about video games, I called on the industry to do a better job and find something interesting to write about our beloved medium. The response has been decidedly tepid. I guess people were confused about what I meant by “interesting writing” or “an enjoyable review.” While one can find the occasional example of what I am after, I don’t think the situation has improved that much.

This post can also be called “In Which I Ignore Kelly’s Advice To Buy A Garmin And Pay The Price”.

I just got my DeLorme PN-40 last night. I went for the PN-40 instead of the Garmin because I was lured by the promise of awesome topo maps and easy-to-obtain-and-load aerial photography (and because there was a fire sale on them and I got one at a very good price). There was some criticism on Amazon about the software being not that great. I am here to tell you that criticism is not at all exaggerated.