March 2020 – The Roohr Way

Pandemic: Week 2

This article does a very good job of pointing out what we should have seen coming, but I disagree with the conclusion. I don’t think it takes any sort of specialized ‘complex systems’ thinking to observe the actions China was taking and realize that soon everyone would be in the same situation. I think the problem was simpler – people have a hard time imagining that the world is going to change very quickly, or that something will affect them. You see the same thing with a lot of risk taking.

https://weather.com/coronavirus/l/41.8934,-70.9117

This tweet chain: is a good summary of what it was like to experience the evolving situation at Slack, a company we and many others use for chat and videoconferencing. There is competition at Hopjump between Slack and Zoom. There are a few macbooks that won’t run Slack calls with a mic, and Zoom offers hilarious backgrounds. But we all already use slack and it removes the overhead of notifying people that the call is starting, distributing the link, etc. I suppose this is the sort of problem an IT department would solve by A) mandating it’s favorite be used and B) fixing everyone’s computer, but we where caught at an especially inopportune time when we’d just engaged an IT services provider. Let’s keep this theme of articles going. This hefty think piece puts the whole situation in an interesting perspective.

is there any benefit to reading all of this, at this point? We’re already doing what we can by avoiding all human contact. We don’t need further convincing. At some point there have to be diminishing returns. I can’t believe this week is already over.

Let’s instead talk entertainment. Nine Inch nails released new Ghosts this week, can’t wait to listen to it. Tiger King (Netflix) is absolutely bonkers, like /r/unsolvedmysteries meets /r/hobbydrama. It’s got a cast of zany, homicidal characters who are all accusing each other of larger than life crimes. I finished the cover for an EP-type thing and I’ll probably drop it next week. I finished painting another 40k miniature.

Playing a 90s web game in the 20s

The first videogames I recall playing where applets on the early web. I’ve decided to explore what I can find of these games on the Internet Archive. I’ll leave notes on how to run them yourself and where to find them so you can follow along.

The Pantheon of game sites was, more or less Alfy.com, Ezone.com, and MoFunZone.com. When the flash era hit, we got Newgrounds, Addictinggames, and ArcadeTown.

This is the earliest capture of alfy.com, from 1999. It’s not the screen I’m most familiar with, but I’m curious to see which games are present already. It appears to be constructed entirely of image maps, so we need to inspect it to find any of the links.

Tail Gunner, Javanoid, Missile Commando, Urbanoids and Asteroids I definitely remember, and we’ll certainly get to them later. This landing page from May 2000 is closer to what I remember:

I’m sure the layout is somehow janked up by my up-to-date browser, but that is the gist of it. Some websites used to be like this. The different clickable sections are sharply rasterized images. There are probably a bunch of things on here which I’ll explore later, but most of my time was spent in the arcade tab.

At just the right resolution, the utterly noisy but correct layout is evident (this is the space games section. I recommend checking these pages out; static screenshots don’t do it justice. Everything is animated. I already recognize a ton of classics just from the little portal views.

Let’s try some games. You’ll need to install the JDK so that you have appletviewer available as a command. To do that in Ubuntu, use

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk

In order to make these games run in appletviewer, you need an HTML file that calls them. When I run appletviewer, I get

java.security.AccessControlException: access denied ("java.lang.RuntimePermission" "accessClassInPackage.sun.audio")

Good to know that this was discussed on Usenet in 2001.

Ok, so let’s install virtualbox, download windows 98, and give it a shot!

I needed to enable virtualization in my BIOS to make virtualbox work. Also I set up the good display driver because when I tried it initially the colors weren’t right.

But the display driver wouldn’t work! The radio button sets it to the driver, but it still thinks it’s disabled. Bummer. I also tried installing ie6 with winetricks, but it was too unstable to use

Let’s try windows XP! We’ll apparently need the JVM. In order to get that on there, I burned a virtual cd which seems to be the easiest way to get files into your virtualbox PC. And it works! At least for some of the games. Check out this one on the author’s site: http://www.javaonthebrain.com/java/warp15/

This had the best graphics and probably made the strongest impression on me. The green/purple stuck with me enough that it’s the base color scheme for my 40k army now.

I probably haven’t played this game in twenty odd years. Does it hold up?

Well, the graphics are amazing. The author used POV Ray to make vibrant raytraced sprites that look great even in 2020. But the gameplay… Well, it’s impossibly hard. The controls don’t work quite right, you can only have two shots on screen at a time, collisions are wonky, and it’s very easy to accidentally slam into a wall and die.

Maybe I’ll return to get some other games working, maybe I won’t. I suspect that the problem with other games is that the assets aren’t in the archive, and if a more current source could be found they’d work just fine. Also some may require newer versions of Java. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. May I recommend SuperKid.

Pandemic: week 1

This is the biggest french toast alert (run on eggs and bread) I’ve seen in my lifetime.

The foundation for the lie that Covid-19 was an inevitable disaster is already being poured, and I despise it. All you had to do was watch the news and believe for one minute that we weren’t somehow special and immune to tragedy. This Op-ed does a better job of tearing down the black swan lie, so I’ll just link it.

A mass video call, now a familiar sight. It was for a friend’s birthday, but we spent most of the time talking about the pandemic.

Italy was the game changer for public perception. Last week I felt a bit like chicken little, but now everyone I know is at least beginning the process of readjusting their expectations for the short term. It will take more time for people to realize that this has changed the course of history, and pre-pandemic predictions of the future will need to be adjusted. That’s what the markets are saying, really. Our once clear picture of the future is now clouded.

I wish I’d grabbed more Goya. Anything with black beans in it was gone.

Sabrina and I are now both working from home and avoiding leaving the house as much as possible. Walks along our street are a decent outlet – I’m trying to replace my usual trips back and fourth from Kendall.

I’ve been making FTS content at a record rate while stuck at home

MELT (ELM Collective)

MELT is an anthology, and as such each track is pretty distinctive. It really pays to listen to each track closely here, as each individual artist has done a lot to make tracks memorable. The overall impression is an IDM treat with lots of delicious drum machine rolls and synths you can really sink your teeth into.

Dracul starts off the album on a strong note with metallic beats and an iconic synth melody.

This track has a couple of particularly well-executed change-up. It plays in a bunch of space that you usually wouldn’t hear in an IDM track. Lots of different sounds playing short sections of a melody in turn, chopped vocals, and other excitement.

Not only is this track great, but it introduced me to Iconic Black Suit who has a deep catalog, including Bionic Eyes Won’t Cry.

Ridebreak absolutely nails the Hangable Auto Bulb drums, but just as you think that’s all it’s going to be, it launches into this awesome soaring videogamey melody that carries the rest of the track. It took me a few listens to get into it.

Pandemic: Week 0

We watch and read the news, so to some extent we knew it was going to be bad. The people who tell you not to worry about things told me not to worry, but this time, I ignored them. We stocked up on food, cough medicine, electrolyte-water, and yes, all-important Toilet Paper.

On Wednesday night, our CRO called it on slack-Hopjump is now working from home. This was in advance of the threshold that E-Staff had previously set, and a very welcome proactive move to flatten the curve. This will be an adjustment for all of us though. I’m going to try and maintain my routine-when I would be on the train I’ll keep working on projects or music or what have you.

State Street still still hasn’t called mandatory WFH yet.

Over the course of the week, the state of mass rolled out measures. In the span of a week we got a state-level state of emergency, a national state of emergency, schools closed, gatherings limited to 25 people. You can get details here. Food is take-out only. It’s been odd to see policies evolve so quickly. I wonder if the idea is to slowly introduce the policy to avoid a panic or if the situation is really evolving this quickly. We knew since the Biogen conference that it was here; why not take a crisis stance immediately?

The biggest difficulty is accepting that this isn’t a blip, this is something that will be with us for a long time and is going to change the course of human events. The futures we each envision for ourselves and our families need to be revised, and I worry that we’re paralyzed by that process. A slow-motion version of the deer-in-the-headlights effect.

So don’t wait. Don’t wait. Distance yourself from others. Flatten the curve. It seems risky and uncool to defy those who would tell to just keep going like nothing is wrong, but this is one of those moments where you need to listen to the doomsayers.