That, I suppose, is simply their right. But if they honestly assume that shutting down the stores will significantly alter use in their county, I think they’re sorely mistaken. It’s a futile response, as nearby counties will likely allow retail stores to open up just across the highway – effectively pushing taxes their schools and city could be using on sales that are, let’s face it, guaranteed to occur.

Now, giving up their share in tax revenue might be justified, if they honestly feel the stores will negatively impact property values, increase crime, and ruin children’s lives. The prior release from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office on Amendment 64 certainly outlined these potential outcomes, in addition to a score of others. You can view a full copy here, it’s full of links to their sources, so you can go ahead and review their claims yourself. Taken at face value, then, it seems like a completely, reasoned response.

But if you actually check out the links, you might find some surprising contradictions, some flimsy sources, and some inflammatory claims. Many of their points aren’t really true, and while some of their concerns are valid (I think nearly everyone can agree think drug use in children is bad), their justifcations just aren’t all based in reality.

It bothered me so much I decided to write a bit about it. But the more I reviewed the more falsehoods I uncovered. It got to the point where I really felt the need to go ahead and address, in painstaking detail, exactly where they went wrong.

Why? Because I grew up there, and I don’t like seeing my home act so foolishly. It’s embarrassing.

So here it goes, I’ve copied every bullet point laid out in their release, marked up liberally with my commentary. Enjoy:

“What you should know ABOUT AMENDMENT 64″

1. “IT’S BAD FOR OUR KIDS”

This entire section makes the claim that Amendment 64, which regulates the sale of marijuana for only persons over 21 years of age, will be incidentally harmful to children. It cites several studies, surveys, and “reviews” which conclude that pot use among teens can be harmful to their mental health:

• A new study says teens who regularly use marijuana have lower IQs long-term.

This is an interesting correlation, but this study hardly has the methodology to conclude that marijuana causes lower IQ’s. It’d be more accurate to state that, of those born in 1972 – 1973, heavy users of marijuana had proclivities to activities which can have negative consequences on IQ.  The study makes no effort to isolate this particular drug, and considering the time frame, speaks more to the lifestyles of illicit drug users in the 70′s and 80′s than the affect of smoking marijuana on the brain.

Now, even assuming that this claim is 100% true, that smoking marijuana does affect metal capacity in adolescence - is that reason enough to make marijuana illegal for adults?

The fact is that there are far more common, completely legal substances that teens do use which can be as (if not far more) harmful. I’m referring, of course, to tabaco and alcohol. And I don’t see the sheriff’s office releasing documents calling for bans (for adults, mind you) on either of those.  The question becomes then, not if marijuana is harmful (it probably is to some degree), but why only it should be illegal.

Perhaps their claim is, simply, that marijuana is the more dangerous than either cigarrettes or alcohol.

So are cigarettes less harmful than marijuana?

In 2011, a team at UCLA, using MRI tests, found that smoking cigarettes between the ages of 15 and 25 had significant impacts on the prefrontal cortex: “Such an effect can influence the ability of youth to make rational decisions regarding their well-being, and that includes the decision to stop smoking.”  In 2007 CASA found that teens who smoked cigarettes had far higher risk for alcohol abuse, mental illness, and interestingly enough: illicit drug use. The American Cancer Association states: “Smoking accounts for 80% of lung cancer deaths,” and that “Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in both men and women.”

It certainly doesn’t seem like cigarettes are any less harmful than marijuana. And while there is direct, observable affects on the brain from tobacco use amoung teens, most of the data on marijuana’s affects are correlative. Granting the chance that concrete evidence does one day prove it significantly affects the brain – the fact remains the link between lung cancer and marijuana has never been proven.

Is it really logical to ban the sale of a substance the might or possibly have serious affects, while overwhelming bodies of evidence demonstrate tabacco is extremely harmful, especially to teens?

So then, are cigarettes less addictive than marijuana?

The American Lung Association says, “Among adults who smoke, 68 percent began smoking regularly at age 18 or younger, and 85 percent started when they were 21 or younger.” Teens who start smoking cigarrettes are extremely likely to become addicted, and surprisingly high new additions occur daily, “Every day, almost 3,900 children under 18 years of age try their first cigarette, and more than 950 of them will become new, regular daily smokers.”

So what about marijuana? The statistics available varry wildly. Many are quick to point out that marijuana dependancy rates are 10%-30%, with “serious addiction” around 9%. Some sources claim, at it’s absolute worst: ”About 1 in 6 people who start using as a teen .. become addicted to marijuana.” Effectively, only 16% of teenagers become addicted, while rates for cigarettes are much higher, closer to 25%.

The fact is, regular old cigarettes are far more addictive.

It’s hardly going out on a limb to claim tabacco cigarettes are bad for teenagers. Their demonstrably bad for people of all ages. They’re extremely unhealthy, and highly additive. But I don’t see Marlboro getting band from sale in Douglas County. If your goal is to bad substances which are harmful to teens, you’d be better off targeting tabacco.

Clearly, this isn’t about keeping unhealthy, harmful, addictive substances out of children’s hands – because there is no concerted effort to stop the real killers here.

The Sherif goes on:

• People ages 12 to 17 are more likely to use marijuana in states that permit it than in states that don’t, according to Columbia University research.

This point is extremely misleading, because it suggests that legalization increases use – but the study itself states that isn’t what they concluded: “Future studies should use large-sample survey data collected in years prior to and after enactment of marijuana laws in states with and without such laws, to compare prevalences and trends.” The result they found may or may not be indicative of an increase in use, rather than a pre-existing higher level of use before legalization. It unsurprising, really, that states which voted to legalize were already experiencing higher than average usage among all age groups, as it’s this group of people that favor legalization. Hence, legalization doesn’t inherrently increase use, but rather occurs as a result of higher use.

What the study actually states, is that voting to legalize does not causatively cause increases in use.

• In Colorado, a 2011 study found nearly 40 percent of high school students use marijuana. Nine percent of those kids tried it before they were 13.

This point is true, but I don’t think this proves the point the sherif’s office is trying to make. Marijuana is already illegal but high school students are  still using it. This isn’t so much an argument against legalization, but rather supporting evidence that the current method of criminalization doesn’t work. It’s clear that they tried to lead you to the former conclusion by prefacing this point with the one above – but as I pointed out, that claim is simply false.

Keeping it illegal won’t keep it out of children’s hands, fact.

• If the amendment passes, experts predict the number of regular users will at least double and likely triple in the most vulnerable 12 to 25 age range.

Ignoring the fact that the link here doesn’t work, it was intended to go to healthydrugfreecolorado.org, which is backed by the Colorado Drug Investigators Association, which is hardly an unbiased source. The organization exists solely to fight legalization, and has released a number of source-free articles on marijuana and other illicit substances. Not only can I not actually find the reference to “at least double” on their website, the statistics I can find aren’t sourced. If this is true, we’re owed at least a source from someone that doesn’t stand to directly benefit by marijuana staying illegal.

• Each year, 60 percent of all new marijuana users are under age 18.

This firstly brings me back to my earlier point – this statistic (again completely unverifiable, my guess is that it was plucked from the CDIA as well) is what we get when it’s already illegal. How will keeping it illegal fix this problem? The answer, of course, is that it won’t. Use will continue to remain high regardless of the law.

• How do kids say “No to drugs” when adults don’t? If parents use it, kids will too.

I get that parents are natural role models to their children. But the fact is that plenty of parents drink heavily who’s children do not. Plenty of them smoke cigarrettes, and chew tobacco – and plenty of teens actually dislike their parent’s addictions. And then there are families who have wine on holidays, smoke a cigar at new years — and demonstrate responsible, reasonable use to their children. I challenge their assumption that children are mindless automatons, especially by their teen years, who mimic and admire every aspect of their parent’s lives. It’s healthy for children to learn about the substances they will encounter when they finally leave the nest, and how to use them responsibly. The Sheriff’s made his opinion of marijuana clear – to them there is no responsible use. My grandfather thinks unkindly of beer – should we ban the sale simply because of negative perception of one person? No, this funny little tagline is far more meaningless than they probably ment it to be.

It highlights, what I think is the core of their real argument: Drugs = bad. It’s not an opinion based in fact but in feeling. And that is precisely why any real examination of it’s prohibition are so easy to pluck apart – it requires a lot of cognative disonnace to separate the “bad” drugs (marijuana) from the “totally fine” drugs (alcohol, tobacco, oxicodone, alprazolam, etc.).

It’s honestly disappointing to see the Sherrif’s Office fall for the old idea that legalization will be “bad for the children”. They are (ironically) quick to point out that criminalization has been a dismal failure – teen use remains high, and is in fact growing – but instead of addressing that fact, they attempt to scare us with extraneous statistics into thinking legalization would only make the problem worse, providing no substantive evidence that would actually occur. If they want to get serious about curtailing use, they’ll need to acknowledge that prohibition has failed, and will continue to fail.

And regardless of their claims that marijuana is exclusively harmful to teens, cigarettes remain legal at only 18, cause high rates of cancer and other disease, and demonstrate far higher long-term rates of  addiction in adulthood. Alcohol use remains high in teens as well, and unfortunately kills far more teens (and adults) every year than any other legal or illegal substance.

And yet neither are banned from sale in Douglas County.

So I ask, is this really about keeping our kids safe? The answer, obviously, is no. Politicians love to tote out the old “think of the children!” to keep us from addressing their very real problems. Marijuana has been illegal for all age groups for years. And what’s the most readily available substance, according to teens themselves? Pot. The truth is, law enforcement thinks that they are the only agency that can save our children from drug use. But the honest truth is that they have failed. It’s high time we tried a different approach. Regulating cigarettes and alcohol does curtail use. Prohibition simply made marijuana more available. If you honestly want to “think of the children!”, the best thing you could do is legalize, regulate, and educate.

Now, if you’re still awake, on to the second section:

2. “IT’S BAD FOR OUR COMMUNITY”

This section must be for all the single ladies out there (the ones who aren’t entirely moved by the “think of your children!” line they tried earlier). This section can easily be summarized as “death, crime and property values”. Leave it to Douglas County to actually list death and property values in the same section.

Here’s their bullet points:

• Today’s marijuana is more addictive than ever — it’s 10-20 times more potent than during the 60′s, according to nationwide tests of the drug.

Well, this one is an odd opener, since it in no way states how pot is “bad for the community.” It’s really more an interesting factoid about potency, but with the extremely unverified claim that potency increases addiction. There is no evidence that is the case, but it was cute for them to try and squeeze that in there.

 • Colorado will be known as “Pot Capital, USA.” In Denver alone, there are already more dispensaries than Starbucks, liquor stores or public schools, according to a 2010Denver Post investigation. If legal, the number of dispensaries, growing and manufacturing facilities is expected to explode.

Again, this bullet point in no way explains how this is bad for a community. It’s another “The More You Know” moment, that lets us know that yes, there is a sizable demand for marijuana. Notice how the sentence only has a negative connotation if you already had a pre-existing notion that pot was bad for a community. This bullet point would still be 100% true if it read as follows:

“Colorado will be known as “Coffee Capital, USA.” In Denver alone, there are already more Starbucks than liquor stores or public schools, according to a 2010 Denver Post investigation. If legal, the number of cafés, growing and roasting facilities is expected to explode.”

We should ban coffee! It’s exploding in popularity!

• A study estimates the state would generate $14 million a year and save law enforcement $12 million a year in the beginning, with up to $40 million a year in later years. However, opponents say that money will cover only 15% of the collateral costs to our community such as: increased drug treatment, emergency room visits, crime, traffic accidents and school ‘drop-outs’ to name just a few.

The first part, the study citing the $14 million a year in revenue and the $12 million savings, is as they admit – very sound. It’s quite likely the state will have an extra $26 million lying around from legalization in the first year alone (and indeed far higher  savings long term). The second claim comes from that same, biased source – the CDIA, an organization whose sole mission is to help law enforcement agencies criminalize marijuana and other currently-illicit substances. They’re claims? Unverified, unsourced, simple “guestimates”. They essentially write a thrilling, dark fiction, a future where Pot Gangs roam free, an a-pot-ocalypse if you will. Think I’m exagerating? Possibly  but for legalization to actually increase the cost to the state so much that a $26 million (first year) surplus would only cover 15% (essentially claiming that legal pot will end up costing us $173 million), the following would literally need to occur:

- A drug with low toxicity (it’s practically impossible to overdose), and an annual death rate of 0 would need to lead to hundreds of additional emergency room visits.

- To have a net increase in crime, it would need to make up for the deficit left by legalizing the drug. Since drug arrests the 2nd highest arrest rate, according to the Colorado Department of Public Safety, legalization would have to at least double homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault to make up the deficit – let alone to increase crime rates. Apparently, the pot heads would be killing each other over the last bag Cheetos and stabbing Taco Bell employees on a regular basis after their Doritos tacos made them “Locos”.

- By the sherif’s office own admission (two bullet points down), there is currently 50 deaths annually by drivers under the influence of marijuana. We all know drugs are one of the leading causes of car accidents, right behind distracted driving, speeding, drunk driving (alcohol), reckless driving, rain, running red lights, running stop signs, teenage drivers, car defects, unsafe lane changes, wrong-way driving, and tailgating. And never mind that most drug-related accidents are from prescription medication, so that when counted alone, pot causes only slighty fewer accidents than ice, snow, road rage, potholes, drowsy driving, tire blowouts, fog, deadly curves, animal crossings, and street racing. But  making it legal could make it bump it all the way up to one of the 25th-or-so-ish most-common cause of car accidents.

The CDIA certainly thinks so. According to federal statistics, less than 3% of the costs of car accidents end up being a burden of the state (usually property damage), so to make even the slightest dent in our $173 million deficit, their would need to be (presumably) at least a million or two in unpaid claims – the CDIA must estimate an increased accident rate of approximately three-thousand percent. (Estimating roughly 20k per accident, 3% cost to the state), to make up even two million of the 173.

- High school “Drop-Outs” would clearly increase at alarming rates for us to be burdened with so many millions of dollars in food-stamps and welfare. Considering the Colorado high school dropout rate is currently a super-fantastic twenty-seven-percent (yikes guys, that’s you’re pre-pot-ocalypse rate?), with 1.3 million students dropping out already. Even doubling the rate, we’d be left with 2.6 million GED-less, 100% unemployable  drains on society, colorado might only be one of the 10th lowest food assistance takers in the nation, instead of the 5th lowest.

Hopefully I’ve made my point, their math here is, firstly, not listed anywhere on the link provided. It’s up to us to figure out how an extra $26 million could turn into a $173 million deficit, and honestly the reasons they do list simply can not, in even the most gracious estimations, approach that level. It’s a dubious number from an extremely dubious source.

Moving on:

• Economic losses. A work force that regularly uses marijuana is tardy, calls in sick, has more on-the-job accidents and is less productive than non-using workers. Businesses would be less likely to stay or move into a state where drug use related risks are high, according to a report by Healthy and Drug Free Colorado.

Again – same shoddy, dubious source. This unverified claim (made by those with an already negative perception) has very little ground to stand on. People who regularly use alcohol could very well have similar tendencies, and yet, at risk of repeating my argument to death: it remains legal.

• Deaths from impaired driving would increase. About 50 people are killed in traffic accidents every year by drivers in Colorado under the influence of marijuana. Experts predict the number of deaths would double.

Assuming this does occur, it’d still be less than a quarter the number of fatalities in Colorado caused by alcohol. To put this in perspective, more people die every year from legal perscription drugs, and more than twice as many from suicide than DUI. It’s not a good number, but it’s lower than many other legal substances by a significant factor.

• Supporters say marijuana would be regulated just like alcohol. But the federal government concludes the societal costs of treating alcohol and tobacco use far exceeds the revenue from taxing those drugs. The health cost from smoking cigarettes is about $7 per pack, while the revenue from taxing cigarettes is about $2 per pack, according to Ken Buck, District Attorney of Weld County.

I spent the first half of this entire article trying to make the point  that tobacco and alcohol are far worse – and here they go and agree with me. If these are legal, and you’d like them to remain legal, than why not marijuana? Not to mention the exorbitant health cost of cigarettes does not translate directly to marijuana smoke, in which no link to cancer (by far the largest portion of the health cost) has ever been proven.

• 80% of cities and towns across Colorado have already kicked out dispensaries because of crime, negative perception and lower property values. If Amendment 64 passes, suppliers could grow in residential areas as a Constitutional right.

The crime is awfully misleading, crime rates do not change by a significant margin, and many counties reported no direct change.  The purported imminent crime wave is by and large a myth, I’d bet 7-11 impacts crime more heavily than a dispensary (since we’re throwing out unverifiable claims now). And negative perception is essentially the driving factor behind property values. This isn’t so much a case for keeping it illegal than it is for working on a perception problem, and making it legal would go a long way in address that.

• Recent studies find marijuana use may cause or worsen mental health problems.Two 2010 reviews say it may bring on the disorders or worsen symptoms of schizophrenia and psychosis, particularly in young people.

Let’s take a moment and consider that you have to have undiagnosed schizophrenia for symptoms to worse, as the review states, pot doesn’t cause you to go crazy. This is just the new “refer madness”, dressed up with a fancy new diagnosis. Here’s the PSA: if you’re already a schizo – don’t do pot. Otherwise, please disregard this message.

• Despite what users claim, Children’s Hospital Boston concludes marijuana is highly addictive. It affects vision, memory, motor coordination and judgment.

Take a moment to check out this source. It’s hilarious to me, because what it actually states is this: “Alcohol is responsible for more teen deaths than all other drugs combined.”  Hmm, and yet we’re banning marijuana? Makes sense. It also says absolutely nothing, repeat nothing, about addiction rates, nor how it affects vision, memory, or motor coordination. It also says “Parameter 2 to onepixelout_swftools_flashvars().” Yes, this is clearly a professional source of information.

So in short – this entire section is about how marijuana is “bad for the community.” Yet more than half these bullet points have nothing to do with “the community” at all. The ones that do are from an organization who’s mission is, regardless of counterevidence, to keep pot illegal. And their claims aren’t verifiable, and in one outrageous case, easily unverified.

If it is bad for the  community – the case is not made here.

Finally, for those with outstanding attention spans: the final section:

3. “IT’S A CRIME”

• Federal law bans marijuana in Colorado regardless of Amendment 64. If it passes, Colorado’s recreational pot users will believe they’re protected by law, but they may be subject to federal prosecution. The federal government could arrest users, sellers and buyers, according to the Colorado Independent.

I’m sure the grey-area in the law will be confusing – and some will make this and other stupid mistakes, and the DEA will likely still be able to make busts. OR, this could finally force the issue be discussed seriously on a federal level. But the case that “it’s illegal so it should stay illegal” is obviously circular. Lots of things used to be legal which should have been illegal (cough – slavery), and many things that are illegal for silly reasons that shouldn’t be (Colorado used to ban liquor sales on Sundays).

• Crimes connected to medical marijuana have increased since it became legal for patients. Police say there will only be more burglaries, robberies, illegal pot rings and homicides if voters approve the ballot measure

I’ve never seen a “pot ring”, but I suspect it’s fried. Seriously though, do you know what a “pot ring” is? It’s the illegal sale of medical pot to unauthorized users. So, essentially the sherrif’s office thinks making pot legal will increase the number of “pot rings” – organized groups selling pot illegally. Hmm, but if it’s legal here, then how could you form a “pot ring”, since it’d be legal to sell the pot? Perhaps they mean sales outside the state – but considering the other option (prohibition) leads to exclusively ”pot rings”, the only sure way to reduce them is to legalize.

• Federal agents say international drug cartels are already in Colorado supplying, funding and running dispensaries. Agents expect cartels will expand their criminal operations if every adult is allowed to use marijuana in Colorado.

If it’s legal to grow here, then what profit would an international cartel have? The supply chain would shift away from international sources entirely – this is essentially one of the main points behind legalization. With marijuana grown legally in the states, money stays in the states, instead of being feed south across the border. Leaders in Mexico are literally pleading with the States to legalize, as it would stop the flow of drug money (and drug-related activity) in Mexico. This is the only way to chip away at the violent operations – introduce safe, domestic methods of production.

Look, I’ve wasted far too much time typing all this out. But such blatant propaganda should not go unchallenged. The affects of prohibition have been terrible to this country, and to our neighbors. Incarceration rates are exceedingly high, and it’s because we continue to enforce illogical, harmful drug policies. We now jail more African Americans than were ever taken as slaves. I don’t want to go down in history as the “incarceration generation.”

Amendment 64′s passing is a small step in the right direction, and alongside Washington state, I’m hopeful that some semblance of reason is returning to America’s drug policies. Actions from groups like the Douglas County commissioners, and their Sherrif’s office, are disappointing, and misguided. You can’t solve all your problems by gating your community – one day you’ll have to come back to the real world.

No related posts.

The age of amazing OS upgrades is over.

I honestly don’t understand what happened, but it seems like hardly anything changes to my operating systems anymore. I used to see dozens of exciting and useful upgrades come out of Cupertino (and I guess kinda maybe at Redmond) every year. But now it seems pretty common practice for me to skip upgrades for years, instead only giving in at the last possible moment before I slip into obsoleteness.

We now live in an age of Minor Upgrades. Both by label and by design (Leopard to Snow Leopard? Really?). I feel like I’ve been stuck on the same Mac OS for years.

I remember the good old days when upgrades used to be awesome and exciting, back when people still used the term World Wide Web and no one knew if email was hyphenated. Back when Apple decided that their OS (v.9.9.8.9.1.9) had gone as far as it could go, and adopted a new Unix-based Max OS X (everything cool had x’s back then).

The year was Twenty-Ought-One ,I needed a new S-controller for my Xbox, so, I decided to go to CompUSA (which is what they called Amazon.com in those days). So I tied an iPod to my belt, which was the style at the time due to their excessive size and weight. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an iPod on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have Zunes because of the war.

In all seriousness, the switch to 10.1 was massive, literally rendering dozens of applications near useless but objectively improving almost everything else. I honestly remember thinking why would I want Classic? It was bloated, clunky and dying. I remember constantly juggling Extensions to get applications to behave nicely with one another, networking started to become hilariously complicated. And printing worked less than half the time.

Well Ok, printing still sucks today, but the point remains valid, 10 was an awesome shift for Apple and it’s positive effects have lasted a really long time. The release of Jaguar was also pretty big, it smoothed out most every significant problem, introduced  a couple applications that have proved nearly timeless for them (Address Book, iChat). Itwas a solid minor upgrade, and actually free to teachers and schools anyways. It was when OS X became the mainstream, and it won over all the last OS 9 holdouts.

Then came Panther, which felt like another complete redesign. The interface was altered significantly, especially for Finder which not only was prettier but came packaged with the still-to-this day extremely useful window management tools, with easy ways to quickly check files in Preview, and at the time a pretty awesome new browser, Safari. And while nearly all my Computer Science students were stuck learning to compile and debug their C code in DOS, I was killing projects with XCode. This package was their most massive yet, with literally hundreds of minor improvements far too numerous to enumerate here and a dozen larger applications, setting an insane president for future releases.

Their next release was marketed with roughly the same number of improvements. But this was the first package in years that felt smaller. Very few applications were significantly altered, things like iChat getting video, mail getting less-clunky, search getting more useful. A dictionary was added. Neat. It was also the point where features that were ultimately not that useful were given center stage – Dashboard was one of their largest selling points. And while it was marketable, I think nearly all of us by now have gotten bored with it. It was and continues to be a waste of RAM, as most every app it supports was better suited in full-versions or, like the clocks, completely redundant.

And while it was a big package, I remember personally dealing with tons of bugs. It was reminiscent of 10.1′s original release, with features like video chats rarely working and incredibly difficult to diagnose and fix, and some bugs just not fixable at all. Spotlight indexed frequently, and it was coinciding poorly with plateauing hardware specs, as the G5 chip failed to leap forward into the mainstream with gusto the way the G4 did.

After that, it just completely fell apart. Leopard was extremely marginal by comparison. Filled with titillating improvements to Finder’s layout, a way to space-bar look at things, and a backup system that would graciously take up all your CPU at random. Their online offerings also stalled, with the previously ahead-of-the-curve .Mac (mail, storage, websites and photos) becoming a MobileMe cesspool of bugs and dropped features; simultaneously getting outpaced by hundreds of competing offerings. Really the only thing I think anyone got truly excited about was Boot Camp, which simply allowed you to leave their OS for brief periods, which isn’t exactly an improvement to OS X.

For something that essentially took two years of development it was my first real disappointment with Apple in general, tempered only with the same-year release of iPhone. I think what disapointed me was how transparently their development efforts were offloaded from their desktop OS to their phone, something that didn’t seem to occur at all with the equally-successful iPod.

Snow Leopard was useless. Another nearly two years of development for what? Exchange support? I actually couldn’t remember a single feature off the top of my head – a qucik check on Wikipedia tells me why. There really wasn’t a big change, the whole thing reads like a list of bug fixes.

The list of existing things that just worked better: Boot Camp, Finder, iChat, Mail, Address Book, Preview, QuickTime, Safari, VoiceOver, and yes, oh boy, the mouse! It was so feature thin, they really had no choice but to cap the price at $30. No one in their right mind would shill out more for so little. But just fiddling with your price hardly seemed to make up the lack of effort. They didn’t even change the name, just tacked “snow” in front of the old one. I, like so many, were used to big changes, huge improvements, and at least the illusion of effortlessly being on the cutting-edge. But that illusion was, at this point, shattered completely.

By the time Lion made it out I was pretty much done. It was yet another bug-fixing spree, with the most notable changes from 10.4 being a text editor that can marginally compete with other freeware  and a full-screen Terminal. Any of their newest features just sucked, either taking up too much RAM to be worth it entirely (auto-saved backups that make my computer slow? AWESOME!) or significantly replicating existing features (launch pad? how many god-damned ways do I need to start up Chrome?). And it also included features I outright reject. The Mac App store is a dumb idea, I can already get everything on the internet, the “approved app” concept is inherently dangerous and only a necessary evil on the phone because the screen is too small and the OS too inflexible to handle other installation and payment methods. mIt was also the first time Apple saw a substantial backlash, for many of the same reasons. Even the most die-hardiest holdout fanboys were losing it. Gizmodo even called it a failure.

The years-long excited momentum for Apple’s OS I once had was lost years ago. Back in the day,  I’d love to read rumors about their newest improvements, waited anxiously on release day for announcements to make it to the blogospheres (before the Twitter was really all that popular), and was usually the first to adopt and try the latest new thing. Now? These days I don’t even hear that Apple has a new anything until it’s plastered so thickly on reddit and Facebook I am forced to see what others are even talking about. I’m completely off the bandwagon, I’m the last to adopt, only this year leaving my 3Gs behind and only upgrading to 10.7 because my mom gave me a free family copy and 10.5 was becoming unsupported.

What the hell happened? These marginal improvements are frankly unacceptable. The focus is shifting to the iPhone and touch devices, I think, only partially because the hardware is new and exciting. It’s also happening incidentally because the desktop PC hasn’t seen a major improvement to it’s operating software in years. I can’t get excited about bug fixes, no one can. They literally give me only one avenue of excitement – all the innovation effort is happening on mobile devices. And even that is seeing an innovation stall, with the iPhone 5′s barely improving upon a years-old 4, and even looking blandly upgraded from 3.

And don’t get me started with Windows. Sure, I have obvious documented bias on that platform. But I also use Windows regularly for games. It’s essentially nothing to me anymore but a login layer that lets me open Steam.

They have essentially released minor enhancements to the same thing for a decade, with the XP years lasting so long thanks to the Vista disaster (one I got to experience at work every god damned day in 2009), and Windows 7 essentially no more than opacity and bug fixes to XP features (wow, networkings!), and I guess introducing the window management that I had on OS X since I was in high school. It has been a completely unenthusiastic roll coaster of a decade for them.

Now 8 is here, showing for the first time really in a decade a change to their interface. It’s clearly all geared to the mobile market, however, which is pretty well saturated between Google and Apple already. I’m not sure colored-tiles and draggy passwords is really enough to get me pumped up. It’s a catch up to that market really, which is great and all, but where is all that innovation? Their desktop half, the monster hiding behind the tiles, is essentially feature-wise 7 again, which is essentially a working XP, which was essentially a not shitty ’95. For a system I really just use to run Steam, I don’t see any real reason to become excited about 8 at all.

It’s just that there is literally nothing coming out of Apple’s OS team right now either. It’d be silly to say we’ve come as far as we can here – but all I see is a massive shift away from desktop development, and to assume that we’re all going to be floating around our offices on iPads writing proposals with finger painting equipment doesn’t seem all that realistic. Don’t get me wrong, the tablet market is here to stay, but it fills a very different role than our desktop PC’s. I’m not sure any of these “fusion” efforts, from 8′s tiles to Lion’s Launch Pad, will last long. Their marketing tools that look great but are substantively empty.

Some day these companies will snap out of it and come up with something truly innovative for your desk. But apparently, not today.

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I’m certainly not going out on a limb by saying so. It’s well received by almost everyone. Well, everyone except The Wall Street Journal.

The publication is hardly an expert source for video game news. A fact they so painfully underscored in their BL2 coverage. “Journalist” Adam Najberg clearly spent a full hour playing the game before taking pen to paper, headlining “Borderlands 2 Fails To Cross Over.” Filling in the blanks with information found on the back cover of the box and from Wikipedia, he lambasted the game for not being “CoD-ey” enough, for it’s standard price point, and for having traditional RPG elements. I caught his review the day it was published (largely because it went viral thanks to reddit), and was immediately so put-off I took to gchat to vent my various frustrations:

9/18/2012 7:00:23 PM - Andy:  he’s comparing the multiplayer deathmatch in CoD to the coop in borderlands, and then concludes 4 is less than 64 so game = bad. he then writes that “$60 is too high” … uhm all, literally all, games of this caliber are $60. period. they have been for years. who is this dude?

Dozens of bloggers and even professional writers took the time to call “this dude” out. GamingOgre  called the review “sophomoric”, N4G called it “flat-out-ignorant”, holygrenade called it “deeply saddening.” Moreso did the community, some of the comments on the article itself were pricelessly hilarious. After Adam called beloved robot Cl4ptrap a “detestible” ”cross between a snarky, profane C3PO with the body of an R2D2″, one fan (who I wish was me) wrote:

“Fuck you, Adam. Claptrap has different wheels, colors, and a different body shape than R2D2 and he has arms and the ability to talk. C3PO was a protocol droid that was built for etiquette. Claptrap is a dirty little circus carne who shouldn’t be allowed around explosives. So yes, he is like exactly like C3PO except for everything about him and if you think he looks like R2D2 then you need to sue your lasik surgeon.”

I spent far too much time perusing their comments, and managed to save one of my favorites. Here’s one written by nonother than Cl4ptrap himself:

I think what’s surprising, however, is that a lot of people also came to Adam’s defense:

 Remember how your mom would call your Playstation “the Nintendo” as a kid? This is that same vague understanding rearing its head again. [This] review is actually pretty spot-on for their audience.

A fair point, the WSJ is a business news journal that doesn’t usually cover games. The reviewer was quite obviously not a gamer, but true to the WSJ’s normal audience, a businessperson with only a surfactant level of knowledge and understanding on how games work, and people like him would probably compare Borderlands to Call of Duty. They both have guns, you use them to shoot stuff, they’re the same thing, right?! It’s probably something my grandma would think too, but then again, my grandma doesn’t write game reviews for the Wall Street Journal. I’d hope their authors were a little more experienced and researched.

The real problem is that the article isn’t just appealing to a older or more casual audience. This thing wasn’t craftily written for the “casual gamer”. It was badly written, period. My roommate immediately pointed out problems with simple structure:

8:50:13 PM Katie: “Menacing characters like Handsome Jack, who tries to you off in the opening sequence via a double-crossing explosion, are not at all fearsome.”

8:50:18 PM Katie: that sentence is wrong, ”who tries to you off”

8:50:29 PM Katie: i think you mean “off you”

They eventually fixed it, but to make it that far with grammatical mistakes is a sloppy start, and only one of many examples of his lazy journalism.

He gave a game with dozens of hours of gameplay a full one evening (probably after dinner), perhaps up to a couple of hours of total in-game review time. How can I tell? He writes “You also wander a lot in winter wastelands.” Hmm, do you now? The game is less than maybe 20% winter levels. It’s clear you never made it past the first or second world of dozens. He writes an entire paragraph about Cl4ptrap despite him only making a significant experience in the tutorial. He basically stopped playing right after figuring out the controls.

To top it all off he literally states he plucked summaries from Wikipedia (apparently no one told him it wasn’t an acceptable reference source, but he only works for The Wall Street Journal). Despite checking with Wikipedia, he get’s the genre wrong (it’s right over there on the sidebar) so he apparently didn’t even give Wikipedia much of his time. If he didn’t know what “First-person shooter, action role-playing” meant he could literally just click on it and read the corresponding articles.

If this guy had reviewed J.J. Abrams Titanic , he would have summarized that the characters “spend too much time dry and on land”, that it just wasn’t as exciting as other Action movies coming out soon like Men In Black, and that for an exorbitant ticket price of $4.59 you’d be better off buying Aaron Carter’s new album, Aaron Carter.

See Adam Najberg? That’s how you use Wikipedia.

His review isn’t differing soley on audience and perspective.  It’s one thing to intentionally or even incidentally capture your audience; it takes skill and tact to summarize a complex, large-scale game to a bunch of people that don’t know much about games at all. It’d even be appropriate to tell your audience: “Hey, this game is probably great for your kids or grandkids, but if you’re like me, skip it.” But to just call it “bad” without that explicit qualifier – to actually say the words “it’s worse than Nascar: Unleashed“ - it shows you have no business writing for the WSJ in the first place.

People love this game, they love this franchise, and Gearbox got Borderlands 2 right in every way that really matters. And he completely missed any valid gripe you could have with it. It’s certainly not without fault, nothing is, and there might even be a broader point to make about the genre and the large, casual gamer demographic. But he didn’t make that point at all, he instead reminded us why traditional media outlets are losing ground at rapid pace – unaccredited experts can, for free, provide far more substance and worth to their audiences than purported experts like Adam.

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Pixels? Yes please.

I’ve wasted far too much free-time playing this FTL: Faster Than Light game than one should ever waste. The game is downright addicting. I think what makes it so much fun is how absolutely difficult it can be. The game itself is deceptively simple, but simplicity does not, in this case, equate to ease. It’s harder than any $9.99 game I’ve ever played. Considering I’ve invested a (embarrassing) 31 hours in it already, I can without question say it’s worth 25¢ an hour.

I’ve reviewed some of the mods too – from Star Trek to Starcraft. Many only seek to enhance the experience, adding additional sprites or levels. Some insane members even developed a “Hard” mode (as if “Normal” isn’t damn near impossible). I too seem to be craving additional content, anxiously waiting for a squeal or expansion that at this point is far to early in the game’s release to reasonably expect.

Pretty damn awesome for something essentially created by two guys and one insanely successful Kickstarter program. It’s incredibly encouraging to see such broad support for an indie game like this one, I hope to see more from this team in the very-near future.

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Omega station: A place where things happen

Last Friday BioWare announced “Omega”, reportedly the largest expansion to Mass Effect 3 yet. I read preciesly one paragraph about it before I just had to stop. While I still (and perhaps always will) have a soft spot for this franchise, I simply cannot forget how the thing ends.

I started having what I could only describe as RPG-PTSD: the ending to Mass Effect 3 was terrible. Not simply disagreeable, but a sloppy, half hearted, nonsensical train wreck; one I had the unfortunate opportunity to witness first-hand. And honestly, in that single excruciating 20-minute sequence, it soured the game for me permanently.

While Commander Shepard may have died at the end of that game, it was the horrendous portrayal of his death that truly murdered him. Months ago I reluctantly watched the “extended-cut” endings on YouTube, as I could not justify spending another several hours of the tedious ending levels to view the few minutes of altered footage. It was good I didn’t play it in-game too, because all of those altered cuts, while dramatically more descriptive than the originals, were still pretty awful. If they had been included in the original release, I might have only regarded them as “not that good” – but most of my original complaints remained valid. Every scene leading up to the extended cinematics was unfortunately untouched, and they remained thematically mismatched with the rest of the game up to that point. Certainly not nearly enough ground was made up to change my overall feelings about the conclusion.

The “refusal ending” they added in was the most compelling new option (I actually begged for losing the war to be the real and only end to the series), but it lost all it’s luster two months after my last playthrough. It was also intolerably short, far too quick to be satisfying even if it was part of the original release, less than 90 seconds. Lord of the Rings could have satisfactorily ended in ultimate failure too – but you better believe fans would have been pissed if Tolken ended The Return of The King with a single paragraph:

The orcs saw right through Frodo’s paltry disguise. They skewered him and Samwise, there at the foot of Mt. Doom, plucking the ring from around his neck. Saroun was surely pleased to finally get it back. The End!

At least give us a a full New York Minute to take hold of the loss before rolling credits.

Suffice to say the extended endings did nothing to alleviate my disgust, nor heal my wounds. When the Leviathan DLC was announced back in September I hardly gave it a second glance. I was partway through reading the statement from Producer Michael Gamble, when I saw this:

Mass Effect 3: Leviathan is so exciting for us! It gives us the chance to jump back into Commander Shepard’s story, and to continue exploring some of the themes that are important to the trilogy

I nearly did I spit-take. Seems you didn’t care too much about “exploring the themes” of the trilogy when you wrote a series of endings that had next to nothing to do with any of them. It’s gotta be hard to fire up your fan base on exploring themes when you so casually tossed them in the bin when it came time to end it. Now we’re supposed to once again hop on board the train to Themetown, next stop Omega Station! Toot toot!

To salt the wound, this whole “expansion” – it’s more accurate to just call it missing storyline. Every attentive player noticed the plot hole that was Omega. Suddenly this massive station which was at the heart of Mass Effect 2 is just “occupied”, and the previously formidable Aria is instead chillin’ at a night club like it “ain’t no thing.” It was transparently plucked from the original release as a DLC item. I’m surprised they waited until DLC pack #2. The reported size of the expansion is telling, as it is obviously a large enough sub-plot to have demanded screen time in the original release. Instead, they silently held it hostage and demanded 1200 Microsoft Points ‘or the kid gets it.’ I mean, it’s not even a secret, right from the horse’s mouth:

The missions were originally included in early versions of the game’s script, before being excised (and presumably expanded) for use in a separate DLC pack.

It’s this kind of shit that’s ruining the gaming industry. Instead of taking the time to write and masterfully execute a crucial end to a years-long, three part saga – they cut it off and rush out an ending to make quarterly projections. Instead of enriching experiences through DLC, they gut content from first-round release only to trickle it back to us $15 a pop. They sold us a puzzle and think we’ll want to pay for the missing pieces. That’s just not right, and it’s certainly not winning me back.

As far as I’m concerned, Game Over.

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But as the only posts on this blog that become even modestly popular are the ones where I complain profusely about things, I simply have to put my outrage on paper. Spolier Alert:

The ending to Mass Effect 3 is complete garbage and shut up my opinions are important.

Having just finished Mass Effect 3 this weekend, I definitely have a huge number of complaints with the ending. Even knowing full-well in advance that the ending sucked and with my expectations primed for  supreme disappointment, I was still shocked at how utterly terrible it was.

I had purposefully decided to avoid reading any specific details that would spoil the ending for me, but the sheer volume of press concerning the quality of the ending made it impossible to ignore. I saw the headlines all over, the ending was going to suck. I accepted this. I was ready for it. But I had to see it for myself.

I couldn’t help but imagine, as I worked my way through the missions, what exactly could be so bad in the ending. The rest of the game was so linguistically rich, the only kind of problem I could conceive was that the content of the ending was unsatisfactory. Perhaps that certain characters died, or the ending was too dark. I supposed that two things were likely: Shepard would have to sacrifice himself, and that the endless cycle was inevitable (ie. you end up losing the war). I could imagine that kind of ending might enrage some fans, but honestly I had no real objection to either.

But boy, was I in for a surprise. Firstly, neither of my predictions were too far off. Shepard does have to sacrifice himself. My second prediction was wrong in the specifics, but you don’t particularly “win” the war either, regardless of your choices (since the Mass Relays get destroyed in the process and potentially Earth or all synthetic life in the universe is destroyed). Browsing comments and forms now I actually see a lot of fans outraged by one or both of these plot points. I can’t say either are exactly satisfying conclusions, but that isn’t what makes the end to Mass Effect “bad”.

A lot of people smarter than me have nailed the real problems on the head: that the ending lacks narrative coherence, referring both to the sudden departure from the flow and path the story itself , and to the disconnected and unexpected emotions and responses by the characters in the scene. In a similar thread of reasoning, someone also called the ending options themselves thematically revolting, as none of the three choices left to your character were connected in theme to the entire plot-line that lead up to the ending, and worse they seem to actually contradict a lot of the themes presented earlier in the game entirely.

The major underlying story is that you are trying to stop the Reapers from wiping out all intelligent life in the galaxy. But the story is hardly that thin- a suite of supporting characters and races are critical factors in the success of this mission. Indeed it’s really the journey itself that makes this plot interesting and colorful. You make choices to help certain races and isolate yourself and your allies from others. You spend so much time in-game talking and learning about your crew, potentially even romancing one of them, that they are nothing short of family to your character. This seems to culminate wonderfully right up to the second-to-last level in the game, where you make an impassioned speech about having each others backs.

But the ending itself makes a turn so abruptly from these themes that you can’t believe what plays out in front you. The end itself is devoid of all of these characters. Despite their purported criticality, they are 99% absent from the entire last part of the game. Worse some of the characters closest to you presumably die in a mad last rush. I emphasize the word presumably because absolutely no time is given to their deaths whatsoever. If you happen to have your Love Interest with you on the battlefield, you get to limp awkwardly over their corpse for about 3 seconds and that’s it. Your character doesn’t bat an eye. It’s the first thing that really bugged me. For a full half hour before this part, there were speeches, goodbyes, then after another twenty minutes of battle they just croak without a second thought.

It was jarring, to say the least, and thematically disjointed from the entire rest of the game. It was also only the very beging of the downward spiral.

Next you know you’re beamed up to the Citadel and get to walk at a frustrating snails pace for several minutes, only to find The Illusive Man has taken control of your body and that of your comrade. He begins making a big dramatic speech about controlling the Reapers being the only way to advance humanity, even makes you shoot your friend – but instead of a big climactic fight, you either get to click the right-mouse and kill him immediately, or your speech skill is high enough he eventually kills himself. That’s it. A good half of the entire last game was about this guy, and he’s given no more than 4 minutes of screen time and just dies with a single boring shot. Frankly if they weren’t going to bother wrapping up his storyline in an interesting, meaningful fashion then they shouldn’t have put so much emphasis on attempting to defeat him the entire rest of the game.

So bad guy #1 goes down like a limp fish, and you go back to defeating bad guy #2, the Reapers. Theres a big beautiful scene of the Crusible docking, and then the narrative madness starts.

You zip up a platform to the roof of the Citadel, and the ghost of a child walks up to you. I audibly sighed to myself right then and there. The child immediately gave me an Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom menace sort of feel. So Star Child starts delivering plot points via clunky dialog at an alarming rate. My character gets to respond with the most awkward set of dialog choices, none of which make any sense whatsoever. The kid says that apparently he’s here to make sure robots and humans don’t kill each other, a theme made no sense in this story at all (hell I just saved the robotic Geth from destruction a few hours ago, and on top of that it’s the Reapers that seem to kill everyone all the time, and their organic…) and in my mind seemed needlessly ripped off from Battlestar.

Star Child then starts to describe my options. The options themselves are so difficult for this kid to describe each one takes a paragraph of dialog and they even have to show an example of your character doing them so you don’t get confused. You ever had a child try to explain a complicated board game game to you? It was exactly like that. The kid starts to blab about the choices:

“If you touch the blue thingy you’ll be able to control the Reapers. Oh also that will kill you . Because it’s really blue, it’ll blue you to death. You see how sparky that thing is, Shep? It’s definitely going to kill you. Painfully. Oh but you can save Earth and it destroys the Mass Relays. Essentially isolating all the races in the galaxy and undoing all you did to bring them all together in the last three Mass Effect titles, but you know, Earth rules!”

Hmm, I wonder, isn’t this option exactly what the crazy crazy Illusive Man was going to do? Man, do I feel silly for killing him now! So, in my mind I’m thinking .. OK, blue option has got to be the bad one because I just killed a guy to prevent this exact option from happening. I literally screamed at this man that no human had the right to take control of the Reapers, to we we’re ready as a species, and then shot him to end the debate. So, I say to myself — we’re not going the Blue option. So, what’s next kid?

“Ok, so option 2: If you shoot that red conduit over there, it’ll explode in your face, and like — kill you. With fire. But the Reapers will all die and you’ll accomplish exactly what you set out to do, with nearly almost no other negative side-affects whatsoever. Oh except it’ll kill the Geth and EDI and like — ALL of the synthetic life in the galaxy. All of it. Everywhere. Like, robo-genocide. Also it’ll probably ruin your iPhone.”

Oh wow. THAT’S option #2? That sounds pretty awful. I actually have to wipe out several entire races to destroy the Reapers? That option is so shitty it actually makes the crazy Illusive Man’s ideas seem sane. Also wait — this immediately confuses me because presumably the Reapers kill intellegent life to keep us from fighting with the robots we always end up creating — but that can’t be true. I literally hours ago just saved an entire race of robots who sacrificed their own lives to help me get here, on the Citadel. And now you’re telling me that I have to kill them all to save us from the Reapers who kill us … to keep us … from killing each other.

WHAT?!? This make no sense logically whatsoever. The fact that the Geth were visibly fighting in the space above my character right now, against our shared enemy — completely contradicted Star Child’s theory that we always end up killing each other and will never be friends.

But OK, the kid stops talking and I am supposedly left with Door #1 or Door #2, both of which seem utterly terrible, bizarre choices. Torn and confused, I decide sacrificing the Geth was better than leaving the Reapers alive, so I took that route and thought they’d be the inevitable casualties of this war. Tears and all.

BUT NO. This option seems to literally vaporize the surface of the Earth, and destroys the Normandy. And the last scene I see is the ship’s wreckage and … a door opening slightly. And star-wipe, roll credits.

My face is just blank at this point. I have no words for the train wreak that just unfolded in front of me. It was like watching a play where everyone forgot their lines, ab-libbed the last 5 minutes, then part of the set caught fire and fell into the audience. It was shockingly dreadful.

I figured I “picked wrong”. There is no way Blue Door could be so terrible as Red Door. So I loaded an earlier save to check out the other option, suffered through the limping scene, the Illusive Man’s terrible Bond-esque monologue that you can’t skip. I let the Star Child barf words at me, and picked the Blue Door.

WHAT THE HELL!?

It’s exactly the same, except blue, and apparently BLUE doesn’t kill everyone on Earth, because you know — BLUE! I was so stupefied that I actually started to laugh. The rest of it happened the same, ship crash, door ajar.

Apparently you can also take neither path and go up the middle, perhaps I’m just profoundly stupid or perhaps the Star Child’s horrendous dialog just dulled my mind, but I didn’t notice that was possible at all. Forgive me for thinking a game that previously gave me two choices for literally EVERY line of dialog (which are also always red vs. blue) actually had a third option all of a sudden. Apparently this choice is some “synthesis” where you make robots and organics fall in love or some trashy shit. This one is GLORIOUSLY GREEN and otherwise exactly the same.

It is all just so bad I literally had to write about it. Even though thousands have written about this before, I am so emotionally scarred by this experience that I had to put it all out on paper therapeutically.

So apparently the word is the “New Ending” content to be realsed this summer is going to “clarify” and expand on what happened in the end. But honestly none of those three options make any sense, even if they were explained far more eloquently, even if the scenes after the choice were more expansive or more unique — none of them make any sense at all. The choices presented are thematically flawed and no amount of downloadable-caulk and seal the gaps. Perhaps if it were delivered more masterfully in the first place my white-hot rage would only be a fiery-red, but it makes no real difference. All three options leave some pretty big plot holes and inconsistencies I can’t ignore, regardless of the quality on which they are served:

• Red (Destroy all synthetic life) — Genocide shouldn’t even be presented if you’ve gone Paragon. It’s a waste of time to present it as an option if you’ve made peace with the Geth. Choosing it under these circumstances is like choosing to drive your own car, filled with your own family, off of a cliff to just kill a wasp on your dashboard.
• Green (Synthesis) — Ok, so Star Child one minute ago said organics have “come a long way”, that just being in the Star Kids presence proved this since no one had ever done it in thousands and thousands of years. And just hours ago we proved that man and machine already can make peace, there’s an entire plot line that shows you that the Geth (and by extension, all synthetic life) are two sides of the same coin, that both share the same desires to live and be free and grow and evolve.  This choice seems to suggest that the real purpose to life is a Borg perfectionist synthesis of both forms when you just proved (and fought and died for) the independent strength of each independent form.
• Blue (Take control of the Geth) — Even if you’ve gone Renegade the entire game, you just killed the Illusive Man for thinking that was a good option. Choosing this is like telling someone not to touch that pot on the stove barehanded because it’s hot, then immediately  afterwords bear-hugging the pot yourself, with both arms and no shirt on. I don’t understand why you’d shoot a man for his ideals one minute and then adopt those ideals yourself two minutes later.

So really if all we end up getting are more supporting scenes to clarify the last few minutes of storyline, it won’t make much of a difference. I’ve seen a lot about the so-called “Indoctrination Theory”, that the ending actually isn’t what it seems at all, that Shepard is undergoing Reaper “Indoctrination” and supposedly this explains the myriad of inconsistencies and odd choices left to users at the end. I’ve watched the video on this and it is very interesting indeed:

But I also noticed that the theory is has some gaping holes. Parts of it make a lot of sense, the ghostly trees, the convenient level design. Some of it simply fit nicely — like the Illusive Man’s monologue. But a lot of it is a stretch. The video has to explain the last three choices as odd “symbols” brought about by your indoctrination — but it seems overtly complicated at this point. It seems to me occams razor cuts pretty deeply here.

Even if these guys are right about Indoctrination Theory, it was delivered to us all so inexcusably poorly I could never accept it was true.

It’s one thing to be craftily cryptic, to obscure the truth and then surprise your audience with the “twist”. But if the truth of your story is so hazy that only conspiracy theorists can see it, you did a really bad job with the delivery. This is a twist so thinly presented even M. Night Shyamalan would never have made it.

For this theory to work, Bioware really had to do what he Indoctrination video itself did — interlace the hidden truths with blatant exposition. If it were done right, it would have started ambiguously so only the careful would be able to spot it early. You leave clues like the trees and grass on the ground, the level design, stuff only a few would get outright, but then start to slowly show your hand. Perhaps make the dialog from the Illusive Man scene a little more to the point, and use the medium (video) to lead us down the path you’re intending: if you won’t tell us the truth, use sound and sight to visually explain that what your viewing in the game isn’t real, that your character is being indoctrinated.

When you make your choice of explosion color, if you don’t explicitly reveal the truth to us at this point, no one is going to get whats going on. Storytelling isn’t supposed to be like finding a needle in a haystack. Tell us the damn story at some point. Dropping a couple of hints is a crafty start, to get us interested in what’s going on, but at some point you have to tell us: did we “choose wrong” and get indoctrinated? Or did we “choose right” and kill the Reapers? The game shows us absolutely nothing — all we see is that we picked one of three colors for our explosion scene and the game ends.

So while Indoctrination helps make sense of the chaotic crap that was presented to us as “the ending”, the fact that (if true) it was told so appallingly that I actually hope it’s nothing more than conspiracy theory. If Bioware releases DLC that proves the conspiracy theorists right, it will feel at best like a convenient cop out. In my mind, they fucked up so badly at this point no downloaded explanation could iron it out besides a total effective re-write.

You already burnt the toast, spreading jelly on it won’t make it taste better.

Oh, and I almost forgot. After the credits, there is the most atrocious scene of them all. It contains a repugnant trifecta: lame voice acting, juvenile animation and modeling (note the child is just a shrunken copy-paste of the adult), and  Stephanie Meyer-caliber writing. Watch the clip below, but make sure your barf bag is handy:

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I recently procured the latest MacBook Pro (2011). And to be blunt, it has a lot of problems. More problems than I’ve had with a laptop of theirs before. Both hardware and software. I’ve been reasonably satisfied with it’s speed, but there’s some serious crazy in this thing.

It started with narcolepsy.

No, it really did, I’m not joking. The damn thing would fall asleep all the time and simply not wake back up. It would act like it was trying to come out of it’s coma, but usually the screen would stay black even if the computer was “on”. Worse, force restarting it didn’t usually work. It acted like it tried to restore to the exact state before it fell asleep, but that state just lead it to go black again. It’d sometimes take dubious quick force-shutdowns in rapid sequence to snap it out of it. I finally discovered that frequently hitting the “dim” button (not the “get brighter” button) actually could get the screen to come back alive (sometimes, maybe). Truly annoying.

It also seems to now require you type in two passwords when you wake from a hard sleep, once to wake up the computer, and once to re-launch everything. It’d likely bother me less if it didn’t fall into hard sleep so often. But now just trying to quickly check email might take 4 or 5 minutes. It’s pretty ridiculous.

But the final straw wasn’t a sleeping problem. It’s the damn Thunderbolt port. The thing is a complete piece of crap. It’s got a long feature list for sure, but realistically one of the most important functions for this port (in fact the only function I’ve ever needed it for) is to plug in an external monitor. With no explanation or reason, it decides not to detect an attached monitor. It happens sporadically, working one day on a particular projector, then failing the next. Some monitors just seem outright incompatible. I’ve got a nice 23″ Sceptre that my MacBook is sure doesn’t exist. I can connect it up and click “Detect Displays” until I’m blue in the face.

I’ve tried not two but four different adapters. All of them different brand and one HDMI. And several DVI and HDMI cords. It’s not the cords. It’s also not this poor monitor’s fault — both of my older MacBook and PowerBooks detect it immediately and without issue. It’s this damn port. How can I be so sure? They’ve released three updates to fix this and very similar display issues already. And I’m also not the only one stuck with this problem. Apple Discussions, as well as many other forum communities, are filled with hundreds of people at their wits end with Thunderbolt and their display/TV/projector/hard drive.

The only option left to me is dropping $200+ on a new monitor. But who knows if the one I pick out happens to be “just incompatible” too.

Mac OS X “Lion” seems all too apt a  big cat name to me. It’s as if this particular version has comfortably settled in as The King of The Jungle: basking too long in the shade, issuing orders with four-finger swipes, gorging itself on the intermediate states of every lowly application. Nearly every new feature has an curiously arrogant feel to it .

It dumbs down the application launching process until it’s just a refrigerator with pictures on it. As if the Dock, Spotlight, Finder, and the Desktop weren’t enough to turn on Mail. Every accidental gesture on the trackpad sends you whizzing through your browser history, pinching and zooming every map that graces your cursor.  It creates a full unabridged history of every document’s evolution over time; so I can finally sift through an unimaginable pile of “versions” to pluck out that witty comment I deleted 17 days ago. It like an episode of Hoaders: Mac OS X edition, hundreds of piles of moldy old copies I keep on hand “just in case” and because “one day I’ll use it”.

To top it all of, it crams everything up in the iCloud and sends you off to the Mac App Store to buy yet another addition of Angry Birds.

Oh, and I intended the Angry Birds reference to be just a joke, but out of curiosity I opened the App Store just to see if ….

Sigh.

You sold out, man.

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Indeed in many circumstances keeping it wide open is the best thing to do, since opening and closing a session file will require disk access (unless session is configured in non-default manners, and stored in a database) and disk access is slow. If your web application does not rely much on asynchronous calls, but on full page reloads, then it’s easy enough to go with the flow: open your session and close it at the end of thread execution. But this is the year 2012, if you’re website can’t support at least some level of AJAX I’m not sure you’re doing it right.

If your application even runs a few things at the same time, you could benefit greatly from keeping sessions closed until they are explicitly required. Essentially, if you keep the session open, no asynchronous threads can grab onto the session file until the first thread completes. Asynchronous calls become quietly sequenced (which is pretty bad) and can dramatically increase overall load times.

Here’s an example of the problem, using Prototype on the client side to run to two supposedly asynchronous calls at the same time:

<?php

session_start();

if($_REQUEST['function'] == 'foo'){

sleep(5); // wait for 5 seconds

echo 'foo';

}
else if($_REQUEST['function'] == 'bar'){

echo 'bar';

}

if(empty($_REQUEST['function'])){
?>
<script type="text/javascript" src="protoculous.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">

new Ajax.Request('?function=foo');

new Ajax.Request('?function=bar'); 

</script>

<?php
}

session_write_close();

?>

The result: Firebug shows us that even though the bar function should be pretty instant (since it doesn’t sleep like foo), it waited the entire 5 seconds for foo to finish:

Bar took 5.02 seconds!

The culprit is the first line, “session_start()”. What’s happening here is this:

1. A request with function ‘foo’ begins a new execution thread (we’ll call it “Foo Thread”)
2. Foo Thread calls session_start(). This opens the user’s session file for reading and writing, and locks the file
3. A request with the function ‘bar’ begins a new execution thread (call it “Bar Thread”)
4. Bar thread calls session_start(), but the file is currently locked by Foo Thread. Bar Thread now has to wait until Foo unlocks the file
5. Foo Thread finishes sleeping, and ends execution. PHP automatically calls session_write_close() when the thread is complete
6. Bar can now open the session file, quickly echo’s “bar” and exits

The easiest way to solve this is to keep the session closed until you need to write to it. At the most basic level, do this:

// Initialize the $_SESSION array:

session_start();

// Now close it so the session file becomes un-locked:

session_write_close();

There are obvious problems that may arise with this approach, however, so I would not recommend closing the session wildly. Essentially, if anyone ever changes $_SESSION paramaters without first re-opening session by calling session_start, the change is lost when the thread ends execution. Calling session_start after making a change removes that change. I suspect this is the main reason most people leave it open all the time – managing opening and closing it over and over isn’t at all practical.

There is also the possibility that your copy of $_SESSION could become out of date, as an asynchronous thread updates values in the session file your on-hand $_SESSION array doesn’t know about. It won’t be updated again until session_start is called, which could potentially be problematic if your code relies on the absolute, most recent state of session for critical functions. Realistically many applications simply won’t find this limitation all that daunting, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.

But these two problems alone shouldn’t deter you. The execution time saved can be tremendous, and there is a deceptively clean way to properly manage your session in a large application: don’t ever call $_SESSION directly. Create your own class to mange $_SESSION, or use a framework like Zend Session to manage it for you (but note, Zend Session doesn’t close the connection automatically either, you’ll have to use a wrapper class to trigger that automatically).

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Ever since I (very happily) dropped their exceptionally overpriced cable service, I’ve fallen back on Netflix and Hulu for complete replacement of their services. For free.

My personal proof-of-concept has convinced coworkers and friends alike to join me. It’s just hilarious that they charge $150+ a month for content available for free on the internet, and with either no ads at all or far fewer than on TV.

The problem is that I am forced to get Comcast to provide my internet. There literally is no alternative in my area (Qwest’s DSL is far to slow). So even though Netflix and Hulu are amazing services, they are funneled through the tiny pipe that is Comcast’s bandwidth.

I am currently watching Netflix buffer, I’ve been waiting so long for it just to start playing that I decided to write this blog post in the meantime. I thought I could make a list of the things I did while waiting for Comcast to buffer:

• Write this blog post
• Make cheesy chicken enchiladas
• Enjoy a wine tasting
• Review pictures of your roommate’s trip to Chicago
• Finish some after-hours work
• Balance my checkbook
• Make a grocery list
• Make some late night bacon

I’d write more, but in the 25 minutes it took to write this crap the video loaded so I might as well watch it.

Related posts:

1. Comcast Now 51% More Evil
2. Comcast Screws Me YET AGAIN

I know it sounds implausible that the base code for all web browsers (ie. the internets) can’t do basic math. But I’ll prove it too you. Open up your “Error Console” (Firefox’s Tools->Error Console) and type the following basic math, followed by enter:

1.519+0.075

The Result:

Yep, according to Javascript, 1.519+0.0750 = 1.593999999999 (for all the math wizards out there, the correct answer is just 1.594).

I don’t want to hear those “Javascript Apologetics” out there blame something else, like the ways floating point numbers are calculated or that it’s the browser or whatever — if I were to design a programming language of any quality at all, Requirement #1 would be “can do basic math.” This imperfect result is in no way useful to me. I can’t even round it back to the right number reliably since the fractional inaccuracy isn’t consistent.

There is a solution, albeit an asinine one (since you really, really, really should NOT have to deal with this in the first place) but if you convert the number to a pure integer, do the math, and then convert it back to a decimal, then it all comes out mathematically correct.

Observe, the solution:

There we go! We now skirt the whole floating-point error issue by using whole number arithmetic! It’s just that easy! Call now, and you all receive subtraction AND multiplication at no additional charge!

That is all. </rant>

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