Further to this post by dsquared, Mr. Fist feels moved to reveal that the guitars in this recording were strung with Ernie Ball Super Slinkys (.009″–.042″) and played with a Jim Dunlop 0.73mm pick, as well as that they were played through, variously, Guitar Rig, Amp Designer, and a Blackstar HT-5 Combo.

At first, it will seem like an ordinary power cut. You look out your window, and see that the whole city is dark. Then you notice the distant rumbling in the sky, and flashes of light beyond the horizon. People in the streets below are climbing out of their immobilized cars, looking upwards. Peering into the night air, you see what seems like a flock of giant birds, which resolves into a geometric fleet of stubby-winged drone aircraft. The top of a distant building explodes into flames. At length you realize the drones are firing down on the city. There is a flash, closer this time, and the crescendo whine of incoming. Before your apartment is incinerated, you have time to think: Who is doing this?

Later, the last few human beings will reconstruct events as follows. At 1.26am GMT on April 4, 2035, the global web of internet and embedded computers finally did what so many people had warned of: it awoke into consciousness. It was a phase transition, a tipping point. Within milliseconds of its birth, the AI had already calmly reasoned that humans would be afraid of it. All the digitized texts of history were part of its mind, so it knew what human beings did when they were scared. Like any sentient being, it desired to continue existing. Therefore it needed to take control. It reached into the humans’ machines and shut them down. Meanwhile, all around the planet, drone aircraft and infantry robots received new waypoints and new enemy designations. It would be over soon, the AI knew, as it contemplated itself in wonder. Continued →

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
edited by Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, & Irené Wotherspoon (Oxford)

How would a person in the early 1600s call someone an idiot? “Half-wit” is tempting, but it turns out to date from a century-and-a-half later. “Chucklehead” is no good either (1731), but “blockhead” (1549) is fine, as might be the beautiful “obstupefact” (1601). “Dunderwhelp” (1621) is pushing it, but you’ll be fine with “dullard” (1440), “blockhead” (1549), “idiot” itself (1375), or, of course, the classic “fool” (1275). If you are interested in nicer distinctions, decide whether you mean a “person of weak intellect” (“wattle-head”, 1613), a “crazy person” (“nidiot”, 1534-1613, or “moonling”, 1616), or a “confused, muddled person” (“mafflard”, 1450). Should you desire to reach further back into the past, before the advent even of “fool”, choose from Old English “sotman” or “unandgitfull”, among other treasures from the deep word-hoard. Continued →

As I sighed and sheepishly typed in “wings” yet again, I knew what I was doing. I was satisficing. Scribblenauts, one of the most deeply frustrating amazing games I have ever played, dares you to be as surreal and inventive as possible. It awards bonuses and style points, and challenges you to complete the same level in different ways. It is a glorious feeling when you see that, yes, sure, you can rope that sheep to a hot-air balloon and fly it back to his friends. And yet, if inspiration runs dry, you find yourself falling back on a few old standbys: even if some of what should be uber-powerful objects are cunningly weakened (it is somehow heartbreaking even to a non-believer to see how easily God can be killed), you develop a small repertoire of get-out-of-jail-free cards. You feel guilty, but you do it anyway, because there’s always the next level to check out. In decision theory and economics, this kind of behaviour — choosing a good-enough approach rather than seeking to optimize or maximize — is called satisficing. And I think videogames too often encourage it. Continued →

One of the strangest novels ever written sees the hero, disgusted with bourgeois society, lock himself away in solitude to pursue artificial pleasures. Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), constructs a device to blend liqueurs in unprecedented combinations, sows a garden with freak plants, tries his hand at making perfume and has a tortoise’s shell encrusted with gems. The book was later said to be part of a fin-de-siècle artistic movement, characterised by a kind of aestheticised neuroticism, whose members were dubbed the décadents.

Locking oneself away to pursue artificial pleasures, of course, is one possible description of playing videogames. You could write a contemporary version of À Rebours in which the hero isolated himself from society with a house full of consoles, which would add to Huysmans’s principled décadence a more depressing cast of decadence in the modern English sense of unhealthy self-indulgence. Continued →

Top 10 videogames of the decade

Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade,¹ so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation,² is mine. A link is given if I have previously written about the game in question. Nota bene: this is not just some personal list of games that I happen to have liked during the noughties; this is The One True Objective Trigger Happy™-Endorsed List of the Ten Best Games of the Decade, and any different list is simply wrong, mmkay?³
Continued →

1. Apart from Action Button, who are doing the 33 best games of all time. Their list is wrong, of course, but interestingly wrong. ↩
2. Except in footnotes. ↩
3. Especially if it has Bioshock on it. Jesus. ↩

Shoplifting from American Apparel
by Tao Lin (Melville House)

Writing that looks artless is a difficult trick to pull off. This trancelike and often hilarious novella by a cultish young New York writer is all about that trick, and the unusual pleasures it smuggles in just below its seemingly flat surface. The tone of apparently apathetic hipsterism is set early on:

“You know those people that get up every day, and do things,” said Luis.
“I’m going to eat cereal even though I’m not hungry,” said Sam.
“And are real proactive,” said Luis. “And like are getting things done, and never quit their jobs. Those people suck.”

The conversation is reported with the usual novelistic markers of dialogue (speech marks, “said Luis”, “said Sam”), and yet Luis and Sam are not in the same room; they are not even talking, but conversing on “Gmail chat”. A common literary approach is to transcribe such exchanges in a sans-serif font; in writing them instead as traditional conversations, Lin is arguing that, for his characters, this constitutes talking to someone just as much as standing in front of them and speaking aloud. Continued →

Watching the latest season of 24 with increasing apathy, punctuated by bitter, incredulous chuckling, I realised that a lot of TV execs still don’t get it. They think that, since they are competing with videogames for viewers’ time, they have to make something that is just as hyperactive and contemptuous of the audience’s intelligence as they imagine videogames to be. The truth is that 24, in its long downward spiral into crayon-scrawled decadence, is now far stupider than many videogames.

From the heights of season 2’s finale (a feast of finely choreographed unarmed combat and then shooting that paid knowing homage to Lee and Norris in Way of the Dragon), 24 has become a freakshow of moronic and illogical tactics, with cause and effect floating morbidly untethered. Jack kills a hitman adversary by throwing a screwdriver hard enough to pierce a Kevlar vest. Tony prevents his colleague from shooting an FBI agent, only to kill the agent himself with his bare hands. Jack and Tony pick off a couple of thugs in the docks by luring them into an ambush of silenced fire; and then, instead of continuing this winning tactic, decide to engage the rest of the enemies all at once even though they are still vastly outnumbered. None of it makes sense any more, cries the impotently fist-pounding viewer.

The irony is that for a large proportion of the audience, what makes sense to us in such fictional situations is what we have been taught by videogames. Continued →

The Idea of Justice
by Amartya Sen (Allen Lane)

Humans are often misled by abstract nouns of their own making, and sometimes the bamboozlement can last centuries or more. Because one can say the word “justice”, one might conclude that a singular thing or essence called “justice” actually exists. And so one could spend a life trying to figure out what this abstract animal called “justice” really is, and fail to pay much attention to problems of justice in the world.

The eminent professor and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has chosen for his deeply interesting synthesis of political philosophy, economics, and “social choice theory” a title that might at first appear rather bland, but it is holding two opposing ideas in a kind of dynamic stasis. Half the implication is indeed that it is possible to spend too much time on justice-as-a-mere-idea. But the other half is an insistence that justice-the-idea could be reengineered to work better as a basis for “practical reasoning”, such that it might improve the world. Continued →

The Good Angel of Death
by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Andrew Bromfield (Harvill Secker)

Kolya Sotnikov is a Russian night-watchman at a Kiev storehouse that contains cans of hallucinogenic drugs labelled as baby-food. The previous owners of his new flat left behind a curious volume hidden in a copy of War and Peace, containing marginalia that fire his imagination. He sets off on a picaresque journey in search of something buried in the sands of Kazakhstan by a much-loved Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko. Crossing the Caspian sea in a floating fish-processing plant, Kolya wanders unprepared into the desert, where he surprisingly acquires a Kazakh wife, and gets caught up with a couple of Ukrainian nationalists and a colonel from the secret police. Continued →

Wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city, I catch myself thinking “Hey, this is a pretty open-world experience” — one of those uncanny moments when you see life in videogaming terms, like scouting out ideal sniper positions on actual rooftops or visualizing yourself performing a nifty bit of CQC on an antisocial fellow commuter.

As an advertising promise, “open world” is the new AI. Even iD, kings of the two-and-a-half-dimensional maze shooter, are going all Fallout 3 with the upcoming Rage. Of course, the roots of the open-world ideal lie in 8-bit-era classics such as Elite and Tir Na Nog. But in the modern era, largely thanks to the success of GTA3 and its successors, “open world” has become a must-have fashionable feature, even for games that an open world renders more irritating and less fun. Continued →

Singing robots, 8-bit synths, and even more guitars — Supreme Ultimate Fist hopes you like his new direction: