Words & things I've learned from MTG

I would've never thought that Magic: The Gathering was an educational game. Yet I've learned quite a few words & other things, mostly from card names or subtypes. I thought these were all just made up when I first saw them. The words all link to the definition/article on Mirriam-Webster or wikipedia:

Homunculus
a miniature adult that in the theory of preformation is held to inhabit the germ cell and to produce a mature individual merely by an increase in size

Autochthon
indigenous, native
formed or originating in the place where found

Vis
Force, power

Ornithopter
an aircraft designed to derive its chief support and propulsion from flapping wings

Fulgent
dazzlingly bright

Abjure
1
a : to renounce upon oath
b : to reject solemnly
2 to abstain from

Cenobite
a member of a religious group living together in a monastic community

Artificer
a skilled or artistic worker or craftsman

Aurochs
an extinct large long-horned wild ox (Bos primigenius) of Europe that is the ancestor of domestic cattle

Cockatrice
a legendary serpent that is hatched by a reptile from a cock's egg and that has a deadly glance

Selkie
Selkies (also known as silkies or selchies) are mythological shapeshifting creatures that are found in Faroese, Icelandic, Irish, and Scottish folklore.

Shinen (This links to a really interesting article that will help you understand Kamigawa!)
The term shinen is a combination of shin ("spirit") and en ("flame"). This should not be confused with the word for "thought" (shi + nen).

Augury
divination from auspices or omens

A study of lyrics on the Internet

I sometimes like to sing along with the ipod/radio when I'm driving. It helps to know the lyrics, but this can be tricky when the lyrics are in another language or being sung by a non-native English speaker, as much of the music I like is. Therefore I often have to look up lyrics online.

There's an old Eurodance song I've loved since the first time I heard it back in '94, "King Pharao" by the group, Pharao. The lead singer is (apparently) from Cairo, Egypt, and the CD (yes, I have the legitimate CD!) didn't have any lyrics in it.

Now I realize that for most EuroDance songs the lyrics are meaningless. EuroDance was basically invented for dance clubs and it's not trying to promote some deep message other than peace & love.

With that said, the lyrics for this song, "King Pharao" have perplexed me. It's such a catchy song I can't help but sing along, but without knowing the lyrics it's frustrating. When I learned that there were websites with song lyrics back in the mid-90's this was one of the first ones I searched for. If you do a search on them now this is what you usually find (this one is from http://www.metrolyrics.com/king-pharao-lyrics-pharao.html):

They called him... Pharao... Pharao
Nanana nana nanana nanananana...
Pharao...

Thousands of years, he's living inside of my mind
Love... star to mine
He was a man, at the...... over their lives
Pharao
Da da da da aha da (Pharao)
Da da da da aha da (Pharao)

Loved and adored


An Egyptian prince is born, where the life goes
Loved and adored
They called him King, they called him the Pharao


The Pharao

If you get out, I need someone to believe
Last thing to achieve
Live in a world, for you just got to believe
That is true


Da da da da aha da (Pharao)
Da da da da aha da (Pharao)

The Pharao...
They called him the Pharao

If you listen to the song and you're a native English speaker you'll notice that this is almost completely wrong. I played the song through at normal speed and again at 55-70% of normal speed and listened carefully and this is what I found:

They called him...

Pharao

Pharao

Pharao

(2x)
na na na naaa
na na
na na na naaa
na na na na

Pharao

(2x)
na na na naaa
na na
na na na naaa
na na na na

verse 1
Three thousand years (Thousands of years?)
he's livin' inside of my mind
memories start to unwind
he is the man with the power all over their lives

Pharao

Fata morgana (Pharao)

Fata morgana

(Chrous)
long time ago
an Egyptian prince was born where the Nile flows
long time ago
they crowned him king and call him the Pharao

The Pharao

(2x)
na na na naaa
na na
na na na naaa
na na na na

verse 2
If you go doubt power me ?????
to want to believe
less the thing (to think?) to achieve
and in the world followed (full of love?)
They just believe
that it's true

Fata morgana (Pharao)

Fata morgana (Pharao)

(2x)
Chorus

The first verse and the chorus really aren't hard, but I have no flippin' idea what she's saying in the second verse. It just doesn't make any sense. Usually you can try to figure it out from context, but the first, third, and 4th lines are so
incomprehensible I can't even put it in context enough to understand. :)

Incidentally, "fata morgana" means "mirage", and it comes from the Italian name of Morgan le Fay of King Arthur fame.

Stupid corporations

Once upon a time there was a company called Chili!Soft. Founded in 1997, their goal was to bring the ease of ASP development to Apache/Unix/Linux. On December 7, 2000, they were bought by Sun Microsystems, which proceeded to cease development a few years later. If you go to the Chili!Soft page now, you see a message that it has "reached it's end of life" and you can't even buy it.

Why?

Why did they let it die? Why don't they at least release it as open source so others can continue development on it? ASP/VBScript is still by far the easiest and fastest website development system ever made. What a waste.

Once upon a time there was a company called FASA. They made Battletech, Crimson Skies, and several other other games. They decided they wanted to make computer games, and began finding developers to make Mechwarrior games. The first 2 games were made by Activision (1989/DOS, 1995/DOS & Windows), the 3rd by Microprose (1999), and everything was great.

But then they decided to partner with Micro$oft for Mechwarrior 4/Mercenaries in 2000, and sold themselves to M$, and it was all over. M$ then ended the Mechwarrior games in 2002 and stopped development of everything they got from FASA.

Why?

They took an IP that had over 20 years of history including miniature tabletop games, a huge selection of novels written by some of the most well-known sci fi authors, and the previous computer games, and they put it on the shelf with no intention of doing anything with it again. WHY?

They had massive amounts of material to draw from. Computer graphics were making massive improvements & they had a huge fan base. I imagine that since it was M$ it all came down to money. But why did they buy FASA? Did they intend to just shut them down from the beginning? Why buy something if you're not going to use it? It makes no sense.

Thank goodness Jordan Weisman, founder of FASA, worked it out so he would get the IP from FASA back! After he recently left M$ he started a new company called Smith & Tinker and is getting the rights to Mechwarrior/Battletech back! They're making a new Mechwarrior game!

economics 101

I cringe whenever I hear people say that athletes or actors or whatever are "overpayed." This is said by people who have no understanding of the most basic parts of economics or capitalism, or are socialist/communist.



Ok, so there is a company/organization called, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers. They sell products. They also have media contracts. Sports teams and leagues negotiate each year with local, cable, and TV networks to carry their games. Local TV contracts can be up to $100 million or more depending on the market, and national league contracts are in the billions. Teams also generate millions in revenue from sales of hats, shirts, DVDs, and hosts of other things.



Where does this money come from? YOU. When you watch a game or buy something with a team's logo on it you are giving your money to the team. They then pay their players from the money pie and the pie is very large. The money doesn't magically come out of thin air or from the government (at least not yet). The players are rich because you made them that way by spending billions on memorabilia and hats. You demanded entertainment, they supplied. Supply & demand - capitalism at is most basic level. If you don't want them to be rich, stop buying their products. Otherwise, you really don't have a right to complain.

Magic: The Gathering

In February, 2008, my friend Bert taught me how to play Magic: The Gathering. I had heard of MTG over the years, but I never had any interest in it. I had never played any kind of collectible game of any type before. It took me a LONG time (months) to understand what was going on, but I now have a pretty good grasp of the rules and even some of the more advanced stuff due to the awesome FAQ's on the MTG forums. A card game with a 150-page complete manual is kind of daunting.

I never thought I'd have any interest in a card game, especially this one. But my interest was sparked not too long before Bert taught me at one of our Gamenights. A bunch of people were having an MTG tournament and it looked kinda fun. Of course, at the time I had no idea what they were doing.

Bert taught me how to play using his recently-purchased Elves vs. Goblins Duel Deck. I remember using the Goblins the first few games and how I instantly loved the Raging Goblin. His flavor text says, "He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mostly he just raged." There were other goblin cards with funny sayings. But the mechanics of the game - tapping land for mana, and using the mana to cast spells - were really interesting to me. I loved how modular everything was and how you could make a deck using any combination of cards and employ different strategies. I also liked how amazingly balanced the 5 colors are and how each color has a distinct strategy for winning.

I soon bought my first preconstructed deck, "Warrior's Code" from Morningtide. It was a pretty awesome deck, and I was starting to get hooked. I then started buying more cards and more preconstructed decks, and eventually I got all 4 of the Morningtide decks, the 10th Edition Core Preconstructed decks, and other cards. I was getting a lot of cards, but not the right cards. Many cards I would only have 1 of, but to be effective in a deck >1 were required.

In late 08, early 09 I taught my then-girlfriend (now wife) how to play and she was really good. Having played Neopets before, she had an easier time understanding what was going on. She & I would play on weekends and sometimes during the week. Those times really helped us bond and have a lot of fun.

I really like a lot of things about the game, but one thing I struggle with a little is the theme. I was raised as a Baptist and taught that stuff like D&D and most fantasy was of the devil. Some of the MTG cards, especially the black cards, have demonic imagery, and I have some issues with playing those cards.

I then remind myself how pretty much every Christian loves CS Lewis. His most famous series, the Chronicles of Narnia, features mythical (fantasy) creatures, witches, magic, etc. I don't think it's wrong to play a game like MTG, because I concentrate more on the mechanics of the cards and making fun & interesting decks than delving into the theme of the game.

Some say that games like D&D and MTG are "gateway drugs" into Satanism, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I don't think little kids or immature teenagers should play those kinds of games because they do feature some adult themes. Someone who struggles with satanism or the occult shouldn't play a game like this. But if you understand that it's just a game and you play for fun I don't see a problem with it.

MTG is a great game and you should check it out.

MTG official site

Recursion makes my brain hurt

Recursion.

It's a simple programming principle: a function repeatedly calls itself until some condition is met. Tree views, such as folder paths, rely on recursion. With a folder tree, you start at the root folder and scan for subfolders. Then you scan through each subfolder and it's subfolders until you've scanned everything to get the entire folder tree. As you can imagine, it's pretty daunting at first.

Another example is cascading menus: you're given a <select> and if you choose a certain option it opens a second menu, which could have an option that opens a third menu and so on. Aaahhh!

I've known about it for many years. Yet it confounds me!

When I try to write something that uses recursion I get so confused. I am able to figure it out, but it's usually a very, very slow process. I wish this came to me more easily. I guess I just need to work with it more to get a better grasp.

I took the author of xkcd.com's challenge ("Which sorting algorithms should I use?") and I was able to write a quicksort, but it took a long time, and I don't know if it's a true quicksort. But whatever it is, it can sort (it works!) and I learned a lot about recursion and sorting in the process.

That's how you learn how to program - by writing programs.

It ain't easy being a Front End Web Programmer

I once heard it said that, "Nobody cares what kind of hammers were used to build the house," when talking about web programmers.

What a load of ignorance! They would care if they had to fix the house and found that it was made out of Styrofoam! I look at the horrible, inefficient code I inherited when I started at my job and how much I've improved it. Functions that before were 20-25 lines long (that simply showed or hid something) are now 3 lines long. I re-wrote another that was over a hundred lines long that would add/remove options from a <select> and my version is about 24 lines (and fully dynamic, unlike the old one which required a separate function for each select!). Massive, enormous tables with spacer cells all over the place have been replaced with clean, efficient <div>'s.

How does this affect you? Well, it's that much less data to transmit from the server to the client, so it speeds things up.

It also makes development SOOO much easier. I try to make everything I write as dynamic as possible. I hate hard-coding things!

Sometimes as a programmer I get lonely. The other programmers that work here can't appreciate how I've streamlined things because they're all Back End programmers. They like static, hard coded stuff and live in a world that hasn't changed in years (when's the last time SQL was updated?).

I've learned so much about CSS and javascript and making dynamic magic on the Front End, and I have noone to share it with. I could go on programming forums but there never seems to be time to go in those - so many posts to read through! When I try talking about it, people's eyes glaze over and they get bored and change the subject. Noone wants to hear about how the house was built.

The best recognition I and other Front Enders can hope for is to wow people with effects (script.aculo.us, etc.), like the sliderbar I created for the new BG site. But - oh wait - nobody cares how it works. :( Designers get all the glory, front end programmers are relegated to the background.

It ain't easy bein' a Front End Web Programmer...