#oneaday, Day 37: Sportyballs

I don’t get sport. I never have, and I suspect I never will.

This is not through lack of trying. I used to play football (soccer, for our American readers) with my local Cub Scout pack when I was a kid. We were sponsored by a scrapyard and our best result was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 21-0 to them. This convinced me that football (soccer) was Not My Game.

Early in my #oneaday career, I decided I was going to attempt to get into Formula 1. Cars racing around tracks is more appealing to me than sweaty men running up and down a pitch. But I found myself not caring enough to keep up to date with it. And forgetting that races were happening. And finding myself thinking there were many, many things I would rather do than sit passively in front of the TV for hours at a time. (One of which was sitting in front of the TV with a controller in my hand, which at least is a bit more “active” entertainment.)

My wife enjoyed football (soccer), so back when we were still together, I picked up a copy of FIFA 10 in an attempt to try to understand what was so appealing about it. I played it a bit, got destroyed 21-0 in an online game and was convinced for the second time in my life that football (soccer) was Not My Game.

I find myself perpetually bewildered by people who discuss the sports team they support as if they have anything to do with it. “We bought that striker person for a bajillion pounds,” they say, substituting “that striker person” and “a bajillion pounds” with an actual player’s name and an actual amount of money respectively. “We had an amazing result,” “We’re top of the league”. I just don’t get it. I don’t even show that much loyalty to my RPG characters. They’re still “they” to me.

And today, apparently, is something to do with a superb owl. (Thank you to whoever posted that joke in my Twitter feed while I was writing this.) There seems to be an assumption that everyone will be supporting either the Packers or the Steelers, which may be true if you’re an American, but I have no idea who either of those teams are or where they’re from. I could Google them, but to be honest, I really couldn’t care less.

I guess it’s just a different form of nerdery; one that is more “accepted” (for want of a better word—perhaps “embraced” is more appropriate) by society at large than video gamery and gadget-joy. I can talk for hours about my character builds in Final Fantasy XII and the makeup of my team of Personae from Persona 4 but I wouldn’t know where to begin if someone started a conversation on the batting average innings goal difference of the Packersteelers bowling out for a duck’s ludicrous display.

Each to their own, I guess. Just don’t expect me to even try a little bit to join in with such a conversation. I’ll see you at the bar.

#oneaday, Day 247: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Twitter broke earlier today. This in itself is nothing unusual, as the existence of the term “failwhale” will attest. But this time it was partly a result of some new changes that the service made, particularly with regard to posting links.

Twitter recently launched its own link-shortening service, called “t.co”. This is one of the shortest link-shorteners out there, and when characters are a precious commodity as they are on Twitter, that’s really important.

Unfortunately, some clever young person discovered that by using t.co it was, in fact, possible to embed HTML code and, worse, JavaScript in these links. It was also possible to format tweets, change their colour and black them out.

Said exploiter quickly discovered that by blacking out a tweet and adding a “mouseover” JavaScript event to automatically retweet the exploit, post giant text on the screen or in some cases, redirect to websites you wouldn’t want anyone to catch you on ever whenever a user moved their cursor over the blocked text, they could cause absolute chaos. Thankfully, most people got wise to the exploit pretty quickly and retreated to the safety of Twitter client apps, as it only affected users on the website itself. Of course, there were a few people who started screaming “OMG VIRUS!!!” and panicking, but most of them were put in their place pretty quickly with a simple, calm explanation (hah, right) that an exploit and a virus are two very different things. And Twitter stepped in to plug the security hole reasonably quickly, too. So the whole thing was over within a matter of hours.

The main point of this, though, is that it wouldn’t have happened at all without the new functionality that Twitter was offering. It seems that every single time something new and potentially awesome appears, there is at least one person out there who wants… no, seemingly needs to break it. Why? Because they can.

This explains the existence of “glitchers”, people who deliberately play video games in order to break them. It explains the existence of software pirates, who are out to break copy protection and DRM on software. It explains the existence of hackers, people who write viruses and spammers. And, indirectly, it’s the reason why every single time you turn on Windows you have fifteen bajillion updates to install.

This is all getting a bit tiresome now. It’s such a shame that things that are new must seemingly go through the “initiation” of being broken by some idiot sitting in his pants in his basement, probably masturbating furiously as he watches the chaos unfold before his eyes. Because you just know it’s a “he”, too. (I’m all for equality, but when it comes to stupid, pointless and inconvenient things to do with computers, it’s always a guy.)

Thankfully, the world seems adequately set up to deal with such dribbling idiots these days. We have spam filters, virus scanners, scripts to clean out malicious code from websites. Companies have teams to fix broken functionality like we’ve seen here. And of course, it’s easy to say that things should be tested more thoroughly before release. But there’s no way you can predict every single possible stupid thing that some member of the human race will try and do. If we could, no-one would ever go outside and the world and everything in it would be covered in sponge just in case we fell over and hurt ourselves and/or tried to kill someone else with something.

So if you know anyone who’s ever come up with one of these exploits, or anyone who’s ever ruined a Nice Thing for anyone else, do the world a favour and go and punch them really, really hard in the testicles.

#oneaday, Day 93: Words Are All I Have

A complete stranger insulted me today. There was no provocation and no reason for it. The only explanation I can come up with is the fact that he was with two friends and wanted to play up in front of them, so he thought he’d pick on the fat guy.

It ruined my morning. I’d gone out for a walk in the glorious sunshine, but that one hurtful comment upset me. So did the knowledge that people exist so obnoxious that they feel the need to pick on other people, like 10-year old bullies. So I went home.

Fortunately, after talking to a few friends online, many of whom say they had experienced something similar at one point or another, I felt a bit better. And I started to think that I’d rather be the person I am, however I look, than the sort of arsehole who judges another person based on their appearance and then insults them to their face. You have to wonder how fucked up that person must be in the head to want to do that.

Rhiarti wrote a touching post the other day about being “the ugly duckling” and not fitting in. I sympathise entirely since I feel exactly the same way. There are times when I feel like I just don’t belong in “normal” society. When I go out to a bar – with friends, even – and find myself unable to think of anything to say, for example. Small talk’s never been a strong point of mine. When I find myself overthinking conversations I’m potentially about to have – and sometimes end up not having them at all. That’s another good one.

It’s strange. I sort of like it and hate it at the same time. When I went to PAX, it was, like Wil Wheaton said at the time, “like coming home”. I was amongst other people who obviously felt the same way, and it was a good feeling. But that made it all the harder to leave them behind and come back to the big wide world where strangers think it’s acceptable to insult you.

I know, I know, I should grow a pair.

But words are powerful. Words are perhaps the strongest weapon that humans have. Well, that’s perhaps not true. A nuclear bomb would probably kill more people than an expectorated obscenity. But when it comes to helping or hurting another person, words are definitely one of the strongest things that there are, and definitely the thing that sets us apart from animals. A kind or unkind word can have a huge impact on how someone feels, whether or not they show it to you directly – or indeed whether or not they’re right there with you. I know I certainly appreciate the kind and supportive words my “distant” friends have for me, whether it’s something serious and heartfelt, or sharing a private joke together.

So, people of the world, next time you’re going to say something, have a quick think about what the person you’re saying it to might think. And don’t be a dick.

#oneaday, Day 68: #PAX East, Day 1

Wow, what a rush! Day one of PAX East is already over and it’s been awesome so far.

Early part of the day was spent meeting, greeting and showering off our respective journeys. Chris “RocGaude” Whittington and I made it into the show just after Wil Wheaton’s keynote speech, which is a shame because the buzz on Twitter made it sound rather inspirational. Still, immediately after that was Gabe and Tycho’s Q&A session, which was seven degrees of pure-grade awesomeness. I’d never actually seen them in person before but their banter was hilarious and they have huge amounts of stage presence, wit and talent. I can see why they’ve become the huge successes they have.

Later, we tried to get in to a panel about the current state of storytelling in interactive fiction, hosted by, among others, Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin and Emily Short. Sadly we were just too late for that one, but we did manage to attend the first screening of GET LAMP, an extremely well put together documentary about the rise, fall and rise again of interactive fiction. The filmmaker had managed to interview a huge number of luminaries of the genre, including Don “Adventure” Woods and Steve “Infocom” Meretzky, both of whom were in attendance along with Plotkin and several others from IF’s past for a post-movie Q&A session.

We also spent a bit of time with the BitMob crowd at the puntastic “Pour House” where the beer was flowing freely and, by the sound of his tweets, Jeff Grubb is absolutely wasted. Holla. I won a T-shirt too. Awesomesauce!

Tomorrow should be a busy day. Hitting the show floor to scoop some stories for my new gigs at Kombo and Daily Joypad, then later am getting the chance to catch up with my brother. Hopefully, then, later in the evening, the Squadron of Shame will be recording something awesome from PAX to share with you all.

Anyway, it’s 1:15am EST right now and I should probably go to bed. Suffice to say that so far PAX is proving to be everything I hoped it would be. I wish there were more in the way of nerd superconventions like this in the UK. I had to cheer when Gabe and Tycho said their next aim for PAX is to do EuroPAX. That would be awesome.

Anyway. Good night!