November 2004 Archives

This entry is spoiler-free.

When the HL2 E3 movies were released in 2003, I couldn't believe how advanced they looked, and knew that if even half of the things demonstrated in the movie wound up in the playable game, it would be an extraordinary release. Well, Half-Life 2 was finally released this week, and it contains almost 100% of the features from those movies. It is, to use a future cliche, fried gold.

I played through Half-Life 2 in about 2 days of solid gaming (which, by the way, isn't remotely normal; I can't remember ever obsessing over a game this much). And it's been another two days since I completed it. But here's something weird: I can't get it out of my head. I've now spent as much time thinking about the story (particularly the ending) as I did actually playing the game.

If you haven't played HL2, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. The human race has been subjugated. The game is set in an Eastern European dystopia, shown with graphics that are the closest yet to photorealism in a game. The environments look and feel real. Characters are modelled in unprecedented detail and animated with complexity and subtlety; the result puts many computer-animated feature films to shame. The backstory to the game's hellish situation is not spoonfed to the player, but told almost entirely through inference -- by looking around at environmental details and listening to conversations and other audio, you can piece together at least parts of what happened, and mentally fill in the rest. HL2 creates, quite expertly, a world in crisis, and makes you -- the player -- care about it personally.

This may be the most nerdly thing I've ever said, but for those two days, I felt like I was Gordon Freeman. His motives were mine, because the things that were important to Gordon were also important to me. And when I was yanked out of that experience when it ended, I felt genuine confusion and anxiety. I'm sure it's exactly what the developers intended, and I would call it emotional manipulation if it were not so well executed and, frankly, welcome; I've grown used to games that engage only the reflexes.

I hope Valve continues this story soon. Six years of waiting was rewarded with two days' worth of exceptional game, and I'm craving more of the gameplay, more of the characters, and more of the world.

Life expectancy has risen dramatically in the modern era, due to improvements in medicine and sanitation. In the late 20th century the average British citizen lived for 77 years. Two hundred years earlier, life expectancy at birth was 36¹. Much of this increase is attributable to much lower child mortality rates, but even when this is factored out, adults are still living longer. Which made me think...

I wonder whether the first human being ever to live to the age of 100 lived recently enough in history that we know his or her name?

Update: The answer is 'probably not', according to this:

Still, there is some evidence, most of it from paintings and important documents, that nonagenarians and centenarians have existed throughout much of recorded history. [...] Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, reported that St. Anthony, an Egyptian monk and ascetic, died in A.D. 356 at the age of 105. Leonardo da Vinci, in his sixteenth-century Corpus of Anatomical Studies notes the autopsy of a 100-year-old man.

From here (web.archive.org link, original page 404'd).

¹ Figures from here.

Okay, comment posting is back on again, but with provisos.

All comments are moderated, at least for the time being. So they won't appear instantaneously, only after I approve them. I'll never use this to stop legitimate (human-posted) comments that I disagree with, it's just an anti-spam measure.

However, at some point in the not too distant future, I intend to fiddle around with the templates to permit the posting of registered comments from users of 6A's TypeKey service, which is basically a centralised identity verification service. This will allow you to bypass the moderation stage entirely, and signing up for a free TypeKey identity will allow you to do this across a ton of other MovableType and TypePad blogs and websites too.

I apologise for complicating things, and I hope it won't discourage people who would ordinarily leave a comment from doing so.

Firefox 1.0 released.

I know that comments don't work, because I intentionally broke them. I've temporarily disabled comment posting across the site. I'll emphasise that: comment posting will now no longer work.

At least until I turn it back on.

What happened is that I upgraded the site to MT3 tonight. No problems there. However, I ran into trouble upgrading the MT-Blacklist module to the MT3-compatible version 2 -- my webserver's missing a certain critical Perl module, or so I suspect, given that all I have to go on is a collection of information-free Internal Server Error pages.

MT-Blacklist was invaluable to me, as it provided a defence against those thick spammers insistent on running repeatedly into my blacklist, just like the slow kid at school used to run head-first into brick walls. So, with no anti-spam measures in place, I thought it would make my life easier just to disable comments for a while.

A little more fiddling to verify if I'm right, and then a polite email sent in the direction of my hosting provider will hopefully do the trick.

I'm playing around with MovableType tonight. Hopefully it won't have much effect, but if the site starts acting all fupped, it's my fault entirely, and I will be wishing I'd taken a backup and crying.

Today Americans will either cast a vote of hope, or a vote of fear. As a British citizen it has never been in my power to make any real difference in this election. However, I -- and the rest of the world -- are heavily invested in this event.

I believe -- contrary to popular opinion -- that the majority of American people are smart, principled, and capable of independent thought. I've stood up for the American people when talking to friends who believe otherwise. I know that the majority is unhappy with the country's direction, and that all that is needed now is for everyone who feels strongly to go out and act upon it today.

This opportunity doesn't come often. Answer the call, and do the world proud.

Update: So much for that theory. Americans sent a clear message yesterday, and the message was "We're dumb as bricks".