Month: September 2014

Wisconsin Patriot Boot Camp

Last weekend, I had the privilege of covering the Techstars Patriot Boot Camp for Xconomy.com. The boot camp aims to give veterans and military spouses the tools they need to become successful entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed hearing the entrepreneurs speak about their business ideas, and I’m glad that Techstars is helping them turn their dreams into reality. You can read my write-up of the event here.

 

OMG! Women Love Shoes!!!!!

“4000 Year-Old Tablets Reveal Women Have Always Loved Shoes!” proclaimed a headline on the webpage of Cornell University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. The article in question was about the Garšana Tablets, a group of 1,600 cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia that were once part of the personal archive of a Sumerian princess named Simat-Ištaran. The tablets cover the years between 2031 and 2024 BC, and they reveal that Simat-Ištaran ran the estate after the death of her husband, a general named Šu-Kabta. They provide scholars with fascinating new evidence about the place of women in Sumerian society. For example, the tablets show that women worked as laborers and even supervisors, and they received the same wages as their male colleagues.

In light of all the fascinating things revealed by the Garšana Tablets, it seems strange to emphasize Simat-Ištaran’s shoe collection. While the article itself provides a more holistic overview of the material, the headline’s appeal to a gender stereotype is still annoying. I suspect that the author was trying to come up with a hook that would draw in members of the general public, but surely something like “4000 Year-Old Tablets Reveal Surprising General Equality” would have been equally eye-catching.

New Gig!

I have some exciting news: I will be writing for Urban Gaming Elite! As a longtime gamer, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to write about an industry that I love.

You can check out my first article here. It’s a preview of a promising RTS game called 0 A.D. If you liked Age of Empires, you’ll probably like 0 A.D. It’s being developed by a team of volunteers from all over the world, and it will be totally free to play when it finally launches. There’s no release date as of yet, but in the meantime, you can play with the alpha build. It’s definitely worth a look.

Some random thoughts that didn’t make it into my article:

  • I question the decision to use Middle Egyptian building names for the Ptolemaic faction. Admittedly, I’m not much of an expert on the Greco-Roman period because it’s boring, but my understanding is that Greek was the language of administration. And if you want to get really pedantic, you could argue that Demotic would be a better choice than Middle Egyptian since Middle Egyptian was only used in highly formal contexts by the Ptolemaic era.
  • The ships look awesome. It’s just a shame you can’t really do much with them at the moment since the AI doesn’t know how to use them yet.
  • I wish the game had more non-Mediterranean civilizations. It seems strange that the Seleucids, Ptolemies, and Macedonians each get their own faction, yet there isn’t a single faction from Eastern Asia (though India is represented by the Mauryans).
  • The game places some annoying restrictions on construction (e.g., you have to build towers a certain distance apart, and civic centers have to be placed a certain distance from resources). One of the great things about old-school RTS games like Age of Empires II is that the game lets you do whatever the hell you want. Want to build fifteen towers right next to each other? You can do that!  Want to build a dozen castles? You can do that, too! The best games are the ones that give you the freedom to do silly things instead of holding your hand or trying to nudge you toward a certain course of action.
  • The skirmish maps suffer from Diablo III Syndrome (i.e., they look really pretty, but they get old after a while since there’s insufficient randomization). I hope the game will eventually have a fully random map mode. Hand-designed maps based on real-world geography are nice, but they reduce the replay value since you eventually come to know them like the back of your hand.

Arguing with a reviewer is a really bad idea

One of the people I follow on Twitter recently posted a link to an epic example of how an author shouldn’t behave. The writer in question, Stephan J. Harper (not to be confused with the Canadian Prime Minister!), wrote Venice Under Glass, a mystery set in La Serenissima that features teddy bears for protagonists. Michael Cohen over at Tidbits.com gave the book a middling review. Instead of grumbling to himself and moving on with his life, Harper had a meltdown in the comments section. He began by citing passages from the book that allegedly refuted Cohen’s criticisms, but when the other commenters basically told him to chill out, his responses devolved into ad hominem attacks.

What Harper doesn’t seem to understand is that writing a review is an inherently subjective exercise, and people will inevitably have different reactions to a given work. Although he keeps insisting that Cohen needs to support his arguments with quotes from the text, doing so would be pointless. When Cohen says that Harper’s prose is ‘workmanlike,’ that’s his opinion. It can’t be proven or disproven because it’s ultimately a question of taste, and as they say in Latin, de gustibus non est disputandum. I may think Firefly is one of the most overrated shows in the history of television, but that doesn’t mean that the legions of Firefly fans are in the wrong.

Harper might want to take a page from Colin Morgan’s book. An interviewer once asked him if he read what the critics were saying about his work, and he said no. He thought that positive reviews would give him a swelled head, while negative reviews would just bring him down. Those are wise words for creative-types.