Posted by Janka
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:36:00 GMT
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game about spaceships, and if that sentence made your eyes glaze over you might want to skip this post, unless “sportsmanship” is interesting to you in general (in which case I recommend you read it anyway). If EVE is familiar for you, you can skip the next four paragraphs.
EVE differs from most (all?) other MMOGs in some crucial respects, most of which belong to another post (or ‘con speech) completely. For this post, what is important to understand is that EVE is not a level- or score-based game where you can measure your achievement against filling some objectives set by the game, such as reaching a particular level or completing a particular quest or raid. There is no “end game”. You cannot win the game, you cannot finish it. Instead, it is a sandbox game where you measure yourself only against other players - you fight for regions, resources, glory and fame, but the game itself rewards none of these. You get no points, no levels, no nothing. The only reward is the fame and glory themselves, and the resources you can control to produce more of those.
In EVE, you set your goals yourself, and you can go about achieving them in different ways. You can change your goals at any point (though if you have made them known first, people will spot this, and you might lose glory in their eyes). Skills and equipment help, but in the end what scores you a kill or wins you a solar system and gives you the upper hand on a regional market is player skill and dedication. While you can play this game solo or with a small band of friends, in the end, if you really want to be one of the “big players”, you have to do it by banding together with others. The biggest powerblocks in the game consist of thousands of players. Co-ordinating that is no little feat and requires real commitment. Even the tiniest alliances, in serious conflict only for the control of some small local area of space, require co-operation with tens of other players, against similar bands.
While “dying” in the game hurts (more than in most games), it does not obviously really kill you off or exclude you from the game. You can push someone out of a particular solar system, you can kill their structures there, you can make them die in horrible ways when they enter the regions you control, you can make it pretty damn close impossible for them to win that control from you, but you cannot make it completely impossible, and you cannot stop them from coming at you and being a bloody nuisance at least. The only thing that can break any player alliance in EVE is the loss of morale, the loss of interest in the fight. Competition is fierce, and the human emotional drama involved is as high as or higher than most of the players probably ever experience in their work places or other such “real life”.
If you think this a little insane, compare to competition sports and their following. Just saying.
Views regularly surface in the game that when it comes to spaceships actually shooting at each other it is not “sportsmanlike” to crush the opponent using superior numbers or otherwise superior force, such as ships specifically designed against their attack. There are several pejorative names for people who are “cowardly” enough to use superior force to crush someone “brave” enough to put up a fight in a fleet that will most likely lose. I totally disagree with these views. Fights in EVE, when they happen, are not “fair”. They are not supposed to be fair. When the shooting starts, the fight is over – the guy with best numbers, ships/modules, and discipline wins. The game is not about who can actually shoot the best. The game is not about spaceships and pretty explosions. The real game is about who can scheme, plan, co-ordinate and maneuver themselves into a position where the unfairness is on their side. It is about forcing or tricking your opponent to commit to a fight they cannot win.
I do believe there is room for sportsmanship in EVE, however. It is just not about the tricks you use in a fight. As far as I am concerned, once you are in the game and the game is on, any trick you can pull (apart from abusing bugs that the game devs say not to abuse) goes. Some tricks are more stylish than others, granted, but still, if you score a kill you score a kill and your enemy calling you lame because they do not like your style is just them being – unsportsmanlike.
Sportsmanship is about attitude. It is not about what you do to win or lose within the game, it is about how you behave once you have.
If you pull a particularly neat trick and win, it is ok to rejoice and gloat a little. It is fine to feel good about yourself if your game is at the level where you are clearly on the top of most of the people you meet in your region. It is great to take pride in your achievements – even if this is just a game, it is a game that takes very real intelligence, dedication, and co-operation to be good at. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to jeer at your opponent who just lost, to put them down, to call them names, to question their worth as human beings and to wish they go to bed sobbing over how mean you are. It is not sportsmanlike to tell someone you just made explode how they are useless and will never amount to anything. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight” salute on the local chat, and (where you can safely do so) to offer them advice on how to get better.
If you get royally screwed, or royally screw up, or a trick is pulled on you, and you lose, it is ok to feel pissed off and to kick and throw your toys a bit – as long as you do this in the privacy of your own home. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to kick and scream where others hear. It is not sportsmanlike to make excuses or to blame your opponent of “cheating” or “cowardly tricks” (or “blobbing”, to give an example of an in-game pejorative). While I do believe in PR and publicity as parts of warfare in EVE, I still think it is not sportsmanlike to engage in a smear campaign against your opponents simply because you are upset that you cannot win them on the field. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight”, and to congratulate your opponent on a trap nicely sprung, and to express a wish to meet them on the field again another day. Be gracious - and then lick your wounds, analyze why you lost, learn from it, plot and scheme and gather allies, and then go spring a trap on them and watch those towers burn.
Sportsmanship is about the wish and ability to respect your opponent regardless of whether you win or lose, even when you pull a crazy trick at them, even when you have an inside man working on their morale or stealing their assets, even when you are doing your best to make the game not-fun for them in order to force them out of some plan they are trying to execute. There are ways of making things not-fun for the opponent and more fun for your guys that rely on disrespecting, dehumanizing, demeaning and humiliating the other guys, on robbing them of their value as a respected opponent and as a human being, and those ways are used in EVE, both in the hearing of those opponents and in internal pep talks and propaganda.
Personally, I just think those ways are lame. Not sure about “wrong”, and definitely not “against the letter of the rules” – but certainly lame. If I cannot win with sportsmanship, with respect to those who play with me, I’ll rather not win at all.
Not sure what is respectful? Here’s a rule of thumb: if you would not talk that way to/about the 12-year-old sister of your best friend, don’t talk like it to or about another player in the game, unless you know for a certain fact that the player is a friend and does not mind. (For all you know that stranger is the 12-yo little sister of your buddy - or your own grandfather, or you professor at college, or the next-door neighbor. Not that it should matter; all other players are humans and deserve courtesy, regardless of whether you personally know them or not.)
(This post is for Queneva, who first asked me the question “Do you think there is a place for sportsmanship in EVE?” in a discussion following her post about a rather disturbing subculture in the game.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags EVE, MMOG, online, sportsmanship | no comments
Posted by Janka
Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:43:00 GMT
Ok, time for a crazy confession: I actually like Los Angeles. I am not sure if I like it enough to actually want to live here, and I definitely do not like all parts of it (see case highways), but I like a lot of places in it, and I like the atmosphere. Despite the fact that I could not stop bursting into giggles every time someone local opened their mouth when I was here for the first time, on account of everyone being hyper and speaking in a movie-accent, I’ve adjusted since. LA gets a worse rep than it deserves. Yes, it is a sprawl, and yes, the smog is terrible at worst, but then again, doesn’t that go for almost all big cities? At least the people are friendly here, and the sprawl has a lot of green bits in it.
One specific thing about LA reputation is the public transport. It gets terrible comments from everyone - you cannot take the bus anywhere, you just have to have a car, etc etc. First time I spend a couple of days alone in the city I figured that Santa Monica must be an exception to this. Second time over, and I think the reputation is just bullshit. The buses are clean enough, and cheap, and run on schedule, and those schedules are very nice – frequent enough for a tourist to not bother checking timetables. I am sure there are commuter routes that are not covered by public transport (isn’t there always?), but the situation is not nearly as bad as you are lead to believe. The trip planner is unable to give me all routes that provably exist, and in general totally sucks compared to the Helsinki area one, but, well, considering the quality of the latter the comparison is unfair to everyone else.
The USA is its own charming self, and some things have me giggling still, such as the fact that you get frigging potato chips with your sandwich in the University cafeterias, or that the locals consider income tax rate of 25 percent “high” (though considering what they get for it, it might actually be), or that practically every public building in California seems to have a sign somewhere by its front door warning that the location “contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer”.
But I giggle less and like it more every time I visit. And this time, I did not even instantly die when temperature passed 30 degrees C, at all. Apart from it turning out that thin-sole shoes on hot pavement are a bad, bad idea (in the “blistering heat is blistering” sense), I quite enjoyed myself walking around in that heat for hours. If you have a day to kill in LA, The Griffith Observatory is a nice place to see, and I especially recommend taking the trail (on your right when exiting the observatory via the main entrance) down to the Ferndell / Griffith park, which is a very relaxing place. (Thanks to the locals for the hint.)
(What? Oh. I was working. The vacation is in August/September, and yep, I will be back in the region then. Burner readers rejoice.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags travel, USA | no comments
Posted by Janka
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:46:00 GMT
Stealing a glance in the streetside windows
I think I am pretty
But I can never say so
The only thing worse than being ugly
is being stupid enough
to not realize it
Posted in Plain English | Tags runot | no comments
Posted by Janka
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:24:00 GMT
Lately, I have wanted to scream every time I hear the term “healthy food”, or see a food or nutrient pushed as healthier than something else. (And you see it all the time, which makes me want to scream way too often.)
Here’s a newsflash to all you intellectually challenged victims of health crazes: food is healthy, by definition. If it is bad for you, it is not food. If you do not believe me, try going without for, I do not know, say a month. If you after that still refuse to eat something that is generally considered food on the grounds of it not being healthy, I will do my best to have you admitted to a psychiatric institution and they can inflict an anorexia diagnosis on you.
And no, particular foods are not healthier than other foods, either. An apple is not by some absolute default healthier than a piece of chocolate. If you eat only apples you are likely to feel like crap, just as you are if you eat only chocolate. (I do not recommend trying either, but if you do not believe me, a month is probably a good length for an experiment, again.)
Particular diets are healthier than some other diets, I have to give you that. But even there, the effect is probably less than you think. Your body is brilliantly good at transforming things into other things, with just a couple of notable exceptions (the major one being vitamin C, the metabolism of which in humans, or rather the lack of essential parts there-of, is one of the best arguments there is against intelligent design). Sure the transformation might be somewhat more inefficient than eating everything in the exact required amounts, but last I checked lack of fuel for their bodies was not a problem for most Western humans. It is also crucial to understand that just because a diet consisting of nothing but pizza, fries, and sugared soft drinks is unhealthy, pizza, fries, or sugared water are not unhealthy as such. They are food. Foods are not unhealthy. Diets are. If you generally eat your veggies and so forth, eating a pizza every now and then is very likely going to do exactly nothing to your overall well-being (if anything, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and adds to your mental health).
And no, we did not evolve to survive on a particular diet. I know, I know, in the stone age we ate berries and meat and not roots and grains and all the carbohydrate crap (says you), but evolution is not about what you do in your everyday. You can do a hundred sit-ups every day and your daughter will still be born the exact same abs she would have been without you taking all that trouble. Evolution is about whose offspring survives. And while I dislike making far-gone conclusions about the effects of our evolutionary history to our current day, if I believe one theory about the evolution of human nutrition, I believe the one that says there has been a huge pressure towards being able to effectively use whatever food happens to be available. If the diet of a nation consists of potatoes and gravy for a couple of hundred of years, the people unable to utilize the potatoes will die off and the rest of us will rule the Earth. If the diet of a nation consists of whatever hell is available and occasionally nothing for a couple of tens of thousands of years, how the hell did the stone age folks who need a carefully balanced diet of carrots and beef to feel good manage to spread their genes to all of us?
There is two major ways to construct an unhealthy diet (given that you have enough to eat in the first place, which we should not forget is still the major problem about food today): eat too much, or do not eat enough veggies. Do both of those, and you end up spherical and feeling like shit. Do not overdo it, and eat your rabbit food like mom told you, and you will in most cases be just fine. Yes, there are cases where special diets and special attention to diet are needed. Some people have actual diseases that kill them off or seriously disable them if they eat the wrong things. Some people are competing athletes who train for full weekdays and compete on the weekends. Pregnant women are recommended to take certain supplements. The likelihood that most people reading this who are very conscious about their diet have any of those conditions is not very great, however.
The ones who really need the special attention should keep on paying it. The rest of us need to stop fussing about it and eat some but not too much of what’s put in front of us, and be grateful.
(I could also use this post to rip apart the YLE newspiece about how “Finns eat healthier, but get fatter” (in Finnish, sorry), but commenter Ari T. did it for me already in the comments. The gist of it is this: 1) the results of the study cited probably mean that some Finns (say) they eat healthier, while some, very likely at least partly other Finns get fatter, and 2) even if point number one does not hold, if your diet makes you fat, it is an unhealthy diet, no matter what you eat, and 3) the questionnaire used in the study does not even ask about the amount of food consumed, so using it as any sort of indicator for the general unhealthiness of anyone’s diet is plain stupid.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags ei näin, I dont want to play anymore, ruoka | no comments
Posted by Janka
Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:36:00 GMT
This entry is for Yoe, who once asked on IRC if someone who is reasonably net-savvy and does not like Facebook and/or other new “social media” would write about why they object to those. I gave a lot of disclaimers, but she said I will do.
Here are the disclaimers. I do not know if I like Facebook or not. I have never tried it. I do not have an account. I have watched someone use it once, and did not get much out of that experience. I suspect that if I tried, I might like it well enough. I also by no means object to other people using it, and I do not find that they are potentially stupid or morally suspect if they enjoy it. (There are a lot of things that I do not object to when other people do it, even though I find them potentially stupid or morally suspect to do so, but Facebook is not one of them.)
I know some people object to Facebook because they worry about their internet privacy, because they do not like the idea of coming to contact with people they do not explicitly choose to be in contact with, because they think “virtual” socializing is (morally or in quality) inferior to “real” socializing, or because they simply do not enjoy socializing in general. I use my own name practically everywhere on the web, I have a public blog, I run IRC in a screen 24/7, I enjoy talking to people, and before the Long September I was practically addicted to Usenet News. I am not one of those people.
I also know that some people object to Facebook and the internet in general, because it is somehow “not real”. I am not one of those people, either. Internet is “really” there as much as a book, a movie, or a park is “really” there: it is something people made. I find it is very relaxing to take a cup of tea and let myself wonder into the wilds of the internet, marveling at its wondrous sights and curious inhabitants, stumbling upon fascinating knowledge and bizarre entertainment and the occasional oasis of real art. Exploration of one’s surroundings, virtual as well as real, is a sign of a healthy mind. This world humans make is a delightful place and there is nothing, nothing at all, wrong in indulging in exploring it.
My worry about Facebook, Twitter, Qaiku, blogs, text messages, newsfeeds, Usenet, IRC, and the web in general is a very particular feature of them: they work on a fragmented timescale. You poll your sites, you read something, you check your feeds, you do something else, an incoming message interrupts, you poll them again, you have discussion on one of your forums, you check your email, you read a bit of a news story here, you twitter it, you check your feeds, an incoming message interrupts, you answer that, you check your email, you do a bit of something else, you poll your webforums, you go back to the discussion you started an hour ago… and whoom, there was the day.
You do not have to do it this way, of course. You can read news only in the morning with your breakfast coffee, you can poll your Facebook and Twitter only once a day when you come home from work, you can only read your emails at lunch break. But a lot of the people who extensively use these services, and especially those who sit in front of the computer for work or free time do not limit themselves that way. The services themselves encourage fragmented usage, starting from the fact that most email programs have continuous polling for new messages and alerts for them turned on by default. Pretty much every communication gimmick we are marketed these days is geared for noticing stuff now, immediately, without delay, as soon as other people do. Being in constant touch so you will not miss anything.
Many people claim this constant staying connected and polling for new comments/articles/tweets/whatever does not bother them or impede their work or their life. I know at least some of them are mistaken or lie to themselves, and I know this because I know I do. It is easy to lie, because it does not feel like continuously reading IRC or polling blogs while I work bothers me - for gods’ sake, it is not like I do it “continuously”, anyway! Just when I have a slow time in my brain work anyway. Yea, right. But let me switch to a mode where I agree with myself that I either do one thing or nothing at all, even for as short a time as for 15 or 30 minutes, and boy does my productivity improve.
No, distractions are not inherently bad. We do not really need to be super-productive or super-focused at all times, despite of what your boss or the gazillion self-help books about motivation and getting rich, beautiful, and popular on a fast track tell you. In the Western world, most of us who have access to the services mentioned also have enough of everything else to get by; we do not need to work harder to get more. We just need to be happy with it. We need to do the things we like to do, and work towards the goals we really want to achieve, and to spend time with the people we really love. With a peace of mind, and no stress.
The danger of fragmentation is that the chopped-up socialization and the constant context-switches eats so much of your time and brain power that there is very little room for anything else. You are less productive at work, less effective in realizing your dreams, less focused on people when you really meet them. Fragment your attention enough, and you completely lose the ability to tolerate slow times. Lately, I have asked myself to spend five minutes every day doing nothing. Five minutes - how hard is that? Very hard. When I started, I had to stop myself about 25 times in that time, getting an impulse to check this or that web forum, or my email, or take up a book, or (in a fit of extreme desperation from my brain) do some laundry. I have a friend (actually, several) with whom it is very weird to have a face-to-face conversation, because if you stop to think about what to say for 20 seconds, they whip up their mobile phone and check their IRC and emails.
The scariest effect of this is that if you get get wrapped up enough in these constant distractions, even peace of mind will not have room, because if your brain slows down enough to feel that peace, the constant-polling sub-process in it pops up and starts screaming “I am not doing anything! I am bored! Do something! Feed me information!” And if you follow the urge, you are not spending your time relaxing and recovering from stress. You are spending your time being distracted from the fact that you need to relax and recover.
And that is why I do not want to know if I would enjoy Facebook: I have enough to do already, and more distractions than I need, and I am not willing to give up any of them, despite actually feeling that I would benefit from less.
Your mileage may vary.
Posted in Plain English | Tags elämä, internet, social media | 4 comments
Posted by Janka
Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:26:00 GMT
on jälleen kesä
toimistot hiljenevät
minä odotan
ehkä syksy käynnistää
kaiken, elämänikin
(runotorstai)
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags runot | 5 comments
Posted by Janka
Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:57:00 GMT
Ahaa, sanoo terapeuttini
aina, kun ei oikein tiedä
mitä seuraavaksi sanoisi.
Sitten se asettelee kasvoilleen
sellaisen ammatti-ilmeen:
kiinnostuneen, mutta kohteliaan.
Ne ovat hyödyllisiä,
se ahaa, ja se ilme.
Niistä tietää, että ajatteli
taas jotenkin väärin.
(runotorstai)
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags runot | 1 comment
Posted by Janka
Sat, 30 May 2009 14:53:00 GMT
2 rkl oliiviöljyä
25 g voita
3 valkosipulinkynttä
2 pientä punasipulia
2 varsisellerin vartta
3 porkkanaa
1 dl silputtuja tuoreita yrttejä (mulla oli basilikaa, lipstikkaa, persiljaa, ruohosipulia)
1 tl cayennepippuria
400 g kuorittuja katkarapuja
1,25 dl + 1 rkl sherryä
1 litra kanalientä (kuutioista)
100 g simpukkapastaa
1/2 dl kermaa
mustapippuria
Silppua yrtit. Pilko selleri ja porkkanat “tulitikuiksi” ja sipuli ohuiksi renkaiksi. Kuori ja pilko valkosipulinkynnet. Kuumenna öljy ja voi kattilassa. Lisää sipuli ja valkosipuli, paista n. 2-3 minuuttia. Lisää selleri ja porkkana ja jatka paistamista n. 10 minuuttia kunnes kasvikset vähän pehmenevät, älä kuitenkaan kamalasti ruskista. Lisää yrtit, sekoita. Lisää katkaravut, sekoittele vähän aikaa kunnes ne lämpenevät. Lisää 1,25 dl sherryä, kuumenna kiehuvaksi, keitä 5 minuuttia. Lisää kanaliemi, kuumenna taas kiehuvaksi ja hauduta vielä 5 minuuttia. Lisää pata, keitä kunnes pasta on al dente. Lisää kerma, 1 rkl sherryä ja mustapippuria maun mukaan.
Menee erittäin hyvin tuoreen hiivaleivän kanssa.
Modifikaatioin kirjasta The Essential Pasta Cookbook, jota voi suositella.
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags reseptit | 2 comments
Posted by Janka
Thu, 28 May 2009 17:34:00 GMT
“Hallinto- ja johtaminen eivät ole itseisarvo, mutta sitäkin välttämättä tarvitaan.” “Mikään paikka ei toimi johtamatta.”
Näillä sanoilla tällä palstalla jatkuvasti vastataan kysymyksiin nykyisen hallinnon virheistä. On varmasti totta, että sairaalassa tarvitaan johtamista. Luulen, että suurin osa potilastyötä tekevistä nimenomaan toivoo sitä, että saisi tehdä potilastyötä ja hallinnon ja byrokratian tekisi joku muu.
Tästä ei silti mitenkään seuraa, että nykyinen hallinto olisi onnistunutta. Ei myöskään ole reilua vaatia hallintoa kritisoivia esittämään itse parempaa mallia. Ei sairaanhoitajan tai lääkärin tarvitse olla automekaanikko tietääkseen, että auto kuluttaa liikaa bensaa tai sammahtelee hassusti; ei pitäisi myöskään tarvita olla hallintoammattilainen tai osata korjata hallintoa tunnistaakseen, että siinä on vikoja.
Kaikista yksiköistä kollegojen kautta kuuluu viestejä, että henkilökunta kokee, että ei saa työrauhaa jatkuvan reorgin kohteena, että omiin työjärjestelyihinsä ei voi tarpeeksi vaikuttaa, että byrokratia vie jatkuvasti enemmän ja enemmän aikaa potilastyöltä, että sairaalan hallinto ei toimi potilaiden ja työntekijöiden parhaaksi, ja että tilanne on vain pahentunut viime vuosien aikana (jo ennen tätä nykyistä talouskriisiä, jolla toki on mukava selittää kaikki ongelmat pois). Kun tilanne on tämä, niin maallikkolle on selvää, että hallinto on jossain epäonnistunut - jos ei muussa, niin ainakin siinä, miten kommunikoivat suorittavan portaan kanssa. (Itse epäilen, että muussakin, mutta kun en ole hallinnon ammattilainen, niin sanon, että vähintäänkin tässä.)
Olisikohan johdonkin siis aika myöntää, että jossain on epäonnistunuttu, ja miettiä miten nimenomaan hallintoa voisi korjata, ryhtyä toimenpiteisiin ja kertoa näistä työntekijöille epämääräisten “no ette te voi ilman johtoakaan olla” ja “tehkää itte parempi” -kommenttien sijaan?
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags HUS | no comments
Posted by Janka
Tue, 26 May 2009 18:14:00 GMT
Digitoday raportoi IT-ammattilaisten olevan petipuuhissa parhaita. Sinänsä vaikka minulla on tästä kotona yksi empiirinen todiste, en ole ihan varma jutun logiikasta.
Mittarina nimittäin käytetään sitä, kuinka suuri osa alan ihmisistä asettaa kumppanin tarpeet edelle omiaan.
Ensinnäkään en ole mitenkään vakuuttunut siitä, että täysi epäitsekkyys sängyssä on minusta erityisen seksikästä - kyllä minulle riittää, jos ollaan yhtä tärkeitä, ja minusta on kiva nähdä, että toisellakin on haluja eikä se ole siinä vaan minua palvelemassa. Vaikka toki se, että ei yhtään kiinnosta kumppani, on kyllä varsin epäseksikästä.
Mutta se nyt sikseen. Tulos on siis, että jos valitsee it-ammattilaisen eikä jotakuta muuta, summanmutikassa, on hieman suurempi todennäköisyys, että ei tule valinneeksi ääliötä, jota kumppanin tarpeet eivät kiinnosta. Mutta kun nyt ehkä ainakin omalla kohdallani tositilanteessa lähdetään siitä, että sitä ääliötä ei valitsisi kuitenkaan, niin tulos ei valitettavasti sano yhtään mitään käyttökelpoista niistä it-ammattilaisista, jotka kumppaniksi kelpaisivat, eivätkä ole ääliöitä.
Että sori nyt, it-ammattilaiset, ei tämä kerro, että te olette petipuuhissa parempia kuin muut. Se kertoo, että pienempi osuus teistä on ääliöitä kuin urheilijoista. Ja sehän ei teitä yllätä, eihän?
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags seksi, tilastot | 2 comments
