Simpson's Paradox

The other day, I had my students make menus and play restaurant. I’d put them in groups and let the kids choose whether to be waitstaff or customers, polite or rude. Usually this class is le tired, so I was quite pleased to see the kids create roles as flamboyent European maître d’s or bored, gum-snapping waitresses.

I was walking around the room, proud of my awesome ESL lesson, when my friend Lynn sent a mayday text asking where a friend of hers could find, um, certain Western feminine products in Beijing. I immediately texted back subway directions, with the additional notes about the secret DVD shop in the basement of a menswear shop nearby.

I have a unique skillset.

I’m teaching at an ESL summer camp for the next two weeks. This school is as poorly organized as a typical Chinese “English center”, which allows me to test my theory that I would absolutely love that life, if only I could eat decent food after a crazy day. And it’s perfect for me right now, the epic rawness of teenage emotions (Teenagers, Cicero and Meg love the superlative), working with other ESL adventurers, and complete, bone-aching exhaustion at the end of the day.

A new group of students was dropped on me the other day, so I set them up to play Who Do You Love?, my go-to game for surprise classes. After a few minutes of dead, sleepy stares, the teenagers caught on and were soon tormenting their classmates and testing the limits of appropriate classroom vocab.

“I love people who wear thongs!”one of the boys called out.

I was halfway through my lecture on appropriate classroom vocab when I realized they’ve got a British English textbook, and everyone but me thought we were talking about flip-flops.

Tom Lasseter, who replaced Tim Johnson as the China correspondent for McClatchy, mentioned today on his blog that Beijing plans to renovate all the hutongs around the Drum and Bell Towers. Renovation is hardly news in Beijing, where the pre-Olympic facelift hasn’t stopped and chai (Chinese for demolish) regularly marks aging walls for demolition. When I lived in Beijing in 2008, I took as many photos as I could of buildings with chai on the side, trying to record as much of old Beijing as I could.

This news hits home, though, because I lived on Brick Workers’ Lane, a hutong in the shadow of the Drum Tower. I was told it was named because it was originally housing for the builders working on the drum tower, and I loved the connection to the past as we made our way down the twisting pathways. Lasseter says that at least one block’s already been razed, with plans for more to go, and I wonder if WarCraft Man or Grandma Waitress or any of my old neighbors have been moved on.

I liked the neighbors in the hutong. I was still a tourist attraction — like in Yantai, I often found neighborhood children hanging on my gate waiting to see the white girl — but the hutong grandmas would fight through my toneless Mandarin and limited vocabulary to ask if I was warm enough, or cool enough, or wanted to drink some tea. I’ll never understand the Chinese love of tea in hot weather, but it was lovely to be asked. Especially after Stick had gone home, and I was alone again.

I loved the area, down back alleys to the small grocery or noodle shop, or out of the maze of twisty little passages and across Dianamen Wai Dajie to the real brewed coffee and rooftap bars of Qianhai.  I loved walking home with takeout Xinjiang barbeque and beer, and passing Beijing-ren who were living just as Beijing familes have lived for generations.

It’s sad that this neighborhood will be over soon.

Via McClatchy blog: China Rises (well worth a visit for the hutong snapshots)

I remember driving alone from Vermont back to Western Mass a few months after I’d started driving, and feeling like the trip was an object lesson in gorgeous road metaphors. The curves in the mountain roads, blind corners, broad views down the mountain, and then the highway opening and flattening out in front of me. All of those road metaphors in songs and poems suddenly made sense!

So, I’m buying a car. This  has turned out to be a hilariously awful process, just as eye-opening as that New England morning drive, only now I’m fully understanding all the things people say about used cars and used car salesmen.

I don’t really like driving, and I don’t really know that much about cars. I can drive a standard and I can check a car’s oil, and I am incredibly impressed with myself for being able to do those things.

I secretly enjoy it when computer salespeople dumb things down for me, because it’s almost always followed by that awkward look when they realize I know what I’m talking about.  But with cars, I actually don’t have the foggiest idea what we’re talking about. Oh, it need a transmisserator? Excuse me while I stare blankly. And Google.

Anyway, I’ve gotten better and better at knowing what to ask when I go to look at cars. Do you have the title in hand, and is it actually in your name or your cousin’s sister-in-law’s roommate’s name? Are you selling the car because it spectacularly failed inspection recently? Did you hit a deer immediately after posting the photos? If it’s a standard, do all of the gears work?

And, one that bitter experience has taught me to ask: DOES IT HAVE SEATS?

Issue 11 of Indie Game Mag is out, including my article on IndieCade:

In the midst of the booth babes, the pumping ‘Poker Face’ from the Dance Central demo at Harmonix, and the all-out gaming promo swag of E3 is a section devoted to IndieCade, an independent games showcase.

IndieCade will host the third annual International Festival of Independent Games this October 8-10 in Culver City, California. This showcase displays of some of the best indie games from around the world. The exhibit in October will feature the winners of IndieCade’s competition, as decided by voters and players, but for a bit of a sneak preview, IndieCade organizers have selected twelve submitted games for display at E3.

The selected games show some amazing creativity, truly engaging storytelling and interesting new ways to interact with a game and with other players.

Just quoted enough to get ‘Poker Face’ stuck in your head again. You’re welcome!

Via Indie Game Mag

A few days ago, I was invited to check out NASA’s new game, Moonbase Alpha. Fortunately for you, it was still under wraps so you all were spared my clever, clever puns about a Moonbase Alpha beta.

Moonbase Alpha is described as multiplayer, but it’s actually for small cooperative groups, either public or passworded, not an MMO. Players work cooperatively to repair damaged life support systems to bring oxygen to save the trapped NPC astronauts. You have 25 minutes before oxygen runs out for a dramatic race against the clock, or you can turn off the timer for a low-stress version.

The game is a gorgeous grey moonscape, and it’s surprisingly fun to hop around in your spacesuit. If you get too interested in bouncing around and looking at the tiny earth in the sky,  you’ll be reminded of your goal by desperate cries from your oxygen-needing crew members.  Not that I did that. I’m just saying.

I found parts of the UI pretty frustrating. The radial menus were a nice stylistic choice, but I was frustrated when options were greyed out with no explanation. I often knew how to solve a puzzle but didn’t know how to use the interface to make that happen. For example, if you’re using a coupler to join two hoses, you need to be holding the hose, and activating the coupler, NOT the other way around. If you drop an item, you may need to wiggle your avatar around for a while to get into position to pick it up. I’m not sure if the goal was low-gravity, heavy suit realism or if the UI was wonky. I’ve said this before, about certain indie games, but it’s never a good thing when design choices can be mistaken for technical glitches.

And, seriously, why add frustration to an edu game about space? Was the goal to convince boys and girls that being an astronaut isn’t that cool after all, and they should be accountants instead?

The game is quite short, although there’s replay value on larger or smaller maps, and the pre-launch press release says that Moonbase Alpha is a proof of concept for a potential NASA educational game.  Moonbase Alpha shows a lot of potential for a cooperative game, especially if it’s the rumored MMO.

The game is out today, and available free on Steam.

Also, if you ever forget to call your parents, tell them you were really busy all weekend, and mumble something about “NDA… NASA…tell you as soon as I can.” It works great!

Bethie and I met up with a bunch of my college friends at Eric’s new condo, for lots of shrieking and hugging and laughing. Oh, and wine.

It took about six seconds for me to feel at home again. A lot had changed, of course, but a lot hadn’t. These are still some of my favorite people in the world, even if we’re not talking about final papers and getting trashed (Note to parents and prospective employers: Don’t worry! I always did it in that order!) anymore. My college friends have, bizarrely enough, gotten married (There was a bit of teasing about whether I time my travels abroad to miss weddings. I swear I don’t! I love weddings!), bought houses,  got proper jobs, and settled in the Boston suburbs. Wow. I could never really picture that for me, and now is the time to build what is for me, and it’s simultaneously exciting and scary.

Then Bethie and I took the T back to her house. We were the only people in the car, so we got a little bit hyper.  Did I mention that my sister is awesome?

Here’s my IndieCade post over on Indie Game Mag. There’s a longer version coming out in the print mag, including reactions to Maum, B.U.T.T.O.N. and my general thoughts on indie games at E3.

I also talked about playing Rock Band 3 over at DeviceMag.

And, in case you missed it, I talked about Civ 5 right here.

I’m still doing the real-journalist happy dance. I’ve written before about the awkwardness of calling myself a games journalist, and then needing to add qualifiers about reviewing small games for small publications, or having a day job, but covering E3 feels like leveling up.

I’m visiting my awesome sister in Boston now. We had a salon last night where she played me some songs she’s working on and I read her my latest story.

In a lot of ways, New England is home to me. I love the saltbox houses and the town greens, and absence has made the heart grow fonder of ubiquitous Red Sox caps. I even like riding the T.  (If you’ve just tuned into Simpson’s Paradox, I feel about driving the way most people feel about visiting the dentist. Oh, not the dread and anxiety part, I just mean that driving is better than all my teeth falling out.)

As Eric said: Welcome back to the homeworld.

[PS I reread several years of Pie2K comics to find this one to go with the title.]

At the airport — on the LAX side — I met Mike of GameDrinkCode. We hadn’t met before, although I’m a big fan of GameDrinkCode (I’m more of a GameDrinkWrite girl myself), and I’d been disappointed to miss his highspeed-development talk at the Triangle Game Conference. When he’s not posting on how to afford an indie game, he does iPhone games as Ludoko. (Yes, from the Latin.) Thought it was a good sign that the first person I met was an indie dev.

I ran into a guy in the elevator who asked who I was representing. I said I was freelance. He congratulated me on my successful BSing of the E3 media board.  That’s how I secretly feel, deep down,  about being a journalist, but sometimes I secretly feel like I’m gothly pale or a bit too pear-shaped, and I don’t think I want that pointed out by strangers, either.

I finally met my Twitter friend @CaptainCursor in person! His people over at Rifts went on Unattended Journalist Alert when I asked to see him, and then Nick came out and said hi and tossed me up in the air a couple times.

(Which was extra nice, because my friend who usually greets me by picking me up and swinging me around the room had the bad manners to move to Korea a few years ago.) The Rifts tour was pretty awesome too, thanks, Nick! And for a little while, I felt like one of the cool kids who already knew people at E3. Look, three full days of endless introductions can be pretty exhausting.

I ran into a guy in the elevator who asked if I was a booth babe. Aww! I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh hysterically or hug him.

I ran into another guy in the hotel coffeeshop, who saw my Triangle Games Conference bag, and asked if my husband was here for E3. I wanted to give him a one-finger salute,  but instead I gave him my card. And an icy glare!

I met up with the rest of the guys from DIYgamer at the IndieCade party for drinks and mutual admiration society. Guys, if I didn’t tell you clearly enough, I love your posts.

I was in a taxi on the way to the Scott Pilgrim kegger when some basketball team won something or other, and the whole city started cheering. Oh, yeah, and when I got to the party, the line went down the block and around the corner, but the  line was fantastic, tarted-up girls and posturing guys, all texting friends and comparing how drunk they got last night to how drunk they’re going to get tonight.  I thought it would be fun to post about how I couldn’t get into the Hollywood party, so I went to the front of the line, and said who I was, and asked if I was on the list. I wasn’t, of course, but here, go in anyway. This is either because A) I am famous or B) There weren’t enough girls inside. You decide!

The thing is, that once you’ve gotten inside, then you’re just a girl at a party who doesn’t know anyone, and that’s a bit annoying. Sometimes, as a journalist, you have to look at the line of kegs and ask yourself “What would Hemmingway do?”

I added an extra day to my trip to see the Getty Villa, because one nerd-dom just isn’t enough for me. Seeing the Getty Villa has been a dream since I first read about the Villa of the Papyri and the reconstruction. It was an awesome day for me. Then I caught the bus back to downtown LA. The route runs along the Pacific Ocean, so there’s a bus full of tired commuters and dirty vagrants… and me, jumping up and down and staring at the Santa Monica Pier.