Living in the Cloud

About a year ago, maybe longer, it became pretty obvious that my desktop PC was not long for this world. I think it was when my hard drive suffered a total failure. For the second time. Or maybe when all the fans in the tower died on me. For the second time. Either way, thank God for backup drives and what little common sense I have.

Last week I decided to bite the bullet and shell out for a shiny new computer, specifically a Dell laptop. I'd been weighing the merits of buying a Mac, but ultimately I couldn't justify spending an extra $400 or more for the privilege of running OS X on overpriced hardware. Sure, a MacBook Pro looks sexy as hell, but I can make do with a Dell and put more money towards a down payment on a house.

Anyway. Today the laptop arrived, and for all the crap I've given Microsoft about Windows Vista, I'm loving Windows 7 right now. My setup experience has been brilliant. I just turned on the computer, typed in my name, told it how to connect to my wireless network, and boom I can log into my desktop and start customizing to my heart's delight.

First customization: Set up a user account for my wife. (Letting her play with the laptop helped me justify carrying a credit card balance again.)

Second customization: Notice that I somehow typed in "Davod" instead of "David" when I was setting up my display name, and end my evil twin's bit-encoded existence.

Third customization: Install free antivirus software and Google Chrome, because I am a big boy and I use a big boy's browser now.

Fourth customization: Delete all the Dell crapware from my system. McAfee trial, already gone. Dell toolbar, gone. eBay application (wut?) gone.

Then I get to some sort of backup software, and I remember Dell telling me I should back up my operating system up right away. Some niggling doubt tells me to look for the Windows 7 reinstall disc.

It's not there. And now I'm scared.

* * *

Cloud computing makes my life easier. That brilliant installation I mentioned earlier? Part of that is thanks to The Cloud. I installed Chrome on my new laptop, and it synced up with my Google account and imported all of my bookmarks and preferences from thin air. I set up Dropbox and downloaded all of my writing, wallpapers, and eBooks in minutes. I installed iTunes and... well, I'm still moving all of my crap over from my new computer. (Apple hasn't quite got The Cloud down yet.)

But there are perils in The Cloud, oh yes there are. What's stopping Chrome from using my bookmarks to launch targeted ad warfare directly at my brain? What keeps Dropbox from stealing all of my shit and running off into the night?

And why should Dell ship me a recovery disc for my operating system when, at this point, most all of my data is living on about twenty computers distributed throughout the country? "Hell," they say, "the bastard geeks just use those discs to get around our advertisers' crapware in the first place. And don't forget about the software pirates! Let them go out and buy their own discs if it's so damn important!"

From a business standpoint this makes sense. I'm betting Microsoft gives Dell a killer discount if they don't ship physical media with their computers. And let's face it, the pirates made a killing trading those Windows recovery discs all over the place.

But damn it, I want to own the operating system I run on my PC

(by which I mean I want to own a physical copy of the software on some form of media, such as a DVD or flash drive, along with a license to install said software on one or more computers which I also own, so long as I do not distribute said software to other persons)

so that if, God forbid, the whole computer dies in a horrible magnet accident or viruses eat my desktop, I can pull something out of a drawer and rebuild the thing from scratch. I do not want to back up and restore Dell's crapware from a thumb drive I don't own.

And things are going to keep moving in this direction. As bandwidth becomes cheaper, we'll start to see entire operating systems that are streamed right off the Internet. Your files won't live on your computer - they'll be off in The Cloud, safely stored and duplicated on a fleet of high-end servers, and triple-encrypted to keep the hackers out. You'll be able to jump onto any old piece of hardware you like, from a friend's computer to a library terminal, and within minutes it'll be like you're in the comfort of your own home.

Until you forget to pay the license subscription, or the Imp of Perversity misplaces your account information, and you're at the mercy of Google or Microsoft or Apple or Comcast or the FCC. And then you'll be begging with the rest of the Unpersons in a big crowd in a cold February day, and every few minutes you'll pull out your iPhone 15 and forlornly look at the screen that says "Operating system not found. Please contact customer support." But you can't get a clear signal because all the VoIP bandwidth is being eaten by people watching Justin Bieber's comeback video on YouTube HD3D Interactive.

And I sense I've gone sideways somewhere, so to sum up: My new laptop is awesome, crapware sucks, and I'd like my damn Windows disc back before it's too late. Now here's a picture of Lina celebrating her 3rd birthday.

Don't look at me like that. I didn't let her drive.

Lent

This year I am... celebrating? Getting through? Well, certainly participating in Lent. It's always something of an iffy proposition for me, being a long-standing member of the Lapsed Catholic Church (I say my prayers, but I'm not confirmed and I only attend church extremely sporadically). And I've already managed to foul up the fasting part of Lent with some leftover pizza I had for lunch before I remembered what I was doing.

But I did give something up, and this year it's a doozy:

For the duration of Lent, I will not buy any books, eBooks, or comic books.

It doesn't sound like it, but this is going to be a challenge for me. For starters, I buy comic books just about every week. And I like the folks I buy my comics from, so I'm going to feel bad when my subscription box starts filling up. And even leaving aside the comics, I have a pretty large book habit that's going to want feeding any day now.

Still! I will persevere. It's only forty or so days, after all. And I've got a few books bouncing around the house that I never quite finished, so if I want fresh reading material I'll have some.

But, well... in some ways it's just going to suck.

Links of Interest - The "Dave Is In Crunch Mode" Edition

Sorry for the lack of blogging. My day job has started to bleed into my nights for the past week, and looks set to continue the trend. This is not a pleasant development, but it happens and I can pretty much cope with it, it just cuts into my writing time something awful.

Anyway, there've been a lot of good articles these past few weeks on writing, so I encourage you to check out:

Combat Porn, by Erin M. Evans - A look at how to write a bloody good fight scene, or a good bloody fight scene, I can't remember which.

Lies Writers Tell, from Chuck Wendig, who is really good at these "On your knees maggots and give me twenty pages" articles. Or, more properly, wake-up calls for budding young authors.

Advice on Writing for Black Library, from The Literary Project. Black Library authors old and new give you some advice on how to sell something to the publisher. If you're going to shoot for their May submissions window (like me), this is a must read.

Hyperbole and a Half, because it's frigging awesome. I don't care that it's got nothing to do with writing, either. Oh, wait, it does, meet the Alot.

The Young Adult Mafia is Bullshit, so I could work a swear word into this post. Note that I've stopped reporting the titles accurately. So I guess there was a rumor that some young adult fiction authors were whacking the competition? I wouldn't know, so far I just have to answer to the one Don in England for my output.

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft as an eBook for either your iPad or your Kindle. You could even find a program to turn it into a PDF and print the damn thing. It's an entire library of weird eldritch horror, from one of the guys who founded weird, eldritch horror. Go download it and thank Ruth X for her hard work.

I think that covers the good stuff, certainly a good chunk of it. Tune in later, when I maybe stop aggregating links and start generating actual content again.

P.S. This headline is my publication credit for the month. I don't care that it's tiny, getting a Fark article greenlit is tricky and I'm going to take pride in having done it. So there.

This Blog Post is On Strike

It's a sympathy strike with the unions in Wisconsin. Governor Walker's being, like, a total toolbag over this collective bargaining thing, and I figure I should show solidarity to, y'know, drive up my page hits a little bit...

No?

Okay, the truth is this has been a pretty long and irritating week. I've had to deal with my taxes (Protip: Never sell stock if you don't have an accountant handy), deadlines at work, botched deadlines at the writing desk, a crazed Corgi, and most recently a garbage disposal that doesn't work except to leak water all over the inside of my kitchen cabinet. My TMJ keeps acting up, I'm overdue for a new pair of glasses so I'm straining my eyes every day, and I'm probably killing my liver with a combination of Ibuprofen and strong liquor. The weather keeps alternating between beautiful spring days and frostbite, and that is because it is February and February is the month of hate.

Well. It's March tomorrow, and that means better weather, (hopefully) better blogging, and my birthday somewhere in the middle. It's a friendlier month overall.

Hey, have you heard about Writing Excuses? It's a podcast where some pretty good writers chat about some aspect of the craft for fifteen minutes at a time. Last week's episode talked about writing in somebody else's intellectual property, which is a subject near and dear to my heart and well worth checking out.</plug>

Okay, back to unpaid overtime. I'll try to be more substantial next week, or sooner if at all possible.

Review: Marvel vs Capcom 3

Well, I've flubbed my attempt at posting two blog updates per week, and it's only been... six weeks? Hell, that's not too bad. Never mind.

So here's my review of Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

Story - You're joking, right? It's a fighting game. Well, I guess they can have stories if they really want...

In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the villains of the Marvel universe (Dr. Doom, Dormammu, M.O.D.O.K., Magneto, etc.) and the villains of every Capcom game ever made (really just Albert Wesker, although Akuma turns up later) join forces to merge their respective Earths together so they can team up and take over. As in every great villain plan, this falls flat on its face when the heroes of the two Earths team up to beat down the villains. And then Galactus turns up and threatens to eat everyone.

Honestly, there's just enough story here to justify a single-player Arcade mode, and that's it. The endings don't tie together; most of them are just "if this happened, what would X do?" sequences, and with only two illustrations per ending there's not a lot to look forward to. So let's move on.

Gameplay - Now we're talking. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a fast-paced cheesefest par excellence. Each player gets to pick out a team of three characters from a roster of thirty-eight (thirty-six of whom are now available). Despite the title, you don't have to pick just Marvel characters or just Capcom characters - mix and match to your heart's content. A fight takes place in one round where the goal is to defeat all three of your opponent's characters in a specified time limit.

The fighting style works best when you focus on setting up and executing devastating combos on your opponent. For example, you might jump in, punch somebody in the face with three quick hits, then uppercut them thirty feet in the air, jump up after them, and start beating on them again until you get tired, call in a friend to keep up the beating, then call in your third teammate to finish things off and smash your hapless foe back into the dirt. When the poor unfortunate soul lands, you're ready with an attack called a Hyper Combo that takes up the entire screen and does massive amounts of damage. And that could be the first ten seconds of a match.

The cast of thirty-eight characters is smaller than Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had, but you'd hardly notice. Because you pick three fighters for every match, the game has a lot of built-in replay value just from trying to assemble the ultimate fighting team. That's not to mention that all of the characters are great fun to watch and listen to: Iron Man sounds and acts like Robert Downey Jr. is reading his lines, M.O.D.O.K. makes giant heads look threatening, and Deadpool will grab the camera and shake the stuffing out of you after every match.

It does take some time to get used to the controls, and Capcom doesn't do a damn thing to help in this regard, besides providing a robust must-read game manual. But once you know what you're doing, the game is a lot of fun.

Online Play - This is one of the big deficiencies of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, so I have to call it out. Capcom's last fighting game, Super Street Fighter IV, had a robust online matchmaking system - you could search for opponents in a ranked or unranked match and link up easily. You could set up a tournament where you watched each fight real-time, while waiting for your turn to battle. You could save your best fights as replay videos to watch or share with the gaming community.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 junks most of that. You can still search for ranked or unranked matches, but odds are about 50/50 that you'll be kicked out of whatever match you find. This wouldn't be too bad - Street Fighter had the same problem - but for some reason the game then kicks you back to the main menu, wasting your time as you navigate down to search for another fight.

Tournament play is still there, but you can no longer watch any fight other than the one you're participating in. For every other fight, you see two game cards duke it out (read: bounce off each other) as lifebars for the respective fighters slowly diminish. The only real use for tournament play is to set up a game between friends - random gamers will not be interested, other than to get the Achievement for participating in an eight-player game.

And replay videos? Gone completely, with no explanation. I assume there were too many technical challenges to overcome, and given the amount of stuff happening on camera in a given fight, I can understand why; but it's still a little disappointing.

I've heard rumors that Capcom will slowly patch in some fixes for these issues, and I hope they do. Thankfully, the annoyance involved in finding a pickup game online doesn't detract from the fun once you actually get into a match.

Verdict - Despite its flaws, I think Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a superior fighting game to the last few Street Fighter games. The fights are quick, insanely beautiful to look at, and rewarding when you grind your opponent into the dirt. None of the characters seem badly unbalanced, and with six of them fighting in any given match there's always a way to bring down even the nastiest character combinations. As long as Capcom delivers on fixing a few of the weaker features, this game is sure to be a classic. 9 review points out of 10.