Text4Dead Dev Diary 2 – Making a House out of Letters

Posted by agentcox under charles cox, game development, language, video games, writing

One thing that keeps popping up as the development of the game continues is the notion of spatial granularity. It’s amazing what we take for granted in even a rudimentary 3D first-person shooter.

Quake, an early example of honest-to-God 3D gaming (and not the 2.5D skewing-and-billboard Wolfenstein clones) was among the first to begin the modern gamer’s training to recognize small deltas in position, rotation, and scale as markers that the action in their vicinity was about to change. It was an exercise of surprisingly complex pattern recognition.

The human brain is tuned to a fine nuance at 60 Hz, and the difference of a few degrees of any game entity can clue a wired brain off to a potential perceived future. You know the columns and stairways and arches of a place, and it is wired into the mind to accept a sudden breaking of any of those planes as the signal that something is about to go down.

It can happen in elements of a fraction of an inch: spotting a gun muzzle telegraphing around a corner, or a subtle color shift in the otherwise unbroken pattern of a wall – the difference of just a few pixels marks the transition from the static world to the dynamic world.

What’s our text-based equivalent?

You hear a sound to the south!

A notification of the above kind is chunky, not gritty; even though it can still maintain the appropriate “don’t open that door” aesthetic, the abstract notion of “south” leaves to the first-person-shooter mind an unsettling notion that for all the liberties taken with licensing, this is not a similar game to its spiritual parent at all.

How Big is Bite-Sized?

In creating the very first encounters between the player character and their undead enemies, it was necessary to model the world of Left 4 Dead’s first level – the Apartments.

The player starts on the roof, and takes a staircase to a landing that opens into a full third-floor apartment complete with kitchen, living room, bathroom, and a few extra rooms.

These rooms are big enough to hold dozens of characters in Left 4 Dead, but small enough that the confines are palpable. Lots of corners and doors – most of the action that goes on is resolved in those micromoments between noticing a figure in your flashlight beam and squeezing off a fatal headshot.

The same space is condensed into eight discrete rooms in Text4Dead, linked by physical direction – the kitchen, for instance, is one room west of the staircase.

Is this enough? Why did I choose to abstract the bathroom into one room rather than two?

In a contextual equivalent of an image resizing algorithm, I could literally stretch the world outwards in every direction: increase every room to the size of four rooms and allow the players eight degrees of freedom in every open space, expanding the third floor from 8 rooms to a sizeable 32. I could go further still, to 9 rooms a piece, for a total of 72.

But it’s a choice with far-reaching consequences: just as “combat distance” becomes a factor in classifying a first-person combat game (”open-world” and “close-quarters” are familiar abstractions), so too does the granularity of the space in the text-based world.

The problem comes down to one of linearity and messaging: if players are allowed to go anywhere, how do they know where they should go?

Least Granularity: Obvious exits: west, up

Most granularity: Obvious exits: north, south, east, west, northwest, southwest, northeast, southeast, up

This is a pretty standard tradeoff in the text-based world, one that is mercifully absent from all but the most open world 3D shooters, and even then bandaged by such augmented reality devices as heads-up displays, compasses, and waypoint lines.

In T4D, we have no such luxuries; the mind must make the world from interpreted text, and omniscient helpers (such as a text-based equivalent of a HUD) are no sure cure: they have the potential to generate mountains of text¹, and modern attentions being what they are, our biggest enemy is no longer too little information – it is too much information.

TL:DR – The Last Word

Ultimately, I can see the game and how it should work, how much time I expect players to stay in one room fighting infected before they make the choice to move to the next room, and how many of those transits need to be successfully navigated before the team crosses the finish line into the loving embrace of the Safe Room.

The things that make T4D different from L4D are all opportunities to embrace the medium, not just problems in copying over the game’s genetic code.

In crafting the size of our transplant world, I chose the size I did because I want the transit from room to room to be a big deal – each movement needs to be deliberate, scary, and risky, a decision made through a hail of bullets and shorn zombie limbs, where the confusion isn’t about where to go, only about whether you’ll make it there alive.

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1 In an earlier text-based game I developed, a solution to briefly displaying augmented reality output was to use a type of abbreviated code: “S2V8E”, for example, would indicate someone to your south two spaces away, walking at a volume of 8 (out of 10, pretty loud), and having just moved there from the east. Needless to say, the decryption required a cheat sheet, and while it would have made a fine tchotchke, more elegant solutions are probably out there.

Text4Dead – An Experiment in One-Dimensional Gaming

Posted by agentcox under charles cox, game development, language, video games, writing

It’s been something I’ve wanted to do since I started with Inform those many months ago – no, not finish Industry. I’ll get to that later (with all due respect to my waning credibility on the finisher’s market, there’s nothing quite like a lifetime of projects in various states of in-progressness-ness).

I’ve wanted to experiment with the abstraction of modern video game titles into text-based forms, preserving aesthetics and feel while developing new, text-friendly gameplay mechanics.

You heard me right. I’m making text-based versions of modern video games, because that’s the kind of self-flagellating logical exercise that passes for fun with me.

The first one is going to be Left 4 Dead – starting with the “No Mercy” episode.

Challenges Taken, Challenges Left (4 Dead)

Let’s not make a bad start of this homage: Understand that Left 4 Dead is an exceptional achievement made by a team that knows how to make addictive, challenging games. There’s a lot I won’t be able to do. This isn’t a copy.

What won’t I tackle? Co-op play, obviously, has a number of technical drawbacks including “I don’t want to wait for that asshole to type before I can type” (we’ll file that one under usability). Also, there’s the rather daunting challenge of making the entire first-person shooter experience play out using standard (or at least enjoyable) text-based conventions, which leads to more than a few things that can’t be simulated in text:

• The challenge of precise aiming and recoil using analog controls
• The advantage and immersion of audio as a perceptive tool in 3D space
• The thrill of split-second reaction and twitch factor

Skeptics and folks late for work alike are asking “so, why bother?”

This is the weird bit: Outside of a vague notion that something about the experience in text can be addictive in a new way, I honestly have no idea.

The Semantics of Unique IDs and Shotguns

In just about every text-based whatever I’ve made during my amateur tenure, I inevitably start with weapons. There’s something familiar and comfortable about the types of data I generally like to represent, but my initial sketches ran into an immediate problem.

Left 4 Dead represents weapons in multiple ways, not all of which are a one-to-one mapping. Some weapons lay about as independent objects, such as those dropped by players, some are more like weapon “factories”, such as the weapons tables and lockers – and all of them are identical.

Problem: Inform 7 doesn’t do duplicate objects. If there’s a way to make a thousand identical copies of an auto-shotgun, I don’t know how to do it. A lot of it has to do with the way you type stuff into a text-based game.

>take shotgun
Which one? There are 3,056 shotguns here.
>uh, the green one

If you think about it spatially, the uniqueness of a firearm instance in 3D space has more to do with its position than any unique visual characteristics – if you want that shotgun, you really mean that one sitting over by the chair next to the guy’s half-chewed leg, and the process of selection is one of lining up your cursor over the polygons and doing a bit of pixelpicking. The entire process of identification and selection in text-based games is head-and-shoulders different. Not that a type of spatial ID isn’t possible in a general way in text, but it carries the extra burden of contextual history.

What I mean is:

>drop shotgun
Which one? You are carrying 5 shotguns.
>uh, I mean the one that I found five minutes ago – you know, that was sitting over by the chair next to the…

So, it became necessary to describe the weapons we’d find along our way with descriptors – basic, I admit, but it does bring over a seasoned text-adventure convention:

The crappy shotgun is a primary weapon. It has an index 1. It is in the apartment roof.
The rusty UZI is a primary weapon. It has an index 2. It is in the apartment roof.
The ugly hunting rifle is a primary weapon. It has an index 3. It is in the apartment roof.

I admit it’s a scant example of the kind of choices that’ll be coming up as I attempt to recreate the feel and flavor of Left 4 Dead in the Inform language, but as these problems present themselves, I’ll share the results with you – and not just in these posts. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to team up with Bill, Zoey, Louis, and Francis to take down hordes of text-based zombies yourself.

Just as soon as I get these weapons working.

In Defense of The Offense of The Defense of Steely Dan

Posted by agentcox under mp3, music

It was years ago, I’m sure, that I got the Two Against Nature music-video DVD, and I figure that with a few glasses of white wine on board, I’m willing to tackle it.

I get it – in word, deed, and eyegravity (that thing people do when they just sort of look at you until you’re embarassed enough to recant) that Steely Dan is no longer anyone’s favorite band. I have my doubts that they ever were. I’m serious. You’d like ‘em, sure, but you’d say Brubeck, Bechet, or – hell, even Bacharach before you gave Dan the top slot.

C: Tell me your favorite band.
X: Oh, Steely Dan, definitely.
C: (eyegravity)
X: Well, I mean – okay, so I always liked what Traffic did with “Low Spark” better.

Dan fans – of which I’d count myself among, at least in the pedestrian cadre – have to put up with the reality that along with everyone else, they too have to tolerate a strategic volley of musical squickery that leaves The Grand House Steely as that uncle with enough tribal casino debt and the resultant ankle monitor that gets everyone at the Christmas party changing the subject and finding the far punch bowl instead of the near one.

Not that there’s anything wrong, right? My God, talk about your bend sinister; they’ve got the cleanest sound of any concert I’ve attended – what you hear on the DVD is literally what you get when you sit on the grass in front of them live. And they never show disrespect to the instruments – they’re muting their trumpets, wiring their saxophones just perfect, and yet – why don’t I want to take another bite of the salmon mousse?

Is it Donald Fagen’s Doolin-Cave-sized stalactite canines?
Walter Becker’s neckbeard?

Realizing it now – they helped a bit, Donald Fagen describing himself as halfway between a nerd and a schmendrick – I think these two are shop teachers. Not kidding. If it wasn’t for the fact that the sleaze of New Jersey tasted good with a seventeen-piece band they might be drooling over another slat of McLendon pine.

Victoria – a backup singer, about Donald Fagen: “He reminds me of my dad.”

I can’t make this kind of stuff up. You can’t ignore the dudes are sixty years old – that’s ten years of “over the hill” joke cards and another ten of depressing silence. I’ve been facing up to the possibility that these guys are flat-out irrelevant.

Cornelius is the saxophonist on this gig. He’s bearded, black, and the source – the guys say – of a tension, no, not a tension: a faux-tension with some of the other band members.

He rolls his eyes.

“Modern psychoanalysis says,” Becker begins to lecture, “Most of your sources of – ah, tension – come from events in your past.”
“And the unconscious always wants to say ‘yes’,” Fagen warns.
Cornelius looks once at each of them, utterly done-with-this. “Can I go now?”

It’s these stunts that makes loving Steely Dan harder than it has to be, and always under the withering tracer fire of perfectly reasonable modern culture; they’re making us all uncomfortable, and not in that Bauhaus way – these guys aren’t finding new ways of fitting glass together at right angles, here. Maybe it’s hubris; I clearly have no idea. You’ve figured that out by now, right?

All I can say is that I’ve got ten Steely Dan albums in my collection and a DVD, and am, over twenty years of listening, from my first youthful encounter with Aja, no closer to understanding whether these transplant blue-eyed soulsters are playing it straight, crooked, or backward.

Guess I’ll keep listening.

BVI 2009: Days 6 and 7 – Soper’s Hole and The End

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

The close of the tour.

Charles:

We’ve got only a few cycles left before we catch the taxi back to the airport, our boat safely in harbor, stalwart against the building dark of the next cold front. To the BVI, a cold front means a drop in winds, rain showers that would be described by most as “a pleasant distraction”, and a decrease in temperature of about a degree. That’s a fahrenheit degree.

In fact, it’s been stuffier today than any other day since we started our trip – the recycled chill of a 757 cabin in flight actually sounds agreeable. I’ve gone crazy, I know.

We spent the last two days making our way back to base – sort of. No trip is complete without a stopover at Soper’s Hole and the gift shops that dot the eastern quay. We got a few odds and ends for Christmas, then fired up the grill to cook the last meal on the boat. The next day, the swell was building again, and our final run back to Road Town was reminiscent of the first day, when our legs still had learning to do about the pitch and roll of the sea.

Sleeping on a boat for this long means we’ll have wave-brain for a while; closing one’s eyes in the shower is a good way to bring it on: your mind imagines you’re still pitching and moving about. I predict the next week of land-based sleep is going to bring interesting, kinetic dreams.

In all, this trip has been a great opportunity to do as little as possible, as laid-back as possible, with the best food and drink possible, with the kindest weather the planet has to offer around Christmastime. The islanders here call it limin’. I could get used to it.

That’s a dangerous thought. Back to Type A mode. Do things. Sound important. Schedules, milestones, grunt grunt grunt. I’ve got a plane to catch. Profit.

W2SBUCUC9Q6X

*transmission ends*

Alicia:

*transmission resumes*

When we set out on this trip, Charles scoffed at me for bringing a dozen books (yes, that’s the actual number, not an exaggeration) on a week-long excursion. He himself brought a single pair. Now, at week’s end, who is loaning him an advance copy of the Jasper Fforde’s newest novel? That’s right. Meanwhile, I’ve cruised through all but three of the books I brought, and those three are some solid nonfiction volumes that should be plenty to occupy me on the long series of plane rides home.

There have been times in the course of our voyage where I have felt guilty for the strong urge to moor the boat, mix a cocktail or two, relax on deck (or belowdecks, on the days when the AC was operational), and read until my eyes were drooping and it was time for sleep. I can’t remember the last time I had an opportunity to go through so many books of my own choosing in so short a period of time. And the bonus facts that I get to do so between bouts of sailing and snorkeling and some truly amazing food? Heaven.

That said, the pull now is homeward. I miss sweaters, and blankets, and not being so itchy and hot. Charles misses the video games, and we both miss karaoke and familiar faces. The best vacations make you as happy to return home as you originally were to escape it, and by such a standard this trip was nearly perfect.

Over and out.

BVI 2009: Days 4 and 5 – Eustacia Reef and Back to the Baths

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

Charles:

We’re tied up at Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbor now, with two full days left to enjoy the rapidly-calming weather. Though it costs a little more, a slip at a marina affords the luxuries of power outlets, air conditioning, WiFi, showers, and a significant reduction in that terrible feeling that your boat is going to swing right off its buoy in the middle of the night and bury nose-first in a nearby reef.

The downside is that – at least here in the BVI – these slips are a royal bitch to get into. I’ve already scratched the paint, bonked her nose, and knocked a navigation light cover loose trying to back this boat into a twelve-foot slip in crosswinds. In Tacoma, it’s no trouble. Here – well, it’s humbling; Alicia has kept my spirits up and has always been there to throw lines and re-rig as necessary to get us to safety. She’s a natural at this.

We’ve still been motoring – at this point, sailing her just feels like too damned much work. This is supposed to be a vacation. We’ve done nearly everything else, including cooking our first dinner aboard tonight – baked some-kinda-white-fish with garlic bread and rum carrots. It’s the cap on a heck of a day – they went from red-flag to yellow-flag at The Baths today, which means we were allowed to come ashore, swimming nearly a mile today to-and-from the boat and ashore.

That’s on top of yesterday’s snorkeling excursion to a reef just off Eustacia Island, diving beneath the waves to escape the pouring rain, finding huge formations of colorful fish just below the surface. On board, we met a couple from Minnesota, and spent the evening over dinner and drinks, swapping stories of frozen winters back home and Caribbean trips gone by.

All of this reminds me daily how important a good crew is in life, in every endeavor, from sailing to singing to everyday work. I’ve had the very best people giving me all of their support every step of the way; that goes double for Alicia, the best partner anyone could ask for, and a damned fine deckhand.

Alicia:

If I am, as Charles says, a damned fine deckhand, it’s because I have a damned fine captain on board with me. Someone this charismatic and capable does not come along every day. They especially do not come along every day and sneak booze into Bond films with you.

The night before last the Bitter End Yacht Club was showing Goldeneye in their open-air theater for free in the evening. “We should watch that,” I said to Charles. “Haven’t seen it in years.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Movies, in the Virgin Islands?”

“It’d be relaxing.”

“Yeah, but I’m already pretty tired.”

“We have whiskey,” I reminded him.

“Maybe we’ll just watch the first part,” he conceded.

And that is how we wound up loading a fifth of whiskey and two plastic cups into Charles’ laptop bag for camouflage and watching a Bond flick with the theater all to ourselves.

The couple from Minnesota mentioned the weather report was supposed to improve, so today Charles and I retraced our watery steps and headed back to the Baths. Mooring buoys are second nature by now, but the only one left was the farthest one north, one bay up from the Baths proper, and the current runs north-to-south along the coastline. “Are we swimming in?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” said Charles.

And we did. It was about a half-mile jaunt, which may in fact be the longest single swim I’ve ever done. When we finally reached shore, we slipped off our fins and turned back to eye our boat.

“She’s way out there,” said Charles.

“And we’ve got to swim back,” I said. “Want to hike the trail to Devil’s Bay?”

And so we did that. And then we swam back. It was grueling — we were fighting the current this time, and the swells were impressive and swamped my snorkel more than once — but we did it. For the second half of the trip we even had an escort: a school of about fifty blue tang, who were gliding happily along the sandy bottom from boat to boat. The catamaran moored just short of our boat had a few swimmers playing around off the back: the tang swam under them with an air of unconcern, and the swimmers never once looked down to see they were temporarily surrounded by tropical fish. As we approached Mystique, the tang swarmed happily up and circled the bulb of our keel, feeding on something there and bubbling with excitement. I had to laugh into my snorkel, and then gratefully pull myself up the swim ladder.

BVI 2009: Days 2 and 3 – Cooper to Bitter End

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

In Which our Heroes Tackle Cooper Island and North Gorda Sound.

From Charles:

The wind continues to howl, making it unseasonable weather for the kind of upwind sailing we’d need to do on this leg. I’ve clocked winds in our most recent squall en route to Cooper Island to be in excess of 32 knots, so the canvas, sadly, remains down.

But our engine, faithful companion, has kept us chugging happily along, first to Cooper Island and then to the Bitter End Yacht Club in North Gorda Sound, where we have received a much-needed injection of civilized treats, the first in three days: garbage pickup, air conditioning, and a shower.

Life on a mooring ball is an odd one: first in The Bight and then on Cooper Island, we swung on moorings each night, shuffling open and closed hatches along with the alternating heat waves and rain showers, listening to the wind lash at the boat’s bones, and rolling in the swell. They weren’t bad nights, but you have to get used to them.

On a ball, contact with others comes infrequently, either with trips to shore with the dinghy for meals or shopping, or with the occasional boat-bound vendor that pulls up alongside to hock ice cream, booze, and trash pickup. Other than that, it’s you, your boat, and the weather. About a quarter of the waking day is spent listening to the engine thrum as it recharges the onboard batteries. We’ve spent the remainder of the time reading, tending to the boat, eating, and hunting out good swimming and snorkeling spots.

The conditions are making for difficult snorkeling as most spots at the least suffer from cloudy, churned-up water, and at worst are off-limits altogether, as the bright red flag flown above the Baths at Virgin Gorda indicated today. To remedy this, we’ve signed on with a snorkeling tour here at the Bitter End tomorrow afternoon, which promises three good spots.

We have to stay another night on the docks here in North Gorda Sound to accomplish this. We’re surrounded by date palms, white sands, kiteboarders, and sailboats stretching out on miles of moorings. We’ll manage.

Alicia:
Our boat groans and howls like all of Dickens’ ghosts put together. She is also full to the gills with secret compartments and hatches, more cubbyholes and stowaway spots even than you’d normally expect on a boat. It’s very Victorian, somehow, the wailing and the secrets.

We have decided we must miss the Baths on this trip, as the weather thwarts a safe approach and grounding the boat doesn’t sound like much fun. On the upside, we get an extra night here in the Bitter End Yacht Club, which is so — it’s just — listen, the best way I can describe it is with a question: Have you ever seen “Swiss Family Robinson”?

Now imagine that treehouse as built by Donald Trump.

The heart of the Bitter End  is a long path that extends along the beach, gently paved and lined with coconut and date palms, mangroves, and flowers the likes of which I’ve never seen before in my life. East of our dock, the resort’s small rooms are piled high on the hill and reached by labyrinths of wooden stairways that climb upward from the path’s lush greenery. West of our dock are the cottage rentals, whose pyramidal roofs weirdly evoke the Egypt of pharaohs and long slave galleys on the bulging Nile. Everywhere are cushioned deck chairs, hammocks, shaded benches, and always the curve and sweep of the ocean.

Oh yes, and this central area where we are moored is full of restaurants, gift shops, sailboat/kiteboard/kayak rental places, bars, and even an English pub (!), all with balconies open to the tropical breeze and the sunset views. It’s idyllic, is what it is. It makes me glad the wind kept pushing our boat away from where we intended to put her, at nearby Saba Rock. Clearly, we were meant to end up here.

After two days, even without putting up the sails, Charles and I have evolved a chain of command that suits us both. He mans the helm and keeps us on course; I take charge of deck lines, the dinghy painter, fenders, and anything else that needs fixing or grabbing or tying. It means he gets to steer (which I don’t envy), and I get to clamber around the heaving, bobbing deck, or venture below to retrieve something from the navigation table. It’s a challenge we both enjoy. We’ll see how this plays out when we start our sail westward to Trellis Bay and Sandy Spit on Wednesday.

BVI 2009: Day 1 – Off and Running

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

From Charles:

With only the most minor of inconveniences…okay, there were a few – late planes, frantic gate changes, lack of showers, closed restaurants, and six-foot seas, we’re finally safely moored at Norman Island’s famous Bight.

The place is beginning to feel like home; homemade Pina Coladas and our first snorkeling adventure in the new gear got the bad taste of air travel adrenaline out of our mouths.

The boat is good: lean, adventure-ready, and elegant. A DVD player/TV combo  mounted on the bulkhead gives me the feeling that more than a few people sort of miss the point of a Caribbean vacation.

I admit the shameful truth – we motored over today. Didn’t even raise the sails once.  This wind and the waves, definitely a jump up from the summer months, and about 30% on top of that. Too much. Other people were sailing. Those people are crazy.

We’ll be staying the night here and leaving late-ish tomorrow, long enough for us to get in one more snorkeling trip, and hopefully, get our new underwater camera out there so you can all see what we see!

We’ve got reservations at Pirates Bight restaurant tonight; the barbecued ribs sound mighty tasty.

Alicia:

I lost my beer hat today. It was a 1557 New Belgium baseball cap I’d won by stepping up to the mike one karaoke night and pretending I knew more than the chorus of “You Sexy Thing.” The wind whipped it right off my head as we were turning the boat to point into the Bight. “Oh no!” I cried.

“It’s gone,” said Charles.

“Yeah,” I agreed. This was not like the time my Finland hat went overboard — then, I’d made the person responsible swim out and retrieve it. The Finland hat is special. This hat was merely gone.

Later, we discover a gift shop on shore that sells t-shirts, and therefore very probably hats. We are planning on going to check when we dinghy to shore for dinner (and wifi). So now the loss of the hat just at that moment seems providential. “You have done well with this beer hat,” the universe is saying, “but it is time for something new.”

Charles, by the way, is not joking about the ferocity of the waves today. Apparently the phrase swells of six feet or so is a code phrase for Alicia you better hang on to that boat because it is actively trying to throw you into the ocean. At first this was startling, because growing up with ski boats means I consider a forty-five-degree deck angle equivalent to capsizing. In a sailboat, this merely leads the captain to make sure all the rum is secured below in the cabin. (It was. We had great consideration for the rum.)

Then, on a trip into the boat’s bucking interior to retrieve the cruising guide that would tell us how not to hit rocks, I starting thinking of my movements the way I thought about them when we go rock climbing. This worked like a charm, and I felt much more secure. So remember, rough seas = climbing a vertical wall. End of seminar.

BVI 2009 – Day 0: Pulling An All-Nighter

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

The beginnings are always the hardest. Harder than going home. For our trip this year to the British Virgin Islands, it’s felt like a race against time to get ready.

Starting From The Front Row

Fate has given us hardly a nickel’s worth of consideration in these final days before we depart: work crunches, a mouse infestation in the home, and a sub-freezing arctic front icing down the city is just par for the week before vacation.

You set the traps, you wear a coat, you press on.

Alicia and I took some time last week to drop by Silent World and get some gear; last year’s adventure convinced us both that a good set of personal snorkeling apparatus would both increase visibility and decrease discomfort (and the “somebody spit in this snorkel” ick factor).

We have our fins, new partial-dry snorkels, and a set of superhero-like rayblocker masks from Seadive. In addition, you’ll be able to come along with us on this trip as we explore the BVI’s best (okay, closest-to-the-boat) snorkeling destinations with a Flip Ultra HD cam fitted with an underwater case.

Headed Where?

At some point in 2007, The Moorings completed massive renovations on their Road Town base in the British Virgin Islands. In June of last year, we had a chance to experience it, and it’s a hell of a job. Green marble showers, a pool, restaurant and bar, and shops for everything you need, and that’s before you step aboard your boat and forget all about life on land.

The plan is to be aboard the boat about 17 hours from now, with food freshly stocked and linens primed for sleeping; the next morning sees us at the briefing and on the way to Norman Island where I can go to that place I like that’s got the sand and water and fish.

We’ve been lucky to have been upgraded to a 37-footer; a Beneteau Oceanis line monohull sailing vessel with a bunch of state-of-the-art-blah, blah, and blah. You’ve heard this part before. I’m just trying to write something in order to stay up until 3:30 in the morning.

That’s when we leave for the airport.

Oh, the inconvenient things we do for convenience. Hurry up, 3:30.

My Letter to Senator Val Stevens About the Latest No on R-71 Ad

Posted by agentcox under crime, jobs, politics, writing

Dear Senator Stevens:

I have not been shy about assertive political debate in Washington. I realize that today, for the many millions that live here, the stakes could not be higher. Jobs are at hazard. Security is uncertain. Even public health is at risk.

In times like these, the animus of our collective parties can take battlefield forms, and it’s only aggressive language, challenges, and promises that rise above the noise of common process to stir the populace to action, even if that action is simply casting a ballot.

But it should never escape the conscience of any public official that behind the metaphor are lives: men, women, and children, and that a carelessly-worded statement from a position of authority can put thousands, even millions of these lives in immediate and dire peril.

Today, I read such a statement, and it came from your office – possibly from your very pen.

Senator Stevens, your most recent call to action on Referendum 71, for the members of the Protect Marriage Washington Political Action Committee, starting “Could this be the final battle…” is a deeply frightening and unnecessarily warlike tirade against a group of people who count among their ranks millions of innocent men and women – including children – that deserve no less than the full faith and credit of every one of the public institutions in this great state, down to the last helping hand.

I am aware of your causes’ immediate need for support in order to be successful. I realize the protection of marriage as traditionally defined is a critical component of the faith that so much of our country shares. But I would expect that you, as a senior member of a government in charge of so many millions of lives, would realize that a higher ethic must span your conscience and act as a damper on the rasher actions you might stress in times of crisis.

This wise influence, however, I do not see in your latest statement. In its place, I see a fall – a slide into patterns I had hoped we as merciful and tolerant citizens were rejecting: bigotry, prejudice, even hatred against a group of fellow Americans.

Your own words:

“After 27 years of relentless pursuit, homosexuals finally received protected class status from the Washington State Legislature in 2006, making it illegal for you to refuse to rent them a house, or hire them on account of their homosexuality.”

In casting refusal to hire or provide a home to members of the homosexual population as a desirable outcome blocked only by meddling legislation, you have ignored – or attempted wittingly to undo – generations of progress supported not only by the state of Washington, but by citizens all over this nation. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 and 1964, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 among others are the proud legacies you plow under with these words.

While it may be abhorrent to me personally for you to encourage the voting down of R-71, to withhold pension benefits, medical visiting, even child custody from same-sex couples, the stance is not in itself an unethical use of your power.

Encouraging the citizens of this state to withhold jobs or homes from others based solely on their sexual orientation in clear violation of Washington State law, however, is, and puts real lives at hazard.

If you truly consider this a battle as you say, Senator, you’ll know there are only two choices available to you when it comes to the thousands of families you’ve encouraged to be put out of work and home through your own words. You can either realize your actions have created casualties and take steps to heal the damage, or you can decide that these are simply bodies to trample underfoot on the road to your victory, and let that be the legacy that you leave.

Either way, the voters of Washington are watching.

Respectfully,
Charles N. Cox

The ad: http://protectmarriagewa.com/index.php/component/content/article/2-press-releases/195-important-message-from-sen-val-stevens-on-r-71

Want to write her, too?: https://dlr.leg.wa.gov/MemberEmail/MailForm.aspx?Chamber=S&District=39

A Year Ago – Lesson #1

Posted by agentcox under career, charles cox, microsoft, psychology

A year ago, on a crackling autumn day like this one, I turned in my badge, performed my exit interview, and tried my best to start a new life, a life without Microsoft. With a year behind me now, it’s hard to resist examining the choice and the lessons I’ve learned from life outside.

I’ve heard others describe Microsoft as a kind of graduate school; a place of practicum-meets-theory among unconnected vats of boiling hard drives and college graduates. I always imagined towering vertical pressure cookers. Turns out that’s mostly what I got.

I hear that the fall of 2003 – when I joined Microsoft full-time as a junior technical writer – was a strange season for the company ranks; a type of reorganizing that coincided with new language around collaboration, and less about cutthroat internal competition: in short, the Type A’s were no longer driving the bus.

Lesson #1: I’m a Rotten Type A

Maybe I had a spell of bad luck over 1/10th of my working life, but Type A’s were the only people driving from the moment I swiped my badge. Even if there were relaxed, collaborative people taking care of me, they were always at the mercy of the screamers, the yellers, the keyboard-throwers, because they used their few weapons – the axe of layoffs and the scythe of program cuts – faster and with less concern for collateral damage, and every thoughtful lead and manager knew it well enough to keep out of the way.

But I admit, it gets things done – just maybe not the right things. Still, it looked like success to me, and I fell for it. My arsenal of shirts and pants from Express hail from the days that I mistook histrionics for proxemics. I dressed up. I took Dale Carnegie leadership courses (when you could still get the Company to pay for them). I signed up for the University of Phoenix to finish that 4-year degree and move on to a – well, go on, guess.

That’s right. An MBA.

I don’t know what I would have become, but I wouldn’t have liked me much.

It’s not that aggressors are the only inhabitants of Microsoft. And it’s not that aggressors always go for the MBA. It’s this.

Me + Microsoft = Angry, Competitive, Feudalistic Me.

I believe more and more these days that it’s not the corporation, and it’s not the man, it’s the corporation plus the man that encourages one type of behavior or another. You are the company you keep, and I realized quickly that the competitive bile had nowhere near been drained from the Company by the time I arrived, and for all the talk about the New Microsoft, it wasn’t going to.

It was part of their lifeblood, part of what made them – and continues to make them – unique, innovative, and successful. To cut it off would be suicide.

But as the Psychedelic Furs say, there’s a world outside.

You might accuse me of threading the needle of Bolshevism by my own words, but I’ve seen collaboration work magic in the past year, and I believe there is a case for the listeners, the consensus-builders, and the just-plain-hard-workers to make a goddamned good product.

This past year has been my conversion to a steadier platform of innovation, and my own personal evolution to a calmer way of being.

Maybe it was the pain of losing family members, maybe it was the sickness, but I realized there are things you can’t plow through.

For five years, I didn’t think there was any other way.

Turns out there’s a world outside.