For Allie Iacta Est

The Instance is a podcast produced by Scott Johnson, of FrogPants studios.
AIE is the show’s official guild.
Blizzard Entertainment® is a trademark or registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All rights reserved. Used with permission

I love all of you! Sorry I’ve been so busy doing some computer science research. See, I was working on my thesis, very very busy. You know, I wanted to be a smart computer science major and get my degree, graduate, and earn like $100,000 a year or so.

Alas! Someone already created my research. Dep. Why didn’t I pay attention?

So now, if I want money, I’m just going to have to exploit it.

But, I wrote an interesting little book that I was going to sell online for under a buck, to try to raise money for some new research I’m onto. The book is the perspective of how an Internet gaming company (who is making oh so much money that I am tempted…) and how it’s culture is affecting the world. But in a way, I think it should be AIE’s book.

I didn’t want to charge AIE for their own book!

So I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license, and you guys do what ever you want with it.

But if it gets really nice, I can tell you how to make SJ rich, against his will.

Love you! This is Thowi, the one that got kicked out 2, maybe 3 times… when I forgot to log on for like 3 or 9 months.

😉

But here is the book:
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I’m having way too much fun playing
Hacker, to Have Time to Play a Mage
by Thowi

A work of political satire (and it might even be funny!) A computer scientist’s views on how open source cultural memes are spreading through this Internet economy through video games.
In particular, some observations of the cultural exchange between the world’s largest MMO guild, and Chinese ‘gold farmers.’
And I may or may not have anything to say about trademarks[1].

Copyright (C) 2011 by Thowi

Having way to much fun playing Hacker to have time to play a Mage by Thomas Winters is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://voodooinlisp.com/a-shout-out-to-the-instance-and-allie-iacta-est/.

Disclaimer: This work is marketed as political satire, and as such is subject to political free speech in the United States of America. However, this is on the Internet, so your mileage may vary. And I’m a broke broke broke computer science student that can’t afford a plegaleezer.

Whatever, I’m just making stuff up…

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[1] Free speech
[2] GOOGLE® internet search it, used with permission Google is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

Full of Vim!

0.1: Forward: Why others don’t understand geeks.
Thowi

When I was a kid I used to play games in my imagination.
Make believe.

But with cool and complex rules based on math, and these cool little plastic dice with funny, funny shapes!. And it was so much fun. I always played a wizard, or some other kind of magic using class. And I wanted, more than anything…

Well have you ever thought about what you would wish for if it happened? You found a magic genie, or a leprechaun (hi pixie!), and you had one wish. Anything you wanted! What would you wish for?
Of course, you just can’t wish for more wishes, that’s against the rules!

// Hackers[8] love playing games with rules,
// you know I’m going to figure something out!
// HINT: that’s how it works!

Well my solution was to wish to be a wizard! We all know from that cartoon if you wish to be a genie you get trapped in a bottle. But a wizard! A wizard can CAST their own wish spells!
Isn’t that interesting?

Of course there is no such thing as magic in this world[1]. But I knew there had to be some kind of really cool magic language with which to cast spells.

And oh, how I love formal languages! I used to have a Commodore 64. A friend of mine and I just pwned that system. And we started writing our own stuff. Of course, all we had was Microsoft[1] BASIC. With line numbers. And GOTO’s!

// Warning: GOTO’s very bad, unless it’s an elegant hack!
// But I’m talking about the C64 version, k?

So when I got off to college right out of high school, I started learning about compilers. And then I started playing online Internet games, called multi user dungeons.

// Wow[1]! Does anyone see where this is going?

And I wanted to write this magic language so players in the game could just write their own spells. It would be awesome!

But I also wondered about how a language like that might really work.

// Who the heck understands all these
// acronyms, anyway…

O.
M.
G!!!!!!!!!
// I have an idea
// just took a long time to figure it out…

And that got me to thinking about something… Just how WOULD one make that language?

Then one day I learned about something called NLP[1]

But how did I get so smart? I’m just playing! Games! I use complex rules based on math, and because it is fun, I think all the time. And well, like a muscle, your brain needs to be exercised!

Now I’m having too much fun! So I’ll talk about this language I call Pyr, later.

But that’s why others don’t understand us. They are playing so serious!

1.0: Too much fun
Thowi

When I was little, about 5 years old I think, my Mom told me that I’d better be careful, or I would have too much fun. And well, I thought she was just stupid!

That’s impossible, I thought. Because I knew you could always have more fun. I think that was my first mathematical proof.

(If I’m having fun now, then… I can have more fun later… it doesn’t run out, it just goes on forever!)

She also told me I was too smart for my own good, and one day, I would think of something too smart, and I would get in such trouble. Well maybe she was right, on both counts! Because I’ve got this line of research, and I need a lot of money to go play poker…

(Anyone know how to write a grant proposal to a stiff bunch of stodgy old professors? Now, greedy CEO’s, I think I can get their attention!)

1.1: I want to play with those BAD girls!
// the red ones with pointy bits…
Thowi

Now I knew I was going to hell when I was 5 years old. And I first suspected this unfortunate fact when my Mom told me that good girls would not play doctor with me. And I knew who she meant! Those girls were no fun!

So by process of elimination, I knew I wanted to play with the bad girls! They were fun to play house with, for some reason. (See, early signs of logical thought!)

Every little girl always wanted to play house. But it was fun with a certain class of girl, because, the bad girls would play doctor later! Amazing how accurate that first impression was. Too bad I got confused on the meme there. Because then one day I found out in Sunday school…

ALL THE BAD GIRLS WERE GOING TO HELL.

And there were only boring good girls in heaven…

(Dep! I knew this ‘hell’ thing they kept telling me about was going to bite my tushy sooner or later.)

Ah well, can’t leave them all alone… wouldn’t be much of a gentleman to leave them there alone.

1.2: Video Games Are the Anti-Christ
// Greek: means ‘instead of’
Thowi

One day, when I was little and my Mom taught Sunday school, she came home from church to tell me that they had decided that video games were in actual fact,

THE ANTI-CHRIST (Video games are the devil and that’s where those red girls with pointy bits are!)

Well maybe it won’t be so bad then! Video games and bad girls, sounds good so far to me! Burnt out that Pac-man cartridge by playing for 7 days straight. Didn’t sleep, but I had so many extra lives I could run to the bathroom every now and then. And I had way too much fun.

My Mom plays those social networking farmer games these days. Every once in a while when I see her, I do want to remind her that she and her Sunday school group had concluded… nah, better not.

Because I heard on some Internet broadcast about a paper some guy wrote. Seems big MMO is becoming the new world wide religion or something…

Wow! What if she was RIGHT!

Maybe my mom IS smart. Well maybe she got lucky.
But I think I know who the REAL Anti-Christ is! And I would love to go there forever when I die!
Now if I’m REALLY lucky…

1.2: That toon is going to learn to think.
Thowi (about Amawii)

My daughter plays this big MMO game with me on my account. Now I’ve never actually read the TOS, but I heard on some Internet Broadcast show about how that was cool. So I thought, that’s OK. (Someday want to tell the story of how I deleted a level 72 because I was out of slots, and well, that toon had 30k gold, but… it was an Alli…. well nm.)

I’ll call her Amawii, because that is one of the many character’s she plays on my account. I had to limit her to one realm thingy. I think her highest is like 24?

Now I love my daughter. But when she was two years old,I knew that child was going to learn to clean up her own poop. Because if she did not, that meant she was broke…

AND I HAD NOT SLEPT IN TWO YEARS! (If you’re a Daddy you know what I’m talking about!)

Of course, we all got through that just fine. But I had a similar problem with her a few months ago. She did not want to do her simple whole number arithmetic problems. Because it was too hard…

(I’m talking small integer arithmetic like 5 + 3 = 1000, see I just did that in my head for fun![5])

“Thowi,” whined Amawii. “I’m tired and I have to go to bed and I just HAVE to get this really hard math homework done…”

(Child is a drama queen. Plays mostly blo… ad girls. But then so do I… I don’t get out much.)

Well, I love the child, and I can’t legally beat her… So what the heck am I supposed to do? Ah! I can hurt her brain! WITH MATH! (I’ve taught college classes, it’s easy. Remind me to tell you how I overslept to play a video game and my whole class showed up and took their own attendance and stayed there the whole hour… I was very very angry with them.)

So in about 5 minutes I explained to her that she was going to do a report using only an Internet search engine[1] and write about difference between real live numbers and made up imaginary ones or she would be SORRY!

And it that did not work, I was going straight to my ultimate weapon, some spooky top-secret government math! (No, it’s not classified, it’s public domain, but who can understand it??)
Suddenly I guess those small integers looked pretty good. She did her work.

But that got me to thinking…

1.3: What exactly does ‘HACKER’ mean?

Hacker means to grok. Something like that. Just GOOGLE®[2] it. It really means ‘playful thinker.’

The word you want is CRACKER. The ones with FBI reports on them. Slackers and computer criminals that would rather steal people’s work than do some themselves. Which is stupid, because people with those skills make BIG money.

But I realized one day when I devoured some science papers from other fields, that computer science… well, isn’t. It’s not science, we don’t follow the scientific method exactly.

What we do is a rational and reasonable approach that works something like this.

Hmm… There is something I can grok here, and then I can play with it. And, then, it just takes off, and IT’S ON! Until…
BAM! GROK THE SYSTEM! At a whole new higher level. There is some spooky voodoo math called Bogel’s hypothesis or something about that… And any system with rules can be groked!

(You Elitist Jerk guys know what I’m talking about.)

We call it ‘groking’ or something like that.

But we are all the same: Analysts.

(Or HACKERS, meaning playful thinkers)

And I’ve got a great idea for a new Multi User Dungeon, based on what perhaps might be a proprietary technology REALSOONNOW[^^] may get patented. But I sure do wish I had a way I could publicly share some source code.

Of course, I have this idea for a completely unrelated wide area genetic algorithm spread over the Internet to generate fantasy babble names… Nah, guess no one would be interested in it. Going to open source that and put it on my blog. My blog is about a thesis I will never ever never ever write. EVER!

Cause someone already stole my best idea, and it’s just out there in public. I feel so silly.

1.4: Gold Farming
Thowi

I’m just curious… why can we all play nicely with China, Korea, and just everyone else?

But no one else can? WTF?

(International conspiracy to play a game over the Internet for profit AND conduct computer science research at the same time. There has just got to be something I’m not seeing here, cos this sounds really good to me!)

But I already know where I’m going when I die, if I’m very very lucky.

Thanks AIE! Wish I had time to play with you fun peeps! I truly wish I had spent more time with you guys, so I could talk about it from your perspective. So instead I just put my own thoughts in. Feel free to add whatever you want, and spread it all over the internet.

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[1] Free speech
[2] GOOGLE® internet search it, used with permission Google is a registered trademark of Google Inc.
[3] United states copyright law, http://www.copyright.gov/
[5] Joke: There are 10 kinds of people in the world… those that get it,
and those that don’t.[1]
[6] Dr. Jeff Smith. Living Pain Free: It’s your choice
His name used with permission. I promised him if I got better
I would write him such a review… and I just got real smart.