How to talk to me on the phone

So, one of the many things about me that's notable is that I have hearing loss. My right ear's hearing is significantly degraded, and my left ear has lost much of its high-tone sensitivity (or my brain doesn't interpret high tones correctly; that's also a possibility, given how much of a mess it is in there) due to foolishness when younger. When going to rock concerts, wear earplugs. That will go a LONG way towards avoiding what's happened to me. Take similar precautions around firearms; those things are very loud, and will damage your hearing. Between the loss of hearing and interference from chronic tinnitus, I find it difficult to follow conversations. That's actually a big part of why I'm quiet in person; I don't follow the thread of conversation well enough to join in, because I literally can't hear well enough.

A game designer and generally awesome person I follow on Twitter by the name of Eddy Webb is significantly worse off than I am by way of hearing, and he recently posted a link to an article on "how to talk with the hearing-impaired". While the advice is good, it's very much focused on face-to-face interactions, and doesn't cover telephones. Telephones are a very much harder nut to crack, when it comes to hearing difficulties.

Here's my advice, in handy bullet point form.

• Speak up. Don't shout, but do speak clearly and loudly. It helps.
• Speak slowly. Don't let your words run together.
• Sit up straight. This does actually make your voice clearer, makes it easier to project, and means I find it easier to hear you.
• Minimise background noise. If I'm straining to pick you out over music, fans, engines, or similar, I'm going to have trouble.
• Re-phrase. If I didn't catch what you said, take a moment and try different words.
• Be patient. I really am trying.

Sadly, the biggest obstacle to easy telephone communication with anyone hearing-impaired is the telephone itself. Telephone transmission involves throwing away an astoundingly large part of the voice's spectrum, to save bandwidth. Someone with good hearing can cope fine, but the worse a person's hearing is, the harder they'll find it to correct for that.

The biggest thing you can do for me, in terms of communication, is to only use the telephone when absolutely necessary. I much prefer something that doesn't require I hold large amounts of unsorted data in mind at once AND strain to hear. But if you have to call me, the checklist above will make it less annoying for both of us. Because I've no doubt whatsoever that as frustrating as it is for me to struggle through a telephone call, it's just as frustrating for you trying to get the information to me when I seem bent on mis-hearing.

Hiatus

It pains me to do this, but I'm putting the "regular content" experiment on hiatus for a short while. I've run out of buffer, and between family health issues, various sources of stress for the LA and me, excessively hot weather, and sundry other stuff I won't bore you with, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, shagged out.

So consider this a summer break. I'll aim to restart regular content drops around the middle of September. Feel free to yell at me on Twitter if that doesn't happen.

The booth babe problem

As happens all too frequently, the internet is afire with accusations of objectification, slut-shaming, feminazism, and all the wonderful fun epithets that get flung around when people with poor social skills start talking about subjects which hit gender politics. This time, the catalyst was someone complaining that there are too many attractive women at conventions.

Leaving aside the absurdity of such a statement, the real complaint is that some of the aforementioned attractive women may not be as "dedicated" to geek lifestyle as the complainer. Considering that many of his targets spend large amounts of time and significant money making excruciatingly detailed costumes for themselves, I doubt that one holds water either.

But there really is a problem with women at conventions. The problem is that commercial entities at such events have a depressing tendency to hire representatives based solely on physical appearance, with no thought to having them able to speak knowledgeably about what they're promoting. The term is "booth babe", which I dislike; it diminishes the women involved in this as people.

I've no objection to hiring attractive spokesmodels. I don't even object to having them dress up as characters from whatever you're promoting (although I'd prefer if you let them dress however they wished, and if need be display your expensively-made costume on a carefully painted mannequin). What I object to is having their value to your promotional effort be solely as eye candy. If you're trying to sell to geeks, well, yes, I'll freely admit that the pretty face will grab our attention, but we would much prefer to find out that she knows about this thing, that she cares about it, that she's going to tell us why she thinks it's great. And our social skills aren't so poor as to be unable to tell marketing guff from genuine enthusiasm.

My first assumption when I meet someone at a convention is that they're there because they think the subject matter is interesting. I'd like that to hold true for as many people as possible, regardless of gender, physical appearance, or other unimportant matters.

When to give it up

Recently, I've been discussing fasteners. Screws, bolts, Allen keys and such. There are many types of fastener, and many methods of driving screws. The most common one, in the US at least, is the venerable Philips drive; the cross-shaped slot that generally ends up burred and worn to uselessness within three drivings. Its dominance is a historical accident; it was adopted by Ford because it was available with reasonable license fees, and because it's designed to "cam out". It's very difficult to overtighten a Philips-head screw, because the tool will slip out at high torque. This meant Ford could use cheaper tools. Of course, there's a downside to the cam-out; it's easy to strip a Philips-head screw, and because it's harder to unscrew than to tighten, a securely-tightened screw will be nigh-impossible to remove. These are major reasons why Philips-head is these days largely confined to small electronics work and wood screws.

Speaking of wood screws, the major type of head in Canada is the Robertson. Robertson was offered to Ford, but it had some disadvantages; first, they wanted more money to license it, and second, it doesn't cam out. The square bit stays in the screw, and the whole setup binds. This makes it ideal for hand tools, as does the ability to securely set the screw on the bit prior to driving (anyone who's tried that with non-magnetic Philips screws will know what a boon it is to be able to put the screw on the end of the driver), but powered tools need a torque-limiting device to avoid breaking things.

Car manufacturers have never liked normal people messing with their cars, and once torque limitation had become cheap, it was inevitable that the fragile, unreliable Philips head would give way to something else. The chosen successor was Torx, a sort of six-pointed star; other than the form of the recess, it's similar to Robertson in its advantages and disadvantages. So why go with Torx, rather than Robertson? The main reason was to keep us from working on cars. Torx bits, when it was new, were a pain to get hold of, whereas anyone who can get to a hardware store could get a Robertson bit; just because it was mostly popular in Canada doesn't mean it was unkown in the US. Nowadays, Torx bits are cheap and easy to get hold of; I have at least three sets knocking around, and at least a couple of the anti-tamper ones with the hole in the middle of the bit.

So now, wood screws have Robertson, and car parts have Torx, and all the niches for Philips have a better competitor in them. Why does Philips keep knocking on?

Because it has a massive user base. Everyone, and I mean everyone, owns a Philips-head screwdriver or five. The car nuts have their Torx bits, but they always come with Philips bits as well. The people who care about woodscrews have Robertson bits, but frankly such people are a fringe group in the US. The vast majority of people buying woodscrews will buy Philips-head, because they already own the bits to drive them.

Personally, I've decided that if at all possible I'll go for Robertson woodscrews. My screwdriver collection includes all three sizes of that bit (as compared to the range from 000 to 4 needed to cover the spectrum of Philips, or the T1-Tn of Torx; although above T10 it tends to go by fives) and so I get the benefits of easy location and secure torque transfer without need for axial pressure essentially free. I may be an American these days, but I can at least admit that Canada does some things right.

Admin note

I should give fair warning that I've blown through my buffer of posts, and things are busy here at the moment. I'm still aiming to get the weekly post in, but real life may have to take priority.

What is a role-playing game?

Inspired by recent discussions among my online friends and acquaintances, I thought I should examine this question. It's a surprisingly thorny one.

Looking at computer role-playing games, there are multiple definitions accepted by people. Some will argue that the defining feature is player agency; if the player's actions can affect the world, it's a role-playing game. Some say it's character progression; if the character becomes more effective intrinsically, then it's a role-playing game. Some say it's down to whether success is determined by player skill or character skill. All of these have some justification, but really, we have to look at the origin of role-playing games to think about this meaningfully.

And that means Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is generally considered the first RPG, and we can reasonably look at it to help us define what makes an RPG an RPG. So, what's distinctive about D&D? One of the big things is character progression. In D&D, that's handled with character levels, but characters becoming more effective doesn't necessarily mean levels; it can be handled with skill points, or any other method of making a character better at doing things. But why does D&D have levels? Well, D&D began as a rules hack for a tactical wargame. The original D&D booklets didn't have combat rules as such; they recommended you use the Chainmail rules D&D had grown out of.  The levels came about as a second-level D&D character was assumed to be as effective as two first-level characters. He was essentially worth two men, and so many of his effectiveness factors simply doubled. This isn't exactly fine-grained, though, and later systems used a more gradual advancement mechanic. So character advancement is a part of the RPG nature, but character advancement is present in Grand Theft Auto, and that's not an RPG franchise.

Another distinctive point for D&D is player agency. Because the game is moderated by a person, the world can be changed by a sufficiently determined player. Many campaigns have that as their goal, insofar as "killing the Great Foozle" counts as changing the world. The key point here, though, is that the world can have multiple possible results, and which one happens depends on the player's decisions. This is quite common on a small scale in many games considered RPGs; Fallout has multiple possible resolutions to each quest, which feed into an overall state for each area, and the narration at the end of the game changes depending on how you affected each area.

The third big point is character skill versus player skill. The problem with this is that creating a suitably skilled character becomes a game in itself, and character skill is thus ultimately determined by player skill. Some games also combine the two; Oblivion, Fallout 3, and later games in their series have lockpicking as a skill the character has, and also as a mini-game which the player is forced to endure. To the best of my knowledge, Oblivion's lockpicking skill has no use beyond "walling off" higher difficulty locks from players with insufficient skill; the minigame is just as frustratingly difficult no matter what, thanks to imprecise controls, input lag, ridiculously tight timing windows, and draconian punishment for failure. Fortunately, things were much improved for Fallout 3; character skill increasing still served as a skill gate of sorts, but a character with high lockpicking skill made the minigame easier for a human to complete, and the controls were massively improved by removing the timing puzzle element.

The overall answer to what makes an RPG is one that I refuse to give you; games are a continuum, and there is no real hard line dividing RPG from non-RPG. The factors I consider most important are character advancement, player agency, and significance of character skill. If they're present, in reasonable proportion, I'll consider the game a role-playing game. This means that I consider the Deus Ex series to be RPGs; character skills have significant effects on what the player can achieve, there is character advancement, and player choices affect the game world.

Ultimately, you'll have to make your own decision; or, you could just take my approach. Games are in one of four categories, based on two factors: whether I've played the game, and whether I enjoyed it. Obviously, in the case of games I haven't played, that becomes "whether or not I consider it likely I'll enjoy it".

Just how enforceable is that?

Contract law is a fun area to look at. Just about every part of a contract is there because of disputes, either to avoid them happening in the first place, or because someone got annoyed enough to dispute that point in the past.

So most contracts, these days, are actually pretty comprehensive. They're mostly enforceable, too. Obviously, illegal terms can't be enforced, but you'll have a hard time getting anything legal thrown out.

And now we come to the contracts most of us encounter most frequently: the End-User License Agreement. This is the box of shouty text that shows up when you install software, making you promise that you won't use the cheap version of Microsoft Word to make any money, and you won't use iTunes to run a nuclear power station (I'm not kidding; you can look that up!) and so on. We generally don't read these, and that can be to our detriment. For instance, some games come with software designed to prevent cheating in multiplayer which massively over-reaches, giving itself permission to provide every sordid little detail of your pornography collection to its parent company. And all because you've been conditioned by overuse of "Are you really sure?" to just click "yes" or the closest equivalent thereof.

But are these contracts legally enforceable? Are they, in fact, valid? Well, that's an interesting one. In earlier times, many software packages came with license contracts you agreed to by unsealing the box to read what you were agreeing to. To me, that seems distinctly off in terms of fairness. Not only is there no opportunity to negotiate, there's no way to back out of the deal once you've paid. Once the box is opened, the retailer won't take it back. The vendor knows this. These days, you're held to agree by installing the software, but again there's no way to read the contract until you're committed to the deal. You might, if you paid for the software, and had no opportunity to pre-read the EULA, be able to get said EULA thrown out as unconscionable.

This is actually why Electronic Arts, now generally known as EA, has taken to providing the license agreements for all their software on their website. They'll play it off as being public-spirited and wanting informed buyers, but it's really a way to make their contracts more likely to be upheld should it go to court. You lose the "I wasn't allowed to read the contract until I'd agreed to it" point. I should note that this strategy by EA is part of a multi-layered attempt to keep their agreements scaring you; the major plank, though, is strenuous effort to keep the agreements out of court. No software company wants to defend this before a judge, for fear of setting a precedent that would gut their leverage.

The other plank, of having paid good money for something, is lost if you didn't pay for it. Amusingly, the various Free Software licenses might prove more enforceable than any paid-for EULA.

My advice, though, if you've read this far, is to do your research. Find the agreements you'd be subject to by installing your new software, and decide if you'd be OK with every single aspect of them being enforced against you. While the likelihood is that at least some of them will be thrown out, particularly any which tread on the first sale doctrine, the clickwrap agreement is probably more enforceable than you think.