Month: July 2023

Firmament

Earlier this summer I played Firmament, the new puzzle game from Cyan, the creators of Myst.

I love these sorts of games, and I wrote about what I like about them a few years ago in the context of Zed. I enjoy a mix of puzzles, setting, and story, which Cyan has historically been good at providing. I backed Firmament on Kickstarter as soon as they announced they’d be doing a Mac version, having also backed their previous game, Obduction, which I enjoyed a lot, though I thought it had a few flaws.

Firmament modifies the traditional point-and-click interface with a device the player uses called an Adjunct, which they use to connect to sockets throughout the game which provides some additional flexibility in how the player interacts with the world. It also both makes it clearer what you can interact with, but it feels somewhat limiting since everything has some small variation of the same interface. I’ve seen it theorized that the Adjunct mechanic was created to make the VR experience of the game better or more consistent or something. I guess it’s possible, I dunno. Maybe that was a concern 4 years ago when they started making the game?

A spoiler-free review first, and then some further thoughts:

The setting for Firmament is that you wake up from long-term sleep and are greeted by the Mentor, who appears to be a ghost of your predecessor. They’ve woken you up and advise you from time to time. The world consists of three settings, an ice zone, a botanical garden, and a sulphur-based power plant, along with a central structure1 called The Swan. You travel between them via conveyance pods, and have two waves of tasks to accomplish on each world to get to the conclusion.

There are basically three sorts of things in these games that I dislike: Puzzles that are too hard (this is obviously subjective), having to walk back and forth a lot to solve a puzzle, and things that are hard to see. Firmament has a few spots where there were things I just couldn’t see and I had to use a walkthrough – a video one in one case – to figure out what I was missing. This is frustrating because it feels like I just was never going to figure it out on my own. The game does pretty well on the other two points, although there was one puzzle I didn’t so much figure out as stumble into the answer for. Better lucky than good, I guess?

The game’s weakness, I think, was its story. Since Cyan’s games are solo endeavors with little capability for you to interact with anyone in the game, they all take place in environments where the people who used to be there are gone, and finding out what happened to them is part of the adventure. Firmament feels pretty thin, here, as the Mentor and one other character are the only ones you learn much about. There were clearly more people around, but we learn very little about them. I think they could have threaded more characters and more events into the game and provided a richer story to explore. As it was, it definitely felt less sophisticated than Obduction.

(I’m inclined to think that the use of AI to assist in generating parts of the game are not really at fault as this article thinks they might be. I think they just didn’t spend enough time coming up with enough story to make it satisfying.)

I think the game took me about 15 hours to complete. I did run into one bug, but it turned out not to affect me in that puzzle. Other people have run into more serious bugs, but they’ve been fixing them. If you enjoy games like these, give this one a try, but temper your expectations, especially if story is your main interest.

A few more spoilery comments after the cut:

Continue reading “Firmament”

What Next With COVID?

As I said last time, it seems like just about everyone has put COVID behind them in their behavior: Hardly anyone is masking or physically distancing anymore, and I don’t see many mentions of it other than on social media from the few people who are still taking those precautions.

I see close to zero reports these days of how many cases, hospitalizations or deaths there are from COVID. Since it’s been over 9 months since the last boosters were authorized, and previous evidence was that boosters lost most of their effectiveness after about 6 months, I was wondering what the numbers are.

Today the San Jose Mercury News published this article: New record lows for California COVID hospitalizations. Will it stick?

The number of patients with the virus at California hospitals reached a new low this month since the start of the pandemic, with just 611 reported on July 2.

Statewide, before this summer the previous low was 1,170 people hospitalized with COVID in June 2021. Now, totals have been less than that since early June.

In November 2021 I wrote a piece here titled “This is as Good as it’s Going to Get”. When I first drafted this post I thought it held up pretty well, and was maybe a bit optimistic. But based on the Mercury News article it’s looking a bit pessimistic, at least for the general population; the spectacular failures to support people such as the immunocompromised have been well documented.

I do find this a little surprising: The Omicron variant and its many sub-variants are the dominant strain of the virus, are massively transmissible, and haven’t gone away. But maybe they’ve been evolving to be less severe, and maybe the spotty vaccinations we’ve had have been good enough to gradually suppress the virus. I dunno.

Another thing I saw recently is this thread on Mastodon:

Mastodon post by Pavel A. Samsonov (1/2): Techies perennially yearn for an org culture where their pure, intellectual work is cleanly separated from meetings and politics, where ideas win on their merit and "the work" is entirely solving technical problems. Such an environment cannot exist, for 2 important reasons.
Mastodon post by Pavel A. Samsonov (2/2): 1 There can be no universal benchmark that defines "the best idea." When people get together to decide on the best thing to do - that's called politics. This goes for both solutions and problems. A brilliant solution to an irrelevant problem is bad. 2 The merit of a solution is 1% cleverness and 99% execution. Something that is out there and working suboptimally is "better" than an elegant idea that never got off the ground. Measuring on intellectual purity alone asks us to ignore actual impact

The first post is context, but the second post applies as much to our COVID response (as a society) as it does to the original topic:

People aren’t masking, they’re not physically distancing, and many people are not getting boosters and wouldn’t even if they were available. (And that’s just in the United States. I imagine it’s similar but more so in countries where those things are actively hard to do.) None of that is likely to change unless the current environment significantly changes. While encouraging people to do those things – especially getting vaccinated, which is a very low-intrusiveness part of the solution – is fine, any real solution is going to have to be implemented in the context of how people are behaving and are likely to behave. Because a solution which can’t be implemented is not a solution.

Personally, I’d like to see the FDA authorize twice-a-year boosters for everyone and encourage people to get them. And I’d like to see tests be made more widely available and covered by insurance so people don’t need to worry about access to them. (More info about how reliable they are would be nice, too. Last I heard tests were only about 60% accurate against Omicron.) I think those would be the most effective first steps, followed by covering wages for people who have to skip work because they get sick.

Alas even that seems like a stretch in the current political climate.

Tumultuous Trip

We’re back from a week and a half vacation to the east coast. It was… quite a ride, enough that I kinda feel like I need a vacation to recover from my vacation.

I don’t often talk about it here because it feels like not-so-humble bragging, but we have a vacation house in Massachusetts. It’s in a pretty great location, and we bought it to keep it in the (extended) family. We got a pretty good deal on it, but we learned a couple of years ago that part of the reason for that is that it needed some deferred maintenance. We hired a really excellent contractor, but the project kept getting bigger for various reasons, and ultimately it turned into a major remodel, which is just now finishing up.

Our trip back in May was partly to try to finish preparing the house for this trip. We found that there was more to buy than we’d expected, and so we’d planned to spend the first couple of days on this trip buying and assembling furniture, and unpacking the house.

The plan was to fly out on a 6 am flight on Tuesday, June 27. We were going with friends of ours and their kids, to spend about 2 weeks at the house.

Everything went sideways when Debbi and her friend found out around 11:30 pm that our flight had been cancelled due to extreme weather on the east coast. Worse, we weren’t able to rebook until Thursday. So we spent a couple of days kicking around home before we were able to leave. And even then our flight was over 2 hours delayed. We landed in Boston a bit before 11 pm. On the bright side, the rental car kicks are pretty quiet at that hour, so we were able to get our cars smoothly and get down to the house by 12:30 am. We spent an hour and a half looking around (and figuring out how to turn the lights off) before going to bed.

Unfortunately this meant we’d lost over 2 days of prep time, so we had to shuffle around and compress the work we’d planned to do. We went to IKEA and Target on Sunday, assembled furniture over the next few days as time permitted. Especially on July 3, which is when the area where our house is holds its Independence Day celebrations, presumably because people want to drink and then sleep in on the Fourth. (Because when people are shooting off fireworks, you definitely want those people to have been drinking.)

Among this I also mixed in a number of trips to visit my Dad. His story isn’t mine to tell – I don’t think he’s ever been very comfortable with me writing about him online – but he’s needed assistance from me and my sister Katy recently. So I made several trips up to visit. But I also got to see my sister and nephew, who came down one day to see our house. Seeing them all was nice, but it was a hectic time.

We also spent a lot of time with Debbi’s family, who all came over at various times to visit. I missed seeing a couple of them because I was off taking care of business. Maybe next time.

The weather was a little iffy, always warm but not too warm, but with humidity that came and went, and showers from time to time. We did get a few nice days to spend at the beach, though.

Our friends left us on the second Friday to spend the weekend in Boston, which they wanted to play tourist in. So Debbi and I had a quieter weekend. But it turned out my friend Karen and her beau were also visiting Boston this weekend, so they came down on Saturday to hang out. We hadn’t seen each other since before the pandemic, and it was great to see them.

Speaking of the pandemic, it’s clear that almost everyone has put it behind them at this point. Few people were masking anywhere we went, including in airports, and no one was physically distancing that I could tell. We wore masks a bit for the first few days and then ditched them. I’ll likely write something else about this in the near future. I am looking forward to getting another booster, though, and wish they’d make them available to everyone twice a year.

The trip ended, unfortunately, with another flight delay. We didn’t get back to San Francisco until nearly 11 pm on Monday night, and were totally exhausted by the time we got home and went to bed. The cats were really, really happy to see us, of course, and our friends who care for Domino when we’re away were happy to keep him a couple of extra days so the cats could have some dedicated time with us. But of course he was really happy to see us, too.

Anyway, it was a good, productive trip, but not very restful. Hopefully we can do something lower-key later this year. Once we recover from all this air travel.