OK I’m heading into this one blind, totally blind, so it’s probably gonna be shit. Back story: I’m doing a blog post a day. Links don’t count. YouTube videos don’t count. I have to write something.
I have a bunch of topics, there are always topics. Here is a tag cloud that swirls around my life: preschooler dad Leslieville Toronto Canada US-election 501-streetcar transit tech apple movies games gadgets home-reno modern-design cities coffee food slow-cooking music memories the-future the-past 40something regret love family nesting farts
I could go on. I am amazed, frankly, at the tags above that I have never posted to. Nothing about Leslieville? About my family? About the peculiar and wonderful habits of children? Yet how many posts about tech apple movies games and gadgets?
To cut myself some slack, I don’t ONLY write here. I write a journal, or rather a weekly writing exercise that often doubles as a journal. The more private things tend to get worked out, or not worked out, there. And I write a lot of posts that never get finished or published. A lot of those are tech posts where I stop caring enough to actually polish and post the thing.
I’m out, but before I go, here are the tags I wish described my life: ninja kickpunching heroic-rescue professional-jazz-drummer warrior-poet master-chef backflip space-travel giant-robot eye-lasers independently-wealthy
Note: Not sure whether this “project” applies to every single day of the month or only every weekday. We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.
My post today is an endorsement of The Dirties, the first film by Matt Johnson, the dude from the interview I posted yesterday. I liked what I read, and I respect the opinion of Radheyan Simonpillai, so the missus and I checked it out last night. It’s the best Canadian film I’ve seen in a while (since Incendies maybe? Room and Brooklyn don’t count), one of the best found-footage movies I’ve seen, and the most refreshing directorial debut I’ve seen since Primer. It approaches a tough topic (school shootings) with a unique tone. It’s on iTunes and YouTube. Here’s the trailer.
I am going to write a god damn blog post, god damn it. This blog has been on my mind a lot, but I rarely do anything about it. Essentially I want to kinda redesign it a little and change out the back end, but is it worth doing all that for something I spend very little time doing? How committed am I to this?
(In case you hadn’t tuned out already, this is a category of post that is almost certainly uninteresting to read, in which the author questions his will to write. Imagine the signal shorting out and a graphic coming on the screen of a harried writer crying and drinking, and maybe tune in later. K?)
Like what’s this fucking thing for, basically? My story to myself about it is that I collect inputs of interest and then use it to process my thoughts via writing, which I think may have been the case at some point in the aughts (do people still say that, or do I sound like I’m a hundred years old). But now it’s more like, I link to interesting articles sometimes, or sometimes don’t, and then I want to post some pics or songs I like but it’s a pain in the ass and I only ever seem to be grabbing five minutes here and there because I have a three year old and a full time job and if I’m not tending to one of those things I’m collapsing sighingly into the couch with Netflix and an overgenerous pour of the brown liquor which gives you Energy and Strength.
But I also think the things I was used to writing about, to thinking about, to wanting to process, are no longer the things I currently need to process. I would like the life-stream aspects of this thing to function properly, yes – hence the desired move to a back-end system that is not like a cobwebbed abandoned relic – but perhaps the more important thing to figure out is what I do really want to write about, and perhaps I am unwilling to cast myself as the mommy blogger or home-reno douchebag I appear to be transforming into? I would LOVE to write more about the collapse of my industry (TV! Lol) but that is far from politically expedient. I am not an exhibitionist, honest, so perhaps at times I wonder if I want to be posting anything on here at all, but then I consider how our in our self-surveilling society it is better to treat this as the Age of Honesty and Openness and if you don’t post it yourself it’s just gonna wind up on checkoutthisfuckingagingbloggerdipshit.gif anyway. I mean it’s 2016, I’m aware no one writes blogs anymore. I know you’re all on the Facing Books posting cat anus selfies or whatever it is you do over there.
Anyway. Clearly I have lost the ability to actually edit blog posts, along with write them. So here is what I will do. I will post one post a day, for a month, and then see how I feel about the whole operation. So adjust your RSS feeds accordingly haha WOW! OK I’ll get back in my time capsule and head to whenever the year of RSS and stunt blogging marathons was – 1989? No but seriously see you here tomorrow and if I don’t show up, flash that crying writer PNG again in your very understanding and hopefully forgiving mind.
This is a post for bike month, continuing from this one. All of these live here, in reverse chronological order.
So yeah, I wound up buying a Simcoe. These are city bikes designed with Toronto in mind. They have all the city bike conveniences, plus some weather resistance, yet don’t feel heavy or slow.
The Bad
I bought this bike the first year it came out, which sums up most of my criticisms. A lot of the accessories were not firmly attached – the fenders came loose quickly and made a horrifying rattle; the kickstand came loose and was of debatable quality anyway, so I replaced it.
I was surprised by the weight of the thing. Any of my beater mountain bikes would be lighter. That dismayed me.
I was holding out for the “Signature Edition” 7-speed but it was delayed and I needed a bike, so I got the cheaper 3-speed. I say cheaper, but the bike was still like $900, which is more than all of my previous bike purchases put together.
The Ugly
It was supposed to be blue, but it’s really a blue-green that honestly I’m not that fond of. Ok honestly? There’s no real ugly to be had here. It’s just a riff on a movie title that doesn’t quite match. I mean I would probably choose a modern bike style over the Simcoe’s retro looks, but this bike is, to continue the metaphoric math, better looking than all of my previous bike purchases put together.
The Good
Everything else. Even some of the bads.
Despite the weight, because of the slimmer tires and the quality components, this bike rolls faster than … all of my previous bikes put together. A few pedals and I glide for ages.
I thought three gears would be a problem – my last bike had 21 – but if anything, it’s a blessing. There’s just less fussy stuff to do. Plus internal hub gearing is much smoother than the usual derailleurs, and it allows for a full chain guard, which means I’ve never gotten bike grease on my pants. The fenders are also great (and should be on every bike); I’ve ridden a few times in the rain without incident. Nothing to be afraid of.
I’m no bike expert, and I can’t compare the Simcoe to other bikes in its category. But I love it. It obviously signifies something special to me – a new way of looking at biking. A new chance at mobility.
Three years ago, I eagerly hopped on my bike for the first ride of the spring and rode up my alley to Dundas East, where I needed to turn left. It was rush hour, so cars were backed up waiting for the light. All I needed to do was make my way through these stationary cars and get to the bike lane just beyond. I saw a gap between a car and a pickup truck, so I went for it. The truck pulled forward and blocked my way.
The driver yelled at me, saying I should walk my bike to the lights at Greenwood and cross there. Said lights were currently changing, so now I was stuck as oncoming traffic headed toward me. The truck pulled away. I yelled “thanks” – I intended it to be dripping with sarcasm but really it was soaked in futility. Someone must have let me in, but the damage was done.
Hopefully I don’t have to point out that the truck driver was wrong about bikes and intersections (bikes are considered legally “road vehicles”, the same as cars, with few exceptions1). Or that he was an asshole. But it goes to show how bad it can be biking in this city, much like in many North American cities, I’d guess. My first ride of the year was not even a minute old before someone was needlessly endangering me. More frequently it’s carelessness rather than spite, but the latter does happen. I could feel things getting worse as Rob Ford’s mayoralty sunk in. He campaigned on ending “the war on the car”, on banning streetcars and condemning bikes to trails. Most drivers are decent people, but Rob Ford’s road rager transportation philosophy made the assholes feel empowered.
There is definitely a correlation between geography and belief. The relative car-dependence of downtown Toronto vs. its suburbs goes a long way toward explaining the political divide between the regions. As density increases, the traffic gets worse, and the only way to alleviate it is to encourage walking, bikes and transit, which often takes road space away from the operators of private motor vehicles, which makes them feel beset upon, despite their continued position of privilege in perhaps every regard of urban transportation other than cost. Even that is debatable.
It doesn’t have to be this bad, and hopefully now that Ford is just a councillor again it can start to get better. The results of the Richmond/Adelaide Cycle Track pilot project are in. These physically separated bike lanes took away a car lane but tripled the number of cyclists using the route, despite their stumpy length. Perhaps more interesting is the survey feedback. Of the 1424 survey respondents who self-identified as non-bikers, 54% strongly agreed the lanes should be made permanent. Only 25% strongly disagreed. Even more interesting, data indicates that car travel time has actually improved since the lanes went in. One more bike is one less car, quite often, and that should encourage both cyclists and drivers.
1 Bikes are not allowed on highways, and are expected to keep to the side of the road where safety permits.
Or, third post for bike month, continuing from this one. All of these live here, in reverse chronological order.
As I learned more about city bikes, the thing that really amazed me was how I had bought into this weird suburban attitude towards bikes without realizing it. I always bought beater mountain bikes, and I was always proud of how cheap they were. Yet they were always falling apart, sometimes dangerously so, and with the slightest hint of rain they would spray water everywhere. Even stranger, I was always obsessing about speed when biking. I’d get pissed if someone passed me, I’d be proud of quick times, and generally enjoyed biking as hard and as fast as possible – even though I am not hard, fast, adrenaline-soaked, or performance-oriented in basically any other sphere of my life.
Let’s go back to the back for a second. As I mentioned in the previous post, a couple years ago, I started getting these shooting pains in my back and down one of my legs. It started getting worse. I was diagnosed with sciatica, a classic old man disease I was somewhat disappointed to be getting a sneak preview of in my 30s.
Sciatica is a mysterious illness. I was told it was probably caused by a herniated disc, but no imaging was done so it was never clear what caused it. Apparently since the treatment is the same (physio) in almost all cases no matter what caused it, they don’t spend the money to find out. Could have been spine gremlins!
They told me that 90% of cases are fully recovered within 9 months. They said it didn’t necessarily take that long, but that was how the study was done. I was also told that I would probably feel it on and off for the rest of my life.
It got worse over a couple weeks until I couldn’t walk or stand for more than 5 minutes at a time. Then I slipped and fell and made it worse. I missed work for 2 weeks and spent them lying down – I couldn’t even sit.
I kept going to physio, and got gradually better over a few months. But I had to evolve a bunch of new habits when walking around the city. Every step was painful, so I was moving with the speed of an 80-year-old. No jaywalking, no rushing to make lights. No rushing at all. Over the next months, as my back slowly healed, the walking got easier – but I kept the slow motion habits. I had come to like them. What was the rush? It would take me a bit longer to get places but I would enjoy the trip more. Toronto is a lively city, and walking around it, when you take the time and let your senses roam a bit, feels like a privilege. When you’re rushing you’re fixated on one thing – the menacing abstraction of a clock counting down. When you slow down you can absorb everything.
Thinking about getting back on a bike, I realized that not only would the bike have to be upright, but my attitude would have to be a whole lot… slower.
It’s now about a year into my personal slow-food biking renaissance, and I can report in a bit. A key part is obviously biking slower, but that’s not all of it. In fact, that’s the easy part. I also have been trying to cut out a bunch of behavioural shortcuts that one tends to do when rushing. With walking it’s basically jaywalking, but with biking this can be: not stopping at stop signs or lights, going the wrong way down one way streets, passing stopped cyclists at intersections, riding through crosswalks, etc. etc. You do them when you’re in a rush or just impatient, but almost all of them compromise your safety. Or make you less predictable to your fellow road-users and/or make you an asshole. And if you’re not actually in a rush – or even if you are – is it worth it? Leave earlier and just relax.
This slow-bike attitude isn’t always easy to pull off, though. In my experience, the more separated the bike route, the easier it is to maintain. If you’re in mixed traffic with cars, you wind up absorbing their pace and stress.
This sort of meanders naturally from the previous post.
So yeah, I was making some discoveries about bike types, including the surprisingly practical Dutch bikes, which no one seems to use here.
Except, they do. Sort of.
Dutch bikes are a type of city bike, which is sometimes also called a utility bike, a cruiser or a roadster.
Doing my research for possible bike purchases, I stumbled upon Simcoe, a new Canadian bike company. As it turns out, it was run by the people who do Curbside Cycle, an Annex bike store I had visited many times. Their specialty? City bikes.
Also, talking. Listening to the mighty Eric get rhapsodical about Simcoe, I learned a lot about these city bikes. Here’s an interview with him that will provide a reasonable facsimile of the experience:
You can create a direct link between the decline of the bicycle and mid-20th century suburban expansion. At the turn of 20th century, North American cities supported a dense urban culture where 90% of activities took place within 10km of your home. In that situation, the bicycle was an ideal mode of transportation and upright bikes, or “city-bikes,” were everywhere. But as suburbs evolved and people began to live further from their daily destinations, the bicycle fell into relative disuse. Cycling also didn’t really work in suburbs because cul-de-sacs don’t encourage terribly serious biking. Your main supplier in that situation is a store like Canadian Tire where you could buy relatively inexpensive, lesser quality bikes. Out in the countryside, cycling evolved into an adrenaline sport, i.e. performance road racing, mountain biking and BMX and whole new bicycle varieties were invented while cycling’s urban antecedents was slowly stripped away.
More thrilling heroics on this topic in the next post.
About two years ago I started having back problems that turned out to be a dreaded old man disease: sciatica. At one point I couldn’t sit or stand without great pain – I spent a week lying on the floor. Fun!
It gradually got better, and once recovered, I was never happier to just walk around. But chronic aftereffects remain, and I have had to adjust a lot of things in my life, from work to posture to one of the best things in life: cycling.
My physiotherapist simply said, get an upright bike. I had never thought about relative uprightness of different bike frames before. There was a lot going on there.
Here are four different bike types:
Mountain bike
This is what I always used to buy. I would spend very little money on them and I would brag about it. My logic was that with Toronto streets not being shy with the potholes, having some tread on your tires is probably a good thing. But really it’s designed for offroading. It’s missing a lot of things that might be handy for what I do 99% of the time, which is ride around the city. I used to just not ride if it was raining, for example, as the lack of fenders meant I’d get extra soaked by water flying off the tires. It’s also not great for troubled backs.
Road bike
I never rode these, as I once saw someone riding one hit a pebble and wipe out. Now I know that many other factors may have been at play, including tire thickness. And when I look up bike taxonomy things get confusing: what is the exact definition of a road bike? I most associate road bikes with the drop handlebars, I suppose. And I think of these models as the fastest. They are also the bikes that require the most hunched-over riding position, which makes them a no-go for Old Man Back.
Dandyhorse
OK, no one rides this anymore, but isn’t it awesome?
Dutch Bike
When I was looking at possible new back-friendly bikes, I talked to my sister, who had just spent a year with her family in the Netherlands. She told me all about Dutch bike infrastructure, culture, and the actual bikes themselves. They are very different from mountain and road bikes. They ride upright, and the emphasis is on utility, durability and style over speed or sportiness. You can make out in this pic a few features lacking in the other bikes:
internal gearing – more reliable and durable than external derailleurs
built-in dynamo lights, powered by the motion of the bike
chain guard – to avoid fouling your pantleg on the chain
rack – the bike equivalent of a car’s trunk.
fenders – makes it a lot easier to ride in the rain
Clearly, the Dutch had spent a lot more time thinking about biking than I had. More in the next post.
It’s bike month! It starts on May 25th… Or maybe it starts June 1? So maybe it’s not bike month? Whatever. Any month you can bike is bike month.
In honour of this sacred time, I’m going to publish a series of posts about my experience with bikes. Okay, most of it is really from one super long draft that got completely out of hand and makes more sense as a series of posts.
If you hate bikes, or are simply indifferent, I would understand if you looked away, but I’ll try to keep things accessible. Part of the point I’m going to make is that bikes shouldn’t be some niche thing, it should be an option for everyone, and if the infrastructure in your area precludes this (I’m looking at you, most of North America), it is something we should be working on.
Been digging on Uncle Sid’s latest treat, Starships. It’s Civ Rev meets Ace Patrol, with a turn-based space squad combat game tied to a 4X-lite empire builder. It’s pretty fun – although at the default difficulty level, it’s a bit of a breeze. But if you want to play on “Hard” difficulty or above, some strategy is required. So, here we are!
Specialization
Starships has different victory conditions, and they require different strategies. Here are the types of victory:
Population – control 51% of the galaxy’s population
Wonder – control seven wonders
Tech – upgrade three technologies to level 6
Domination – be the last surviving player. I’m not sure how you get this without already having achieved a population victory, though. Since you can choose to limit your game to one victory type, perhaps that’s the only way.
It’s important to keep in mind that the resources in Starships each apply to a separate improvement category:
food – used to build cities, increasing population and thus the output of all resources from that planet
science – used to get tech upgrades, which affect your starships only
metals – used to build wonders and upgrades to planets. With the exception of the warp nexus and the megabots (more on those later), each upgrade increases the output of a resource.
energy – used to upgrade starships
credits are the exception as they can be exchanged into any other resource, although your exchange rate in each category will get worse the more you do it.
The other important things are your affinity and leader, both chosen at the start of the game. Here are the affinities and the bonuses they get:
Supremacy: start the game with a wonder already built
Harmony: half price starship repairs
Purity: doubled resource rewards for completing missions
And here are the non-catchily-named leaders:
Barre: reduces the cost of cities by 25%
Sochua: two random tech upgrades
Kavitha: one extra city
Elodie: 10% morale boost
Kozlov: 25% metal production boost
Hutama: always gets a first visit influence bonus
Fielding: generates 50 credits per city per turn
Depending on the victory you are going for, you want to choose a matching leader and affinity, and concentrate on certain resources. Here are some ideas:
Population – choose Purity (a good all-rounder) and as a leader try Barre or Hutama. Focus on food production and build lots of cities. You will also want to expand, as adding systems to your federation will also add to your population.
Wonder – the wonder victory is perhaps the easiest. You will want to make a lot of metal. Choose Kozlov as a leader and supremacy as your affinity, for the free Wonder. Upgrade your planets’ metal production first, then build Wonders wherever you can. Some are better than others (more on that later). Wonders in systems you take from rival civs count toward your seven wonders, so don’t play too defensively.
Tech – this is a hard one as the tech upgrade prices seem to increase at a faster rate than the wonders. Definitely take Sochua as your leader. Affinity doesn’t really matter. Concentrate on science production. As for the techs to upgrade, some are cheaper than others (torpedoes, stealth, sensors), but the more expensive ones (shields, lasers, armor, cannons) have a more direct effect on ship combat ability. I particularly like stealth and fighters – again, more on this in a sec.
Domination – I haven’t actually won this sort yet, so this is speculative, but go with harmony as your ships are gonna get battered. Elodie and Hutama would be good leaders. Focus on energy production, and to a lesser extent science and metal and use the metal to amp up energy facilities and to build some combat-improving wonders.
Expansion
No matter which victory you are trying for, you will want to expand as much as you can in the early parts of the game. Not all systems are created equal, so focus on systems that have advantages you want, whether in the rewards for missions or for their production boost in one resource or another. That said, you will also want to favour those systems that your neighbouring federations are closer to.
The default map size is pretty small and with a high default number of competitors, you are going to bump into them right quick. If you like that, great! If not, the largest map still isn’t that big, so pick that and maybe also drop your number of rivals down – although this does make the game a bit easier.
In terms of the missions you have to do to win favour, green are easy, orange are medium and red are hard. If you are going science you should bend over backwards for the free tech upgrade missions.
A big help in expansion, and also in the defence of your systems, are the warp nexus improvements. Normally travel decreases your crew morale until you have to take a shore leave, aka end your turn. However, travel between systems with warp nexuses (nexi?) doesn’t hit morale at all. Building these things lets you scoot around the galaxy much faster.
Also, let’s say a neighbouring civ decides to attack you and your fleet is on the other edge of the galaxy (it will happen). Normally, you start that battle with one or two ships from your fleet, plus whatever megabots you have built. The rest of your fleet shows up after a number of turns that correspond to the distance of your fleet from the system you’re defending. If you have tons of warp nexuses, you could drop that number to zero. So it’s better to build them than putting money into megabots.
Combat
Since expansion is a must, so is combat. Some general pointers that you’ve probably figured out: use cover. Try to get behind your enemy. Impulse power lets you move an extra hex, or turn to face a better direction, but usually means you can’t attack. Where possible, you want to attack from the open, but save a few movement points so you can get behind cover for the enemy’s turn.
And, again, you’ll need to specialize. On easy you can just upgrade all parts of your ships without thinking too hard about it – but on hard, you don’t have that luxury. You can build specialist ships, and you’ll want some of that: fast ships pair well with plasma cannons, slow ships with lasers; you can have carriers, torpedo boats, etc. But you will also want to tailor your fleet as a whole to match your other improvements. Wonders and science are important to consider.
Take stealth, for example. At its highest, your ship is undetectable unless the enemy is in a neighbouring hex. There is a Wonder that automatically engages your cloaking device every turn. Plus, the stealth-related technology improvements are cheaper than some of the others. All these bonuses stack to make your fleet a squad of mysterious ninja ships, caring not for cover, stepping out from the shadows to blast the enemy, only to vanish again.
Also consider fighters. You may have discounted them since a base model fighter is essentially a one-shot kill for your opponent, and it takes a turn to deploy them. Think again. Upgrading the fighter technology gives your fighters random improvements: some will get extra armour, some extra guns, etc. The more you upgrade the better your fighters will be. By the end of a recent game my fighters typically had 90 armor – that’s basically a destroyer, and each of your ships can have eight of them! The wonder that gives you two actions per unit per turn means that your carriers can discharge two fighters a round. Some other handy wonders for the fighter enthusiast are the one that allows passage through almost any asteroid hex, one that lets your fighters move immediately upon deployment, and the one that lets you make three moves on impulse power. Finally, let’s not forget that even when the enemy takes your fighters out right after they deploy, it’s still to your advantage. The rather crappy AI tends to target fighters, and that’s good, as you can use them as decoys. You don’t have to pay to have fighters repaired like you do with your capital ships.
I also must give torpedoes their due. They can be frustrating since you can’t be sure of hitting anything. However, even a single vanilla torpedo is useful in that it strongly discourages the enemy from entering part of the board. Given that asteroid fields often constrain available paths, this can be hugely helpful. Again upgrades can make them much more menacing: you can use science to up the damage they do, which is already substantial, and certain Wonders can make them undetectable or faster, with longer range. If you manage to get stealth torpedoes, equip them on several of your ships and start your turn firing torpedoes down every path the AI is likely to take to get to you. Even without stealth this is a good tactic; I’ve won a battle using only torpedoes this way.
Final notes
Not only do you have to win, you have to do it before your opponents do. Keep an eye on what’s going on during their turns, and while the diplomacy aspect of this game is mostly useless, you can get your rivals to brag about both their achievements, which can keep you appraised of impending science and Wonder victories, and their fleet, which can let you know if it’s wise to attack them or not.
Positioning is important. You may want to take your Shore Leave in a system a rival is likely to attack. You can also decide by their fleet’s position, and by the visible buildout of warp nexuses, when and where to attack them.
If you do fight a rival civ and win, keep going. Often they can’t or don’t repair their ships after a fight, and you can take a few systems for the price of a few tediously one-sided victories. Also, if you move into their system when they are weakened, hit the ‘negotiate with…’ button to see what they’re offering. Tech upgrades are a possibility, and they may be worth giving up on a system for.
Any comments? Stuff I missed? I am @dsankey on Twitter, hit me up there.
Let’s follow up about the recent CRTC announcements I linked to last week. Here’s a good article with some more detail and some good analysis. There’s also this (thanks, Xorkaya) that seems to indicate US specialty brands are salivating about how dropping genre protection may mean they can move some channels north. I would point out that unless the CRTC is changing more rules than I’ve heard, those channels would still have to be Canadian-owned and subject to CanCon restrictions (which of course have been eased), so similar to existing branch-plant channels like HBO Canada, History, MTV, Discovery, HGTV, etc. Certainly killing genre protection means we’ll see more American brands up here, but they’re probably still going to have to enlist a Rogers or Bell to do so.
There are further rulings coming Thursday, and it’s likely the CRTC will announce how pick-and-pay for cable channels is going to work.
My opinion? (Not in any way my employer’s opinion!) A lot of this is water under the bridge. The bridge is red and has the word “Netflix” on it. Not that Netflix is the only future, but the future is going to look like a grid of icons with things like “Netflix” on it. Each of them opens up to a grid of shows. (Or perhaps a live feed? The exact thing that opens up is in play now.) Regardless, these things replace channels, and the purpose of these things is to get as many subscribers as possible, so they want to be on as many platforms as possible. They also need content. The Canadian producers / distributors / brands / entities / whatever you want to call them that can either provide content or be the actual icon in the grid, those are the entities that, long term, will survive. It’s similar to the past, but the cultural walls around Canada, if they ever existed, are crumbling. That isn’t scary. We should be thinking about where else in the world we can develop a taste for poutine, maple syrup, good comedy by people who haven’t moved to LA yet, or profoundly terrible hockey teams.
Yup, that’s why I didn’t post here much. I suppose I could have warned you ahead of time, but that would have taken planning and foresight! Which I had just enough of for the novel, and nothing in surplus for the blog.
I had tried this once before, years ago. I didn’t have much of a plan back then – only the vaguest idea of what I would be writing. It didn’t work out very well. Failing at something big like writing a novel makes you think you’re not cut out for it.
Luckily, I forgot that thought. And wonderfully, completing a novel – even a shitty, nonsensical, and in-need-of-years-of-revision novel – makes you feel like a complete writing boss. Like, a complete champion. Like, you guys should probably fear and respect me. And call me Lord Wordgunnz from now on.
Anyway, here are some thoughts about what to expect if you have thought about trying NaNoWriMo, but haven’t yet.
First off, have an outline. Maybe not for the whole book, but the more detail the better. You just want to have thought through certain issues first and not be doing them as you put words on the page. You absolutely do not want to change your mind about the direction of your book and need to rewrite something, because THERE IS NO REWRITING when you have to do 50,000 words in a month. There is no going back.
How hard is it? It’s 1,667 words a day that you have to do. That’s about six or seven pages, depending on what kind of page you’re imagining. It sounds like a lot but it’s doable. I found it to be about two hours of work a day. I actually thought I’d get a lot done at work (ssshh), but that wasn’t the case. If I was lucky I’d get 500, which you can do over lunch, and the rest I’d do once the kid was in bed. I’d get a bit behind some days and then catch up on the weekend, because my wife was very supportive.
Get ahead in the beginning. Go for it, hit the ground running, do Future You a favour. Future You will thank you. Bring your daily word total down to a cool 1,400 words a day, or less if you can.
You don’t want to miss a day. You probably will (I did), but it sucks, because it means you have to do 3,000 the next day to get back on track – and that’s a lot of words. Even if you’re hung over, had 1 hour sleep and have meetings all day, you’re better off getting 400 words in on your phone on the subway than getting nothing at all.
The muse is fickle, my friends. Some days you sit down and barf out 2500 words as quick as… barf from a sick person’s barf hole (sorry, used up all my similes on the novel). Other days, you are pulling words out like teeth and you check your watch and it’s been two hours and you have 78 words (true story). You can’t plan around that, you can just allot a certain amount of time, and spend more or less depending on the fancies of the muse. But I did find, if you had a lot to get through (aka it’s the weekend), it’s better to do shorter spells followed by substantial breaks rather than thinking you can churn out words in a solid eight-hour block like you’re working the night shift at the Hemingway factory. Short controlled bursts, like they say about machine guns.
It should be obvious, but it’s important to not have any illusions about the quality of your writing. Your goal is not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in a month, it’s to write 50,000 words. Most of these words will be shitty. Your novel will be shitty. That is just what you get. But the proverbial Shitty First Draft is a hell of a lot better than no draft. Don’t judge it, laugh it off and keep moving.
Final thought: the advice above is applicable to a lot more than novels, isn’t it? So whether you want to record a shitty album really quickly, or build a shoddy, unsafe house in record-breaking time, you know where to turn for hot tips!
Jessy Lanza looks like she is fourteen. She is slight, short and wearing a short skirt, with a mane of long wavy hair. She is dwarfed by the massive synth in front of her. She nods her head quickly, stoops to tweak the synth or the computer, and then lifts up the mic.
I recall someone’s review of Lanza’s album in which they say her slow jams work well, but the fast songs are duds. The opposite is the case tonight. Unfortunately, she has many more slow jams than fast; her relative immobility makes the slow tempo less effective at getting the crowd into it. But the fast ones really kick. I had actually rated the song “Fuck Diamond” two stars in iTunes, and I make a mental note to raise that to at least three. I make a second mental note that I could dance around with my daughter to this song, provided I tell her that Lanza is singing “fun dad”, not “fuck diamond”.
Lanza’s voice is amazing though; sweet and misty. Her production and palpable love of vintage synths are also great. Plus, did I mention she’s from Hamilton? How awesome is that?
Rating: three stars, would see again.
Lanza has been touring with Caribou for a month or two. It strikes me as Caribou begin playing: if Dan Snaith gave her such an opportunity, he should have gone all the way and given her access to his light show.
An aside about LED lighting. I had been looking into smart bulbs for a pair of lights we have in our living room and have been impressed by the capabilities of these little LED bulbs. Much more light from less power, dimmable, adjustable colour temperature, and controllable from a smartphone app. Sounds like fun! And when we were doing a colour correction session earlier that day, I was speaking to our director of photography about LED lights on film shoots. Big lights on film sets often require big power sources, so you might need a generator or a genny truck, which is massive and expensive. Plus, you have to worry about different colour temperatures; mixing light types can lead to nightmares of different shades of colour that you try vainly to get out in the colour correct. Sure enough, they are starting to use LED lights to great effect.
So when Caribou comes on, and suddenly there is a blasting throbbing temple of light in the air, made out of smoke, supported by pillars of photons, sweeping one way and the next, changing colour, timed to the music, silhouetting the band – I think, yes! LED lights. LET’S DO THIS!
Visually it looks a lot like an iTunes visualizer, except far more badass. (Far badasser, far badderass, far worseass?) Come to think of it, the silhouetted-band look is also reminiscent of mid-2000s iTunes ads. But again, badder-ass.
Dan Snaith himself looks a lot more like a tech mogul than a rock star: balding, white jeans, tight shirt. He could sing developers developers so softly into that mic instead of sun sun sun. He had Lanza back on stage to do the song “Second Chance”, which I have played 22 times in iTunes (make that 23 now, damn), and afterwards the stage lights came up a bit for him to thank her, as this was the last date on the tour and could be the last time they do that song together. We said to each other, “he’s so nice!” He used to be a math professor, and he probably was a very good professor – the sort of professor you could talk to about your problems.
So imagine, then, Mr Rogers popping a couple pills, firing up the smoke machines and the light beams, and taking you on a swirling light-tunnel journey of sound into the deepest corners of your soul. Musically this is some next level shit. Caribou sits somewhere at the intersection of rock, dance and singer-songwriter music. He’s playing with a guitarist, bassist and drummer. He’s singing in his wispy, meek falsetto songs of love. And underneath he is marshalling a tsunami of sound, all the thundering sonics that modern electro-acoustic science can bring to bear upon affairs of the heart.
He is master above all of the rise and fall. Mostly rise, not much fall. Songs start quietly and mount until you think they can’t mount any further and then they mount further and further. It’s present on the album from the first song on, but it’s all the more present live, where he – I should say they, it does seem like his fellow white-outfitted silhouette people have a say in the ups and downs of the songs – where they turn an arpeggio loop that lasts maybe four bars on the album version of “Sun” into a four-minute escalating odyssey. And those damn LED lights and smoke machine make you think you are a giant space robot from the future finally connecting to the Motherdome through your Lightcord.
Here are two posts from old-school bloggers declaring their intent to resume old-school blogging operations: Andy Baio and Gina Trapani.
“Sorry for the lack of updates” blog posts are a classic of the genre, and these are exemplary examples – I’m not being sarcastic. I particularly like Trapani’s list of personal rules, which made me think what mine would be. Sometimes I wonder why I do this! It doesn’t really make much sense. But essentially this is how I roll:
Blogging is therapy foremost. I write to organize thoughts. If they get organized, I post them. If they don’t, I often don’t post them. I have probably ten drafts to every post.
Post interesting links. If there’s a lot more of this than there used to be, it’s because sometimes that’s all I have time for. That’s ok.
It doesn’t matter who reads it. I don’t check anymore. I only know when someone tells me in person. That’s all good, I do this for me.
No bitterness. There’s no shortage of snark on the internet, so try and post constructive, thoughtful, silly, or beautiful things instead.
Keep it stripped down. No tags, no “read more”, no comments. Not adding enough to be worth the hassle.
No guilt. It’s not work. No need to maintain a posting schedule or anything. Do it when you feel like it. If it stops being fun, stop doing it. Or try something new.
Some of these rules are harder to follow than others – it’s especially hard to value something posted publicly without thinking about its reception, audience, etc. And sometimes you have to. Here are my problem areas, things I want to get better at, or find better solutions for:
Posting personal stuff. This is an age-old problem with writing. Sometimes I want to but don’t for fears that someone else might get hurt, I might look like an idiot, etc.
Keeping the blog reflecting my life. It feels like it should, but it doesn’t really. I don’t post at all about my daughter, home renovations, work.
I’d like to post pictures more but for mostly technical reasons I don’t.
Get better at ending posts. Better to cut it short and take it up in a follow-up post than to not post at all. Drop the mic, walk away.
Here’s Leigh Alexander’s vitriolic, already-seminal piece on Gamergate. She argues that Gamergate is the death spasm of “gamer”, the identity based around games, which is becoming obsolete in an era when everybody plays games.
“Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.
And here is an interview with Mikael Colville-Andersen, head of Copenhagenize, a bike-related urban design company and associated weblog. This passage is interesting:
The cycling sub-cultures are a hurdle to mainstreaming bicycle culture, even though that may sound counter-intuitive. The nature of sub-cultures is insular. They are not often keen to see their beloved hobby/activity become mainstream. Much bicycle advocacy in North America is done by the “avid” cyclists. They have a sense of ownership over all things bicycle. They don’t, however, realize that the 99% doesn’t want what they want. They don’t want over-complication with gear and fancy bicycles. People – Citizen Cyclists I call them – just want to be able to ride a bicycle safely and conveniently.
Having avid cyclists doing the talking about bicycles is like having race walkers doing the talking about pedestrian-friendly cities. It doesn’t work. It’s two different things.
The parallel is striking, and weird.
Ultimately, if you think about telling hobbyist cyclists that they “drank the kool aid” and are “angry young men” who should “grow up” because “traditional [biking] is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug,” it seems waaaay over-the-top. These are just a bunch of dudes who enjoy riding around with their friends, really fast! You would want to say something much less threatening, like “you guys are right, biking is awesome! While we value your advocacy, we also need to hear from other bikers, people who may not share your point of view exactly, and in fact those people already outnumber you. But this doesn’t mean you have to have to change anything – keep doing what you’re doing!”
It’s a shame that the Gamergate thing has already gotten so out of hand that such dialogue seems impossible. I guess that’s what happens when the death treats start.
At the first iPad presentation, Steve Jobs was at pains to explain that the iPad would only work as a product if it found a spot between the iPhone and Mac where it did some number of things much better than either. […] Over time, though, that middle has shrunk.
Phones have gotten bigger and Macs have gotten smaller and get better battery life.
Last year I bought an iPad mini for the first time. Initially I loved it, and was thrilled that I could carry it everywhere I brought my bag. But increasingly I realize that I don’t use it that much. I mostly use it at home, where it might as well be the bigger iPad Air.
There are very few things the iPad can do that the iPhone can’t, and that’s why – when you’re out and about – you’re almost always going to reach for your phone. The iPhone Plus may well be just as good for reading, which is one of the main things I use the iPad for.
Thompson notes that “the downside of a bigger phone is reduced convenience and portability, opening up room for a device that is even more portable and always with you – the Apple Watch.” If you’re carrying a big phone that may not be usable one-handed, you can see why you’d want a smartwatch. A lot of my iPhone uses are relatively brief interactions that require a minimum of data presented: weather, figuring out when the next streetcar is coming, seeing a notification, fast forwarding a track. You can see how this could be taken over by something on your wrist.
Tablets are far from useless, however. I prefer a touch interface to a mouse or trackpad for many computer-y tasks (web browsing, feed reading, photo editing, music creation, games). Also, the sheer size of a tablet makes it better than a phone at other things (games, reading, video).
But it strikes me that a) I want the biggest size since it will only get used at home, b) I don’t need the newest, fanciest model, and c) maybe don’t even need it to be iOS. The video apps I use are all on Android as well – it’s really just games that would make me stick with iOS.
That is something Thompson notes: there was an opportunity for the iPad to define itself through killer apps, and Apple has mostly blown it. When you see a good iPad app, it’s impressive: all the fun and usability of a phone app, most of the power and real estate of a desktop app. The iPad is more of a computer alternative (and eventual replacement) than it is a phone. The middle hasn’t vanished, but it has moved, and may be swallowing one of its neighbours.
I realize these are dull first world problems for people who have more than one fancy gadget. Still, it’s interesting to see how computing changes over the years based on both tech and how people actually use the things.
I’m no jazz expert but I did take a lil’ course in university and one thing that stuck with me was the definition of jazz that the prof gave us: the blending of European harmony with African rhythms. There was nothing about improvisation.
I’ve continued listening to jazz since that course (you go to see some live shows and drink some sangria and realize, hey this is really fun, despite the knock on it that it’s just for middle-aged white guys now). As the saying goes, I listen to a lot of stuff, but a personal staple is electronic music, and it struck me a while ago that the definition of jazz applies equally to that genre.
The biggest stumbling block for people is that jazz emphasizes improvisiation and live performance, whereas electronic music is traditionally a recorded art. But that has changed with time. Software like Ableton Live and various live-performance hardware tools, and the coordination of elaborate visuals, have made electronic music more and more performative. On the flip side I can think of a few jazz releases of the past few years that were very much studio albums (say, Takuya Kuroda’s Rising Son).
Two recent electronic releases have really cemented that: Aphex Twin’s Syro and Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead. The Aphex Twin album is very much a studio production but the palette is all polyrhythm meets jazz harmonics. Looking into the FlyLo album I see Herbie Hancock played keys on much of it, and Flying Lotus’ aunt is Alice Coltrane (John Coltrane’s wife, who played piano with him).
People may think jazz is dead. Those same people may listen to these albums and not even think about jazz. But it’s still there, maybe moreso than ever.
I am a huge Bungie fan, having loved their games since Marathon in the 90s. And I was a big Halo player – I’m not in a frat and I don’t like cursing at complete strangers over the internet, but I did like playing it with my pals, for a time. So it’s almost inconceivable that I’m not planning on buying Bungie’s latest game, Destiny.
The reviews are not good. Back when I was really into console games, it bothered me that almost every heavily-marketed AAA game title got review scores in the 90s. And here we are with one of the most expensive games ever made and the reviews are floundering in the 70s. Here’s one bad review from Giant Bomb, here’s one from Polygon. Surprising!
But more than that really, I’m just not playing console games at the moment and am reluctant to spend $70+ on something I’m not sure I’ll play. I have a small child and that means I only get a couple of hours of contiguous leisure time per day. Plus I DEFINITELY don’t like paying that kinda scratch, because my media consumption is spread thinly across a lot of different things: a bunch of shows, movies, iPad games, and books. Paying $70 on one thing feels like I want it to monopolize my attention, which I don’t want. Besides that, neither shooter nor MMO lies close to my games-taste wheelhouse these days (if it was a turn-based pixel-art WWII space conquest 4X, I’d be out-innovating 8-bit Space Hitler right now, not writing this crap).
Still, it seems slightly sad to not be playing it.
My 1.75-year-old daughter received an animal puzzle as a gift. It has pieces shaped like different animals, and when you place them in the appropriate spots, it plays that animal’s sound. Which is great! She’s gotten pretty handy with it, which is also great. Only problem is that the zebra sensor-thing has gotten out of whack, and it goes off seemingly at random. Like late at night when you are tiptoeing through a quiet house. Which is not great, because have you heard what a fucking zebra sounds like?
Here’s a take on how AppleTV could disrupt gaming.1 Consoles, pursuing hardcore gamers, have gotten more and more expensive relative to PCs. As I’ve mentioned many timesbefore, smartphones & tablets have replaced consoles for casual gamers. They are general-purpose devices that happen to run games really well. Why buy a dedicated gaming device when you have something that does the job in your pocket?
Like the iPhone and iPad, AppleTV also runs iOS, just a more restricted version, without the App Store. As this post details, though, recent changes to iOS mean that the AppleTV is just about ready to transform into a pretty great gaming box. It would be easy to play the games on your phone on your TV, with an optional hardware controller (like one of these). There would be better performance than before (the new AppleTV would presumably have the chip currently in the iPhone & iPad, but this may even work on current-gen AppleTVs). Games you buy on your AppleTV would also work on your phone & tablet. Suddenly the console of choice for casual gamers – and many hardcores – would become clear.
1 Like Gruber I think the two tiers of AppleTV are one tier too many.
Here’s Apple’s iOS 8 Overview site. And here’s the site for OS X Yosemite. I’m more psyched about both new OSes than I have been for any in a while. My favourite upcoming features, which all solve problems that I’ve faced quite recently:
iCloud Drive, in which iCloud acts like Dropbox, and the related
iCloud Photo Library, in which Photo Stream is replaced by something that works the way you’d want
Spotlight on both OSes is much more like Quicksilver or LaunchBar and looks to be much more useful (and bypasses Google quite a bit)
Continuity, in which things you’re doing on one device can be easily picked up on another (still not clear how the UI will work)
They opened a lot more of iOS up to developers, including share sheets, notification center and documents, meaning complex workflows will get a lot easier.
Family Sharing, in which sharing media among a family’s different Apple IDs isn’t a bewildering hellstorm
In other news, The OS X design flattening is quite tasteful (font: Helvetica Neue). Finally, I’m not a developer but I’m excited for Siracusa that a new programming language has appeared as he hoped it would.
I have been going through my photo collection on my computer because I was going to try out an online photo service and in the process write an article for my site about various photo storage problems and options. The service I signed up for costs $7 a month for 100 gigs. Turns out my library is 140 gigs. That would cost $15. I knew I could get it down. There are a lot of duplicates and rejected shots.
The collection starts in 2003 with the purchase of a digital camera. It was small and cost $700 for very little quality by today’s standards. The photos are sporadic. At first there are single tentative photos here and there, then – realizing the cost structure of digital photography – they blossomed, in fits. A night out, blurry and grainy. A day with visiting family members. Another night out.
They’re not from every day, but reflect conscious efforts to use the camera. A series of photos from a walk to work. Pictures of the condo I used to rent a room in. Pictures of the locations of the failed film I worked on. Of Lucy, my then-new girlfriend, now my wife.
They reflect my bizarre obsessions. There are quite a few of Toronto grafitti (all works which are now, I would assume, long gone). There are many shots of alleyways, signs, and abandoned things.
The years advance. Friends’ kids grow. A trip to Cuba, a couple jaunts to Ireland for a funeral and a wedding. Lucy cycles through various haircuts. There are shots of the first apartment we got together, and Christie subway station nearby, and the decrepit barber in between, and the tree that fell after a storm.
In 2008 I got an iPhone. The photos multiply. Many are mundane, fleeting images: a bruise I got after a bike accident. The serial number on my mom’s washing machine. A shot of a stranger on the subway. I delete a few but start realizing that these photos also tell little stories.
A year later another camera enters: the Panasonic GH1. The photos are all of a sudden much better. Some are beautiful, even. I bought the camera for its video capability as I wanted to shoot a documentary in Windsor. I took a ton of stills with it. The photos of abandoned things, of urban decay, explode.
I try to decide what to delete. I mostly delete only duplicates. There are quite a lot, as if the photos, left unsupervised, have been breeding like rabbits. But when it comes time to evaluate other photos I defer. Some of these I would have deleted years ago had I been paying attention, but now with the time passed, they seem much more interesting. Who am I to say what I will find interesting in another five, ten years?
A trip to Windsor, photos of the Detroit skyline. Around this time my dad was falling ill with dementia. There are only the occasinal photos of him. They are then followed by 40 pictures of my new Kindle. I was writing a review of it for my site.
Lucy’s parents’ cottage. My friends getting older. Abandoned buildings in Windsor. An image of my dad in the dark. I remember the occasion distinctly: he asked about my brother. I do not have a brother.
Then, 80 pictures from a shoot for work, with Star Wars characters. A trip to dim sum, with closeups of pristine teacups and chopsticks.
I start to realize I should not be writing about online photo storage problems and solutions. I start to wonder what reality my current urge to write such things obscures.
My dad is now three years dead and I have not written about it. I have but I have not shared nor finished it. But I am ok now with his absence. It does not seem as sad, or rather, the sadness has a character of beauty.
The photos continue unabated. Pics of houses for sale. A mortgage agreement. Our new house. Our new daughter. I do not want to delete anything.
Some rumours were going around that sounded silly:
[Evercore Partners analyst Patrick] Wang predicts that Apple wouldn’t just simply release a larger iPad — he sees the company using the additional screen real estate to create a hybrid-style device that could serve as both a tablet and a notebook, and would make the iPad lineup more appealing to business customers.
Apple’s never targeted the “enterprise”. (Aside: I know I’m a huge nerd but when I hear that word I always think of the starship rather than business people doing business things). Why would enterprise users need a bigger iPad anyway, and/or why would Apple feel the need to change strategies to compete with Microsoft’s keyboard-wanting Surface, which is not selling anywhere near as well as the iPad? Silliness.
But then I thought about “Pro” in an Apple context, which means creative professionals, and then I realized that Apple’s pro software products – Final Cut and associated apps, Aperture, and Logic – still do not have iOS versions.
In this context, a larger screen iPad would make a lot of sense. I once bought an 11” MacBook Air, hoping to edit a project on the go. It was too small a screen to edit on, however. Certain apps need certain elements on screen at all times. Video editors need a timeline, a clip selection window and a playback window, and when the screen gets too small, the utility of these elements is compromised. Step up to a 13” Air, however, and editing works much better.
It is by no means a given that Apple will release its pro apps on iOS. They may feel that the consumer creative apps – iMovie, iPhoto, and GarageBand – fit the bill. That the iPad is only for playing around, and when you need to do real work, you go to a computer. That doesn’t sound much like this pitch though, does it? Or, you could argue that Apple isn’t that interested in the pro market any more. And as an Aperture user, I can sympathize with that. Surely the pro market is a lower priority than their much larger consumer markets in different categories, but if they didn’t care about pros anymore they wouldn’t have just revamped Final Cut and redesigned the Mac Pro from the ground up.
You could also say that yes, Apple will eventually release Pro apps for iOS but no, that doesn’t mean there will be dedicated Pro iPads. Look at the marketing for the iPhone 5s first, though: “forward thinking”. “the most advanced technology”. “desktop class architecture”. Isn’t that very close to a pitch for pro hardware? Or look at the history of any of any Apple product line since Jobs’ return: start simple, and add an increasing number of models over time. I would expect a bigger, pro iPad, and maybe even a 10” pro iPad. I just wouldn’t bet on when.
Are there other distinctions this thing could have, hardware-wise? Besides the obvious (faster processors, faster graphics, more storage), I would argue for pressure sensitivity. Artists, designers, musicians and even photographers would benefit from it. Would they make a keyboard? I doubt it. When you think of these sorts of jobs – music, design, illustration, film & video, photography – a keyboard is not the tool that they need. If anything, different custom inputs depending on the role might be interesting; imagine a mixing board for music production, for example. But really the touch screen is the ultimate custom input, and is much more direct.
A 13” display isn’t the biggest thing in the world, but if the iPad Pro displays get any bigger – and one would guess that they might eventually – Apple would probably want to make a stand for the thing that would optimize its use on a desk. You would want to approximate the ergonomics of a drafting table; the stand might elevate the thing at a 15° angle and prevent it from sliding around.
The biggest thing holding back such a device isn’t really the hardware at all but rather the software. Apple has just last year completed the consumer-level iLife suite for iOS (do they even call it iLife anymore?). The pro apps would have to be a big upgrade from those. The OS itself may need substantial upgrades as well.
That’s it – some completely unqualified speculatin’ about an unreleased Apple product. Just what the internet needed.
I’ve been dangerously obsessed with the iOS/Android game Hoplite. It’s good, miss-your-streetcar-stop good (right Steve?). All the more impressive given how simple it is. Anyway I would like to channel the obsession into something useful. So here are some pointers for strategy.
General points
You don’t get any points for killing demons. If you can pass them by, do it.
Don’t go chucking your spear every which way. You may find yourself unable to get it back.
Until you have some energy upgrades, don’t jump around too much either. You only have enough juice for two jumps by default.
It’s beyond the scope of this article, but get a sense for the specifics of movement and which types of movement result in attacks. Jumping right at someone: good. Jumping over someone: good. Getting close to a demon in a non-straight line: bad. It’s hard to explain all the ins and outs, but it’s important for you to know.
I tend to go after demons in this order: wizards, archers, footmen, demolitionists. Wizards and archers are dangerous in groups as they can control whole rows, blocking your movement. Demolitionists are unpredictable and can be dangerous, but their bombs are also really handy for bashing into enemies.
VERYIMPORTANT: archers and wizards will not fire through their allies. That means you can use footmen & demolitionists as a screen.
You regain energy (needed for jumps) by +10 “when moving into a tile with an adjacent monster” (per the dev blog). Good to know.
Upgrades
There are some base upgrades, but others are unlocked by getting achievements. The available achievements are listed in a screen off the game’s main menu.
Clearly, not every altar has every upgrade. Certain things are only offered if you have the base upgrade in that category, and other things are only offered at specific altars.
If you do not see an upgrade you want when you go to an altar, get ‘Fortitude’. The best upgrades require sacrifices of health capacity, so bank some early on.
Expand your throw distance early on by getting ‘Greater Throw’. That’s so demons who think they have retreated out of your throw range will still feel the sweet kiss of your spear. I also like ‘deep lunge’ and ‘mighty bash’.
My favourite upgrade by far is ‘agility’. Once you unlock it you will only be offered it on level six, along with two other possible upgrades that depend on killing three turns in a row. With agility, if you get a string of three, you get a free turn. What the description for agility doesn’t express, however, is that if you keep killing you KEEPGETTINGFREETURNS. It’s killtacular. The later levels are so packed with dudes that I’ve managed to massacre everyone on a level, with time stopped, and then exited to the next level WITHTIMESTILLSTOPPED ready to kill again like a total time-destroying MONSTER. I think you’ll agree that the all-caps passages were ABSOLUTELYNECESSARY.
UPDATE: the latest version has changed this behaviour. Now you only get one free turn at a time. Perhaps those all caps weren’t necessary after all.
Another great upgrade is “winged sandals”. They increase your jump range. Sounds not that thrilling, but in later levels you will appreciate the huge range of possible moves it opens up. Pair it with increased energy to make hopping quickly to the exit a viable strategy. These are only offered at the level 10 shrine.
I thought ‘teleport’ and ‘recall spear’ were great upgrades but I’m not as sold any more. In practice it often doesn’t work out – either there’s a demon standing on your spear, or you can’t teleport/recall without getting dinged by someone.
I haven’t yet unlocked all the upgrades, so I’m probably missing some good strategies. So far winged sandals plus agility have gotten me to level 27, but I think now I’m just going to try and get all the achievements as some of the others sound pretty neat.
