Movie Progress, Part 3

During the script writing process, I have learned how hard it is to write an entire movie from start to even - even a fairly short one. I had a few scenes in my mind that I thought would be funny, and a couple of scenes that I wanted to do that would be nice surprise (like tracking down a developer he had worked with in the past to be in the movie), but as for stitching it all together, it was a bit of a mish-mash. Props and location were a big obstacle. I've done what I can do with a green screen, and the furniture in our office has been rearranged in ways that I didn't think were possible. I also had to respect the fact that the main star was pretty camera shy, and didn't want to film any scenes in public (which is completely understandable, plus, it might result in our secret project leaking out).

I did overshoot a little by asking over half the team to be a part of it. That meant I had to include them somehow - though a few of them were OK with having tiny parts, so that worked out OK. I did have a bigger part in mind for one of the developers who has worked quite closely with the developer who is leaving, but he didn't feel comfortable having a big part, so unfortunately, his part has been turned into a short shot of him dying.

I wanted to have more shots of the city from our building, but unfortunately, all the rain lately has meant that the windows in our building are dirty and so I couldn't get a clear shot (first world problems, I know...). I have a much higher appreciation of location scouts for movies now. Just thinking about how many places the Games of Thrones crew must have scouted out in order to find the location for King's Landing boggles the mind. I don't know if they had a place in mind from the start, but the location they picked just seems so perfect for the part - it's pretty much exactly as I imagined it, except with more naked people and more dead people. Most of my locations for the movie are in the office, though a few are green-screened to look like they're somewhere else. But the space was pretty confined though, so you can see chairs or tables in some of the shots, which makes me sad, but you gotta work with what you have.

There were so many Bond tropes that I never got to work into the movie. Bond doesn't even sleep with the girl in this... the Bond girl just kinda disappears into nowhere after he meets her. There are a few racist jokes, but nothing too sexist. Unfortunately, there aren't that many women in the office, and though all of my female characters get speaking parts, none of them really do that much in the plot (except the Moneypenny equivalent, who points Bond in the direction of his next target, but that's just one line). Nearly everyone in the movie is a bad guy, which I didn't want to do, but it made it easier to fit them into the movie if they were just faceless mooks that Bond had to fight through in order to get to the big boss. I did manage to fit "shaken, not stirred" into the movie, but I thought it would be inappropriate to be drinking martinis in the office, so Bond orders a water instead, and I have a bit of a sight gag, with the waiter trying to shake the water and failing.  The one person I screen tested it with didn't get the joke though, so I don't know if I should leave that on the cutting room floor. It does mean I have some nice transitions during the poker scene though, because as a long take, it looks horrible and boring.

That's the other thing, my dialogue is terrible. Here is one of the scenes in my movie:

(at the beach)

Bond girl: Enjoying the view?

Bond: I can't help but enjoy a girl when she's wet.

The guy playing Bond's face was so red when saying that line it's really lucky he was wearing a mask.

Then there's the end of the car chase scene, after the driver is killed.

Bond: I guess they'll have to... install a new driver.

I really had no idea what gadgets to give to Q, but we were working on one of the fight scenes, and we had no idea how to end it. So the guy playing Bond grabbed one of the office chairs and pushed the bad guy into it so he was sitting down and pushed him out of the frame. The problem is, given the background, where the chair comes from is never explained. So I had to have one of Q's inventions be a pen that magically makes a chair for you to sit on. Since I lack the special effects or CGI studios that most big budget films have, I'm just going to do a really bad cut, with one shot without the chair, and one shot with the chair. 

If I have time, I want to dress up as Rick Astley and film myself dancing to Never Gonna Give You Up, as one of the BAs said the developer who is leaving dresses like Rick Astley. That counts as rickrolling, right? My contract doesn't say that's a fireable offense, but that's going to be the thing that I'm most proud of at my time at the bank - the time I got to rickroll my entire team.

I am incredibly bad at writing funny scenes though. I have a scene where the bad guy demands a ransom payment from the UN, and I wanted the Greek representative to say, "Well, I've got no money, I'm out." as a reference to Greece's current economy. I hesitated over that line for so long, because I was afraid that the Greek people on the team would get offended. Then the Chinese UN rep responds that they can spare some change. And again, I just kept thinking, what if the Chinese people on the team get offended? Even though racist stereotypes are par for the course in Bond movies, I wasn't sure if it would be OK to cross that line. To be fair, as far as racist statements go, I think that's fairly tame. But it plays such a small part in the movie that it wouldn't hurt to cut it out (though it'll mean those two people won't get to be in the movie).

I'm about halfway through the movie now, so I'm 100% confident I can get it done by the weekend. The only part I'm unsure about is that I asked a couple of people from the UK office to film some lines for me. I managed to replace one of them, but the other one has quite technical lines, so he could only be replaced by another developer. Unfortunately, all of the devs on the team are already in the movie. As a last resort, I'm going to have him be a silhouette and use Microsoft Sam, but hopefully he'll mail me his footage before the end of the week. He's the guy who hired the dev who is leaving, so I know he'd be really happy to see him in the movie.

Unfortunately, I've come down with a cold, so I think it's going to be an early night for me.

Night at the Movies

I have to say, this Bond movie thing has been an amazing learning experience. I put down video editing on my resume, because I enjoyed making small videos and used fairly basic tools to edit videos. I've always enjoyed putting together a story in a visual format, I guess I'm more of a visual person which probably explains why I also enjoy watching movies - though doesn't explain why I'm not that keen on art. Anyway, after having worked on this movie for the past couple of weeks, I realised the crappy little things I was doing in my spare time back at uni is nothing compared to what you can do with video.

Since I knew I'd only have a few weeks to put this together, I started a 30-day trial for Adobe Premiere Pro, the creative cloud version. At first, it was completely overwhelming. There were so many buttons and panels, and menu options. To be honest, I've only used a few of the features so far, and I know that there's so much more it can do. It makes me wish I had taken a video editing course while I was at uni, because there are a lot of words that I don't understand, and it has mostly been trial-and-error with a few YouTube videos thrown in here and there.

I've done my own green-screening, which I'm really proud of! It's not the greatest, as my "green screen" is a couple of 3m sheets of cloth I bought at Lincraft, so there are plenty of shadows and folds where the cloth didn't hang very well from the wall.

Before:

After:

Ignore the big black rectangles, that's just where my actors were standing. It's not the greatest, but given everyone's low expectations for this movie, I think it's actually pretty good. Though you can see the obvious folds. I'm hoping that since only a few of the actors were involved in green screen scenes, everyone else won't even realise that it was green-screened, so they won't notice the folds. It kinda looks like it's just part of the sea....

I've also mentioned this idea to a few people (and of course to everyone reading this blog). One of the people had a great suggestion, which I've now incorporated into my movie. I feel like I should credit him, but nobody else on my team will know who he is, so it seems a bit silly. I will credit him here instead - thanks, Steve!

In the interests of time, I've decided to limit myself to 10 minutes of footage. It does mean I've had to cut a few scenes a bit short, and cut out a couple of scenes entirely. The Bond + Bond girl sex scene has been scrapped, though mostly because the actor playing Bond doesn't really want to do a sex scene, and I don't think it's appropriate to be watching one at work anyway. So it is a bit disjointed, because the Bond girl appears on screen for one scene (to show Bond where the cinema is), then just disappears, never to be mentioned again. I was going to have Bond mention her at the end, but I haven't been able to work it in.

The most difficult parts to put together were the opening song (with the dancing naked silhouettes - which unfortunately, I didn't get to include in my movie), and the gun barrel. I kinda lucked out with the gun barrel though, as I'm not the first one to be putting together my own Bond parody. I found a couple of YouTube videos, including one that linked to a pre-made Adobe After Effects project. You could just insert your own video, and music, line everything up, and that's it!

The Adobe Creative Cloud trial also includes AE, which I've become familiar with over the course of my movie making. It has some cool text effects, including that type-writer effect. It feels like a super-powered version of PowerPoint, except instead of making a slideshow, you make a video (which, if you think about it, is just a really fast slideshow with sound!).

I'm actually super impressed with the Adobe suite. I wish I had had more time to go through the tutorials and stuff, but unfortunately, time is of the essence. By the time we return from Europe, my trial will be over, and I'll have to give it up. If I could justify spending $30 a month to subscribe to the Creative Cloud for AE and PP, I'd definitely do it (plus, you get all the other Adobe goodies, including Photoshop (if you want PS only, it's $10 a month)).

If the whole programmer thing doesn't work out, and the security thing doesn't work out either, maybe I could try my hand at making crappy movies.

A Perfect Murder - Motive

I think this one is the toughest to deal with. Well, unless you are happy to kill some random person you don't know, just to make it easier to get away with murder. In which case, your motive is just to get away with murder, which is a pretty tough motive to prove. Unless you make a series of blog posts talking about how to plan a perfect murder and you talk about how killing someone just because you want to kill someone. I'd say the best solution in that case is not to commit the murder, because you're risking getting caught making a stupid mistake for very little gain.

But realistically, if there was someone you wanted to take out, how to make it look like you don't have a motive? I think, once again, that patience is the key. If there's someone you want to off, bide your time. Someone might remember that fight you had with your husband last night. Someone is less likely to remember that fight you had with your husband five months ago. If you're killing someone because you have money issues, then make a public attempt at trying to clean yourself up. Start living frugally, take on an extra job. If people ask, show that you're trying to change your ways and dig yourself out of a hole. Then, when someone dies in a freak petrol fighting "accident", and you happen to benefit from their life insurance, just pretend it as a happy accident.

Though I think the biggest benefit of waiting before carrying out the act is that it might dissuade you from doing it in the first place. Can't get caught for murder if you didn't commit it. On the whole, I don't think there's a lot you can do about motive except try to hide the evidence of it. Don't complain to your co-workers, just try to keep it to yourself as much as possible.

Anyway, another short one from me today. My movie is about 1/5 done, and my new deadline that I have set for myself is Friday. At this stage, I am fairly confident I will make it, but that's if I dedicate a lot of my time towards it. I've got the major scenes done, but the story isn't coherent unless I film the bridging scenes. At worst, it's just a series of Bond parody skits, which isn't the worst outcome.

A Perfect Murder - Means

In yesterday's post, I covered opportunity, today I am going to cover means. Basically, do you have what you needed to have in order to commit the crime?

If you have a job where you have some sort of rare or unique tool - DO NOT USE IT TO COMMIT YOUR CRIME. Especially if it will leave an identifying signature.

Find some commonplace item. More importantly, don't buy it immediately before you're going to use it. Buy it somewhere that doesn't have video surveillance. Again, this is preparation. If you buy it ahead of time, then it's unlikely that they'll be able to trace the purchase back to you. That supermarket cashier isn't going to remember who bought a particular bottle of bleach 3 months ago. Though you'll need a secret place to store this stuff, because it'll look suspicious if you had a bottle of BLEACHO in your laundry up until the day of the murder.

I don't really know much else you can do to deal with getting yourself out of having the means. If you want to use a gun, you'll have to practice so that you don't screw up, but then that'll probably leave a trace, since you'll need to go to the gun range or something, and that increases the chances that you'll be remembered by someone.

Yeah, I don't really have anything else to say..... The important things to remember - try not to be memorable, don't use anything that is likely to identify you, just try to be average.

A Perfect Murder - Opportunity

Ever since that episode of Veronica Mars, where she is set the class assignment of writing the perfect murder, I've been fascinated with the concept. Not because I want to kill someone, but because of the challenge. I don't know how good police are at investigating murders, but shows like CSI make it look like they're nearly infallible, because people always leave something behind that links them back to the crime. So what does it take to pull off the perfect murder?

For starters, killing someone in the heat of the moment seems to be the worst idea.  You haven't got anything planned, so when it comes to things like hiding the body, or cleaning up after yourself, you're in a rush, and unlikely to be thinking straight. Not only that, but you're limited to the things that you have on you. So when the police come to investigate, and notice the chef's knife is no longer in its spot in the knife block, and that happens to match the stab wound, it's not looking too good for you. In Castle, Detective Beckett mentions that when someone goes somewhere with the intention of killing someone, they usually bring their own weapon. That way they know they will have the tools to get the job done. Sure, if you're murdering someone, you could count on being able to shove them down the garbage disposal at their apartment, but what if it's blocked up that day, or closed for maintenance? Unless you had the forethought to have a back up body disposal plan, you're coming close to being in the heat of the moment killer level.

So more TV detective-based ideas. They generally try to find someone who has means, motive and opportunity, i.e. that person must have the capability of performing the murder (e.g. owns a gun of that calibre), has a reason to perform the murder (e.g. scumbag cheated on them for five years), and the person must have had the chance to perform the murder (e.g. alone in a hotel room together).

In reverse order, I'll start with opportunity. The best way to dodge the opportunity card is to hire someone else to do it - after all, if you weren't there at the time of the murder, then you clearly couldn't have done it. Unfortunately, I learned today that even if you are an accomplice to the murder, you still get charged with murder. And I think in the case of hiring someone, there's also conspiracy to commit murder (but maybe that one only applies when the murder doesn't actually go through). So if you are going to go this route, you'd better be sure that you are good at cleaning up the paper trail. This is where preparation comes in handy. If someone makes a large withdrawal, it gets noticed. If you withdraw small amounts over a long period of time (especially if you can claim it was for things like buying fruit at the farmer's market, or other innocuous cash transactions that are difficult to trace), you are less likely to be found out. Of course, you'll need somewhere safe to store this cash pile that you're building up, so maybe it's time to hollow out one of your bedposts.

Another trick that comes up in TV shows is the falsified alibi. Sure, there was a charity dinner that went from 7pm-1am (conveniently when the murder estimated to have happened), but you don't need to have been there the entire time for people to remember you being there. As long as nobody catches you leaving, they'll just assume you were there the whole time. But the one that's my favourite comes from an episode of Monk. The killer has an alibi that he was running a marathon when the murder was supposed to have taken place. His run tracker shows him running the race, and there are photos showing that he was there. Monk suspects that he just attached his tracker to someone else, but his times are unique from every other runner in the race. His trick was that he attached the tracker to the motorcycle filming the racers, and so the tracker would show him at the marathon. However, during a blind spot, he ducked out, changed clothes, and went to kill his ex-wife. After the deed, he rejoins the race further down the track. His mistake though, was not grabbing the tracker back off the motorcycle, which was really stupid. I mean, if he could think of such an elaborate plan, you'd think he'd have thought of retrieving the tracker.

Ooooooh, on Castle they had one where the body had been frozen for a long period of time, so it was hard to pinpoint the time of death. I find it a bit silly that they asked about alibis for years ago. I barely know what I was doing a month ago, much less than five years. I imagine the police wouldn't be able to hold you for not being able to provide an alibi for an event years ago. I wonder if alibis have a limit. Even most businesses, in the interests of saving space, will only retain surveillance footage for a certain period of time. Storage is cheap, but when you're recording video, especially from multiple cameras, it adds up!

Personally, I'd go for the falsified alibi. Oh no, I hope this blog post doesn't end up being used against me in court some day..... Hypothetically, I'd go for the falsified alibi. The issue with the freezing trick is that you'd have to freeze it for a fair amount of time to be able to benefit from them not being able to pinpoint the time of death. In that time, if you are related to the victim in some way, you'll have to justify their disappearance. If they are discovered missing too early, then the trail to the frozen body is still warm.

Oh, I just had a thought. If you are good at manipulating photos, and the person you want to kill is willing to go on a holiday with you, then you invite them out, kill them, and photoshop some images to make it look like they're still with you on holiday. It has to be good photoshops though, because those photos are going to be the thing that throws off the murder timeline. The police will think that the person was killed in September, because there are photos of the two of you together throughout August, when in fact, they were killed at the start of August. They will begin the search for the body at the last known location in September, which might be Ayers Rock, based on your holiday snaps, but in reality, the body was left in a hole somewhere in Darwin. And since you had to fly back early, the last time you saw them, they were "alive and healthy", and there are people who are able to place you in your home city, and not back in Ayers Rock doing the deed. How could you have done it if you never had the time to?

So that's my hypothetical way of covering the opportunity angle.

The Button

As an April Fool's joke, the Reddit team created a subreddit called /r/thebutton. At the top, there's a timer counting down, along with a button. You can press the button to reset the timer back to 60 seconds.

Only accounts older than the 1st of April, 2015 can press the button and each account can only press the button once, after which, the button becomes a grey rectangle, and all you see is this:

If you look on the right, you can see different coloured dots. They're the flairs you get after pressing the button, indicating how long you waited before pressing it. According to the wiki:

Grey = haven't pressed
Purple = 60.00 - 51.01s
Blue = 51.00 - 41.01s
Green = 41.00 - 31.01s
Yellow = 31.00 - 21.01s
Orange = 21.01s - 11.01s
Red = 11.00s - 0.01s
White = account created after April 1st, 2015, and cannot press the button

When the subreddit was first released, lots of people pressed the button right away, not knowing what was going on. So a lot of them ended up getting purple flairs. I guess some of them are a bit sour about it. However, a "religion" of sorts has popped up, saying that purple is the true way of life, and that everyone should be pressing it as soon as possible - some see the user flair saying they hit it at 60s as a badge of pride. However, because of network delay, you might press the button at the same time as someone else, and their press goes through first, so they end up with the lower number, and you end up with 60s. Another thought is to try and keep it going for as long as possible. There's obviously a limited number of accounts that can press the button now. so eventually the timer is going to go down to zero.

That's the big question - what happens when the timer reaches zero? I assume it'll mean that nobody can press the button anymore, but who knows, maybe it'll spawn another button? There are a few theories going around about what'll happen after the timer hits zero. Someone thinks that maybe it'll lock the subreddit, and only those with flairs will be able to participate. Maybe the timer starts counting up and it becomes about how long Reddit as a whole can wait before pressing the new button (now that'll be a short-lived experiment, as I imagine a lot of people are going to race to be the first ones to press the new button). Maybe everyone gets Rickrolled. Who knows?!

Then there's the last group, the non-pressers. It's hard to work out if they genuinely believe that not pressing the button will mean something special for them, or if they're just holding out to be that one person who pressed the button when there was less than 1s left on the clock.

I have pressed the button, as you can see from my screenshot above, and now MrFodder is trying to beat my score, and getting mad at all the people who are pressing it earlier than he wants to press it. That's kinda why I pressed it when I did. I saw it go quite low, and I was about to press it when someone else pressed it. Then all I was seeing after that was people pressing it after ten or fifteen seconds and I thought, it's never going to get that low again! So as soon as it got as low as the last time I saw it, I pressed the button, got my flair, and moved on. It wasn't until the subreddit was linked in another thread that I remembered to check back, and it looks like it's still going. I wonder if it'll have gone down by the time May hits.

It's somewhat hypnotic watching the timer count down, but then I realise that I have a heap of more interesting things that I could be doing, and so the x gets pressed and life goes on. Although it is funny listening to MrFodder ranting about it.

Unknown Unknowns

I was talking about my experience on Stack Overflow with a few other developers from work, and they all seemed to agree that developers are douchebags (though nobody specified that present company was not included, so I assume they all think I'm a douchebag - and I guess I did make that horrible homophobic-sounding joke at lunch, but I asked later, and he said he thought it was funny).

One of the things I see a lot on SO, is when someone who is obviously new to programming asks a question, and it seems like a fairly innocent question. Sidenote: You do get those questions that are from people who are obviously just saying, "I have homework due tomorrow, please do it for me" - these people are termed help vampires by the community. They are people who post questions that show little to no effort on their part of trying to solve the problem themselves, or even the effort required to format the question to make it easy for someone else to read. They suck time out of the community, as knowledgeable people waste their time clicking on those posts, sometimes trying to fix them, or other times, finding another question that already exists which answers that exact problem.

But for the innocent questions, it's often someone asking something that's second-nature to a novice programmer, and quite a few times, I've seen some fairly abrasive responses. Quite a few times, I've seen someone instantly jump to the conclusion that the person is a help vampire. I can understand valued community members being frustrated by help vampires, as I do find it disheartening when someone basically pastes all of their code, with a description saying nothing except, "It's broken, please fix."

Rewind back to my first year of uni. My only programming experience at that point was programming my Casio graphics calculator with functions to simplify calculations and crappy text based games. I was completely overwhelmed within the first couple of weeks of classes. It was the first time I had used a *nix system (I think we had gnome?), was my first time using vi, and I just felt like I was completely out of my element. I hear a lot of people say that they don't understand how people can struggle to learn programming, as there are tutors, and lecturers, and other students, as well as the computer science help desk. But I understand.

When you don't know what you're trying to ask for, how do you know how to ask for it? It's like when you're trying to remember the name of a movie, and you can see glimpses of it in your mind. You try describing it to another person, in case they can help, and you end up with stupid sounding things like, "It has a man and a woman." and "There's a computer." You feel like you can see the movie right at the edge of your brain, but you just can't seem to articulate it. Two weeks later, it jumps out at you, it was You've Got Mail, but at the time, you found it really hard to describe something, even though you kinda knew what it was.

I feel like that's how my first few years of programming went - and even now, I have that feeling every now and again, when I know what I'm trying to do, but I struggle to put it into words to be able to form a proper Google search. It's especially frustrating when it's something you're new at, and so your knowledge is only a tiny fraction of the possibilities out there. So you might stumble upon a really elegant solution, but because you don't understand 90% of the text that accompanies it, you don't realise. So you keep searching, and refining your search, and then grow frustrated.

I can't remember what the question was, but there was a question that had a lot of comments over whether to close or not. The asker was asking how to do something, and the answer was, "duh, there's this incredibly common thing, just use that". Half of the comments were arguing that the question is valid, and that many beginner programmers might not have heard of this particular term, and so they wouldn't know what to type in the search box. Others were arguing that if the asker didn't know this incredibly basic thing, then they obviously haven't put much effort into learning. To give some context, it'd be like someone asking if there's a book on putting raw ingredients in a metal container, then heating that container up until the raw ingredients heated up enough to become soft enough to combine and make something suitable for putting on some form of carbohydrate. And you'd say, "Yeah, it's called a cook book."

I believe that anybody can learn to code. I try not to pre-judge people as a help vampire, as I feel like that will drive them away, and they will give up on their learning journey. But I do agree that there needs to be some form of effort on their part. I am giving up my precious spare time, and I'm not going to do it so that you can hand in your homework and not fail your class despite having put in no effort. Imaginary internet points isn't enough motivation for me - well, now that I have enough reputation to be able to comment everywhere, which is the bare minimum that I try to achieve on all of my Stack Exchange accounts. As another sidenote: You need to reach a certain threshold of reputation before being able to downvote (125), and unlike Reddit where you can downvote as many things as you like, downvoting things costs your reputation. So I like to think it makes people a lot more wary about downvoting. Unless you are Jon Skeet and you have SO reputation rolling in like marbles.

Unchange Log

Wow, nearly forgot my post for the day. That would have ended my streak.

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Auto brought up an interesting question - what makes a sport like AFL or basketball, or even a game like chess, so popular despite the fact that it's never "updated' or changed? If you look at the gaming world, many of the top competitive games are constantly being patched and updated. They're still in the process of porting all of the DotA heroes over to Dota 2, and heroes are constantly being changed in order to keep the game "balanced". Starcraft 2 has a new expansion coming up, and it also gets updated. I think the only exception may be console games that aren't able to be patched, and there are quite a few competitive console games, like FIFA, Dead or Alive, and MrFodder would hurt me if I didn't mention Smash Bros Melee - which has never received an update, though there are mods that try to emulate it, but bring it up-to-date with the new characters.

The simple part to answer is that one big difference between physical games and computer games is that you don't have software bugs in physical games. No matter how hard you try, there isn't going to be some weird part of the football field where you can latch on to a badly smoothed piece of wall, allowing you to jump up into the sky. So on the question of exploit fixes, I think it's mandatory for computer games to fix those, because they allow people to have an unfair advantage over everyone else. Especially when you consider the fact that things like computer-aided-gaming exist. For instance, there's a program that you can run in the background that monitors your gameplay in Dota 2, and when specific conditions are met, e.g. an enemy hero comes into range, it will automatically cast certain spells for you with split second timing, something an ordinary human will not be able to do.

But on the topic of sports rules vs computer game features, why is it that sports rules tend to stay the same? I don't know about the history of other sports, but in the case of chess, that game wasn't always the way that it is now. Pawns couldn't always move two spaces on their first move, en passant wasn't a rule, castling didn't always exist, and queens and bishops were once limited in movement. But it has been quite a long time since the rules were changed (other than meta rule changes for tournaments introduced by the governing bodies, but that doesn't really affect the your average 1v1 game). A lot of sports have just had a long time to mature. All the major issues have been ironed out. Most computer games have a fairly short lifespan in comparison. Many game companies will release the next title in the series, and there will be a divide of the player base. As happened in the case of the split from Starcraft: Brood War to Starcraft 2.

Unlike sports like soccer, where you have FIFA, or Australian Rules football, where you have the AFL, it doesn't seem in the interests of a game company to have a ruling body to govern the competitive scene. Sure, Riot and Blizzard sponsor various tournaments for their respective games, and of course, you can't forget Valve's massive once-a-year event, The International, but in general, they aren't the ones working on making their game a huge spectator sport. It's very much a fan-driven thing (with some sponsorship from e-sports related companies). Imagine if the AFL had a kickstarter to fund the grand final. Not required, they've already built up a huge fan base who is willing to spend tons of money on tickets to their events.

So there's also the chicken and egg problem. In order for e-sports to be big, it needs a large fanbase. In order to increase the fanbase, there needs to be good games. In order to have good games, you need good player. In order to attract good players, you need good prizes. In order to have good prizes, you need sponsors. In order to have sponsors, you need a large fanbase. Add to that the fact that the number of people who would watch competitive e-sports is already limited (I mean, I consider myself a gamer, but I rarely watch competitive matches, because I'd rather just play myself), the fanbase is already split over the multitude of games that exist out there. Similar to watching sports, you need to learn all the rules before you can really enjoy watching, and if you try to spread yourself too thin over multiple games, it's very hard to follow along with the ins-and-outs of the game without completely giving up the rest of your life.

Add to that the fact that games companies don't really make money from their tournaments. Their main drive is to sell copies of their game. Once everyone who is going to buy their game has bought their game, their income source has dried up. But servers still need to keep running, support staff continue to require payment. What's the solution to bring in more money? Release an expansion, or release the next title in the series. The AFL has no motivation to start the AFL 2, because it'll just cannibalise their own market share. It's just not worth the cost, for so little gain. Whereas games constantly have to stay relevant. If you were never to update your game, people would get bored, and move on to one of the millions of other games out there. Sure, people can change to other sports, but when you already have the team scarf, and the bumper sticker, and the garden gnome (yes, MrFodder's mum has a garden gnome supporting her football team), it seems like a huge investment to swap over to another sport. A lot of people also build their personalities around liking various sporting teams. There's a guy on my team at work who is a devout Essendon Bombers supporter, and I have to say, I have a lot of respect for him because his loyalty never wavered despite the supplements controversy.

I do think e-sports is becoming a bigger thing though. I can't speak for other games, but at least in Dota 2, there are a lot of people who are perfectly content to buy digital tickets to the events. Even for events that are completely free, and the digital tickets only unlock cosmetics, people still shell out the cash. I hope that games companies, like Valve, will start to realise the potential in e-sports, and build more support around it.

Threading and Empty While Loops

Today I had my first threading issue at work. The stuff I work on is multi-threaded, of course, but a lot of that is magically handled by the framework that we use, so I've never had to explicitly do anything requiring threads, other than to call Thread.sleep() when I want one of my tests to wait for something to execute first. So my experience with threads is very minimal. It wasn't even covered on the Java exam I did, it's in the next one, that Grad Daniel and I are thinking of sitting next year.

So I was writing a unit test at work today, and I wanted to test that something was executing threads one at a time.

while(!threadUpdated);

vs

while(!threadUpdated){ 

System.out.println("Waiting...."); 

}

The gist of what I was trying: I had a condition that was updated by another threads. So my while loop was looping, just waiting for that condition to change. In the first case, I just had an empty while loop (EmptyLoop above), and it just kept looping forever, even though I knew it was supposed to finish running within 10 seconds (all my threads were doing was sleeping for 5 seconds, then updating the condition). In the second case, I had a while loop with a print statement. I had a Stopwatch measuring the time, and it finished running in 10 seconds, which is what I expected.

I couldn't understand why having a print statement, which did nothing other than print the message "Waiting...." was making my test work as expected, when it wasn't modifying the state at all.

So I tried to debug the code to find out what was going on. When I ran it in debug mode, it was working both with the empty while loop, and with the print while loop. WHAT ON EARTH WAS GOING ON?!

Well, the lovely thing with working with threads is that it's hard to track down issues, because by running your code in debug mode and stepping through it slowly, all the other damn threads are doing as they please, and that makes it really difficult to replicate the issue, because if you run it normally, and thread A runs, then B, then C, debugging A might mean that B and C finish while you're busy inspecting A, and so you're not really reproducing the original situation.

As it turns out, what I was missing was the fact that my empty while loop was causing that particular thread to hog the resources (or at least that's my theory). So while it was looping endlessly, it never gave control over to the thread that updates the condition, so the condition never gets updated, and so it keeps looping. When I ran it in debug mode, when it paused for me to inspect it, the condition thread got a chance to run, and so it updated the condition, and the test passed as I was expecting. When I added the print statement, I guess that tiny period where it waits for an I/O process to write to the console meant the updating thread got a chance to execute, so again, the test passed as expected.

As this SO answer explains, busy-waiting is expensive.

And now I know more about threading in Java than I did yesterday.

Game Review: Telestrations

Played a game at lunch today called Telestrations. It's kinda like Chinese whispers crossed with Pictionary. Each player has a game pad with 9 pages (you draw using erasable markers). Each player also gets a card, and you roll a dice to see which word on the card you have to draw. So you write your word on the pad, flip it over so that you can't see the word anymore, and draw the word. Then you pass it to the next person, who has to try and guess what you were trying to draw. At the same time, you'll receive a pad from the person before you, and you have to guess their drawing. You pass again, and you'll get a word which you have to draw, and so on, until you go all the way around and end up with your original pad.

It was pretty funny. Geoff started out with "Head over heels". Kaela saw his picture and guessed "69". Tom did his interpretation of that, which I thought was a guy with a tiny head and a big dick, so I guessed, "Tiny penis head". Dan just had no clue, and ended up drawing a penis with a wart. Jade guessed big dick. Which Albert drew and Paul guessed was a "giant carrot".

I had "bear hug", which Tom guessed was "beastiality". So Daniel drew something which Kaela thought was a "wookie". Geoff drew that, which Paul guessed was a "cucumber man with a hammer". Albert drew that, which Jade guessed was a "potato man with a hammer".

It probably doesn't sound nearly as funny now, but it's the kind of game that gets very silly very quickly, but I also think that only really happens when you play with a relaxed group of friends. I think the game has scoring built into it, but we chose to ignore that, as Geoff said adding competition to the game just ruins the fun of it. And we had a lot of fun. I don't think I've laughed that hard in a long time.

Unfortunately, the game seems to be out of stock at every single game store that I've tried, and I've been to six so far. So this is a mean review, as many people won't be able to play it. Though you could probably make your own, using a game of pictionary for the word suggestions, and make your own pads of paper.

I rate the game 2 thumbs up.

I don't know if MrFodder will play though, as he refuses to play Pictionary with me after our PS3 UDraw Pictionary debacle.

Invoking the Spirits

I hit a wall in my Dota 2 All-Hero challenge a while ago. Invoker. If you haven't played Dota 2, Invoker has the most spells (14) out of all the heroes in the game - if you don't count Rubick, who can steal an active spell from any hero, or aghs Chen, with the neutral creeps. He is a hero with a high skill floor and a moderately high skill ceiling, meaning that to even play him somewhat decently takes a lot of skill, and when played by an incredibly skilled player, he is fairly effective. Long story short, he's really tough to play.

I managed to win a game with him. He took me 7 attempts, which is more than any other hero so far.

Playing him was an experience in perseverance. I got called useless a lot, because at the time, I had only mastered one of his spells - Cold Snap. It didn't require any skill shots, I just had to click my target for it to land.

I started out maxing Cyclone and EMP, because Anton said that's the best way to contribute, but I wasn't landing any of my EMPs, and though I was able to disable people with my cyclone, I didn't really have anything to finish them off. So I changed to maxing Sunstrike instead, thinking that I could hide and farm fairly safely, and still contribute somewhat with the global spell Sunstrike. People yelled at me a lot, because I didn't do much otherwise, and I wasn't farming all that efficiently. Also, it was hard to defend the base when all I really had was Sunstrike and Chaos Meteor.

So my next journey was to go Forge Spirits + Necronomicon, to try and push towers. I also got yelled at a lot, but less so, because at least I was doing something. At this point though, I was starting to get the hang of invoking spells. I found something I was comfortable with, Forge Spirits + Cold Snap, and because I was maxing Exort, my Sunstrikes were fairly powerful - and I was getting better at landing those.

If you're interested, the final scoreboard is here (you can see that I was carried by my team, but I managed to finish with a positive KDR, and I also contributed to the fights):

I was actually really proud of myself in that last game, where I had been ganked by Shadow Fiend, and I managed to quickly invoke Ghostwalk and get away. Six games ago, I would not have had the reflexes to pull that off, but by that game, it was like second nature.

I still haven't managed to use Ice Wall, and while I've invoked Alacrity a couple of times by mistake, I haven't really used that either - though I imagine it would have been handy.

After all this, I'm not going to play him again for a long time.

---------------------------

On a movie-related note, I filmed my first piece of footage today! I tried to film some stuff over the weekend, but everything looked too depressing with the rain.

Lifting a Chat

Was hanging out with some friends last night, and Ben mentioned how some of the people who go to the same gym as him will comment on his physique. Other than the staff who supervise the gym, I've only had one person speak to me ever, since I started working out, and that was to ask how many sets I had left (and I stupidly answered that question wrong. I said I had one set left, but what I meant was that I was on my final set). He turned around and went to work out on another machine. Steve said that he finds it weird that people will ask him how many sets he has left, and then stand around watching him while he finishes.

When I first started going to the gym, I was super self-conscious. I thought everyone was staring at me, and at how I was only doing the lowest weights, and moving so slowly on the cross-trainer. I thought everyone was secretly laughing at how my fat was jiggling around, and how red my face was. I avoided eye-contact with everyone, and if someone was on the machine I needed, I'd just move on to the next one and come back later, even if it meant I had two arm workouts in a row, instead of arms, then legs, then arms. I pretty much gave up on going to the gym during the peak periods, because it was too intimidating.

I read a Reddit thread where people spoke about their gym-going pet peeves, and one of the ones that came up a lot was complains about the "Resolutioners". At first I thought they were talking about some weird Illuminate-style gym cult, but what they were referring to was the swarm of people join join a gym at the start of the year as a New Year's resolution, and then hog up the machines to post photos on Instagram about how hard they're working out.

There were also rants about how some people will go to the gym, do some really low-intensity work out, and then leave. The ranter would talk about how they're not going to achieve anything, and talk about how they're a waste of space, and that they wish they'd be kicked out of the gym.

I actually worry a lot that the other people in the gym hate that I'm there. I think I've been a member long enough to qualify as a non-Resolutioner, but my workout is still pretty nooby. It's actually somewhat motivational. Every time I get on the pull-up machine, I feel really proud of myself, because I consider it to be one of the more "hardcore" machines at the gym, and despite the fact that I still can't pull my own body weight up, I'm really happy about the fact that I can even do a semblance of a pull-up at all. So whenever I'm on that machine, I feel happy about the thought that there could be someone else at the gym watching me do pull ups.

That being said, I've started going to the gym Sunday mornings, where there's barely anyone. Once I was the only person in the gym, other than the staff member there.

Whoa, huge tangent. I just wanted to say that I don't understand why people chat to other people or watch other people at the gym. When I'm there, I need to put my brain into work-out mode. I need to focus on motivating myself to keep running for just one more minute, and one more, yes, now that there are only two minutes left to run, you might as well keep running, because you've already run for 28 minutes, and it would be a pity to stop now. I can't really get my brain into conversation mode, and try and focus on my workout at the same time.

On the topic of watching people, I find the other people at the gym become faceless blobs to me. All I really process is that there's someone on that machine, or someone is using the dumbbells I need. In general, I don't notice what weights they're doing, what exercises they're' doing, nothing else about them really, other than the part of space that they're occupying. I don't know, I feel like that's kind of the etiquette, letting people do their own thing. I try to make myself as unobtrusive as possible. Oh, I lied, I just remembered another encounter I had. I was lifting weights in front of one of those bench things, and someone asked if I was using it, and I said no. Phew, glad I managed to answer that one right.

I wonder if things would be different at one of those hardcore gyms.

Movie Progress, Part 2

Gun Barrel Opening
Going to have to work out how to do some video editing magic to get this part to work, if I can't get the gun barrel, I will just have a pan up the person playing James Bond, until we settle on his face, which I plan to have a mask made from a cutout of a printout of the leaving developer's face.

Action Prologue
Austin Powers-style, going to open with the main bad guy blackmailing the world for money, otherwise he'll unleash terror on the highly computerised world - taking out the stock market, banking, airports - basically the plot of Die Hard 4. The world leaders don't know what to do, but they do know there's one man for the job - James Bond.

Opening Credits
Again, going to have to learn how to work some video editing magic. And maybe also learn to sing. But if I do go with my idea of using GoldenIDE, at least the song for the movie Goldeneye (YouTube link) almost sounds the same (I can just record myself yelling "DE" and badly work that into the song - actually, listening to the song, it kinda fits. Because as she sings Goldeneye, it goes doo-doo. I think I could just fit the D-E over the doo-doos). I don't think this'll be all that fancy, as I don't really have five minutes to throw away for a song.

Moneypenny, M, Q
Bond is found drinking in a bar (shaken and stirred). He gets called into the office. He arrives, briefly flirts with Miss CryptoBitcoin (I dont't know, this was the best I could come up with as a play on Moneypenny that had it somewhat geeky). Goes inside to talk to M, who tells him about the blackmail demand, and the background of the big bad guy (I need to come up with a silly Bond villain name for him). They've worked out that he's linked to a casino (by enhancing an image of his eye where you can see a casino chip in the reflection), and the information leads them to believe there's a high stakes game going on that he will be at. He goes to Q to get his gadgets

Exotic Location, Contact, Bond Girl
I'll film a shot of the city from the view of our office, and claim it's somewhere exotic. He will meet with his mentor-style person, who will be the first to tell him about the existence of the Golden IDE. But he gets poisoned. Introduce the Bond girl (need another stupid name for her), if it is Intern Daniel, we'll wet him with water, and film him walking (he seems to think it's easy for me to green screen him into some stock footage of a beach, I don't know if that's true). She catches Bond's eye, and he tries to flirt with her, but she is dismissive.

Henchmen Fight
No fight, instead I'm going to add my scene with the Russians (I'd like them huddled around a fire in a barrel, but I doubt I can find one in the CBD. One of them said he has one of those fluffy Russian hats though, which will be awesome), where they basically ask why they're in the movie. One of them answers that it's because it wouldn't be a real Bond movie without Russians (breaking the fourth wall, I know, but there wasn't enough room in the movie for Russian bad guys as well!). The third Russian says that's stupid, and suggests they go and shoot puppies instead. The first replies that Putin took his gun. The second replies he has no money for bullets. The third suggests they go and drink vodka and the other two agree.

Bond Girl #2
Bond bumps into the Bond girl again, and she reveals she's dating the Big Bad, and that he'll be at the high stakes game. Bond later finds one of the players who will be in the game, and kills him so that he can take his spot. They play the epic game, the Bond girl has a change of heart and decides to support Bond. Tells Bond about the Big Bad's tell. Bond doesn't win. Big Bad reveals his plan with the IDE, because that's what Bond villains do.

Escape
Haven't worked this one out yet, but there will be some stupid death trap, and Bond will escape.

Car Chase
Lame car chase that serves no purpose.

Non-formulaic Stuff
James has to track down where the IDE might be, and he starts by trying to track down who might have had it. He starts by finding the original two developers of the IDE. They say that they made a huge mistake by making the golden IDE, and in fact, once they realised what they had unleashed on the world, they ended up writing stuxnet (using the golden IDE) in order to remove any possible installation of the golden IDE. Well, it seems like they missed one. They talk about a third developer who was the one who came up with the idea, and unofficially contributed code. He thought the world deserved to have the golden IDE, and when they disagreed, they parted ways. Then, as they're about to reveal the name of the third developer, they die (maybe due to being poisoned).

James has to track down the third developer, and finds him, but there's an obstacle in the way. The third developer has a bodyguard, Weird Chore, who kills people by throwing exceptions at them (I'm still a bit iffy about this one. While the other developers on the team will get a chuckle out of it, I don't know how the non-technical people will respond. I guess they might notice the parallels to Odd Job and think that's the joke). James defeats Weird Chore, and speaks to the third developer. He reveals that he kept his own copy of the source code for the golden IDE, He opens his safe to find the source code, only to see that it has already been cleaned out. Then he mysteriously dies due to poisoning as well (look, it's a low budget movie, and having people keel over and die due to poison is a lot easier than pretending they were shot or stabbed).

That's all I've got so far, still need to work in a heap of people.

Movie Progress, Part 1

The plot of the movie is starting to form in my mind. It's a bit crazy, I started this project with about 6 people who were going to be in the cast, but over the past few days, I've managed to recruit over half the team, and I'm nearing 30 people that I have to fit into this movie. I decided not to ask some of the newer people on the team, as the developer might not know them that well, and I also don't know them that well, so it's hard to think of a good role for them. What I'm really excited about is that I managed to recruit three Russians for my movie, and what's a James Bond movie without any Russians? Well, to be honest, none of them are actually Russians, there's two Ukrainians and an American, but hey all speak Russian fluently, so that's close enough.

A tough task I have is that a few people on the team are happy to be a part of the movie, but are a bit camera shy, so they just want really small parts, like dying at the start of the movie. Which is a pity, because one of those people is a good friend of the departing developer, and I had a few lines that I wanted him to say. I wanted him to play a mentor-type figure in the movie, and say something like, "I'v been writing code since it was holes in a punch card, kiddo. You don't want to see what I have seen." Then have him die dramatically. Actually, given the number of people who want small parts in the movie, I think a lot of people are going to have to die early on.

Actually, another tough task will be fitting everyone into the movie. I spoke to our higher level boss, and he seems really keen to be in the movie, too. He even said that he wants to screen it at our next team meeting (which I won't be able to attend, unfortunately, as I'll be away on my honeymoon). Given the amount of money that a lot of people on my team get paid, including the Porridge Lady, I don't want to waste their time watching a movie, so I want it to top out at 15 minutes at the most.

According to the James Bond film TV tropes page, a James Bond film usually follows the following formula:

• The Bond Gun Barrel; a stylized gun barrel tracks Bond (usually wearing a tuxedo, in later films at least) across the screen from right to left until he reaches the centre of the screen, at which point he spins around and shoots at the camera. The gun barrel slowly shifts from full colour to a red filter that gradually covers the screen from the top downwards (as if the person holding the gun has been shot and is bleeding out), at which point we segue to:
• An Action Prologue, often involving either Bond in action on a mission which usually has some connection, if tangential, to the main plot of the movie or something which establishes the main villain's plot. Once that's out the way and something's blown up, we go to...
• The Opening Credits, often highly stylized and abstract, set to a catchy theme song by a major recording artist. Frequent motifs involve guns, beautiful women writhing about in semi-undress, playing cards and martinis, something thematically linked to the villain's plot or theme (lots of gold for Goldfinger or oil to reflect the villain's oil-based plot in The World Is Not Enough, for example) and Bond himself.
• A scene/series of scenes where Bond flirts with Moneypenny, receives his assignment from M, and receives his gadgets from Q.
• Bond arrives in his first exotic location (often driving his current car), meets a contact, crosses paths with the Bond Girl (or one of them if there's more than one), and begins to seek out the bad guy. He usually doesn't do so very subtly, allowing the bad guy's henchmen to pick up on him, which leads often to...
• A fight with some henchmen. Bond may encounter The Dragon at this point.
• Bond meets the 'main' Bond Girl. If they've already met, or if there's more than one, this is when it's made clear who Bond is going to end up with at the end of the movie.
• The bad guy may become aware of Bond's presence around this point if he's not already. They meet and exchange veiled threats, after which...
• Bond's contact is killed, and / or Bond and the Bond Girl are attacked or captured. They may be put in some kind of 'inescapable' Death Trap. If so, they escape, which in turn leads to...
• A Chase Scene in an exotic location. This often shows off Bond's flashy car in some way. Once Bond has shaken / killed his pursuers, he now has to...
• Find and infiltrate the villain's headquarters, often a Supervillain Lair of some description, in another exotic location. This generally leads to a battle with the bad guy's forces; Bond will kill plenty of Mooks, but he and the Bond Girl will be captured, leading to...
• A confrontation with the bad guy, during which the bad guy will reveal the plot. After which, Bond is put into another 'inescapable' Death Trap and left to his 'assured' doom by the bad guy. Naturally...
• Bond escapes, rescues the Bond Girl, and begins to sabotage the bad guy's base with her help, leading to...
• The Final Battle. Reinforcements may be called in, but it will almost certainly end with Bond confronting the bad guy face to face. Spoilers: the bad guy ends up dead, at which point...
• The bad guy's lair blows up. Bond and the Bond Girl just make it out, usually with the help of The Cavalry. If s/he hasn't already been dealt with, Bond dispatches The Dragon around this point. Finally...
• Bond and the Bond Girl have a final romantic moment (Oh, James...).
• End Credits. Usually set to the same pop song as the main credits. If it's different, then it'll be another catchy song but one which is often slower and more mellow than the main theme. By the end of the credits, we will usually be reassured that James Bond Will Return.

So lacking any other ideas, the tentative title for this movie is GoldenIDE, a play on the movie title Goldeneye, and a similar concept to the golden gun from the N64 Goldeneye game (which had the power to kill with one shot, no matter where you hit - I assume the gun was inspired by the movie The Man with the Golden Gun, though in the movie, he just had a gun and bullets made of gold). An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a tool that some developers use to write code. It has lots of handy features that make code writing easier. So my rough idea is that during the cold war, a "golden IDE" was developed, that has some crazy property. Maybe it writes code that always compiles, no matter what, or any code written by the golden IDE can infiltrate any system. That part isn't clear yet, but the plot of the movie will involve the big bad guy getting his hand on the only remaining installation of the golden IDE. It's up to James Bond to get it back. (Don't ask why he can't just copy the binary files onto another computer and run it, I'm hoping that one can be chalked up to willing suspension of disbelief. Although, knowing the people on my team, someone is going to nitpick it, so maybe I should address it.

Oh, so another tough aspect I'll have to address. A lot of the people on my team are the kind of people who like to point out plot holes. I have gone around telling everyone that it's going to be a bad movie, so I'm hoping they're not going to go in thinking it's going to be at the same level as complex Christopher Nolan movie. I'll probably run the plot by MrFodder before I start filming though, as he also loves to point out plot holes. I'm still not sure what gadgets I'm going to get Q to give to James Bond, but at least I can work that out at the end after I have the whole story complete.

This is getting quite long, so I will outline the rough idea in tomorrow's post!

Superstitious

To continue from where I left off yesterday, I wouldn't say that I am superstitious. While I wouldn't go around breaking mirrors or walking under ladders (because that's dangerous), I don't really care about black cats anymore, or the number 13 (or 4). However, I do have some little quirks that could be considered as such. Although most of them are from my mum.

My mum believes that you cannot wash your hair while you are on your period. I don't understand the rationale behind it at all, as I don't see how washing your hair and addled hormones can be a cause for bad luck. I guess maybe back in the old days, if you were on your period, and your hair was wet, it might drip down your back and soak through your underwear, which might soak through to whatever you're using to catch the blood. That's not really an issue these days though, as we have hairdryers.

She also believes that you shouldn't cut your hair or nails after dark. Perhaps that stems from it being too dark to be able to see properly, and so you may end up cutting off a finger, or an ear, but again, that's not really an issue these days with modern lighting.

One of her superstitions that we do stick to is that you're not supposed to do any sweeping after Chinese New Year, because you will sweep the bad luck away. Though we mostly follow that one because we rarely do any sweeping all year long, so it's not really like we do it for superstitious reasons.

Although, I've noticed that whenever I have a big thing coming up, I'm all for trying to keep on the good side of Lady Luck, just in case. I mean, with a lot of these little things, does it really hurt to knock on wood, or avoid stepping on the cracks on the footpath? I read that a lot of sports stars are incredibly superstitious, needing to wear their lucky underwear, or make sure they dress themselves in a particular order. When you think about it, ever single match is a big event for them, because how well they perform will determine whether they get to stay employed or not. Out of all the athletes, not many of them will get the chance to become mega stars like Ian Thorpe, and with the exception of perhaps golf, a lot of sports have a very limited time span in which you are at your peak, so unless you can make enough to retire at a young age, you need to make yourself at least somewhat bankable, or line up a potential career path for after you're booted off the team. So the more great matches you have, the higher your chances of securing sponsorship deals, or radio spots.

I have this little thing about the milk in the fridge at the office. If there's more cartons of soy milk than regular milk in the fridge, then I know it's going to be a good day. If there's no soy milk in the fridge, but there is one floor up, then that's OK. If I have to go hunting more than one floor away from my own, then I know it's going to be a horrible day. If there are equal or less cartons of soy milk than regular milk, then it can go either way. I don't know how much of that is self-fulfilling or confirmation bias, but damn, it's really nice to get in in the mornings and find five cartons of soy milk in the fridge.

Everything is Coming Up Fodder

I'm sorry that this post is basically a what I ate for breakfast post, but writing is writing, right? And forcing myself to get words on a page is part of the exercise!

Being the Easter period and all, a lot of people were taking time off work because it also coincides with school holidays. I've pretty much taken all of my leave that I'll be entitled to for a long time for my honeymoon, so other than the wedding, I didn't have much leave left to take, so I was in the office. Which meant that the two usual go-to guys for my system were not in the office, they had to rely on the AAA-team: me (Intern Daniel dubbed me the AAA-team because the Z-team was still too good for me, so he went AA-team, but even that was too good, so I'm the AAA-team. If you open an excel doc, look at how many cells you have to scroll across before you get to the AAA column, That's how bad I am, according to Intern Daniel).

For the first couple of days, I was just completely lost. People were asking me things that I vaguely knew about, but since I was never directly involved in it, and some of these things were done before I was in the team, I spent a lot of time trawling the codebase to answer simple questions.

Today though, I was on fire. Yesterday I had fixed a big issue, and today I packaged it up to be tested. There was another issue dropped in my lap, and I managed to quickly get to the bottom of that one as well. Lastly, just as I was about to leave, I got an email with another issue, and even though I was due to meet my friends for a belated birthday lunch, I managed to solve that issue pretty quickly, and make it out in time to get there for entrees.

I have been feeling pretty down about my own skills lately, even to the point where I pretty much have a foot out the door and am looking for a different career path. However, today made me feel so good. I was fixing up erroneous configuration, telling people to grep the logs for the information I needed, writing SQL to try and track down the database entry that was causing an issue. I just felt like I was really in the zone today. Every single issue that came across my inbox was resolved today, and there were quite a lot. Granted, some of them were there because of a mistake that I had made, which isn't great, but at least I was able to work out what the cause was without having to rely on one of the more senior developers.

That's just the support issues I had to deal with. I also managed to close off two development tasks today. I am on fire. Feeling so good right now.

To top it all off, I had dinner with my friends from work, and we had deliciously greasy food, topped with playing a few rounds of Werewolf at the dinner table. After a few false starts where people accidentally revealed who they were ("OK, so I'm a werewolf, what do I do now?"), we managed to get everyone into the game, and had a few tricky situations, but I think overall, everyone had fun accusing each other.

If I were a superstitious person, I'd say that after today, a heap of bad things are going to happen to me. Luckily, I am only somewhat superstitious.

Raining Words

When it rains, it pours. I've been inundated with writing tasks lately. Other than this blog:

• the thank you emails that went out to our guests, and asked them to upload photos to a file share that MrFodder set up, so we would have all of the photos in once place. A lot of them were very generic, and we plan to send out proper thank yous once we get back from our honeymoon (as that is also when we'll get the official photos from the wedding photographer, but some of them were customised.
• this one is pretty sad. I found out that my cousin's grandmother isn't doing so well. We spent some time with her as kids, as she lives near a beach, and we'd often go to visit her in the Summer. I also stayed with her for a week before starting Year 12, and even though she's not directly related to us anymore (her son divorced my aunt - though her grandchild is my cousin), she has always treated us like family. She sent us a nice lace heart thing for the wedding, so I wanted to write her a snail mail letter to thank her, and send her some of the photos from the wedding.
• super giant semi-personal project that I've committed to. One of the senior developers on my team is leaving. He's the one who basically made me the coder that I am today (I don't know if that's something he's proud of, since he might think I'm a rubbish developer, so I've never told him). He also shares my love of crappy B-grade movies, and James Bond movies, so I want to do a Threat Level Midnight-style James Bond parody featuring the people in our team as the cast members.

I had actually thought of the parody idea a while ago, but I figured I would have plenty of time to write the script and film it, since he seemed like he was going to stick around for a long time. Unfortunately, an email was sent out today saying that his last day will be in a few weeks.

So I went around trying to recruit various people for my movie. Most of them were happy to take part, though I had to reassure some that their part would be fairly minor. But the whole point of it is to be really low-budget with crappy acting, so I'm not expecting any Judi Denches or anything like that. Plus, given that a high proportion of my team is male, I don't even have a proper Bond girl. But hopefully, that'll just add to the charm.

I want to make it slightly Java focused, because we are Java developers, but I also want to keep it not too techy, as less than a quarter of the team are developers, so I don't want to alienate most of the audience. A few of the scene ideas I've had so far:

• opens with James Bond (character name TBD) and his current female love interest trying to break into some sort of secret building. They get caught, and James Bond has a choice, he can either try to finish the mission, or rescue his girl. He chooses the mission, and the girl is killed. As she is dying, she says, "Don't worry about me, I'll be garbage collected soon." (Java joke, as unused objects get cleared up by the garbage collector. I'd like to do a callback to this scene later in the movie, as James is breaking in again, and you see his love interest still on the floor. He runs to her and asks how she's still alive. And she replies that garbage collection hasn't run yet. (Another Java joke, the objects sit there waiting to be cleared up, but the JVM isn't guaranteed to run garbage collection at any specific point in time, so the objects might hang around for a bit.)
• as a parody of Oddjob, I want to have a character who also throws things, but instead of throwing his hat, he throws..... Exceptions! (Java joke: your code can throw things called exceptions as a way of saying, "Ooops, something you didn't expect happened.") 
• we can't afford an Aston Martin, so I'm just going to try and make a fake Aston Martin hood ornament and stick it on my Hyundai. Jeremy also suggested overlaying fake Aston Martin engine sounds as a background sound - for all the car geeks who would notice those things.
• as I mentioned earlier, we don't have a Bond girl, so Intern Daniel is going to be our Bond girl. I'd really like to get one of those t-shirts with a picture of a body of a woman wearing a bikini on it, and film him walking out of the water at the beach, but given how cold it is, I don't know if that's going to be a health hazard. But I'm keeping my eye out for the bikini shirt.
• Geoff suggested having a golden keyboard (parody of the golden gun), which has the power to hack into any computer. As a super cheesy ending, Intern Daniel suggested that the golden keyboard be destroyed by the big bad guy, and James Bond realises that he was the one with the power all along, not the keyboard. I think that's too cheesy though. Fits in for a kid's movie, but not James Bond style.
• I have someone who is going to play Q, and so I'm going to get him to give James Bond some seemingly crappy gadgets that will come in handy at some point during the movie. I'd really love to get my hands on a Nokia 3310, I wonder if my dad still has his.
• explosions, and lots of them. Not sure how I will achieve this on my zero-budget, but I will try. Grad Daniel wants a scene where he goes to lock his car and it explodes, but exploding cars aren't really on my budget either. I guess I'll have to get creative.
• I'm thinking there has to be a dramatic card game at some point, but I don't know if we have enough cast members for that. Also, doesn't quite fit the plot at the moment. But baccarat seems to be a staple of Bond movies. Of course, we could have a crappy unrealistic poker scene. Although I really want to parody the scene from Austin Powers (as quoted from the TV tropes page): "In the first Austin Powers, Number Two hits on a 17 while playing blackjack in a Las Vegas casino, despite being advised to stand. Sure enough, his next card is a 4, making 21. He has X-Ray Vision from his Eyepatch of Power, and could at least see the card. Austin then subverts the trope by trying to upstage Number Two's risky playstyle. He holds on 5, and loses."

To be honest, I'm a bit torn at the moment. While I feel committed to this movie, as I've already told so many people at work about it, I kinda want to go and visit my cousin's grandmother, in case she doesn't make it until we return from our honeymoon.

Either way, I feel like there's a lot of writing in my immediate future, and a few posts will probably consist of draft scripts, so I understand if you don't find this interesting and want to tune out for a bit. Fodder will return shortly in..... Tales from Europe.

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I want to add that it probably seems like I don't do all that much work at work, since I seem to have all these crazy ideas, like the boss mug (I can't remember if I explained that, but it was when I made my boss some "World's Best Boss" mugs, with a picture of him on it, and printed a copy for every developer on the team. Then I organised a meeting with all of the developers, who would drink out of that mug in front of him, and I also presented him with his own boss mug at the end.

I do actually do work at work, and these extra-curricular activities are in my own time.

Chill Lunch

I had lunch today with Grad Daniel, Intern Daniel, Uni Paul and Grad Paul. I don't know why, but it makes me so happy when I'm with people who share the same name. I even managed to get the two Daniels to sit on one side of the table and the two Pauls to sit on the other side. We had a super delicious lunch of KFC, but I ate so much of it that I felt a bit like throwing up. Grad Paul and I split a Streetwise Feast (6 pieces of original recipe, 6 nuggets, 3 chicken strips and 2 large chips).

It was good fun to hang out with people, without anything hanging over my head. As usual, I was the slowest one at eating, so by the end of my lunch, everyone was watching me eat. Uni Paul said that nobody was leaving until I finished my food, so I managed to stuff the last three pieces of chicken into my mouth somehow, so we could go back to work.

Uni Paul and Grad Daniel were reminiscing about growing up in the not-so-nice suburbs, and how there was a prostitution ring going on at one of their nearby schools. They said that there was a 15-year-old girl who needed money for something, so she agreed to sleep with other students for sex during one of their spare periods. Then some other girls did it as well just because. Yep. I like to think that no matter how many druggies we had at my high school, at least we didn't have a prostitution ring. I have to say, despite everything, Uni Paul and Grad Daniel turned out OK.

I had a really good time at lunch today. It was really nice to just chill and chat about things other than work, or relationships. The relationship I have with these people means that we tend to make fun of each other as a sign of affection - especially Intern Daniel. Everyone is just so relaxed and I don't ever feel like everything is a competition. I can say what's on my mind. It's really hard to pin down what it is - the five of us have very different backgrounds, but we seem to be able to talk to each other so easily. It's really what the doctor ordered, a nice, greasy stress-free lunch. I highly recommend it.

Overqualified

I still remember the first job I applied for after graduating. Earlier in my travels, I had met some Korean girls when staying at a hostel, and they said that one of the jobs that's pretty easy to pick up while travelling is cleaning hotels. It's a pretty simple job, you just pop in some headphones, make the bed, wipe down things and tidy up. Don't need to deal with people, and as long as you clean as many rooms per hour or whatever as you're supposed to, everything is OK. Oh, and as long as you don't steal stuff. So when it came time to apply for jobs, I saw that one and thought, why not? I'm more than qualified to meet the criteria, as I had a two university degrees. Who wouldn't hire me? I thought it would be a nice job to compliment my casino work, until I built up enough confidence to get a job as a programmer.

Well, as it turns out, they wouldn't hire me. I got back a generic looking email saying that there were a lot of applicants and I didn't make the cut, which made me feel about 2cm tall. I couldn't understand it. I met all of their criteria, I had good references, I don't have a criminal record. Why didn't they want me?

Perhaps the answer is that I'm overqualified. Like Robert Jordan found out when he was refused an interview with the police department because score on a pre-employment exam was too high. Why would any company want to hire someone who looks to be on the way out in the next year or so, as it costs money to hire and train someone up?

I feel like it creates a bit of a sticky situation when someone loses their job and isn't able to find another one in their industry. I read all these threads on /r/personalFinance with people telling the poster that they should just suck it up and get a job at McDonald's because the economy is still bad, or whatever. But I don't know if it's as easy as that. When you're 15, they're probably happy to take, you because they don't have to pay you an adult wage (I think my brother was paid $6 an hour at Red Rooster), you don't have years of experience under your belt, so you're still able to be trained. I get the feeling that if I were to apply for a retail job now, I might not make it. Though I have to say, that's probably one of the benefits of working at the casino - they can only have adults on the gaming floor, so they're not going to be hiring people just to be able to pay them below minimum wage!

I remember my parents not wanting me to get a job, my mum just wanted me to focus on my studies. I didn't think uni would be that hard, and I wanted to get a start on my independence. I also applied for Red Rooster, but I didn't get that one. So many part time job applications led to nothing until I finally got a job as a service cashier at Woolworths. I feel like I learned a lot working in retail - things I would never have learned at uni. How to deal with customer issues, how to diffuse arguments, how to stand there doing a repetitive task over and over and over, and how to entertain yourself during long shifts. OK, so I can see why they don't want overqualified people, but I was overqualified for working at the supermarket, and yet I managed to last five years. I don't think there were any major issues with my work, and it was a good job, at least I thought so.

Though I have to admit, that maybe I would have done a lot better at uni if I didn't have a job. But it's unlikely. It's more likely that I would have just played more WoW. Anyway, all of this was to cheer myself up a little. I have been thinking about applying for the police force now that I can meet the minimum fitness requirements, but if I got turned down by the police, it would be soul crushing. Not because I think the job is below me, but because it's something that I've wanted to do for so long. I told myself that it wasn't possible earlier because I wasn't fit enough, but now that I am, I really have no excuses. I still don't think I'm ready to do it though. Maybe in a few years. Char says I'm a chicken because I don't like to put myself out there, and I know that she's right, but at the same time, it's really tough to put your heart on the line when you feel like the odds are stacked against you.

Regardless of whether I'm intellectually overqualified or not, I should be happy that I currently have a job where I'm being treated well, and given things that intellectually stimulate me. What more can you ask for?

TV Show Review: Orphan Black

I first saw this show at JB Hi-Fi, it had one of those tags underneath the DVDs saying one of the staff members recommended it. I wasn't watching anything else at the time, so I thought, sure, why not? I don't know how to describe this show without spoiling the basic premise, but I think it's something that you find out within the first couple of episodes, and I think the description of the show also spoils it, so I figure I might as well. Warning: If you were going to check out the show just because you heard it's good, and you don't want it spoiled for you, stop reading now!

The main character is Sarah Manning, who was raised in the UK, judging by her accent. She's at the train station when she sees a woman who happens to look exactly like her. That woman jumps in front of a train and kills herself. Turns out Sarah is not doing so well for herself, and when she finds out the jumper is well-off, decides to take advantage and use what the woman has left behind - since it's not like she needs it. Things end up a little more complicated, and so she has to impersonate her for longer than she intended.

So the big spoiler, there's another woman out there who looks just like her - suburban housewife Alison. And another - genetics student Cosima. As it turns out, Sarah, Alison, Cosima and Beth are all clones. As stupid as the premise sounds, the show is actually really enjoyable. Tatiana Maslany plays all of the clones, and she is amazing at it. Each of the clones has their own quirk, and you can really tell which one is which based on the way she plays them. What is also really enjoyable is when she plays one of the clones pretending to be one of the other clones.

What I love most about the show is Sarah's foster brother, Felix. He's just such a good character, and all the deadpan snarking.

OK, I have to admit that there are parts of it that don't quite make sense (though maybe it'll be cleared up in a later season), but the story is interesting - if you can ignore some of the stupid techno/science--babble that. The story follows Sarah (as Beth) trying to investigate why they were made, while still trying to pass under the radar as she doesn't want anyone knowing that Beth is dead. There is a little hint of the secret society-style conspiracy, but it doesn't completely take over the show in a stupid way like the Rambaldi stuff did in Alias.

It's also interesting seeing the other clones live our their lives, and all their little problems, which don't seem all that important when you consider the bigger picture with the cloning mystery, but still funny. Even though I found her incredibly annoying the first time I watched it, my favourite clone is Alison, and I love every scene where she's with Felix. She's the kind of person who would worry about what kind of stain she leaves on the carpet after shooting someone.

If you like action and sci-fi, along with a bit of drama and snarky humour, I think you'll like this show. I do sometimes feel that the side characters (i.e. the characters other than Felix and the clones) are almost one-dimensional, but the amazing acting with the main characters more than makes up for it. I'm really looking forward to season 3, which I guess I'll have to wait to show up on Netflix or be released on DVD (seasons 1 and 2 are available on Netflix, and I'm re-watching it now. Note: I have watched something new on Netflix, I watched the movie Tangled. I started watching Mean Girls 2, which was just as terrible as everyone told me it would be, and I couldn't make it past 15 minutes. Serves me right for trying something new).

I don't know what else people are meant to talk about in TV show reviews. I have a feeling that my high school English teachers would be really disappointed in this review, but I wanted to review it without giving away the major plot points. Anyway, if you have the spare time, I think it's worth checking out!

Sparkly

This it! The long-awaited post number 100. I guess I will try to keep going for as long as I can, but I'm glad that I made it to this milestone.

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Had a discussion a while ago about Twilight and why it is so popular despite having quite terrible undertones. For starters, the main character, Bella Swan, doesn't seem to have any redeeming qualities, and yet all these people around her seem willing to sacrifice themselves for her, and all of them seem crazily obsessed with her in some weird way. Oh, quick disclaimer, I haven't read past the second (?) book, I think. The one where there are those Italian vampires. I think I only saw the first movie as well.

Quick recap off the top of my head: Bella transfers to some tiny town to live with her dad. She meets Edward at school who turns out to be a hundred+-year-old vampire who can read people's minds, except Bella is immune. Edward's whole family are vampires. Edward and Bella fall in love, except it's doomed, because Edward has to keep resisting the desire to suck all of Bella's blood. Enter Jacob, Bella's friend, who turns out to be a werewolf. Jacob also loves Bella, despite having met her twice. Werewolves and vampires fight each other, except Edward's family has some sort of truce with the local werewolf population. There are other bad vampires in the world who want to kill people, and they want to kill Bella for some reason, but Edward's family and Jacob's pack protect her. Oh, and how could I forget, in this world, instead of vampires burning when they are exposed to sunlight, they just sparkle like diamonds.

From what I can remember, Bella is somewhat pretty, well, Kristen Stewart is really pretty, but I thought in the books she was described as fairly plain. Or not amazingly attractive, just... not unattractive. It has been a while though so maybe I am misremembering. She is clumsy, which means she is not very good at sports. I don't recall her being particularly smart (well, if you go by some of her actions in the books, like purposely putting herself in danger so that she can get brief flashes of Edward's face instead of something far more sensible like making a painting of him or something, but I don't think she was failing at school or anything. She doesn't seem particularly sociable, though she did have friends. I think the best way to describe her is average.

So Graham's theory is that the reason why Twilight is so likable is because she's such a bland and nothing character that anybody can see themselves being in her position without disrupting suspension of belief. If the main character is incredibly attractive, you can wish you were them, but the fact that they are always getting hit on, or talk about buying some slim figure-hugging dress that you know would look terrible on you breaks that fantasy. With Bella, all she seems to do is hang around guys or mope around that nobody loves her. I'm sure that most people can at least identify with the moping around part. I know I had many high school angst-filled days where I thought nobody would ever love me.

The other part that's so attractive about the novels is that the main character is being romantically pursued by two men - both of whom are considered quite desirable in their own right (although I think Edward was famous for being somewhat stand-offish, I can't remember). What did she do to deserve such love? I guess in the case of the mind-reading Edward, Bella's immunity means that he can never really know what she's thinking, so she's one of the few people who would be a genuine mystery to him. However, her immunity is not something that she achieved, it's just mysteriously some innate trait she has. Then you look at Jacob's crush on her. He is willing to do all kinds of things for her, just because he loves her. I can't remember if there's anything in the books that she does to even the score. If I recall correctly, he fixes some motorbikes up for her so that they can go riding together, but the only reason that she wants to go riding is to get glimpses of Edward which she seems to get whenever her life is in danger. So he's doing all of these things for her just to help her mope after some other guy. Of course, she doesn't tell him that, so he has no idea that all of his endeavours are for nothing.

Is that the grand fascination of Twilight? You, too, can have two incredibly attractive men chasing after you just by being a weirdo who is immune to mind reading powers for some reason. To be honest, when I was reading the books, I was completely wrapped up in the romance of it all. I was distraught when Edward left Bella because he knew he was dangerous for her (I think she cut herself and Edward's brother nearly killed her while trying to suppress his desire to suck her blood, or something like that). At the time, I didn't realise how terrible the books were, because a part of me wanted that - the whole someone liking you for who you are thing.

Bridget Jones had the "just as you are" thing as well. That moment when Mark Darcy tells Bridget that he likes her just as she is, conjures all those feelings of acceptance. The feeling that someone can love you warts and all. I guess a lot of people have a mask that they wear out in public, and often, it can be quite confronting to think that if people knew the "real you", they wouldn't be quite so eager to be your friend.

My theory is that is the great fascination of Twilight - the idea that you can be some bland nobody and still have men chasing after you anyway. Ultimately, a lot of people just want to feel loved, and for young teens who don't have the self-esteem to be able to love themselves, these books are a good escape, in the hopes that maybe they'll find their Edward, who will be madly in love with them, despite all of their flaws. I found my Mr Darcy, so anything is possible, right?

Choose Your Partner

One of my co-workers was telling me about how he found his wife. I say "found" because from what it sounds like, he seemed to be on a mission to find a specific type of person. It actually turns out that my co-worker and I went to the same university, and happened to study the same course (well, he did the single degree version, choosing to study software engineering only). He told me that he was absolutely determined not to date another programmer. He refused to spend any time in the engineering library, or in any of the computer labs, instead, he joined all the social clubs he could in the hopes of finding someone with a different specialty to him.

He ended up meeting an accountant (well, I guess she would have been a student majoring in accounting at the time), they started dating, got married, and had kids. He said that he's really happy he met someone who doesn't work in the same industry that he does. For one thing, they cover a larger range of necessary life skills - so he'll never have to hire an accountant, and she'll never have to hire IT support to fix her computer.

To each their own, I guess. It sounds like he's really in love with his wife (so I wouldn't say he married her for her skills or anything like that - it sounds more like a happy coincidence). From my point of view, as someone who is with someone who works in the same industry, I actually really like that we share a common vocation. Well, to be honest, it would be nice if we did have a split in skills, similar to how in every MMO we play, we both decide which crafting skills we are going to try to max, so that we cover a broad range. But realistically, I feel like the cop dating stereotype applies to more industries than you would think. Note: This is just based on my observations, as I've never directly asked people how they feel about their spouses working in different industries, as it sounds rude.

For starters, me and MrFodder. We both work as programmers (though technically, he is not a programmer, at least not according to his job title). Even though we both work with different technology stacks, I do like that we can share those industry-specific in-jokes with each other. I can post him funny/interesting questions I find on Stack Overflow. Or silly things from /r/programmerHumor. It also means that when I have had a frustrating day at work, or someone has come over and made a really stupid request, I can rant without having to go into encyclopedias of backstory before going into the annoying part.

Based on my from-television-series wealth of knowledge on life as a cop, it seems like there are a lot of industries where only people who are in your industry can really understand what you're going through. I have to admit that being a programmer is probably tons less stressful than being a cop or a doctor, but it still has its own stressful moments. OK, my own job is not super stressful most of the time, but I'm pretty lucky that I get shielded from the worst of things by my project manager. I get that MrFodder's job can be quite stressful though, as he has tighter deadlines, and more money is on the line for his projects than for mine (well, yes and no, as my projects tend to bring in a lot of money, I guess, but they don't really cost huge, huge sums of money, nothing like the sounds of his projects). I think it's nice that on stressful days, we can understand each other, and know when it's time to give each other some space, or take on a few more chores than usual.

Another one of my co-workers has a non-technical wife, and sometimes I overheard them talking on the phone (well, I hear his side of the conversation). He will usually start explaining things in layman's terms, and sometimes, he gets quite frustrated that she doesn't seem to be grasping whatever he is trying to explain, and he'll get frustrated and just tell her to wait for him to come home and he'll fix it himself.

A different co-worker seems to never discuss work with his wife. I don't know if she even knows what he does at work, it just seems like once he leaves the office, work mode is turned off. He might have spent an entire day trying to solve an issue, and be perfectly happy to discuss it with us, but at any after work activities, it's a very curt acknowledgement of the issue and a swift subject change.

On the other hand, I have a friend who is married to someone, and they are both dentists. Judging from their Facebook posts, they seem to have a very cute relationship going, and they often post what I'm guessing are dental related jokes that they both laugh at (I don't know, most of them often go over my head and I'm too lazy to Google them to try and understand).

Even though I am a programmer, I am a big fail whale when it comes to computer related things. I have (finally) reformatted my computer once. I installed an SSD (in a very sloppy way, it's kind hanging on to the case by one screw because I screwed up and bought the wrong size (2.5" instead of 3.5")). I have forwarded one port in our home network (for Sea3D). That's about my technical achievements for the household - all other technical issues get delegated to MrFodder because it's too hard for me. :'( So I guess it is good that we do have that skills-based divide. Or rather, he covers skills that I do not have.

Although we realised that I am probably a better secretary than he is. Just based on the wedding stuff, I did most of the correspondence with guests, and with the various vendors we had. I am usually the one who keeps track of our schedule, and what plans we have for various weekends. Still, I feel like I need to learn some sort of practical vocation. Like fixing cars. Or plumbing. This is probably the reason why I never made it to max level in Final Fantasy XIV - I had to level all of the different crafting classes! I really do like the idea of covering lots of skills, and I don't think I'd like to be in the kind of family where you have generations of people being in X industry. I would never force our children (if we have any) to work in IT, though I'd encourage it if they seemed interested in it. I just think it's a waste of character slots if all of your characters are of the same class!

What do you think? Is it better to be with someone who works in the same industry as you, or someone who works in a different one?