Jan. 4th, 2012

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This afternoon, I had a problem. Django is a popular tool for building websites, and the Django administration tool is designed to show individual tables from a database and lists of their contents. I had a fairly complicated problem whereby a related, generic table was supposed to have-- but may not have had-- data associated with items in my target list. This relationship is tenuous, meaning the database doesn't understand it natively; there has to be some external process that manufactures the relationship with every request for data. Django does this fairly nicely with a plug-in, but the plug-in doesn't always play nice with the administration tool.

I spent about two hours puzzling it out until I finally found the answer on Stackoverflow. When I found it, I facepalmed.

I had written that answer. In fact, not only had I written that answer, but at the time I had written it, barely 14 months ago, I was considered one of the world's leading authorities on doing weird things with the Django administrator.

I've forgotten more about Django than most Django heads have ever learned. Unfortunately, "forgotten" seems to be the operative word today.
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While I was browsing in the local supermaket, I picked out two romance novels at random, the kind that has a handsome, well-oiled torso on the cover, sometimes straddled by the bright white flashing thighs of the heroine, and thumbed through them.

The first one made me cringe as the POV switched back and forth between the hero and the heroine in the same paragraph. Repeatedly. The author seemed to think that giving the reader enough information involved constantly flipping back and forth between "He wanted..." and "She felt..." sentences.

The second one was worse. After the meh-handled love scene, the paragraph ended with this gem: "Her gaze tangled with his, enjoying the sensation, before she rose and stretched." Her gaze enjoyed? Really? Where the hell is your editor? How did this get past your beta readers?

Man, I should get back into writing. This stuff is terrible.
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I finished Rage, and I have to say that, in the end, I was not terribly impressed. Rage is basically a technical demonstration of the ID Tech 5 gaming engine: a whole bunch of different games, all thrown together into a stew, but made without enough meat, or vegetables.

There are three acts: Wasteland, Wellspring, and Subwaytown. But Wellspring is "in" the Wasteland and you can drive back and forth between them easily. Once you go to Subwaytown, you can never go back to the others, and if you haven't finished all the sub-missions (not critical to the central plot, but still fun), you can't. Worse, Subwaytown feels rushed: there are only four real "missions," which felt like far fewer than those in the Wasteland part. Part of that was due to there being only one "side job" in all of Subwaytown, and while there are seven sewers in Wasteland, later there are only two.

And the final act is, well, dumb. It's like suddenly you fell into Quake III, with no explanation, no build, none of the critical revelation. Just wham!, and you're in. Also, two things you were promised never happen: You never meet Dan Hagar a second time, and I won't spoil the other one but believe me, it's a big promise never delivered.

Rage has a problem: it needs to be popular enough to justify producing downloadable episodes to round out the story, but it had to be shipped on time. It has failed at this balancing act, and I'm oddly not sorry. This is the first game ID has released since being bought by Bethesda software, and it's the first one since Return to Castle Wolfenstein that has failed to grab me in a serious way.

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Elf Sternberg

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