Final Fantasy XIII-2 announced for the end of the year

On the one hand, I am excited to see another non-MMO Final Fantasy game is going to be released in a reasonable amount of time. On the other, after two radical departures from the tradition of the series in a row (in completely opposite directions), I think they really needed to make a serious return to tradition a la Final Fantasy IX.

Still, they could make this work wonderfully if they focus on a) not repeating Final Fantasy X-2's major failings and b) correcting Final Fantasy XIII's failings.

Regarding Final Fantasy X-2's failings, they should definitely avoid:

• Hiding essential plot resolutions in a secret unlockable ending that involves mashing the X button during a particular point mid-game that you need a guide to even know about. That still burns me up, especially since without said hidden ending the Yuna/Tidus relationship doesn't get its resolution which was the raison d'etre not only of the game's plot but of the game itself. And the way they did tie it up was so perfunctory and deus ex machina that it was just lame. But I'm getting a bit off-topic.
• Having the musical score be ill-matched to its in-game presentation. Final Fantasy X-2's musical failing wasn't that it was bad (listening to it as a separate soundtrack made me conclude that it was actually quite good), but that it didn't serve well as presented and left a bad taste in my mouth (to say the least). Using a track for the airship that gets really annoying really fast was the worst part, especially considering how much time you spent on the airship in that game. If they bring back the same guy that did Final Fantasy XIII, that shouldn't be a problem; he understands mood very well and I expect he would bring in some tracks from the first game to provide musical continuity (not too much, though). That's something Final Fantasy X-2 sorely lacked.
• Trying to hard to appeal to new players as if this were a totally independent entry. It should be accessible, but shouldn't pull crap like the afore-mentioned massive failure with the Tidus/Yuna ending and the failure to ever establish why the villain looked exactly like Tidus, came from the same city (sortof), had the same special attack, had the same voice (actor), etc.

As for the failings of Final Fantasy XIII that they need to avoid:

• Being excessively linear. Final Fantasy X took linearity as far as it could go and did it very well. Final Fantasy XIII took it much farther and failed, unfortunately.
• Eliminating central Final Fantasy, and even RPG, traditions. In other words, it needs to have an airship that's controllable by the player in some fashion and it needs to have towns, dammit! Sure, you can collapse the practical functions of a town into a save point, but it ruins the pacing of the game. Your characters never, ever get a break and psychologically neither do you. Besides, without talking to people in towns, all the information in the game is force-fed to you. I much prefer going around and discovering things.
• Having a combat system that involve too much mindless button pushing. They either need to move towards a more Final Fantasy XII-like system where you can set up precise gambits to determine automated action, and have it activate without having to press any buttons, or they need to move back towards the traditional combat system where there's no auto mode and you can control the other two characters. Heck, it'd be better if they made it an outright Action/RPG; at least then the button-mashing would be a little less mindless.
• Making the game so difficult, mainly through fake difficulty like the rule that it's game-over if your leader dies, and then having to take it back by making death meaningless (you just get to continue from where you were). This is especially ridiculous when you consider that the means of running away from battle initiates a game over state.

Things they should keep:

• The listening in on conversation. This may not be possible if they have full towns (too much voice acting would be probably be required), but it was still really, really cool. If they do keep it, they do need a lot more formal conversations where you talk to someone with the X button.
• Having everything said by important characters be voiced. That's something that was done in Final Fantasy X, but was abandoned in favor of voice-only-during-cutscenes thereafter. It was brought back in Final Fantasy XIII (in fact, everything said by anyone was voiced), but as mentioned XIII had no towns so you encountered far fewer NPCs than in any other game.

There's a better quality version of the trailer posted with the linked story here. It's in English, which makes it even better. I wonder if the guy at the end of it, and who is obviously half of the game's logo, is Cid Raines. It looks like him to me, and I certainly hope it is. He ended up being such a pathetic villain (if you don't consider him a very pathetic tragic semi-hero), especially the way he seemed to die, he really deserved better and should be revisited. He was a very tough boss, though.

Actually, it almost has to be him. If it isn't, they'll either have to introduce another Cid into the same universe (though they arguably did that with Al-Cid Margrace, the false Cid, in Final Fantasy XII) or else violate another immutable Final Fantasy tradition.

A Princeton Undergrad on running a TOR exit node

This is a fascinating read. Personally, I'd never run one, certainly not unless the EFF's legal position that Tor exit nodes are covered by the DMCA's safe-harbor provision gets backed up by the Supreme Court. On the one hand you have the .1% of traffic that really is people legitimately wanting to voice their opinions without fear of retribution (probably .01% when you filter out the paranoids), on the other you have the 95% of Tor traffic that's music and video pirates that don't want to pay for their own VPN service plus the 4.9% of traffic that's genuinely criminal all tied to my IP address. No thanks.

Why is Gmail the least popular of the big three?

I just find this incredible. It has more far more free features than the other two (including free Imap access, something almost unheard of), far, far less intrusive ads, and has a fantastic and highly innovative interface. It also never had a tagline on outgoing emails. That alone should have should have boosted its popularity over the other two back when they added them (Yahoo stopped in 2008 and Hotmail finally stopped last year).

My guess is: lots of people had Hotmail and Yahoo accounts from way, way back (I know I did, and still do), people weren't willing to jump through the hoops that Gmail used to make you go through to get an account, and some people like the old way of doing things and not the awesome new interface. It could also be that one of Gmail's biggest selling points was also its Achilles Heel: the lack of a tagline. As the Hotmail guy said in the above article about their ceasing the practice, it did bring in customers. I wonder if they're the same sort of people who respond to spam.

I still find both of the others unusable due to their gigantic and very distracting ads. If I had to use them, I guarantee you I would use AdBlocker--something I reserve on principle only for only those sites whose advertisements are so bad that they're virtually unusable otherwise.

Sometimes Gmail Labs features really aren't ready for primetime

I have the unread message icon feature turned on in my Gmail and it does absolutely nothing. Of course I am using Firefox 4 beta, so that might have something to do with it. On the other hand, considering how widespread use of the beta is, and how bloody long Mozilla's been taking to get Firefox 4 out the door officially, you'd think they'd support it. Hence "not ready for prime time."

Update: I just updated to Firefox 4.0b10 and this feature now works. So I guess it was a Firefox problem after all.

New York Times to charge (probably slightly) under $20 a month

It's a pity, since the Times is one of the world's great newspapers, but there's no way in hell I'm paying anything close to $20 a month for web access to it. Considering that getting it delivered in dead tree form is only a little more than twice as much, the upcoming paywall is even more ridiculous. And I suspect that it won't work out well for the paper. The subscription cost of newspapers has always been to offset printing costs while the real money comes from advertisement. Now they're trying to milk subscribers for profit directly. It hasn't worked and won't work, not with so many other sources of news (and indeed, syndicated New York Times content) out there.

Is the pen inherently better than the keyboard?

Lifehacker seems to think so. Intuitively this makes sense to me. I'd probably write with a pen most of the time if getting handwriting into the computer were painless and hyper-accurate. On the other hand, intellectually it isn't convincing. Of course you learn symbols and shapes better by drawing them yourself than by finding them on a keyboard. As for the study at the University of Washington, does it prove that the pen is a tool more suited for the human brain or does it merely prove that the keyboard is a more difficult tool to learn? After all, the children may have performed more poorly simply because they were more adept at their age with a pen than with a keyboard. If they had already become touch-typists, would the results still have given the advantage to the pen?

Google strikes a blow against HTML5 Video and H.264 Hegemony

Chrome is dropping H.264 video support. Adobe should be cheering, considering that this will likely artificially prop up Flash video. If you want to host videos, you have four choices: do HTML5 with H.264 only and lose all Firefox and Chrome users, do WebM only and lost Safari and IE9 users, do both, or do Flash and get everybody. Okay, everybody except mobile users, but still.

Update 01/15/11: Or maybe it won't kill HTML5 video, since Google will be providing a free plug-in to make WebM video work on Safari and IE9. Good for them.

Status bar and RSS in Firefox 4

Firefox 4, while a huge improvement over 3.6 in many ways, does have two major pet peeves for me: the dumping of the status bar at the bottom of the page into the location bar and the elimination of the RSS icon in the location bar. What's more annoying is that neither of these changes come with options to reverse them within Firefox 4 itself. Fortunately, there are extensions that allow the full restoration of these faculties: Status-4-Evar and RSS Icon. The latter restores the old system right out of the box while the former requires a little about:config tweaking.

By default, Status-4-Evar puts the status bar functionality in the new optional Add-On Bar at the bottom of the screen. The problem is that it still displays the same information in the location bar as well, which can be distracting. It also leaves the Add-On Bar's annoyingly unremoveble close button (an X) in place. That can be fixed by going into about:config, changing status4evar.addonbar.closeButton to false, status4evar.linkOver to 1, and status4evar.urlbarProgress to false. Do that and it'll look and act just like Firefox 3.

Firefox 4

I just started using the beta of Firefox 4 and I have to say that the Chrome vs. Firefox issue is finally settled for me. It's almost as snappy as Chrome (it's much faster than 3.6, at any rate), has the wonderful pin-tab feature of Chrome, and has Firefox's excellent bookmark system. The best of both worlds.

It's the simple things that keep me from switching to Google Chrome

In every major way, I find Chrome to be far superior to the public release version of Firefox. It's the minor things that get me:

1. Bookmark Management. Firefox is simply far, far superior. Not only can I conveniently search through my bookmarks in the sidebar, I can much more importantly drag and drop links into folders on the toolbar and choose where they go (rather than have them always fall to the bottom). This is how I use bookmarks and until Chrome fixes that I don't see myself switching.
2. RSS Support. True, extensions and bookmarklets can help with this problem, but Chrome's native inability to deal with RSS feeds at all really irks me.
3. History. Chrome's history interface is a joke. Not only is it highly difficult to plow through, you cannot both search and delete simultaneously. So one foolishly browsed along embarrassing lines outside of Incognito mode, searching for that subject and deleting all history pertaining to it is not an option. The smallest of the three points, but still highly annoying.

For Kindle users, Calibre is the way to go

It is amazing just how good Calibre, a free, open source program, is. It will allow almost anything to be converted into the Kindle-viewable MOBI format and the books look great too! I used it on other kinds of ebooks, PDFs, and even an ebook published as a whole folder full of HTML and it converted them. The only thing it wouldn't turn into a .mobi ebook was a Word document, but that was easily fixed by exporting it as a PDF in OpenOffice and converting that. Awesome. It is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Apparently Final Fantasy XIV sucks

At least according to almost all critics. Since I don't do MMOs, I haven't got it and never planned to. I thought trying to insert MMOs into the main Final Fantasy series was a horrible idea when FFXI came out, and think it's doubly so now.

I hope this won't be the deathknell of the Final Fantasy series. It certainly doesn't help after Final Fantasy XII and XIII were both radical departures from the tradition of the series in totally opposite directions (heck, Final Fantasy XIII even did away with even a vestigial airship for you to control). Don't get me wrong, I really liked XIII, and I loved XII. The series already feels like its losing cohesion.

If it were to end, then it's a pity they didn't stop with X. That would have been a perfect stopping point, considering both the overall feel of the game and the nice, round number. It also still is my favorite of the whole series. XII, and XIII too, should definitely have still been made, but should have been branded differently. Final Fantasy XII was heavily influenced by the Final Fantasy Tactics team anyway. It was awesome, but it was its own kind of awesome, not a specifically Final Fantasy kind of awesome. Final Fantasy X-2: nah. It's origin was the need to explicate Tidus' fate, and they did a horrible job even doing that. All you had to do was excise one solitary line of optional dialog from FFX which made you think the scene where he comes back might be a dream and it there'd have been no need anyway. Besides, I personally consider it to be a Compilation entry, like the movie Final Fantasy: Advent Children anyway, and not a real main Final Fantasy game.

If XV isn't torpedoed by Final Fantasy XIV, I think it needs to be like Final Fantasy IX: a return to tradition to bring the series as a whole back into focus. Getting Uematsu to do the entire soundtrack, as they did with Final Fantasy XIV (more's the pity!), would be awesome. I also feel like they not only need to have an airship, it should be a freely navigable airship like I-IX had. This need not mean bringing back the conventional overworld map. Seiken Densetsu II and III had an airship equivalent without an overworld map, as did Lost Odyssey for the XBox 360.

Jammie Thomas case shows how ludicrous copyright law is

$1.5 million for sharing $24 worth of songs? Really? Even the minimum statutory damage of $750, or $18,000 is still severe considering the crime. Going by the IFPI's figures, 40 billion files shared in 2008 (IFPI is the internation equivalent of the RIAA). If every person were to be made to pay the same amount as Jammie Thomas, the amount would be $2,500,000,000,000,000. That 2.5 quadrillion dollars, or 2,500 trillion dollars. It dwarfs the world GDP, which is only 57,843,376,000,000, i.e., 57 trillion dollars. It even dwarfs the entire net wealth of the planet. There is literally not enough money in the world for all the pirates to pay the RIAA at that level.

Obviously the sizes of the verdicts far beyond the minimum weren't based on the offense of sharing 24 songs, but rather on the supposed offense of fighting it in court rather than taking the RIAA's settlement. That is really screwed up too: to be punished for exercising your constitutional rights. The law needs to updated to take into account the individual non-commercial filesharers and have a much more reasonable damage award. $750 should be the top, or near the top, not the bottom, in such cases ($18,000 is a lot of money for normal people).

It's time for the filibuster to end

Matthew Yglesias is right: now is the right time to put the filibuster to rest. After this last congressional term it has finally matured from being something to use only in "extreme" circumstances to the default response to any bill you don't support, making 60 votes the new normal threshold for bills to pass. As such it is a critical threat to the proper functioning of our government.

As Yglesias says, now is the perfect time to get rid of it. With John Boehner becoming speaker, there is no chance that it will be "needed" to block the legislation of the Obama administration. Actually, getting rid of it is now as likely to bite Democrats on the ass as Republicans (which is why it won't get eliminated, more's the pity).