嘘とワンダーランド

(Yeah, sleep again. Didn’t I say I’d write about something else for a change?)

I highly recommend writing down your exact sleep times and level of tiredness every day. It will help you see patterns and prepare for tight spots in advance. However, occasionally, it will also show you when things are not working.

Like with my sleep. For the last 3 months, there is always the same pattern. I adopt a strict sleep pattern. It works great for exactly 6 days, with maybe a slight amount of tiredness here and there. Then, on day 7, I suddenly get hit with all that missing tiredness at once. Once, I was still able to go another day, but most of the time, I just crash on the spot and sleep at least 8 hours. Of course, this is anything but practical. There is nothing I can do to avoid the crash. I have done uberman and it was easier.

I noticed this patterns before, but I’m now confident it will always be there. So it’s not my own incompetence of adapting, but something my brain just does. I never read about another polyphasic sleeper noticing that, though chronically undersleeping and then catching up on the weekend is pretty common. Yet I don’t feel like I’m getting too little sleep – I can function perfectly fine for 20 hours a day, with no caffeine and no concentration problems at all. It’s as if constantly delaying sleep during school made my brain unable to not crash once a week.

So, solutions. I mentioned 2 a few weeks ago, namely incorporating the crash into the schedule or trying to get more sleep per day. I know of several polyphasic sleepers how do crash regularly, generally on the weekend, but they do this once a month, not once a week. So I don’t think this is a good solution. I’m pretty sure crashing that often is a sign of deeper problems. Also, when doing uberman and uberman with a core, I didn’t notice this pattern. Those two worked just fine.
I also get vivid dreams everytime I sleep and feel refreshed afterwards. I make sure it’s dark, avoid sugar or anything else that screws with your awareness and so on. Really, if sleep quality is the problem than it is beyond my powers anyway.

Conclusion? It is possible to be severely sleep deprived without noticing it at all for about a week. Do not feel safe after you had several good days – you might still be doing it wrong. Reassuring, isn’t it? :) Anyway, I’ll try to make the core longer again, hoping to average it out.

Guess what. Yeah. I feel like the counter-example for both sides, with regards to polyphasic sleep. “It is impossible to sleep 4 hours or less per day and be healthy!” Hundreds of people do. “It is impossible not to adapt to polyphasic sleep! Everyone can!” muflax can’t.

Well, this is overly pessimistic. I am polyphasic, for about a year now. I sleep multiple times per day, mostly 4. I sleep, on average, around 6-7 hours per day and go about half the time with 4 hours or less. I almost never feel tired for more than 2 hours a day. Generally speaking, I feel alright-ish and my memory retention is fine. So, polyphasic sleep is at least a partial success and all those results are already better than any sleep schedule I ever had before it. I can do better in any single point, but not in most of them or the total average.

However, I’m not on everyman and I feel I can do better. Call this the engineer syndrome – I am aware of a better solution and I’ll be damned if I can’t implement it. Every time I try to, I learn something new and then fail. But this is ok. I’m getting better at this. And this time around, I genuinely feel I found The Secret(tm).

I started the adaptation on 09/02, 17 days ago. The first 6 days were pure awesome. Everything worked. The core took a day, ok, but every nap worked and after 30 hours in I was never tired – ever. Than came a crash that had nothing to do with my sleep. My study regiment broke down (and I with it). I’m working on fixing the things that caused it (and there is a big-ass rant coming up about it), but because I drifted into a few depressive days I couldn’t find the energy to get up from my core. I was awake, but I just didn’t feel like being awake. And this, of course, destroyed everything. I kinda got back on track 4 days later, but by then it was to late. I couldn’t find back into the schedule. I overslept irregularly. I did a big crash day in hope of recovering enough, but it didn’t work.

I learned two things:

1. Sleeping position is incredibly important, more important than almost any thing I have been doing. I can not stress this enough. For most of my life, I’ve been sleeping on my stomach. This feels most natural to me. But out of frustration and because it’s hard to wear a sleep mask that way, I changed it. Suddenly, I woke up with an amount of energy I had never seen before. It makes little difference for the core (though dreams get more intense), but the naps went from “meh” to “this. IS. POLYPHASIC SLEEP!!k!”. I did experience similar naps on uberman, regardless of position, but never on everyman.  So, seriously, if you are not sleeping on your back – try it. Like, NOW.
(Actually, I suspect a breathing problem (I do have a fucked up chest), though, so it might not affect everyone. Still.)

2. Re-adapting while on a bad schedule doesn’t work, but about a week of monophasic sleep as a reset works fine. If you ever had working monophasic sleep, that is. (puredoxyk, of course, tried polyphasic sleep as a measure to fight her insomnia, among other things. The very concept of insomnia is virtually foreign to me. Unless I am extremely sleep-deprived or on drugs, I can sleep any time, for as long as you want. I did once sleep for 60 hours in a row (with a bathroom break in between). So, totally different starting point for different people.)

And because it worked so great for 5 days, I have enough motivation now to make it work for longer. Possibly forever. So, I’m going to do about a week of monophasic sleep now to reset. Around Friday (09/25), I’m gonna adapt again. I hope to fix the other problems by then so I don’t fail again. :3

Statistics. I love statistics. And graphs. Graphs are cool, too.

It’s funny, actually. I really suck at statistics. I have a hard time understanding probabilities and statistics is probably the one mathematical field I understand the least. But I still love it. I track a lot of data and love reading tables. I have several books full of yearly death statistics, broken down by age, gender, cause, region and so on. Some of the greatest stuff I ever read. Crime statistics are really cool as well.

Anyway, it might come as no surprise to you then that I like correlating personal data. If I do this change in my life, how does it affect me? Is their a correlation between sleep time and happiness? What about nutritional supplements? So I wrote a tool to track and analyze just this. [0]

Enter ashuku. I’m lazy, so let’s just quote the readme:

ashuku is a tool to track a multitude of daily statistics, like mood and
health. Its design goals are simplicity and fast usage.
ashuku can draw graphs [citation needed] and analyze data for correlation.
Data is stored in plain text files in YAML. It’s easy to read for both humans
and machines.

ashuku is named after one of the 5 Wisdom Buddhas, 阿閦如来 (ashuku nyorai).
He is immovable and reflects all emotions like a mirror, showing things as they
really are.

ashuku is strongly influenced by todo.txt.

Dependencies
============

* Python 3 (although the code is probably compatible with Python 2.6)
* PyYAML

Here’s a screenshot. It’s fully customizable, so don’t be afraid of the Japanese UI. It’s in English by default and you can change it however you want. :)

a screenshot

I’ve been using it since 9/12. The data before that is from a different tool and partially incomplete, so there.

You can grab it here: http://github.com/muflax/ashuku

[0] Well, the second one, actually. The first one was a Perl script and… you know what they say about Perl code. It’s  all true, unfortunately.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about game design and I even started playing a few of the games that have been lying around here for positively ages now (アウターワールド (originally Another World), SMB, Dig Dug 2, plenty of stuff on the NDS). I started notticing a small set of Deadly Sins. If a game commits one, it stinks. If the rest is done exceptionally well, it might still be enjoyable, but there already is a bad aftertaste. Commit two or more and it’s hopeless. The game is shit. Interestingly, most of them apply to TV as well.

1. Shut up already!

Aka Navy syndrome aka All Players Are Retards. Never, ever tell me how to play your game or how all that stupid stuff works or what I’m seeing. “Hey, I bet you can JUMP up there!” “Hey Link, that’s a VASE. You can TOUCH it and then THROW it on the ground to SMASH it.” Will you shut up already! I can figure it out myself! If your game is so complicated that it needs half a college course to get used to, than your design stinks. If you think I might be to stupid to understand the simplest of concepts, than I don’t anything to do with you. If you fear I might miss some part of your awesome game and you need to explain everything to me, than this might be because your game is shallow, stupid and boring!

This applies to more than just gameplay. Ever heard of “show, don’t tell”? Doesn’t look like it. Never use text (or worse: speech), when you can show. Learn a thing or two from Half Life 2. Instead of telling me about oppression, show it. You could go on hours and hours about your angst and loneliness, or you could show me one woman desperately waiting at the train station for her husband that will never come. One of the two approaches works, the other is annoying. Can you tell which is which? Never explain and tell, when you can imply and show.

Now, this doesn’t mean “don’t talk”. I’m a pretty big fan of Planescape: Torment and Arcanum and boy do these games talk. But what they have to say is interesting. PS:T never explains any game mechanic. It never explains stuff to you, the player (though it does explain a few things to the main character). Many main plot points are never made explicit at all and lots of information can be missed. If you are not actively looking for it, you might even miss 2 of the 3 classes your character can be. So “Shut up already” and ‘talky” are not opposites. But when you can do without words, do so.

2. Sure, take your time

Yeah, you have this awesome feature. Say, in your game, you can reverse time at any point. Then it’s a good idea to take it slow and don’t give me this feature or anything. Let me do a dozen or so tutorial levels first. And talk to me. Maybe a nice, long intro. Or really long loading times. Anything goes, as long as you can prevent the player from actually enjoying your game. I’m looking at you, Braid. A couple of minutes before the first enemy, really?

When I play a game for the first time, I give it about 30, maybe 60 seconds. During this time, something cool has to happen. If it doesn’t, that’s it. The game is over, it’s boring and it can bugger off. Mario’s main skill is jumping. How long does it take to jump? A couple of seconds, at most. You move a bit, start running to the right, press a button and there it is. You jump.
Or take Another World. You get a short establishing shot of some research lab and the character, 10 seconds later, some weird shit happens and you are sucked into a parallel dimension. You don’t know what the fuck is going on and without warning materialize in a pool of water. If you don’t react immediately, and you won’t because you will still try to figure out what is going on, a bunch of tentacles grabs you and you are dead. Not even a minute in and already dead. You continue, this time swimming up. A strange world awaits you and you are attacked by a beast right away. From this moment on, you will be constantly on the run, trying to survive. You are never given a chance to get bored.
If it weren’t for the intro, I’d mention God of War, too. You are thrown right into a battle and encounter your first boss within 2 minutes or so. That’s how it should be.

You know what? It’s not enough for something cool to happen. I, the player, must do something cool. Which brings me to Sin number 3.

3. Don’t let me play the game

Take control away from me at any time you feel like it. Throw in a cutscene! Let the character do something automatically that I could have done instead. Even better, let another character do it for me! In a cutscene!

I get it. You are way cooler than I could ever be. It’s for my own best if you do all the awesome stuff and I just watch. Like in Oblivion, where the final battle is fought between two NPCs in a cutscene. Don’t get any of this hideous game stuff in your movie, Mister Game Designer. It could be, you know, fun.

4. Big Numbers

It’s really important for any self-respecting game to have as many Big Numbers as possible. You must have 16x anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, 50,000 polygons per character, not just one, but several layers of shaders and at least 10 different buttons and if you can count the number of axes on one hand, than it’s not enough and you need to throw in another analog stick. NOT.

Pick one feature. Do this one feature well. SMB has 2 buttons and one D-pad. Portal can do with 3 buttons (blue / orange portal and grab). If you need much more than that, you are doing it wrong. If you think that a top-notch graphics engine matters at all, you are doing it wrong. Many designers seem to think that the less people can actually play their game, the better. Especially PC games are affected by this. Many modern games run on less than 1% of all machines. That’s, like, really smart. And don’t even get me started on DRM and digital distribution (read: renting games). But anyone who thinks that publishing games on the PC is a good thing in the first place must be insane.

5. I like buttons

This is the one that I understand the least. Don’t people play the games they make? Then how come many are so cumbersome and slow to use? Buttons after buttons, multiple seconds of blackout between each screen and a HUD that was seemingly designed on LSD. The one that really annoys me right now is Scribblenauts. If you want to change your avatar in the middle of the game, you have to go through5 menus and then go all the way back again. Fail a puzzle and you have to not just watch the introduction again, but click away a pop-up, too. Every. Single. Time. How do they test this? Didn’t someone try to smash their NDS after a week or so of playtesting and trying a puzzle over and over again?

6. Rape the setting

To be fair, this Sin is not as common as the other ones, but it’s so horrible that it is a complete deal breaker for me. I’m not talking about “Don’t dare to be different when working in an established franchise!” bullshit. What I mean is the sheer lack of respect for what you are creating. A good example would be Jade “make it Asian, but not too Asian” Empire. Or Fallout 3. Inconsistent worlds that don’t have any kind of respect for themselves. Throw in whatever crap you can think of. Pile stereotype on stereotype. I don’t want to drift into a violent rant about constant sexism, racism and just plain ignorance about anything, or offering “moral choices” that only a 3 year old could think of as intriguing (“Do you want to be a NICE GUY or a BIG MEANIE?”), or making characters expendable and “funny”, or throwing in stuff because a market analysis indicates that the target demography might want it (and not because you like it or anything), or confusing violence with maturity, or…, so I’ll stop here.

Just… don’t. I’ve played enough games that even /b/ couldn’t have made more stupid and offensive. Just stop it already, ok?

7.  Bad Actors

Voice acting. Nuff said. Bad writing is one thing (and not necessarily a show stopper because games don’t always need writing). But bad actors physically hurt. In my paradise, I’m allowed to club 3 line-readers to death with a metal reinforced Model M keyboard per day. I’m going to start with Bethesda, then work through the entire JRPG genre and finally take out however voices the people in FPS cutscenes. You guys make my ears bleed. Take some classes, seriously. You suck. And insist on getting your lines in context, please, so that you can at least pretend you could convey any emotion at all.

New Scientist just put an article out listing 13 mysterious problems that baffle scientists today. Linky.

Let me do a quick summary:

1. The universe is tilted, probably by something big.
2. Something really big pulls away a bunch of galaxies.
3. The earth was way hotter a while ago than we thought.
4. Something big is pulling away our satellites.
5. Life fuses in ways thought impossible.
6. An imaginary disease is spreading.
7. Unknown, really loud sounds in the ocean. [0]
8. Something fucked with the universe to make it asymmetric.
9. Stuff’s missing in the stars.
10. Light doesn’t work as we expected.
11. Magnets don’t make any sense.
12. The universe is noisy and maybe has a shape that is way weirder than what we experience.
13. The power of delusions is getting stronger.

Now, it might not be obvious to everyone, but I see a clear pattern here. There are basically three groups of observations:

1. There are many really big things we do not see.
2. Our perception of the universe is completely at odds with its real shape.
3. Madness is spreading.

Do you see it now? The Awakening is near! Praise the Great Old Ones! They will return and eat us all! Cthulhu fhtagn!

[0] Incidentally, not that far away from R’lyeh…

In “The Humble Programmer” (1972), Dijkstra writes:

The analysis of the influence that programming languages have on the thinking habits of its users, and the recognition that, by now, brainbower is by far our scarcest resource, they together give us a new collection of yardsticks for comparing the relative merits of various programming languages. The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other  things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. In the case of a well-known conversational programming language I have been told from various sides that as soon as a programming community is equipped with a terminal for it, a specific phenomenon occurs that even has a well-established name: it is called “the one-liners”. It takes one of two different forms: one programmer places a one-line programm on the desk of another either proudly tells what it does and adds the question “Can you code this in less symbols?” – as if this were of any conceptual relevance! – or just asks “Guess what it does!”. From this observation we must conclude that this language as a tool is an open invitation for clever tricks; and while exactly this may be the explanation for some of its appeal, viz. to those who like to show how clever they are, I am sorry, but I must regard this as one of the most damning things that can be said about a programming language.

This is the year that C was invented in, and 15 years before Perl. I feel very guilty and amused at the same time.

It’s nice to see that even puredoxyk is adapting to everyman sleep again. She just posted her Big Fat List and I thought it might be a good idea to assemble my own. I’ve been monophasic for about one week (to cleanse myself of sleep dep and other stupid reasons) and feel ready (again) to do the adaptation. 10 months of polyphasic experiences be damned. I hope the sleep mask will be here soon[0], but I’m too damn sick of monophasic sleep to wait for it any longer.

Anyway, here is my list. I do have a pretty masochistic monastic tight schedule for the day, composed of 4 units (Japanese, Russian, programming, general study), each ranging from 4-8 hours (exact times and distributions are still subject to experimentation and are the topic of another post), so I expect to be pretty much busy and occupied all day anyway, but I know how it is. You make plans, you get tired, you ignore plans. So I need a Plan B. Especially for when I’m totally sick and tired of reading or doing exercises. That’s where the List comes in.
I particularly like puredoxyk’s division in physical / mental / healthy. I’m gonna use the categories STR (physical), CON (healthy) and INT (mental). Also, activities that can (should) be done more than once are marked with “cont.”.

• do a 15 minute Anki session (INT, cont.)
• act out 3-5 Assimil lessons (INT, STR, cont.) (just reading them is too boring, but grabbing a sword and pretending you are torturing socializing with the foreign hostages is kinda cool… what?)
• look up and add selected sentences to Anki (INT, cont.) (every time I read something and I encounter a new / weird word or phrase, I take a screenshot so I can add it to my SRS later, so there’s always a queue)
• read a 漫画 (manga) (INT, cont.) (currently reading 東京赤ずきん (Tokyo Red Hood), what a great story!, ソウルイーター (Soul Eater) and うずまき (Uzumaki))
• go for a run brisk walk (STR, CON, cont.)
• clean room (STR)
• do paperwork for university
• check out this weird Japanese game (INT, cont.)
• learn another chunk of 漢字 (INT, cont.)
• write some more propaganda objective articles about SRS and other learning techniques (and try some new ones) (INT, cont.)
• code something (some unfinished projects, some ideas flying around or just fix some random bug) (INT, cont.)
• get out XBox, play some Mirror’s Edge (STR, cont.) (more of a fallback strategy because it’s better than sleep, but still a waste of time)
• play some Mario (STR, cont.) (totally not a waste of time) (interesting fact: after suffering[1] playing through Yoshi’s Island on the NDS I was so angry at the game and exstatic at the same time that I swore to finish all Mario games, just out of spite)
• meditate some more (CON, cont.) (Normally, it would be dangerous to do this when tired, but the way I sit is actually so uncomfortable until you get it right that I will start vomitting and screaming because of pain before I could ever fall asleep (I should know, I did this years ago and it took me a month to not curse my legs anymore.).)
• fold a few Cubees or paper cranes to annoy my mom (STR, cont.)

I will also need something new to drink that has no caffeine (but I love my perfect green tea :[...), is easy to prepare and totally refreshening and tasty and stuff. This fruit juice I've been drinking for the last few months is no more (new recipe?! and now there's no more celery in it?! what the fuck?!) and I'm in dire need of an alternative.

[0]How insane is it that it’s now cheaper to send something as trivial as a sleep mask from Hong Kong to Germany, instead of driving to the nearest town and buying one there? It would cost me more time and money to actually buy one just around the corner than to send it 9000 kilometers and get it through customs. This would have been unbelievable just one generation ago. As far as I’m concerned, there is no need for infrastructure anymore. If I can receive stuff from Hong Kong, have an internet connection and there’s a supermarket nearby, I’m happy. Who needs towns anyway?
[1] I might have discovered the Strikethrough button. Maybe you noticed.