Won NaNoWriMo

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Screenshot anime Inou-Battle

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed about writing a novel.” Well, unless it is as bad as mine.

I totally won NaNoWriMo this year. I wrote over 50 000 words of one continuous story. That’s all it takes, and I did it in less than two weeks. Mission accomplished with margin, as we had one month to do it. I am a master of quantity, woo.

The quality was terrible. I think a decent editor would have killed about 90% of it. There was all kind of irrelevant stuff, only one character worth mentioning, very little plot and virtually no drama. It was basically a mix of wish fulfillment and midlife angst. But no one is asking about that on NaNoWriMo.org. Quantity is king. At least I got verified that I still have that. Also I dispensed with some of my signature writing traits, like the long dialogs, often humorous, and barely worksafe humorous references to human sexuality. This year’s story would probably have passed a Republican party convention without any critical remarks, except that it was repetitive and lacked direction.

So yeah, it was an OK practice, but nothing more than that. It is not something that could be salvaged and made into a publishable work without a complete reboot.

I am not sure whether I am going to continue doing NaNoWriMo, even if I live for more years, which I sincerely hope. I feel that I have mastered quantitative writing now. I hope there will never be a time when I need to write for a living. And if there was, I would rather write fact than fiction, these days. There is so much beauty in truth. Just before NaNoWriMo started, I signed up for an edX MOOC about exoplanets. It is somewhat heavy on math, but, exoplanets! Planets around other stars! Alien worlds! Thousands of them! Isn’t that much more interesting that the petty power plays of insignificant humans? Let alone insignificant imaginary humans.

More MOOCs

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Let us build ourselves a place of learning! On the Internet! Actually, some people already did that, so I’m just mooching on their MOOC. ^_^

Last year I started taking a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course – a course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people.) It was about information technology in the society, the impact the technology had, and I was quite active at first. But then I found a part that was actively misleading (the “search bubble” was presented as a fact, whereas it has been disproved shortly after it made headlines). When I found that neither students nor professor did basic fact checking or reacted to being directed to correct information, my interest in the course quickly faded to zero.

At the time, the MOOC concept was still fairly new in Norway. Besides NTNU, I think only the college in Molde had started, and it was mainly a work by pioneers with little formal support from faculty staff, much less inter-college organization. In America, MOOCs had already been around a year or two (possibly more, but not in the public eye). So that was where I cast my gaze next.

This summer I took a MOOC from University of California San Diego, “Climate Change in Four Dimensions”. This is not something I need for my job, it was just interesting (it is a big topic and gets a lot of interest these days, often from people who have opinions but little knowledge.) To no small degree it was also a test of Coursera, the platform delivering the course. Each of the major MOOC platforms has courses from a number of universities, but they vary in which universities and how they present the courses, probably also in what type of courses, although there is clearly some overlap there at least. If I could complete a fairly long single course (10 weeks) that interested me, I knew that the MOOC model was not broken despite my failure to complete the one last year.

I completed the course, had fun and got a good grade, although I did not purchase the official certificate track to get the faux sheepskin certificate or whatever you use these days. As I say, it is not a thing I need for my work, and it is not like it gives me any authority elsewhere either. If people don’t listen to actual scientists, they sure won’t listen to me. But the course was a success as far as I was concerned. (Not that I was overly concerned.) (English is a funny language.)

I followed up the success with a course this fall from the main competing platform, edX. This was the “Science of Happiness” course I mentioned. edX seems to have a clearer line between us freeloaders and the serious students, although you can still take part in pretty much all activities even if you are not on the paid track. But it seems a little easier to slink away. I have not quite done that yet, but I am slipping behind.

Then started the course “Learning how to Learn” on Coursera, which I had signed up for before I started the edX course. You’d think I would be able to handle two fairly small courses like this – they require only a few hours a week each – but I am finding it harder than I expected. Admittedly, this is in part because I have started this huge Sims 2 project, which runs on my second computer during much of my free time. Well, when I am not outdoors playing Ingress, which I am 2-3 hours a day typically, if you include the ingressing on my way to and from work. I am trying to keep it under 10% of my time, but it is rarely much below at least. Anyway, the Sims 2 thing should theoretically take very little time, as it runs mostly on its own on the upgraded Vista computer. But somehow I keep getting sucked in and end up guiding my sims to maximize their life satisfaction rather than my own. That’s just the kind of wannabe guiding spirit I am. ^_^

Of the two courses, I give priority to Learning how to Learn. Both because I find it more agreeable (the incessant invocation of Darwin in a study of happiness really starts grating on me, BerkeleyX) and because the learning course is a tool for all my future courses. If I can optimize my learning even a little bit, this will pay off in all future courses. Of course we don’t know how much future I have, but I haven’t found an expiration date yet, so for the time being I intend to keep learning and stick to my plan of working till I am 75 or until I can’t work any longer. The “can’t work” part tends to depend a lot on your education level here in Norway, with intellectuals often working well past 70 and laborers typically quitting at 62. So, if I can upgrade my intellectual status for free, I improve my chances to keep contributing to civilization, which it could certainly need!

The world also needs my novel (or at least NaNoWriMo says so), but that is a story for some future day, if at all. At least I am having vacation all November, so perhaps the chaos will settle down enough that I actually can think of something to write. The Learning How to Learn course should be finished around then, and the other one by the middle of the month.

 

No visible friends

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Screenshot anime Baby Steps

“It’s like they’re not even in the same dimension…” That’s why my friends are invisible friends, even when they are not imaginary friends.

The “Science of Happiness” MOOC (online course) from Berkeley continues to presuppose that its students are humans. This is by and large a reasonable assumption. But I just finished the second week on Tuesday and it still does not apply to me.

The new “happiness exercise” this week was Active Listening. In this, you sit down with a friend or loved one and “invite him or her to share what’s on his or her mind. As he or she does so, try to follow the steps below. You don’t need to cover every step, but the more you do cover, the more effective this practice is likely to be.”
1. Paraphrase.
2. Ask questions.
3. Express empathy.
4. Use engaged body language.
5. Avoid judgment.
6. Avoid giving advice.

Somehow I think my coworkers would freak out if I tried any of that. While one of them occasionally rants about colleagues, our relationship is not quite such that we sit down and go through his problems. More’s the pity, since I am a great listener, except for the body language which is more detached than you might want.

Coworkers is as close as I come these days. I only know a few who I work with regularly over a long time. I don’t have any other visible friends. I do have relatives, but we don’t see each other every year. All the rest of my friends are invisible friends, even those who happen to have a body at this time. In most cases, those bodies are in foreign countries and I have never seen them except in photos, sometimes not in photos either. I have had comrades of whom I did not know their fleshworld gender, age, skin color or citizenship. Some presented themselves as characters in an online roleplaying game. Some took on the features of vaguely humanoid animals (anthropomorphs). I haven’t really seen this as a problem.

I guess it makes sense for materialists to focus on the body, which is after all made of matter. But as for me, I cannot clearly remember a time when I mistook my body for my true self. I probably did when I was a toddler, but we are not supposed to remain toddlers. By the same tokens, it does not make sense for me to mistake my friends for bodies, which is one reason why I felt at home on the Internet pretty much from the start.

Between this and my Invisible Friend and family from Heaven, there hasn’t really been much motivation for me to seek out and try to befriend neighbors and random townies. But my sims do this. They also have a lot of options for conversation, although not quite the same list as above. Too bad, or I could have tested it on them. It would certainly be easier than testing them on myself. But you are probably a more normal human, perhaps you want to give it a try, if you don’t do this already?

Things don’t just happen

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Screenshot Sims 4. Romance and family aspirations collide.

Babies don’t just happen. Well, for Don they do, but for Carola they are a life aspiration. Sometimes life happens to us, other times we happen to it. (Don’t worry, no babies happened at the Chaos Node! The picture is from Sims 4, where the imaginary people are more normal than me.)

The “Science of Happiness” course from Berkeley is not all theory: Each week they introduce an exercise that is known to increase happiness in most people. The first week we were told to write down, each day, three good things that happened to us, or that went well for us, that day.

I managed to get three such things the first day, with a little imagination, and for the next two days I was on the lookout for them through the day. But my conclusion was that this was counterproductive and meaningless to me. (It is probably a great idea for most people, and I don’t see any reason not to recommend it for my readers.)

In my case, however, I don’t often see the world as happening to me. Rather, I see myself as happening to the world. This is certainly not without exception, but it is usually what I focus on. There are of course a great many things that I have no influence on, but which have some degree of influence on me, such as weather or traffic. But they usually don’t influence my happiness. They don’t register as “good” or “bad”. If it rains, it is probably not direct sunshine at the same time, and I can read on my way to and from work. On the other hand, it means I get wet to some degree – my walk to get to work and back is half an hour each way, not counting the bus ride where I read (or not). Conversely if the sun shines, I am unlikely to get soaking wet, but also unlikely to get any reading done. So I do something else instead.

In other words: I simply alter my micro-behavior according to the circumstance. This is not really something that registers as “good” or “bad”, but as “action” on my part. It is part of my self-view that I am the subject rather than the object, I am the one that acts. I don’t usually assign responsibility to the world. I am responsible, where possible (although I may not always act like a responsible adult). The world is the canvas on which I paint my life.

It is only when the canvas is badly frayed that I assign it some part in the outcome. When something happens that threatens my ability to maneuver around it, like a potentially life-threatening or disabling illness, or if I ever experience serious crime or accident. These have not happened so far, by the unusual and extraordinary grace of the Light, despite my 55 years on this planet, which certainly is a good thing, but not usually something you write down every day. I mean, “Did not die today either, was not shot or stabbed today either, house did not burn down today either” are certainly a list of good things; but it does not really have the flavor that the exercise was aiming at.

When the road gets so bumpy that I can’t hold on, such as being rushed to hospital, I am unlikely to write it down the same day as a good thing. Years later, perhaps. But it takes about as much as that for me to notice the world happening to me, rather than I to it.

I explain this in the uncouth but memorable term that “shitting is part of eating”. When I choose to do something that has a range of likely outcomes, then any of those outcomes is a part of the original choice, even if their exact time and form is not known in advance. So you can’t eat and not expect a toilet visit at some future point. You can’t borrow and not expect to pay back with interest. You can’t go to bed late and not expect to be tired the next day. You can’t eat whatever you want and just sit still and expect to be in great shape for the foreseeable future.

Life has some randomness but it also has a lot of causality. There is little I can do about the randomness, so I leave that in the hands of Heaven for the most part (with the occasional request) and concentrate on the causal part, especially the part where I am the cause. When other people cause things, I tend to lump it with the “random” part, since everything I have learned implies that most humans have even less control of what they do than I have. And I certainly have my limitations, not just of the body but also of the mind. Make no mistake, the mind or personality (the psyche in psychology) is limited much as the body is. You can train them both and force them to some degree, but often you have to plan around their limitations or else accept them. Such is the life I live, it is focused on myself — yet not quite in the same way that most self-centered people are.

So how about you?

Not your kind of people

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Screenshot Sims 4 - happy young sim using computer

Introverts won’t be cast as demons, creatures you despise. Except when trolling forums.

Today’s title is of course from the awesome song by Garbage. (Here on YouTube, although I have bought it on Google Music.) I have sometimes wondered if this would not be a good “national anthem” for Aspies (people with Aspergers syndrome, or more generally on the high-functioning part of autism spectrum). It certainly sound like it, although it is probably unintentional – it is hard to imagine Aspies going into the popular music career willingly. Anyway, I am only half Aspie. There is also religion, which I also clearly experience differently from most humans.

As I promised in my previous entry, I am going to say something about the MOOC (online university course) “The Science of Happiness” from Berkeley and the Greater Good Science Center. Ironically the title is the same as a book by Ryuho Okawa, the Japanese author who gradually has begun to think of himself as “God or Buddha”. I guess that is an occupational risk. Anyway, the book was better, at least in the regard that it did not bombastically declare that people need a lot of friends to be happy. Rather the record-breaking author and would-be god from Venus holds the same view that me, that happiness comes from within, or from Heaven, which isn’t really two different things in this regard.

In contrast, let us look at this semi-mandatory quiz that appears in week 2 of the university course. It starts with this “what the hell” inducing question:

When I feel lonely, there are several people offline that I can talk to.
I clicked “Strongly disagree”, but it is more than that. The whole question is off. When I feel lonely? Uhm, yeah, that’s been about 5 minutes, perhaps 10, over the years since I left my birth home at the age of 15, a bit over 40 years ago now. I won’t say categorically that I can’t be lonely if I am without human company (online of offline or simulated). Just that it is not a “when” in my life. To me the question reads approximately like “When I miss having a raccoon in my living room, there are several raccoons outside that I can let in.” Not that there is anything wrong with raccoons, some of my best friends (online) self-identify as raccoons. And there is Rocket Raccoon … but back to our narrative.

The rest of the quiz is not quite as bad, but it certainly seems to presuppose that much of your “self” does not reside in your own head but is distributed across a wide range of other humans, who help you make decisions, solve your problems and influence what you are interested in. Unfortunately this seems to be an apt description of humans. Obviously when you are small, this must necessarily and literally be true. As a toddler you cannot understand yourself. But we aren’t supposed to remain toddlers.

The course goes into the idea that our evolutionary history explains the “hypersocial” nature of humans. The helpless infants and long childhood made it necessary to have strong family ties, close friendships and many connections to the rest of the tribe in order to successfully bring children up to become adults in their own right. We are not like sheep, who only need to eat and hide in the pack in order to grow up and make more sheep who grow up and make more sheep. Making a human is a whole adventure and it takes a village, as socialists like to say. (Conservatives think that it takes a family, which in my experience certainly doesn’t hurt. Well, I suppose if is a really evil family, the village is preferable.)

It is weird how people say the appendix is a relic of our evolutionary past and want to remove it, but when hypersociality (hypersocialism?) is a relic of our evolutionary past, they want to make it mandatory. At least the appendix doesn’t hurt unless it is inflamed. Loneliness hurts day and night, from what I heard. Shouldn’t they funnel research into how to make people more autistic? For now, the only known method is to make the next generation more autistic by having kids with an autist. Not that I am volunteering or anything, I am only half Aspie after all.

But as I said, this is not simply a matter of genes. It would be cool if Aspies are the new breed of man, Homo Superior, which is set to replace the primitive Homo Sapiens the way these replaced their grunting ancestors. A beautiful narrative. But it seems far-fetched that the Buddha, Lao-Tzu, and the innumerable saints and sages of the great world religions were all Aspies. They were filled with happiness even during prolonged solitude, and even in adversity where those around them resisted their message and responded with anger, threats and outright violence. Clearly it was not their friendships and social network that carried them through these times, unless you count their Invisible Friends.

It takes a lot of friends on Earth to substitute for one Friend in Heaven.

So being surrounded by family and friends can make people happy, but being alone can also make people happy. I sometimes say that “Evolutionary Psychology is the science of explaining why whatever is popular in the USA this decade is the natural state of humans and the rest of the world has got it wrong”, or words to that effect. And Americans are extraordinarily extroverted by most measures. It is not a country known for its monasteries, exactly. And not really for its happiness either. I mean, sure, compared to the developing world. But on a “happiness per dollar” scale, they fare very poorly indeed. Perhaps a little more peace and quiet would do them good.

Sims 4: More human than me?

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Screenshot sims 4, two sims playing chess and talking

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing.

Since the original “The Sims” game in 2000, the little computer people have become more and more like normal humans. With me, however, it seems to be the other way around. This fall it seems that they have become more human than I, in some ways.

Obviously I don’t mean the body. Mine is still flesh and blood, while theirs is pixels on the screen. What I talk about is how well they emulate human behavior, whereas I have my own style that is pretty unusual in some ways where the sims are not.

Specifically, this is about social interactions, social needs, even social wants. As mentioned before, the sims now have a lot of social interactions and they love to use them. Even a sim with the Loner trait rolls around a fourth of his wants about social interactions, like talk to someone, tell a joke, compliment someone, practice talking, use a pick-up line (!) and more. Strangely, these wants cannot be satisfied over the Internet, so the sims need to actually go out (or have others come over) to fulfill their wants.

The social need is borked, if I may say so. In The Sims 3, Loner sims would experience their social need meter go down fairly slowly. Eventually it would go in the red, but it would take its sweet time. This may be simply lazy coding, but in The Sims 4 the meter goes down seemingly as fast as for everyone else, it is just that they don’t suffer any negative effects of it, quite the opposite. But the meter still takes on the orange and eventually red color of impending desperation, and a quick look at the screen will make it seem like the Sim is in danger. Only when you look more closely you see that it is just the social need that is bottoming out.

Of course, I have had this problem with my journal too. When I innocently mention that I don’t have any friends except invisible friends, people get worried as if I was about to jump from the nearest bridge, while I feel quite happy this way. Even when I mention that my last kiss was some 30 years ago (and even that was rather a surprise) people worry about me. Now if they were just worrying about my genes, I would understand it, for they are overall pretty amazing genes. It would almost be too bad to dilute them. Someone should deep freeze some of my blood so I can be cloned when that becomes more trivial. Unfortunately, genes don’t guarantee the same personality, as you can see with identical twins:  Identical twins that grow up together are more different than identical twins that grow up apart. (In the real world, that is. I haven’t tried that in the game yet.)

There is another reason this is on my mind: A MOOC (massive open online course) from BerkeleyX, the electronic arm of Berkeley University, distributed through the EdX platform. Yes, I am MOOCing this year again, and more successfully. But anyway, The Science of Happiness spends an inordinate amount of time elaborating and belaboring how absolutely necessary a rich social life is for human happiness. And I am like WTH you people, but then I think to myself: At least this may be useful for playing The Sims 4, if nothing else.  Actually I guess both the course and The Sims 4 may be useful for understanding ordinary humans, of which I am clearly not one. More about that next time, probably.

Sims 4: Easier and harder

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Screenshot Sims 4 - two sims in deep conversation.

The sims are not only more emotional now, they are also more social. There are easily a hundred different social interactions to choose from, and almost every skill, job or hobby adds to the list.

Compared to its predecessors, The Sims 4 is both easier and harder, simpler and more complicated.

It is very easy and simple for those who just want a “human fishbowl”. You can start playing some of the existing families, or roll random characters, or download some of the thousands of sims that are shared on the Net. Put them in a pre-made house, or put together a house from pre-made rooms, then let them take care of themselves. The sims are more intelligent, and they have gotten better at multitasking. They can mostly take care of themselves, even more so than in The Sims 3. I’ve seen a social type sim got out of the house and start chatting up neighbors while I was doing something else, and they are able to hold down a job. They still have trouble with broken equipment, though. But apart from that, there is a good chance that you can go to work and still find your sims alive and well when you come home.

It is easy to get started, and there is very little that you as a player need to decide or meddle in unless you want. But chances are that you *do* want to meddle, rather than just watch “unreality TV” with imaginary people. And this is where it starts getting complicated.

Most things are just more detailed. This detail is optional. If you just want to get started, you can ignore it. But if you have the time, you can go into ridiculous detail when designing your sim, from the shape of the eyes and nose to picking half a dozen sets of everyday clothes that your sims will choose from when they get dressed in the morning. (You can also have several pajamas, party clothes, swimwear etc, with matching accessories.) The only notable exception is the ability to color every object in a unique pattern of self-made colors, which supposedly filled up the save files like whoa in the Sims 3. You still have various colors and patterns to choose from, but can’t create your own.

Once your sims move in, the rapid growth of options continues. Even without any expansion packs, the social interactions have multiplied in the extreme. Increasing the charisma skill unlocks new options, but there is also a separate comedy skill that gives you more jokes and funny stories to tell. (So instead of “tell joke” you have “tell joke about penguins”, “tell joke about fashion”, “tell knock knock joke” etc.) There is even a pranking skill that lets you expand your ranks of pranks to play on other sims, if you are that kind of evil, detestable person. In addition there are interactions that are unlocked when the sim is in a particular mood, and there are a whole rainbow of such different emotions. Even choosing just the Friendly interaction menu gives several pages of possible interactions between two sims, in the base game without any expansions, and that’s before I have maxed any of the social skills.

Other skills have also got an excess of optional detail. Take painting, for instance. There are now a wealth of different styles to choose from, increasing as the painting skill goes up. Abstract, realistic, pop-art, impressionist, classic. Some emotions also have corresponding painting styles, like “confident painting” or “playful painting”. Paintings in these styles can only be started while in the corresponding mood, and contain a mood aura which can be activated after the painting is finished, and will influence nearby sims with the same emotion. So if you know that you will need to be confident at some point in the future, make sure to start making confident paintings at any time you feel confident, so that you can put them up in the house and activate their confident aura the day you need it.

Or you could write a self-help book, if you have a fit of confidence and sufficient writing skills. Reading the self-help book will make a sim confident for a few hours, then it fades. I appreciate the realism in this. ^_^ (Regular readers may know what I feel about self-help books: Given how many there are of them, and how well they sell, we would expect to live our lives surrounded by weakly godlike superintelligences. That is pretty far from the truth. But that they can make people feel confident for the duration of a short date, I suppose that could happen. It seems to work for the sims, at least unless they accidentally fall under the sway of a different emotion such as getting angry by getting chewed out by a bitching bystander.)

The complexity just continues over the top. Maxing your cooking skill is faster than it was in The Sims 3, but there is now a separate Gourmet cooking skill that is unlocked a ways up the ordinary skill, and that is needed for the more advanced culinary endeavors. I am honestly not sure where that idea come from, but you can now be a master of making ordinary meals and a total noob at gourmet cooking.

Computer gaming is serious business, as one might expect from Electronic Arts. Gaming is now a skill that you level up through practice, either on your computer or FlatPad (tablet) or smartphone. You unlock more games as you level up your gaming skills, but you also unlock conversation topics. This is the case for other skills as well. Sims who may seem strikingly different in other ways, like a lazy snob and an athletic outdoors lover, may bond over their elite gaming skills or their love of the violin.

Some of the skills are associated with a career. The number of careers seems somewhat limited, but bear in mind that each of them now has two different branches that you have to choose from halfway through your career. Acing your career has become much harder: In The Sims 3, you basically just had to improve the associated skills. Now you have to do that, but you also have to do various job-related tasks at home.

For instance starting in the culinary career as a dishwasher, you have to wash dishes at home as well a few times for practice. Then for the next step you must improve your mixology (drink making) skill to 2. Next you must make an outstanding grilled cheese sandwich. This is a tricky one, and you’ll find something similar in other careers, like paint a brilliant painting. The thing is, there is no choice to “make an outstanding sandwich”. You have to grill sandwiches until you make an outstanding one. The quality of your food depends on your skill level, your mood, your experience with that particular dish, your kitchen equipment, and a random element of luck. Maybe you can get it right the first time, perhaps it takes ten times.

In The Sims 3, everyone could reach the top of their career if they improved their skills and went to work regularly. Now it has become something you achieve if your life revolves around it. Chances are you will retire without reaching the top, if you try to have an active social life, or a large family, or a couple unrelated hobbies. This is more realistic, of course. We aren’t all bosses (and some of us are quite happy with that). But I am sure some long-time Sims players will feel frustrated.

And that is the problem with The Sims 4. It is amazing, but it is also somewhat frustrating. The learning curve is not steep, but it is very long. For those of us who were masters of the earlier games and felt in control of them, the jungle of options seems entirely too dense. I cannot imagine how it must look to someone who has never seen a plumbob before. In one way this wealth of options is a benefit, because people won’t quickly put it aside as “finished this game, on to the next”. But in my experience it requires the player to stop from time to time and relax. Tell yourself “Hey, it is just a game.”  But with the sims becoming as lifelike and complex as they are now, this is harder than ever.

 

Sims 4: The Sims get emotional

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Screenshot Sims 4 - female sim outside

But we still got plumbbobs!

For 14 years, the “sims” – the small computer people invented by Will Wright at Maxis – have been the more or less constant companions of me and many others around the world. At a time when computer games was seen as a boy thing, girls and grownups embraced the ever more complex life simulation that was The Sims, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, each of them adding more content with a stack of expansion packs as well. It did not surprise anyone that there  would be a Sims 4. It did not surprise anyone that the base game – the starter pack, if you will – would lack much of the content from the previous games. But gamers have grown a bit cynical about this over time, and with the announcement that the game would not have toddlers, a wave of disdain washed over the Net.

There are no toddlers in The Sims 4. The open town from Sims 3 is also a thing of the past – now you once again get load screens if you travel to community lots or visit other sims, although you have a block of up to 3-4 houses (depending on size) that are always loaded like your home lot. On that note, it seems that the “story progression” has also bitten the dust, the engine that kept the rest of the town living some semblance of a normal life, marrying and having children before growing old and dying. At a glance, it seems as if the game is shrinking, except for the price. And of course there are a bunch of bugs. The reviews have been less positive than at any other point in the series’ history.

I, on the other hand, am quite impressed. To me there seems to be a relentless progress in the underlying direction of the game series: To portray human life in as much detail as the current generation of computers can handle.

This time, the sims have been given emotions. They were not entirely without them before, at least indirectly: Your sims could make enemies, have a nervous breakdown, or enter “platinum mood” where they functioned at peak efficiency, more so than usual. But now there are a list of emotions to literally color their lives. (The various emotions are color coded, such as pink for romance and red for anger. Perhaps in order to map the moods onto colors already associated with them, the spectrum is not evenly populated.)

You can see the dominant color of a sim at a glance, but their portraits are also more expressive and give a fairly realistic facial expression and stance for the mood they are in. The emotions are not simply for decoration: They influence what sims can do, and how well they can do it. Social interactions tend to go down the drain when sims are angry, and this emotion tends to spread in a group because people who get insulted or shouted at take it out on others again. On the other hand, the romantic mood opens a bunch of new interactions and lends more powers to romantic options that are open more widely. Confidence also stands out as opening a fairly wide range of interactions. Some colors will improve your sims ability to learn the corresponding skills – the “focused” emotion is pretty much all about this, and is quite valuable for learning logic and programming but not for socializing. Aspies are going to feel at home in this one.

The sims have two “whims” at any one time. These are wishes that follow from their life aspiration and personality traits, or from skills they have acquired. If your sim has started getting the hang of cooking, they will start rolling whims to make food, to make group servings, and eventually to make specific dishes. But there is also a third whim, which deserves its name even better. It is only active when your sim has an emotion, and only for the duration of that emotion. If a different emotion breaks through – for instance because of some bodily discomfort – the whim is forgotten, and any effort toward fulfilling it will not give any perk points. (Fulfilling whims accumulates points that can give sims some pretty powerful benefits if you save up long enough, including some degree of rejuvenation.)

In addition to the whims, there are now separate requirements to fulfill for your sim’s lifetime aspiration. You level up toward this by doing related tasks, which may or may not also be whims, usually not. A similar system applies to jobs: In order to advance, you need to fulfill certain requirements on your free time. While most of them can be gained reliably, there are some that require luck so you will have to just keep trying till you get it. While positive emotions improve your chances of a good outcome, they are not enough and not strictly required.

One amusing detail is that emotions have a fairly strong influence on your sims’ stance and how they walk. You can set a default walk, but emotions tend to overrule it.

Not only the emotions of the sims have become more detailed, their bodies are also slightly more realistic and easier to shape in the create-a-sim module. You can zoom in and drag or push details like eye shape or ear size. Unfortunately I am too left-brained to benefit much from this, although I have learned to use the brand new butt slider. Strangely, the sims don’t react to this at all, and not to the breast slider either, which is inherited from one of the Sims 3 expansion packs. Oh well, perhaps in Sims 5 they will notice! It should be out around 2019.

The Dragon Upgraded

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I feel like I can go anywhere… With Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium, you can dictate anywhere using a USB microphone, wireless microphone, smart phone or dictation device. (Even so, I don’t recommend dictating while biking!)

In the past, Dragon NaturallySpeaking has been available in several different versions, and I have always used the cheapest one, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home. It usually cost around $100, with the occasional big sale where you might buy it to at half price. As an existing customer, I could also upgrade it to the next version at half price from the start. Last time, two years ago, I also did that; I even preordered it.

This time, there was no question of pre-ordering. Either they didn’t ask me, or I missed it somehow. My first hint that there was a new version available came from a mail that offered to let me upgrade to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium for €99. A bit more, but then the Premium version has some unnecessary but nifty features. So instead of being my usual cheapskate, I went for the premium version this time. It was already available for download; there was a link in the mail to the website where I could buy it. I checked the requirements and looked for any traps, but that didn’t seem to be anything suspicious. So I bought it with credit card, and could immediately start downloading.

The installation was easy and trouble-free, although it took some time. I first downloaded a small installer program, which then downloaded the big installer program, which then unpacked to a separate folder, which then installed the program in the default location. It may sound a bit complicated, but it was mostly just pressing the “next” button, although I had to choose a directory for the temporary files. I saved them to the network drive in case I have to reinstall on this machine or another. I would also recommend using an external disk for the temporary folder if you have limited disk space, since at some point there will be three big files and folders taking up space simultaneously: The big installer, the folder with the unpacked files, and the actual installation in your Program Files folder. If you have a reasonably new computer, this would probably not be a problem.

Speaking of new and old computers, the two latest versions have each reduced the computing requirements, so that you can actually run version 13 faster on a weaker computer than version 11. Good work!

After installation, Dragon offered to upgrade existing user profiles. This took surprisingly long, even for the profile that was almost empty. Several times I wondered if it had crashed, but I didn’t need to use it immediately so I just checked in on it from time to time, and eventually completed. If you don’t have an earlier version of Dragon, each with an effort to create a new user profile instead. I believe that in this case, you will also be offered to train the program to recognize your voice and improve its accuracy. At least this happened in the earlier versions. It may be that it is so good right out of the box that they don’t bother with that now?

As far as I remember, version 12 looked very much like version 11. Version 13 has a whole new visual profile, so it is obvious at a glance that you are running the new version. The DragonBar, usually placed at the top of the screen, is now just a small button when not in use. If you move your mouse to it, it expands to become larger than it was in the previous version, and the microphone on/off button also becomes much larger. The “Learning Center” (formerly Dragon Sidebar) still takes up the margin of the screen, but it now has a black and white color scheme and also seems to have larger letters. As always, you can minimize or remove this Learning Center if you don’t want (context dependent) hints about what you can do next. Even the DragonBar itself can be minimized to the system tray, and you can access the most common functions by shortcut keys or by voice commands. But that has always been the case, I just wanted to mention it.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, the first thing I noticed when trying Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 was the leap in accuracy. I realize that I have praised its leaps in accuracy since at least version 10, but this time the difference seemed to me bigger than the official count of 15% improvement. 15% improvement does not seem a lot when the accuracy is already claimed to be about 99%. To me, it seems more like it has increased from 99% to 99.5%, which would actually be a doubling of the accuracy in the sense that there would be half as many errors. But I admit that in my case this could be because of an improvement in the handling of USB headsets.

(It is unfortunate that I cannot maintain this level of accuracy for longer texts, because my voice becomes hoarse after a few minutes. But this is an affliction that I share with very few humans. One hypothesis is that it comes from my years of almost complete silence, where I only asked a few questions at work and did not speak at all on my free time. If I take breaks and drink a little water between the paragraphs, I can continue for longer.)

The premium version contains some features not found in the home version. For instance, you can now make the program read back your own voice, not just a synthetic text to speech rendition of the text. You can also use a smartphone as a microphone, or even use recording devices and have the program transcribe them later. There is supposedly also an option to create your own voice commands, basically macros, but I haven’t tested that yet.

In conclusion, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 is awesome. You can actually speak naturally to it, and with very little training it will put your words on the screen and let you control Windows. Upgrading from version 12 seems to make a big difference for me, but your mileage may vary. Upgrading from Home to Premium is probably not a priority unless you have a USB microphone or some other unorthodox input device, but it adds some fun new features.

(As usual when writing about dictation software, I have dictated this entry in its entirety, except for a few minor corrections.)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13

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This is how I think my readers should react when I write about Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition from Nuance. Somehow that never seems to happen. Let me try again, it’s two years since last time.

I love living in the future. And one of the more futuristic things that I have is the speech recognition software for Windows, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (Windows also has its own built-in speech recognition, but for those who can afford it, Dragon is definitely the one hardest to distinguish from magic.)

Today I got a mail from Nuance, offering to upgrade my Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 Home to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium for €99. I immediately grabbed the chance, just as I have done every time there was an upgrade for the last five years at least. Was it worth it? Well, to paraphrase a friend of mine, €99 is a lot of money if you don’t have it. This is obviously not a product for the working classes of the developing world, but for Norwegian office worker the amount is trivial, barely noticeable against the high salaries and the high prices up here. And for me at least the effect of the upgrade was dramatic.

According to their website, version 13 is 15% more accurate than version 12 right out of the box. Evidently this has either crossed some kind of threshold in my case, or there was some bug in the version 12 Home in relation to my Plantronics USB headset. The USB headset worked very poorly with the previous version on my laptop (although it had worked reasonably well on the desktop with version 11). So when I wanted to dictate, I had to take off my USB headset and put on an analog headset for the duration, and even then the accuracy was at most marginally better than in version 11. Today after the upgrade, I can use my USB headset again, and what’s more: The accuracy is more than 99%. It still makes mistakes, but less so than my fingers. (And I have been typing for almost 50 years now.)

Back when I wrote about an early version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking here in the Chaos Node, it had only entertainment value for me, although I realized it could be useful for people who could no longer use their arms at all. Some years later a newer version helped save me from disability when my job caused a serious case of repetitive strain injury. At that time it still made quite a few mistakes, but at least I could correct them with my voice. Since then it has improved even more, and I have given it pretty good reviews each time. But let me tell you something: For me, version 13 is a giant leap.

It still makes mistakes, but so few mistakes that I risk overlooking them in the middle of all the perfect text. We are talking about perhaps one error for each paragraph on the first day. The software gets used to the sound of your voice and your writing style and also learns from all the errors you correct, so it gets better the more you use it. So to pull off this level of accuracy with almost no training is impressive indeed.

For those of you who are still here instead of being busy buying it, my next entry will get into some more detail about the installation and differences from the previous version.

(As usual when writing about dictation software, I have used the program to dictate this entry, except for a couple of minor corrections.)