marku's New Writeups

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (review)

2013-05-09T15:07:46Z

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a massive open-world RPG developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was one of the highest-selling titles of 2011, where it saw concurrent release for Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. Post-release enhancements to the game through patches and official downloadable content concluded with an announcement by the developer in April 2013.

Vitals.

Title: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Genre: Role-playing game, open-world, first person, action
Reviewed for: Xbox 360
Release date: November 11th, 2011

Overview.

Skyrim is the fifth title that Bethesda has released in their flagship RPG series, The Elder Scrolls. It is set two centuries after the events of the previous two games in the series, Morrowind and Oblivion. Skyrim is a…

May 4, 2013 (personal)

2013-05-04T07:12:42Z

As long as I can remember, I've loved being in cars at night. Riding, driving, it doesn't matter. Something about the sense of motion without the clear perception of distance, and the rolling countryside replaced by colored lights slowly pulsing on and off in the distance.

My parents split up when I was about seven, and settled in separate houses: my mother in St. Louis Park, Minnesota; my father in Waconia, Minnesota. Separated by a county line, about 50 minutes by car, and a court order mandating that my brother and I make the round trip near twice a week. Out to Waconia on Monday nights, back on Tuesday mornings; back out every other Friday, and then back again the following Monday morning. Rhythmic, 150 minutes a week staring out the passenger windows of cars. My brother did it for close to ten years; I did it for about eight.

My dad made a game of it for us eventually. He drove a GMC Suburban, powder blue and navy blue with a tailgate and a trailer hitch, and every time we…

we are game-based nonsense (essay)

2012-09-04T01:25:48Z

A couple of years ago, I noticed that you can find something floating around the Internet called a travesty generator. This is a piece of software that makes word salad out of whatever text you give it. The software chops up sentences and paragraphs to form new streams of words, without worrying at all about grammar, punctuation, or proper capitalization. Generally the programs accept input of unlimited length to produce randomized output of a specified length. This can result in a high degree of repetition if the input text is shorter than the output text. The result is unreadable nonsense: a travesty. But there is sometimes something helpful in letting that happen to text you care about, because it gives you a feeling of tone, disconnected from more intentional meaning. I'm told the process has something to do with Markov chains but I've never studied those in detail--although I have made note that the same technique here used to destructive effect on coherent text is being used…

June 3, 2012 (personal)

2012-06-03T07:48:28Z

These bartenders keep asking me
why I always order my Diet Coke with a lime
and then never use the lime.

And I have a story that I tell
(really a whole patter)
about becoming diabetic
and discovering in California
that the smell of the lime's peel
masks the chemical tang of
the aspartame
in a diet soda.

When what I should really be telling them
is that if I squeezed the lime into my soft drink
the way I would normally prefer
I would probably just end up
licking lime juice off my fingers
for hours on end,

But that getting the lime
and denying myself the pleasure
of abusing the privilege
is far better
than not having the lime at all.

a child of divorce in the happiest place on Earth (personal)

2011-11-18T20:02:41Z

In October of 1986, Northwest Airlines merged with Republic Airlines. One of the logistical issues arising from the merger was how to integrate two separate staffs of pilots into a common seniority system. My father was hired as an IT consultant during negotiations about how that integration would work, I believe to help one of the parties produce decision support data that ended up being used during the arbitration process. Once the work was finished, he received a thank-you from his employer in the form of three free airline tickets which he could use to take me and my brother on a vacation anywhere in the country. This was a thoughtful gift, as he and my mother were going through a bitter divorce and the inflexibility of the visitation/custody schedule had been a challenge that visibly affected his professional availability during the contract.

My parents had separated in November of 1985, quite abruptly: my mother packed a couple of bags and we spent the next two…

things I have learned about the migration of tundra swans (personal)

2011-11-16T21:54:02Z

Things I have seen for myself.

Precious little. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has a page on their web site indicating that the best time to view the tundra swans is from mid-October through mid-November. In 2010, mid-November was too late in the season; in 2011, mid-October was too early. The website suggests that they only appear in large concentrations on the flight south.

Things my dad told me, but haven't been able to independently verify.

Tundra swans summer in Canada, and on their migration to winter grounds well south of Minnesota, they spend a little time in wetlands and lakes near the Mississippi River in a region bordered by Weaver, Minnesota on the south and by Alma, Wisconsin on the north.

You're supposed to be able to see them from a scenic overlook off of Highway 61 just past Weaver, a place called Weaver Bottoms. On the Wisconsin side, the best place is in Rieck's Lake Park just outside of Alma.

I've been to both of…