Spencer Janyk

A rare candy, evolving

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Revisiting Heroes with AI (and fixing a crash I could never have fixed alone)

I guess I’m using AI to fix my childhood.

When I was young I was a Mac gamer in a mostly PC world. I spent most of my time in Escape Velocity and Harry the Handsome Executive, but one of the games that stuck was Heroes of Might and Magic II. I fell for the music (with an amazing score by Paul Romero / Rob King / Steve Baca) and the art: gorgeous hand-crafted VGA-era 2D—town screens and creatures that to my childhood felt like illustration. HoMM II brought the series to prominence in the mid‑90s; but I wasn't tracking the market… for me it was the one that felt like I was playing inside the Michael Hague-illustrated version of The Hobbit. It was a complete fantasy toy box when I played it on my family's Bondi blue iMac.

As a kid, I didn't notice that the gameplay was unbalanced. In fact, I was more interested in the story than competitive play, so with most games I would find the GameFAQ guide, and use ResEdit to alter my savedgame files to add black dragons. While I was happily playing my game Heroes III (The Restoration of Erathia, 1999) was released and updated the design: adding towns and units, offering a random map generator, improving support for multiplayer, and giving birth to a scene that could actually sustain itself. Heroes III really solidified the franchise because it offered more strategic factions and balance, official and fan maps, LAN and later online play. Also, because the game was capable of running on relatively low-end hardware, it was also popular outside of North America. The Russian localization by Buka landed in 1999, and it became a phenomenon in Eastern Europe.

So during COVID, when I returned to gaming in a small way, I drifted to HOMMIII for playing, even when HOMMII stayed my favorite for atmosphere. The story of how the publisher—New World Computing—was eventually acquired by 3DO is a fascinating story, but beyond the scope of this small post :-)

If you're just in it for the art, HOMMIII probably isn't the game for you.

Heroes III moved toward higher-resolution (though definitely not high-resolution) sprites based on pre-rendered creature models, and a busier isometric battle board. To me, it’s an awkward blend of 2D presentation and early 3D-era rendering. It's sometimes interesting, but never gorgeous and usually muddier than the painted clarity of HOMMII. Some people disagree; but I don't think the position is very defensible.

Either way, today's community lives in III—tournaments, the Horn of the Abyss mod is seemingly the most popular but doesn't support the mod most popular in online competition ("Duel"). If I want to play in the ecosystem today, HOMMIII (or something compatible with it) is the table everyone’s sitting at.

VCMI is the way to play

VCMI ("Vinyar Callor Meletya Ingole" or "New Heroes of Might and Magic" in Quenya) is an open-source reimplementation of the Heroes III engine: the same general idea as “run the classic with modern platforms, mods, and AI,” complete with forums, Discord, and development on GitHub. I’m not good enough to play competitively (probably, I've never tried). so I don’t live in the ladder scene. For a long time that made me feel like a tourist in a game I’ve loved for decades.

Cursor, a crash, and feeling less like a tourist

Recently VCMI on my Mac started crashing randomly after I ended turns. I would get annoying macOS crash report windows that pointed at Metal / OpenGL being the culprit on the main thread. I had no idea how to interpret it, but I dumped the logs in Cursor and learned about what causes that kind of thing:

When a background thread throws and the process aborts, the UI thread can still be inside a frame update. macOS Crash Reporter showed the main thread first—plausible, but misleading. The real stack was on the embedded server thread:

BattleResultProcessor::endBattleConfirm → StatisticDataSet::getPlayerAccumulator.

I turned up logging and restarted from my safe. After one of the computer players battled some random creature, the log printed `Disaster happened.` and:

Invalid player color -1 for statistics accumulator

In VCMI, `-1` is `PlayerColor::NEUTRAL`. `getPlayerAccumulator` only accepts real map players; it expects `isValidPlayer()`, not “we checked `== NEUTRAL` somewhere and hoped.” The battle-end statistics path had that mismatch—plus a few related spots (strongest hero, surrender, escape) that assumed the loser was always a player color.

With Cursor (and the VCMI source tree), I could search the error string, read the throw site, patch `server/battles/BattleResultProcessor.cpp`, rebuild `vcmiclient`, and verify the same scenario no longer crashed. The fix went upstream as PR #7214. While others had already fixed the same class of bug elsewhere, the other fixes were for a different callsite. Phew! my work wasn't duplicative. I was happy I checked the upstream commits and other branches before committing the PR.

So the AI didn’t “auto-fix” the game in a vacuum. I had to reproduce, read the log, decide the patch was right, and own the PR. What Cursor changed was friction: faster navigation, less time lost to boilerplate, and enough confidence to touch a codebase I’d have treated as read-only a few years ago.

It was the second time I fixed a bug (the first was enabling the user to press the "escape" key to exit the inventory screen), but the first time I felt like I’d contributed to the VCMI side of the community.

I'm now no longer a tourist. I hope you can use the new tools to make some community improvements yourself!

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Mr. Peanut

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Thoughts on Sourdough

I feel bread should either be the star of a dish or play a supporting role and I don't think sourdough does well in either role. Sour flavors are acidic but muddled. In my opinion, bread dish flavor is clearer when it comes from a preserve (e.g. jam) or vinegar (e.g. mustard). When you'd like to emphasize the acidic flavors of a sourdough, butter alone is the best toast topping.

As a supporting role, sourdough can complement sandwiches that feature a lot of pickled ingredients (e.g. sauerkraut, pickled onions), but because its flavor is so broad, it can often cloud the flavors.

I consider bread most often as a stage for the flavors of the topping to stand-out. In that case, you might expect white bread would be best and for fatty toppings alone (e.g. butter or cheese), white bread is usually my go-to. However, I usually prefer wholewheat/multigrain bread for sandwiches and avocado toast. Using the entire grain tends to impart more sweetness than white bread, which cuts and enhances fatty/umami flavors and brightens any acidic flavors without muddying them.

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Mea Culpa

A brief follow-up to yesterday’s post about Thunderbolt 3 Docks. It appears I missed an important contender.

Kensington SD5000T Thunderbolt 3 Docking Station - $350.00 It looks like it’s available now and has two positive reviews, which makes it far-and-away the best choice right now. Amazon’s algorithm strikes again.

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Finding a good Thunderbolt 3 dock

It’s… still not possible.

I recently got a new Thunderbolt 3 Macbook Pro for work, which is great, except that it doesn’t have DisplayPort out.

I want to be able to bring it home (or to work) and use a single cable to connect it to power and all my peripherals, which currently include:

DisplayPort display

USB-A transmitter for a mouse

USB-A cable to Rode Podcaster

Gigabit Ethernet

You'd think, given the increasing ubiquity of (at least) USB-C gear, it would be easy to find a dock that I could plug everything into, and then connect to my Mac.

No such luck.

I had conducted a search about a month ago looking for options, but none seemed to exist. Today there are seemingly three, but none seem like great options. Let’s review:

Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD - $350.00 Though “temporarily out of stock” at the time of this posting, it’s very poorly reviewed so far (3 one-star, and 1 two-star reviews) with complaints that DisplayPort doesn’t work, it doesn’t support the USB Superdrive, and that the dock doesn’t support two external displays.

CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 3 - $299.99 Also unavailable/out of stock, this is a slightly odd solution in that it features 2 eSATA ports. It has been nicely reviewed by MacRumors and 9to5Mac, but there aren’t any user reviews yet, so we’ll have to see how it ends up. I can’t recommend it before it’s widely available, but it apparently begins to ship this week.

Elgato Thunderbolt 3 Dock - $299.95 If you’ve got to have a dock today, this seems like the best (only?) option. Of course, it’s not available on Amazon (in fact, the link they supplied to The Verge has reverted to the Thunderbolt 2 version), but it was well-reviewed by 9to5Mac and seems to be available for order on their website, but is out of stock with all the external vendors they recommend. Again, no user reviews mean I can’t recommend it, but it’s the one it’s possible to order right now.

What to do?

I’m going to wait and see, living that 2-cable-solution life until someone creates a useful dock, that’s reviewed by intrepid early-adopters, and supports all the features I need.

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Fascinating video from Jarrett Fuller about the Video Essay as Design Criticism. It’s brief, gives a shout-out to one of my personal heroes Tony Zhou, and helps conceptualize the future of design, now that everyone has access to video.

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Should the DNC support Clinton?

Someone asked on Facebook today whether the DNC should support Clinton. I took the opportunity to frame the issue thusly:

Most intellectuals who defend Bernie do so in the context of the broader trajectory of the Democratic party.

The Democrats shed their Southern Segregationist Labor-advocate allies (the "Dixiecrats" like Strom Thurmond) in the 60s, and have increasingly become aligned with capital-intensive industries like aerospace and banking to the exclusion of labor. It's been a shaky alliance that has persevered only because labor-intensive industry like agriculture and manufacturing have been militantly anti-Union, while capital-intensive industry is largely agnostic to labor.

I think we've already crossed the rubicon in terms of the transformation of Democrats into New Democrats. Labor isn't on the agenda any longer, nor are any grand plans for Social Democracy, Green technology, or strong commitment to the Public Sector in terms of employment, education, or research.

Sanders would represent a new direction for the party, and would constitute some pushback to the disastrous tough-on-crime, pro-Austerity, pro-Intervention, pro-Monroe Doctrine, anti-Labor, pro-privatization Democratic agenda that was pioneered by Bill and is being further advanced by Hillary.

Clinton's support for unions is weak at best, as evidenced by her tenure on the board at Walmart, and lack of emphasis on labor issues in her campaign.

Hillary Clinton has a record of advocating for disastrous military interventions, maintains close social and business ties with some of the worst elements of the finance industry, and has been known to compromise on her core issues (including women's health).

But by-and-large, wealthy GOP donors and elites seem to prefer Clinton to Trump. Trump's agenda, or the little of it he's been able to articulate so far, seems to be based around decreasing US intervention abroad, returning to mercantilism, and instituting race-based immigration and judicial policy.

Some of the most serious issues we face seem to be:

Economic inequality

Ongoing wars

Police violence and repression

Civil rights and press freedoms

On each of these issues, Clinton has significant failings or lacks clarity. An ambitious agenda might not "pass congress" but many people feel is necessary in order to win gains.

So to answer your question, the DNC probably should support Clinton. She's better for the interests they actually represent. But the reason that Sanders is popular is because many poor and middle-class folks don't feel that Clinton represents their interests very well.

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Ogeechee River, 2016 © Stephen Milner

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Election Excitement?

I was briefly interested electoral politics when it seemed like a different kind of politician could plausibly win the Democratic nomination, but once again Democratic voters have allowed themselves to be taken in by an obvious charlatan with a terrible record.

Truly, the way forward is—as it always has been—independent movement-building and strengthening grassroots organizations.

I’ve been amazed to see the work some of my friends have been doing in New York, Baltimore, in the academic debate community, and even in my hometown to advocate for justice and to strengthen political movements.

I haven’t been very impressed with the political work and rhetoric (or lack thereof) from my former graduate program. I’m not sure if it’s because I chose incorrectly and Performance Art is an apolitical subject, or because its status within the University is still too precarious to risk making firm and vocal political commitments.

Over the past few years living and working in Silicon Valley, I’ve toyed with the idea of returning to the academy; working as a lecturer and earning a PhD, but as time goes on I’m increasingly confident there’s no room for me in that world. I love building products that touch peoples’ lives, and while as a professor I (might) have the opportunity to be a public intellectual and to write books for a more general audience, I think I can do better work building sustainable and ethical systems that people rely on to live, learn, and relax. Even if my name isn’t on the cover and I don’t get an acknowledgements page. That’s what Tumblr is for.

I remember being excited in High School for the Kucinich campaign because he spoke about the issues with passion, and seemed to really have his heart in the right place. But I learned then, and still know, that I shouldn’t place my faith in a politician, or in political theories, but rather in people who do good work, and better yet, in myself. If I can leave the world better than I’ve found it, I’ve done enough. 

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Sunday Reading for 02 November 15

Video

The Essence of Humanity - Lewis Bond puts together a lengthy supercut of Hayao Miyazaki films in order to argue that Miyazaki users animation to explore the inner emotional lives of characters rather than using the image of the character as a flat emotional surface.

Master/Mind - Connectomics is the science of mapping and understanding the brain’s connections. I firmly believe that the future of humanity rests more with brain research than it does with space exploration and technology. This video is a bit light on science (and heavy on piano music and B-roll), but great about some of the principles involved. Kudos to filmmaker Francesco Paciocco for putting these interviews together.

The Wisdom of Pessimism - I’m deeply pessimistic, so those who speak well of pessimism tend to be on my good side. This brief and beautiful video by Claudio Salas is just the kind of tonic I need after a long day surrounded by preternaturally cheerful people.

Text

You Don’t Own Me - I love the thoughtful, post-snark pieces in The Hairpin about feminism and Julia Cooper does a great job teasing out the way women portray wives on screen (and in real life). She focuses on Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014), a film which, thanks to this review, has made it to the top of my “to watch” list.

These Are Words Scholars Should No Longer Use to Describe Slavery and the Civil War - I’ve been accused, perhaps rightfully, of an ahistorical approach to history. I imagine the past in much the same terms as I experience the present, and as such I very much appreciate Michael Todd Landis’ piece in the History News Network about the language we (historians and laypeople) use to speak about slavery. Not sure I agree with all of his proposed phrasings (e.g. I think describing Northern forces in the Civil War as “Union” rather than “United States” is fine—in that specific instance I think it would be better to rethink the mythology than to use new words), but the thought behind his argument seems sound to me.

A Buyer’s Guide to Barbour - Put This On’s Derek Guy breaks down the different kinds of Barbour jackets. The Barbour Bedale—and the women’s duffel coat—has always turned me off because it’s so formless. That being said, I’m beginning to start appreciating the fashionability of those kinds of jackets, so I was interested to get this breakdown. I had looked at the Barbour website before and was lost in the complexity of all the different makes and models.

Get Up, Stand Up - Great short feature in Wired by Bijan Stephen about Black Lives Matter’s use of technology, along with an interesting contrast of 60s-era Civil Rights organizing.

Belabored Empires - Interesting history of the unionization of newspaper workers by Jason Boog. He goes on to contrast the old unionizations with the current media environment. 

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Testing out DSCO by VSCO.

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Softest in the Game

Drake first made it onto my radar when he was called out for being “The Softest N**** In The Game” by an online commentator pretending to be Ghostface Killah.

At the time  I was an undergrad, listening to a lot of conscious hip-hop. Somehow through reading continental philosophy and listening to Dead Prez I contorted myself into being able to laugh at Drake for being “soft.”

As a grad student who took the time to dwell more deeply about affect and Blackness I ran across Drake again.

I wasn’t on top of the world anymore. I was about to graduate with a Masters degree in a field that prides itself on being indefinable. I didn’t have the time or the money to finish a PhD, and my personal priorities were evolving. I hadn’t started at the bottom, I certainly wasn’t at the top, and I was unsure about what came next.

Drake is famous, definitely at (or near) the top of his field, and I think critics are still being pretty unfair to him.

Hotline Bling, like much of his other work, isn’t a work of slut-shaming. Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be.

90s Nostalgia and the Dopamine Hangover

It seems like virtually every young person has 90s Nostalgia, whether or not they were born this side of the 2000s, but as someone who lived during the 90s, I can tell you the 90s aesthetic alive and well on social media is much different than the one I lived through. 

Sure, the sadness and alienation expressed by groups like Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, and Insane Clown Posse was loud, but it was about being excluded from society. Affirming an outsider status, and letting the thrill of rebellion take over comes with a certain thrill, and gives a rush.

Lately though, the outsider stance just doesn’t seem authentic anymore. Outsiders too, can “make it” and have success break them. For all the popularity of those who would claim to defy the system, George Bush won the presidency. As the public imagination starts to accept a postmodern condition as the “new normal”, we recognize that an outsider status isn’t possible anymore.

Wither Team Drizzy?

Few artists understand the postmodern condition more than Drake. His story lacks much of the “authentic” political provenance of Tupac and Biggie. A Black Jewish child star on a children’s TV show, and now come up in the rap game, Drake seems as confused by his success as he is happy about it. Notably, even though he’s gaining money and fame, he’s still worried about being successful.

I’m interested in seeing Drake as someone who’s curious about investigating masculinity and experimenting with masculine affect. Seeing the reactions to his most recent video, Hotline Bling, have surprised me in that they seem more interested in painting Drake with a broad brush of misogynist than in doing a making a more nuanced read of his work.

Towards a Useful Sadness

A more productive reading of the video might be about the way that problems follow you.

You don’t need to be a trained psychoanalyst to know that critics are often projecting. When Drake counsels the song’s subject that “You should just be yourself, right now, you're someone else” I think it’s likely himself that he’s speaking to.

Transforming one’s life into a bacchanal is often less than satisfying, and who would know better than a famous musician?

Drake’s not mad at the woman he’s speaking to, he’s just imagining her life, wondering if she’s happy, perhaps regretting dragging her into the circles she now inhabits.

Perhaps there’s a future for her there! Perhaps she’s happy there!

Certainly, and I’m not disputing that she is.

But at the same time, there’s a meditative sadness to the vacuity of sadness in Drake’s music, and I think it’s a useable sadness. It helps tease out some definition on broader psychic structures that lie at the root of our ability to be hypocrites, to accumulate more than we need, to focus on the future instead of the present.

To merely condemn Drake, rather than rescuing a productive perspective on his work, I think may miss out on this important reading.

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Visit Original Link

I made this trailer as a joke for my roommate who works at Save the Bay. I used Aidan Dumore’s “The Adventure Begins” which was just the first result for “epic trailer soundtrack” on Soundcloud.

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Thoughts on XOXO

This was the first year I attended XOXO Fest (2015) and it was an unusual experience.

My fear going into the thing was that there would be far too many earnest but apolitical white people, and that I’d feel adrift because I didn’t know anyone.

While both of those things turned out to be the case, neither bothered me as much as I anticipated.

Conferences in general are strange beasts; part networking opportunity, part showoff, and part reinforcement of the pecking order, XOXO is deliberately designed to challenge traditional conferencisms and is actually somewhat successful. There’s a strong code of conduct, and while there was free booze available, there was also a (non-alcoholic) soda bar. Yumm.

XOXO calls itself a festival and I think earns the moniker. While there are talks and presentations, they’re mostly art-focused and were riveting for a cultural studies major like me. There were two primary takeaways for me:

1. Don’t Fear Failure

You’ve heard “fail fast, fail early, fail often” and you’re already annoyed by it. So am I. XOXO attendees aren’t necessarily told to just “keep trying,” though.

Failure is treated as an art (not going as far as Lauren Berlant) that one should be able to meditate on/with not only as a way to improve one’s product, but also because emotions are real, people have them, and we should be honest with ourselves.

That’s a refreshing difference from the “iterate until you’re rich” crowd that so often predominates at conferences. The sheer level of focus on failure as a life-modality and acceptance of depression was unusual, but not unwelcome.

Every time I’ve been promoted or gotten a new job, I’ve experienced some degree of emotional failure. Whether it’s a result of Impostor Syndrome I can’t tell you.

2. Maybe Fear Death (memento mori)

While the approach to failure is atypical, the approach to death is not. But the mention of and interest in death is very unusual—in my experience—for a technology-focused event.

Many of the presenters I saw at XOXO wanted me to know that death was coming, and to use that knowledge to make sure I was living my life to the fullest. I’m not sure I feel the same way. Knowing that my death is inevitable doesn’t make me want to work on my passion projects because I know that human happiness is frail.

Desire, Freud tells us, always exceeds the capacity of the object to satisfy. In other words, if we get what we want, we don’t stop desiring, we merely begin to desire something new.

The urge to fear death is a little strange, especially in the absence of a focus on social justice.

Talib Kweli has been in the press a lot lately talking about #blacklivesmatter and I was excited to see him speak at a conference that, despite the best efforts of its organizers, remains mostly white. 

Given the ongoing social death experienced by people of color and non-mainstream gender identity, I had hoped that more words would be spoken about social justice. Alas, much like Talib Kweli himself, the hard work speaking and thinking about social justice never really showed up.

Overall

All in all it was a good experience. I don’t know if I will go again (they joke that they may never put it on again), but I met a lot of awesome folks doing great work, and had some amazing experiences with VR. Plus Portland is beautiful. 8/10.

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Thoughts on Moral Purity and Perseverance

Sometimes I too want to be vulnerable and sensitive to all the hatred and prejudice and fear, to let myself soak it up and cry it out, to avoid engaging with the world lest I make a misstep and pursue moral purity. It does kill me spiritually and emotionally to (mostly) witness and (occasionally) experience injustice in all its various diabolical forms every day. Every conversation with someone who says something subconsciously rude and aggressive that betrays their self-doubt and fear (microaggressions) feels like getting stabbed and makes me want to flee. It's even worse when I notice I've done it myself. But I don't feel the world isn't in a place where it can afford losing fighters—even compromised, imperfect ones—to their own sensitivity and inward life. That being said, I don't think being incapacitated by depression means one has done anything wrong. I'm thankful I haven't had that happen to me. I'm working hard on figuring out how to better draw the line between "flawed" and "bad," but I'm confident and excited about about Syriza and Podemos, the recent victories of the Kurdish people, #blacklivesmatter, Anita Sarkeesian (and the growing feminist consciousness among "geek" intellectuals), The Jacobin's slow success, and my friends on Twitter. ¡Venceremos!

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just a small preview of the new spencerjanyk.com

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Links of the Day 01 November

The recent piece by Justin Elliott, Jesse Eisinger, and Laura Sullivan about the Red Cross in ProPublica made me furious. I've long been upset with the prohibition on gay men donating blood, but mismanaging disaster relief on a grand scale adds insult to injury.

You may remember the New York Times getting pranked into publishing a list of supposed "grunge speak" in the 90s, which is one of my uncle's favorite all-time pranks, so I'm particularly wary of (but also interested in) this BBC account of British battlefield slang currently used in Afghanistan.

There's an interesting playlist of psychedelic Islamic music published by discostan that I saw on BoingBoing on Friday and am currently jamming to.

Most of my friends in San Francisco thought it was hilarious that The Church of Satan created a statue of Baphomet to add to the Oklahoma state court grounds after a court decision in favor of preserving a controversial monument to the Ten Commandments. The Paris Review published an excellent gonzo-reporting story about the situation there by James McGirk.