Lamest. Title. Ever.

Tomahawk seems to be one of the most exciting new developments in the music playback world – an aggregator for all your music services, including your local library, Spotify, Grooveshark, Youtube, Last.fm and a few others I’ve not heard of. I’d never heard of it until a friend of mine, Flexstyle, pointed me to Wired’s review of the app, which is – to say the least – glowing. Also, it’s open source, which regular readers of mine will know makes me all sorts of happy all by itself.

So! How does it actually work?

I downloaded the app from their website and installed it, happily discovering that this much, at least, was free of any surprises or unnecessary complications. When you launch the app you are asked to choose from a list of “resolvers” and let Tomahawk know where to find the music stored locally – Windows users, your “My Music” library is selected by default. So what’s a resolver?

Resolvers are the plugins used by Tomahawk to use a content service – so for instance, you would have a resolver for Youtube, another for Spotify, and another for Last.fm. You can add or remove these at will, and almost all the ones I was interested in came by default with the program, I just had to install them from the list of available choices. Notably absent was Spotify, which must be downloaded separately from their website, but that’s a hassle that takes all of 10 seconds to resolve. The resolvers for Youtube and Soundcloud both gave me the option to include or exclude covers, remixes, and live versions, which is a nice touch – but relies on whoever uploaded the file to have labeled it as such. This isn’t something I expect Tomahawk to be able to handle, but it’s something end users should keep in mind.

So, I added my resolvers, signed in to Spotify (it requires a premium subscription, which I have, to function) and Last.fm, and set it to work scanning my local library. After completing the scan, the app crashed. Whoops. Fortunately, it at least had saved all my resolver and account settings, so all I needed to do was set it scanning my library again… which led to another crash.

I wish...

I have about 8,000 songs on my local disk right now, and it took the app only a couple minutes to scan and add them all, which was impressive, but what I found odd was that the “local collection” says it found 25,000+ tracks before it crashed, which makes me wonder if it is duplicating when coming across playlist files or something like that. I tried selecting “update collection” instead of “fully rescan collection,” and this time it counted up to 50,000+ tracks before crashing. I headed off to their support forums to see if anyone else was having the same issue, but didn’t see anything apparent, and trying to register an account didn’t work. It appears their site is moving slow – maybe Wired’s fault? – and the registration email isn’t being sent. Bugger. I’ll be skipping the local music library for now, I guess.

It worked just fine with Spotify and Soundcloud immediately, though my initial searches didn’t find anything on Last.fm or Youtube, when I know there’s content at both for those searches. Youtube started getting hits when I told it to allow all versions of a song, but I couldn’t get Last.fm to give me anything. I was also hoping it would be able to import my playlists from Spotify and/or Youtube, but no such luck – this would be a great feature, though I don’t know what technical limitations might stand in the way of the developers. My biggest hesitation in moving to any new music application is the need to recreate my playlists, of which I have far too many.

This could be a really cool app once the bugs get worked out, but for now, I think I’ll stick to the normal Spotify app. Hopefully I can review this again in a couple months with more success!

“Readers are leaders, and leaders are readers” was the advice an old mentor, Charlie Bell, gave me years ago. It’s a bit of a cliche statement, I suppose – but if it is, that’s only because it rings of truth. I’ve always been a reader, and a voracious one at that. I remember distinctly the look of shock on the new librarian’s face when she told me, at age 10, that I’d checked out over a thousand books from the library – and the look of amusement from the other librarian, who’d seen me dutifully coming in and out of that branch since I was four.

That pattern of eagerly reading everything I could get my hands on continued throughout my teenage years, but at some point – I’m not sure when – I stopped reading books at the breakneck pace I used to. A couple weeks ago, I realized (with no small amount of horror) that I’d only read six books cover-to-cover in all of last year. That’s one every two months – this from a guy who used to average a book a day! In its place were thousands of blog posts, news snippets, forums, and discussion threads.

What’s interesting is how I see myself having changed during this time. It could be a result of this, or something else entirely – correlation does not equal causation, after all – but I honestly don’t feel as smart or as sharp as I did. I don’t feel like I’m sharpening myself as much as I was before. It appears there is some loosely scientific evidence to back this idea up – but regardless of what caused it, I do miss reading as much as I used to. That said, I’m making it a goal to read actual books significantly more than I have been, lately – I’ve gotten two down already this year, and I’m about halfway through a third right now – “A Feast for Crows,” by George RR Martin. Up next are A Dance With Dragons and then the Hunger Games series, but I’m open to suggestions as to what to read next – fiction or non, just so long as it’s a book and not a blog. So, what say you, my readers?

I’ll close with a video of a vaguely on-topic poem that I enjoyed.

Today’s passage: Galatians 3.

As I referenced in my previous post, grace is a key concept in the Christian faith. The idea of God’s holiness is so overpowering that grace is the only solution by which an imperfect being can be allowed into God’s presence – without grace, there is simply no mechanism for us to have salvation, or hope. Incidentally, the concept of grace lays waste to the idea of “losing your salvation” – if you can’t do anything to improve your status with God, and didn’t do anything to attain your salvation, then how can you do something to lose it?

So, what is the Law? The Law is God’s standard. It’s a catechism that explains what “perfection” means, what standard we are held to. Take note that the standard is perfection - anything less, and “cursed be!” And unlike in college, God doesn’t grade on a curve. This means you’ve already failed before you even knew the rules. The Law exists, in essence, to show you that you’re screwed. “The only way to win is not to play,” and that’s the option that grace gives us. Interpreted through the lens of grace, the Law is now, as Paul says, a tutor, something that directs us to God.

But, if doing those good works has no effect on your status with God, if you can’t do anything to improve your standing, then why do good works? We shouldn’t do them to improve our standing, we should be doing them out of love. “If you love me,” Jesus said, “keep my commandments.” Not “if you want to get in good with me,” or “if you want to get into Heaven,” but “if you love me.” If that doesn’t make sense to you, let’s try analogy.

Say you’re someone who’s worked their way into an incredibly deep debt – the kind of hopeless, crippling debt that prevents you from doing anything else. Then one day you get a call from your dad: “Hey, son, I just wanted you to know, I love you. Don’t worry about the debt, it’s taken care of.” You later find out that your father sold everything he owned to pay off your debt, and was living in a small apartment. What’s your reaction to this? Do you immediately go back into debt? Or do you make sure to do right by your dad from here on out?

Or what if you had screwed up your lungs from years of smoking, to the point where you needed a transplant – but no medical board would ever give you one, because you refused to quit. So your friend, without you asking, gives you his. Do you keep smoking? Or do you refuse to touch a cigarette ever again?

Analogies for God are never perfect, but I hope you get the idea of the dynamic here. That’s why James is able to say that faith without the accompanying actions is dead. If you really had that happen to you, if you really had that faith and love, then something would happen. You’d keep his commandments.

So take a look at your life. If you call yourself a Christian, do you really believe that enough to have it show evidence in your life? If not… why?

Saint Paul, generally considered one of the greatest heroes of the Christian faith, called himself a “wretched man” and the “chief of sinners.” I sometimes wonder if he’d still say that if he’d met me.

We’re in a series titled “Fighting for Grace” at church, which looks a lot better on an overhead than “A Study in Galatians,” and also paints a nice picture of the way a Christian should view this doctrinal issue. Too often do we look at grace as some vague construct of theology, some abstract idea that God must be calling upon as an excuse to get us into heaven. It’s a very easy thing to ignore when you’re either not thinking about your spiritual state, or thinking about it a lot.

The way I see it, self-examination is a difficult thing when you’re called be holy, because all you will ever find is a flawed human being in place of that holy creature you dream of being. You see your mistakes, your shortcomings, your failures, and they dwarf your victories. It’s a small comfort than in Romans 7, even Paul shares this perspective for a brief moment – but if Paul had moments like that, who am I to think I will ever get past them?

It’s grace that must be called upon to bring context to these failures and hope to the wretched man. As hard as it is to admit, we must admit that our sins are no worse – and no better – than any other person’s. That cute girl at Bible study? Just as wretched and damned as you, apart from Christ – and so is that jerk you work with and can’t stand. And so is Hitler (because no internet discussion is complete without at least one Hitler reference). The homosexual in the pride parade is in no worse a state of sin than the pious preacher who “borrowed” a few dollars from the offering plate. Sin isn’t about shades of gray, it’s about being either perfect, or imperfect. Holy or not holy. Black or white.

In that context, grace makes sense. It’s the force of spiritual nature that turns black to white, dark to light – it’s a reversal of spiritual polarity, so to speak. You couldn’t be any worse off, and after grace, you couldn’t be any better off. Grace obliterates everything you’ve done and replaces your karmic score with that of Jesus Christ, the perfect savior of mankind and son of God.

But that’s not fair, we spoiled Americans cry out. The idea of free, total salvation for any who accept it, regardless of history or future, regardless of action – a completely equal status before God? Why, that sounds downright communist. I earned this, we cry out, I can be better, just give me more time…

But remove grace from the picture and you’re back in black, shining your keychain flashlight into the night sky and pretending it’s the sun. You’re deluding yourself. All your “good works” are of no greater value than the diapers in the church nursery’s trash can – at least that’s how Isaiah put it, more or less.

Accepting grace means accepting your weakness. Accepting your complete and total lack of power to do anything about your eternal scenario. Accepting your spiritual impotence. Fighting your pride, fighting your sense of self-worth, fighting the messages of the world, fighting the status quo…

Fighting for grace.

Get it now?

Warning: Excessive geekery inside. Continue at your own risk.

So a few weeks ago, I picked up Star Wars: The Old Republic after constant poking and prodding from several of my friends to come play it. Having now hit 50 on my Jedi Knight, and having created a couple of alts as played the early levels, I’ll go ahead and submit my thoughts on the game so far.

TOR was hailed, as so many MMO’s are, as a WoW-killer. That’s simply not true. There is no WoW-killer, and there will be no WoW-killer, at least not until Blizzard comes out with WoW 2. It is simply far too good at what it does and has far too established a subscriber base and IP for it to fall to an upstart of the same genre – at least anytime real soon. Now, that said, TOR has what it takes to match WoW’s numbers, if they fix the bugs they have and – here’s the important part – churn out good content at a breakneck pace for the forseeable future. It looks like they have the next few big content patches already mapped out, which is good news, so hopefully they don’t slack on that any time soon.

TOR is, as any new MMO, buggy and far from perfect – but overall, I think it’s the best out of the box MMO I’ve played yet, except perhaps WoW. The reason I give that caveat is that WoW released with the general idea of giving players more freedom, and then reigning in what they needed to – TOR comes out with a deathgrip on the experience. I think WoW had the better philosophy, though both have merits. Let’s explore a little deeper.

What TOR did right

Single player. Oh my goodness, single player. Leveling felt like playing KOTOR, or Mass Effect, or Dragon Age, or any other great Bioware RPG. The story for Jedi Knight was great, and so far it’s been excellent for Sith Inquisitor as well. The morality choices are a brilliant touch in an MMO, as is the companion system and the subplots there. Quest rewards are always relevant and often provide many attractive options, so you never feel like you wasted your time. Also, every quest is voice acted. I’m blown away thinking of how many hours of audio must have been recorded to achieve what they did – and it’s very well done, too, for the most part. I am happy with the purchase for the experience of just playing through the story up to the level cap, which is something I have never said before about any MMO, not even WoW. They really knocked this one out of the park.

Crafting. I was apprehensive about this at first, but the companion-based crafting system is actually really nice. The missions system takes the “grind” out of it while still keeping the element of time in place, and the ease of crafting combines the casual crafting environment of WoW with the procs and random bonuses of older MMOs, Everquest being the one that immediately comes to mind. Crafting is easy, but still an investment of time and resources, and there is an element of luck involved that is rewarding enough to be fun, but not crippling if you find yourself unlucky.

Companion system. Another thing I was apprehensive about. But it really does make it feel like you’re less alone in the story, and gives you more options as to how you play through the game and see the world. I can play a tank with a pocket healer, or go full DPS and grab a tanking companion to take the beating for me. Whatever I find fun at the time, I can do. Additionally, each has their own personality that plays into the storyline and each interact in their own way with the various quests.

Gear System. In addition to the normal gear system of light, medium, heavy armor and green, blue, purple quality, they added a gear tier called “custom,” which sports an orange classification color. This gear has no base stats and gets all its properties from upgradable modifications, which means if you find a really good looking robe that you don’t want to lose, you can just buy a new mod for it. You can also change the stat weights – switching from tanking to DPS? Just buy a might mod to replace that guardian mod.

Flashpoints. Like instanced dungeons in WoW, but better in every way. This feels like what WoW was trying to do with the lore-based instances at the end of Wrath and in Cataclysm, but is taken to a whole new level. Each flashpoint has a story that you work your way through and it often takes you to multiple environments as a result. I’ve loved every one of the flashpoints I’ve done so far, so great work on these.

Space Combat. Star Wars meets Starfox. Enough said.

What TOR did poorly

The UI. You know it’s bad when there’s a tip on the loading screen that explains how to reset your UI via hotkey in the event it freezes. You’ll use that hotkey a lot. Additionally, the inability to move any UI elements or change scale, hide elements, etc, feels extremely dated. WoW was already ahead in this regard during it’s beta phase almost eight years ago, and every MMO since then has at least offered some options here – but TOR doesn’t budge. Additionally, they’ve thus far refused to allow addons, and while they say it might happen eventually, I wouldn’t count on them being nearly as powerful as the ones in WoW. Now, to be fair, BioWare has said a lot of these options will be coming – I just don’t see what reason they had for not making it a day one feature.

Fine-tuning. Bugs, bugs, bugs. Falling through the world is not an uncommon occurrence, nor are quests you can’t abandon, story events that don’t properly trigger, resource nodes you can’t mine, invisible walls that trap your character, or the game just crashing. It’s not terrible to the point of being unable to play, but it seems like a studio like Bioware could have done a much better job with the polish given the funding they had from EA on this one. Additionally, some of the individual encounters seem a bit … problematic. The last Jedi Knight story quest, for instance, has been generally agreed upon to be not soloable, despite it being designed to be so. A poor move on the part of the designer, and one that should have been discovered in the QA or beta process.

MMO Amenities. No guild banks? No achievement system? No sorting at vendors or the auction house? No dual spec or easy respec? It feels like there are a lot of things that are just inexplicably missing, though hopefully many will be added as they continue to fill in the gaps.

Republic Gear. Why do Jedi Knights get forced into looking like clownish space samurais? Kira was right, all the fashion designers joined the dark side.

Other thoughts

PVP has been mostly enjoyable so far, though I was sad to see that there is a “PVP” stat, like resilience in WoW, that is featured on gear you buy with PVP rewards. I much prefer a system that allows any gear to be useful, such as Aion’s, where you simply had a flat rule that decreased all damage and healing by a flat amount in PVP. This seems simpler and more elegant to me than having a specialized PVP stat that is only on some gear, and has the additional advantage of making PVP more accessible. The warzones (battlegrounds) are well-designed, though Huttball is often a nightmare with the sheer number of knockbacks that this game has. Still, it wouldn’t be Star Wars if I couldn’t force push you off a cliff or force choke you over a fire trap.

I also feel like at this point in the game, melee is a bit undertuned for the most part – ranged classes all have strong CC and high damage but aren’t really any less tough than their brawler adversaries, which makes getting to them an exercise in frustration quite often.

There is no “honor” or ranking system in place yet, just commendations you win from participating in battle which you can use to buy gear. I’m hoping this is something that comes in a patch soon, because this existing system will get old quickly.

I haven’t gotten a chance to try much endgame content, but I’ve heard good things. My friends who play are mostly not level capped yet, and the server I’m on has a fairly limited population of level 50′s. This is to be expected with such a young MMO, though, so I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve had a chance to interact with it more.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed TOR so far. If you like Star Wars or are looking for a good MMO, I highly recommend it. Look for me on the Kinrath Spider server!

I realized today that there are people who are still unaware of the SOPA and PIPA acts currently trying to make their way through Congress. While it’s hard for me to imagine, apparently there are people who still just watch CNN and so have no idea this exists. To those people, here’s the moral of the story: government does scary things when you are not watching.

People far better at this sort of thing have said everything there is today in all sorts of ways, so rather than discuss the details of what this will do and why you should care, here are some of the more excellent sources I’ve seen:

• Jason Harvey (of reddit.com) gives a technical examination
• TotalBiscuit – WTF is SOPA?
• Fight for the Future – PIPA/SOPA breaks the internet
• EFF – How SOPA/PIPA violates free speech

Now let me tell you why I care.

I believe that the internet is probably the single most game-changing invention in the last hundred years – maybe more. It’s radically changed the way human beings interact with each other, given humanity new access to information and communication that was before undreamed of. The last time there was a game-changer this big, it was Gutenberg and his printing press allowing people access to literature they’d never dreamed of.

Like the DMCA before them, SOPA and PIPA seek to give the American government more and more power and control over what can and cannot happen on the internet. It’s done in the name of “fairness” and “copyright” (an abused term unto itself!) and the phrasing is so poor and permissive you’d think they were trying to upset anyone who’d read the bill. It was written by lobbyists for organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, whose histories show them to be firmly entrenched against progress or free speech, and more than willing to use outright lies to extend their spheres of influence. SOPA and PIPA are two sides of the same ugly coin, and as long as people remain unaware of what is going on, politicians will keep grabbing at power in this arena, because the lobbyists are paying them well to do so.

I have yet to meet someone, even trolls on internet forums, who think SOPA is a good idea. The closest thing I’ve heard to support from anyone outside Washington is, “I hope it will pass so that people get pissed off enough to start a revolution.” I’m a pessimist when it comes to politics, but I don’t want a bloody revolution. I’m not even looking for a candidate to make things better at this point – I’ll gladly settle for someone who won’t make things worse. Stopping SOPA and PIPA are part of that agenda, for me.

For the record, Gingrich and Paul both oppose SOPA.  Romney and Santorum both have given wishy-washy non-answers when asked about it.

As seen on Youtube:

Mitt Romney: Looked great, even though I disagreed with him. Nobody touched him, and the moderators gave him softball after softball. Going after him on the contraceptives issue even allowed him to play the “voice of common sense” – something he is the last person on stage to deserve. However… only he could somehow turn the phrase “Constitutionalist” into a slight.

Rick Santorum: Came off as a petty jerk on a couple of occasions. He needs to stop that. Also, he got a nice soundbite on his “Americans don’t believe in ‘class’” bit. Otherwise he kept the “W”-esque party line carefully, and got some great shots in on Obama. I don’t know that he gained many supporters, but I doubt he loses many either.

Ron Paul: Clarified a couple things for me personally, otherwise, nothing surprising. What was surprising was how many attacks were made on him. I wish he’d spoken a bit more clearly, but his points were made, and directly.

Newt Gingrich: Contributed very little of relevance. Seemed more just an example other people used. One thing that I did think was interesting was that he seemed to be the only one to address his local audience primarily over the national one, using specific examples on occasion.

Rick Perry: “I would send troops back into Iraq!” Bye, dude. You were doing alright until that one.

Jon Huntsman: Surprisingly sensible, and funny too. Too bad he’s irrelevant at this point.

The moderators were embarrassingly bad, and didn’t even try to appear neutral or unbiased.

So, Iowa has come and gone, and we have some fairly interesting results, in my opinion. Looks like Santorum and Romney came out essentially dead even with Paul in a close third. As I write this, the winner’s not yet decided, but really, it doesn’t matter in the overall picture. Romney surprised no one, Santorum suprised a lot of people, and Paul did exactly what the polls said he would.

Now, Iowa has a pretty good record of showing who’ll be the nominee historically on the Democratic side  - but on the Republican side, they picked Huckabee (34%) over McCain (13%) in 2008, and Dole (37%) over Bush Sr. (19%) in 1988. They did get Dole right in 1996 and Bush Jr. in 2000, but if we go back further, they were wrong on Reagan as well. So we can’t really say that, at least recently, this is going to make a huge impact on the chances of those top 5 in regards to November’s results.

What it does do, however, is cut the field to five, and the hopeful field to four, since this was Perry’s best-polling state out of the first five. Bachmann and Huntsman are done, though I’m sure Bachmann will squeeze a few more dollars out of her supporters before tapping out, and anyone hoping for Cain to come back can fuggedaboutit. I think the most surprising thing to me is how strong Santorum polled – I suppose he’s the one receiving the majority of the “oh please don’t let it be Mitt” vote. Romney actually pulled the exact same showing as he did last year, which can’t be an encouraging start in his camp, given he has the huge advantage in name recognition and time spent.

But that Ron Paul… he over doubled his result from last year and came dangerously close to taking it. That’s a bit surprising to me, given how hard the media’s tried to ignore the guy. That said, he was polling ahead of both Romney and Santorum yesterday, though by a narrow margin, which means he’s not grabbing much of the undecided vote. He ended up gaining about 1% in the actual vote, where the other two made up about 6% each – that could be a problem for him going forward. Now, he’s currently polling second in New Hampshire, behind a heavily-favored Romney and just ahead of Gingrich – Santorum is only polling at around 3% there right now

Now assuming Paul stays steady, this makes me think that he may hold on to a strong position as he’s still polling top three in the next few states to hit their primaries, where Santorum and Perry are both doing terribly. Unless Santorum sees a big swing in those states soon, I’d expect Romney, Gingrich, and Paul to be the frontrunners by the end of the month – and given the media’s treatment of Paul thus far, that means we’ll be hearing a lot about Gingrich and Romney.

As it is, I’m already starting to consider Paul the least of the available evils – somewhere I didn’t think I’d see myself a few months ago. Oh what interesting times these are.

Every year I quote one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, as he has written probably the most charming New Years wish I’ve read anywhere. So here’s to you, readers:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Happy new year.

Today, a man of God passed away. He is home with his Father now, and his family rejoices, because they have hope.

Today, a man of God got engaged to the love of his life. His friends rejoice that God has brought together two of his children in such a way.

Today, a man of God stood before a room of hungry believers to teach and used the passing of his wife to forward God’s kingdom.

Today, a man of God spoke to a sports reporter saying emphatically that his excellent performance was not his work but God’s.

Been a pretty awesome day for the Kingdom, I’d say.