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So i’m kind of glad i wrote the previous entry. If nothing else, i got to read over my assumptions after progressing further in the game. It’s always fun to see how close you were.

The plan was to avoid the game until the weekend struck again, i have too much to do and can’t really afford to obsess over games. I intended to write another entry with further observations and assumptions, and i wasn’t really in a hurry to do it… But it turns out that i’m sick. It’s just a cold, but it feels like it’s going to put me out of action for a while. If i end up having to take tomorrow off work i know i’ll find myself entering Rapture for some more action. Which means i need to get this entry penned, no point writing about my assumptions when i’m tainted by hindsight.

In the last entry i discussed Atlas. I have nothing further to say about him, so i’ll go with the character that’s currently preying on my mind. As before, i’ll try to leave out any plot spoilers but i will talk about characters and basic events so skip this entry if you don’t want to know.

<SPOILERS>

Tenenbaum: Different person, or different personality

Your first “encounter” with Tenenbaum isn’t through conversation with her, you find mention of her in peoples audio diaries as well as locating her own personal recordings.

Her accent appears to be German, and it seems that she spent time in a Nazi Concentration Camp during the war. One of her diaries mentions her willingness to help the German scientists, much to their disbelief. This alludes that she is actually Jewish, and a prisoner of the camp. Tenenbaum states that despite her situation, she believed that the “techniques” should be carried out correctly. This haunting notion gives us an immediate feel of her character. Dark, disjointed, disloyal and dangerous are all words beginning with D that might describe her. We immediately label Tenenbaum as being sociopathic, and barely human. The Germans on the other hand refer to her as ‘Das Wunderkind’. Heh.

Our first real contact with Tenenbaum comes when we are first presented with an unprotected Little Sister. She implores you not to kill the child. Instead giving you a Plasmid which you can use to save her. She is honest about the fact that doing so will not allow you to reap the benefits of harvesting Adam, but to make up for it she offers to help you in any way she can.

Tenenbaums apparent protectiveness of the Little Sister would be an easy concept to accept. If nothing else her maternal instincts make it a fairly natural assumption. But, intrepid explorers can locate a diary (if memory serves, recorded by Suchong - the third person self referencing geneticist) which presents the player with the notion that Tenenbaum has absolutely no problem harvesting (effectively killing) the Little Sisters.

So what happened? It’s hard to get a feel for the passage of time in Bioshock. I’m not sure of the period covering this apparent personality change in Tenenbaum, but i’m fairly sure it’s h not long. So what caused her to turn around? It seems that she helped execute her people during the war.. then apparently invented the Little Sisters, had no problem killing them.. But suddenly she wants them to be kept alive?

Later in the game you get to “meet” with Tenenbaum, before she sends you off on your mission. Much like Atlas her instructions seem to benefit you. It seems that she wants to help, and if you play the game in a similar way to me it’s fairly easy to accept. You help her - she helps you. Unlike Atlas she is rather rude at times.

That is, until she gives you a ridiculous sounding plan. You’re stuck in an area you can’t leave. The door you want to pass through can only be opened by a Little Sister. Tenenbaum informs you that the only way to proceed is to be a Big Daddy. Only then will the Little Sister listen to you.

Okay. Sure. But she’s been having the Little Sisters do things for me in the past.. why can’t she just ask one to help you now?

Again, like Atlas, she does not give the player a choice. She gives the player an order. Become a Big Daddy. It is not explained whether or not the process is reversible. The vocal cord alteration machine i used certainly didn’t LOOK reversible.

The quesiton is.. what’s in it for her if i turn into a Big Daddy? Does she think the added power will help me defeat my enemy? Does she think that it will turn me into her slave (perhaps controlling the Little Sisters will enable her, in turn, to control me?)? Or does she think that as a Big Daddy i will stay with her children, protect them?

Who knows.

My most pressing question is on a slightly different vibe though. I found a diary by Suchong which infers that Tenenbaum is dead. Did she die? Did she fake her death? If it’s the former.. who exactly is this person “helping” me?

I haven’t written in a couple of days because i’ve been pretty busy.
This administration system i’m developing is due for a demo on Sunday morning, so i’m polishing it and sorting out a few additions.

You know you’re working too hard when you start having an existential crisis over variable variables while sitting in the first class section while zooming across the country in a train, and complaining that your code has become “way too abstract”.

Yeah.

The good news is that i have my collectors edition of Bioshock. Though there was some drama getting it. Since i had the day off work today i asked a friend to collect my copy. The shop enthused to me a few days ago that there would be absolutely no problem with that. But, you’ve guessed it, there was. Some employee didn’t want to hand it over, because my friend did not have a receipt. I had to call them from home to explain that i was the first pre-order. The line started with me, and that in the front of his ringbound pre-order folder he’d find a hand written slip with my name on it (which he did). So, long story short, i got my copy. Six inch big daddy statue and everything.

I haven’t played it yet, because i’ve been forcing myself to work. How’s that for willpower?

In other news, i’m really enjoying a show on The History Channel called Human Weapon and the latest episode airs tonight. Sadly that’s “tonight” in America. It’s already “tomorrow” (01:46) here in Scotland and i’m shattered. I don’t think i can stay up till it hits the torrent sites. Bleh. As you can discover by clicking the link i’ve provided, it’s a martial arts show - a subject i have much interest in.

Oh! My new connection got enabled today. Brand spanking new ADSL2. It’s rated for “up to 24mb” but at the moment i’m getting just over 16.

I spent ages staring at:

Till finally i got desperate and called up and asked for an ETA. I was told “sometime before 9pm”, which was lovely to hear except that i called at mid day, so i had anything up to 9 bloody hours to wait. Thankfully it kicked in just after lunch, and it wasn’t long before i saw:

That’s one point six MEGABYTES a second.

We’ve always suffered from slow connections here in the UK, because we were dominated by one telecoms company. In America there has always been a lot of competition to drive prices down, so people have been used to things like “free local calls” for as long as they can remember. We on the other hand got to enjoy extortionate prices and dial-up internet for wayyy too long. It all began to change when Ofcom (or possibly Oftel at the time) forced British Telecom to give other companies access to it’s telephone exchanges. Other companies could step in and install their own equipment. Offer their customers new exciting things. Provide some much needed competition.

The horror of dial up still lingers in my mind during dark and stormy nights, no matter how much i try to suppress the memories. When MP3s became popular, and we were all stuck on 32kbps or 56kbps modems it was a luxury to download a couple of them. We were so used to the speeds that it was common parlance for us to refer to 1 megabyte of data as “five minutes”, seeing as that was how much time it would take to download. A three megabyte MP3 would have taken fifteen minutes to download. Though i shaved off quite a bit of time because i insisted on using external modems (because internal “software” modems shared your CPU, and could cause a fair bit of slowdown.. or be affected themselves if you were doing something resource intensive like.. playing tomb raider 1) and had a high end ISP.

The point i’m struggling to make is that these recollections are ingrained in me, and it still boggles my mind to think that i can now download in two seconds, something that would’ve taken fifteen when i was in school.

Sick.

When we first had access to DSL in my area i signed us up to an ISP who happily stuck with their unlimited use policy. This was important to me because now that i had ultra fast broadband (512kbps.. yeah) i planned to download everything i had ever desired. We stuck with this company for years, slowly upgrading as the tech was available. Eventually we got to a claimed speed of 8mbps (though in actuality we weren’t getting nearly that much bandwidth), and with that speed bump i learned that the company had changed some things around. Most importantly their policy regarding usage. No longer did you have the luxury of “unlimited”, now things were very much limited. 13 gigabytes of downloads a month before they’d start imposing limits on your account. Thirteen gigabytes a month!! To put that into perspective i just checked my modem stats: The modem has been running for pretty much dead on 12 hours, and in that time i’ve downloaded just over 12 gigabytes.

So we’ve established that my monthly limit was lousy. But that wasn’t the only problem. The ISP also implemented strict traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the notion of detecting and categorising different types of network use (like web surfing, video use, peer to peer downloads, gaming, etc) and allowing them certain percentages of bandwidth use. Web traffic for example would be given the largest percentage of the network traffic because it’s the most important, but peer to peer downloading would be given the smallest because it’s disruptive to other users and potentially criminal. It’s all well and good on paper, but it is absolutely disgusting to fire up a torrent and discover you’re getting something like 800 BYTES per second. Not megabytes, not even kilobytes.. just bytes. I could fax the data and get a better transfer rate.

To contrast that, here’s the transfer rate i got in bittorrent earlier today:

Yeah. It’s a big difference.

I’m rediscovering what it’s like to have a bit of freedom on the internet. I can download new game demos on my Xbox 360 without feeling guilty. I can watch streaming videos. I can download linux distributions. Freedom.

I got a bit carried away with my ranting here, it’s 02:21 and i really should be sleeping, this was only going to be a tiny quick post. Heh.

Goodnight.