I am Benjamin Button

Picking up objects, crafting and hitching your horse are three things that take too long in Red Dead Redemption 2. As for the first, adopting a Bethesda-like system would be ideal (i.e. you click on a storage 'object' (a wardrobe, a basket, a box, or a corpse), and you immediately see a list of things contained therein, any or all of which you can expropriate at a click). And there should be more creativity in quest design. Fewer shoot-em-up quests, somewhat less mandatory horse-riding, and a little less handholding (quest markers with fewer quest instructions). Ultimately, I should say I was pretty impressed with the main story, which, though very tiresome in parts and definitely too long and repetitive on the whole, was ultimately (as in, when you finally fucking got near the end, in particular, started helping out Rains Fall) quite rewarding and somewhat moving. The moral awakening that Arthur underwent in the story-trajectory I was in felt geninely authentic, seeing as the game wore on, I completely stopped doing anything violent or morally abhorrent outside of the depredations required by most of the quests and also completed a flurry of altruistic sidequests in the lategame (and therefore had perfect honour, occasionally dipping to the next-lowest tier every time I accidentally ran over someone or pressed the right button at slightly the wrong time, etc).

Ultimately, it was a stupid experience and I hopefully won't buy another video game for a year or more. And the game had a godawful start. Chapter One is terrible, and very boring. Also, I suspect I am one of many players who was at the peak of their wealth in Chapter 4. This leads to issues in Arthur's final interactions with Mary Linton, because Arthur says he'll leave the gang and go live with her in blissful matrimony or whatever, as soon as he gets a bit more money to afford such a life... When he clearly has enough money to probably buy a comfortable cabin or whatnot... and then could easily just get a real job once he's bought that, and commit a petty crime every now and then. Anyway, I really wanted to just opt out of the quests at that point and go live with Mary... Such is life.

Just as it was when I was 10 years old, I have spent these holidays obsessed with two things: cricket and that aforementioned video game. I have now pretty much stopped playing that video game and am just obsessed with cricket. I guess I have also done a smidgeon of reading, but mostly it's been cricket. And really as a spectator/analyst first, player second (not to discount how much I have been enjoying playing recently, which is a vast amount). I am involved in the Big Bash Super Coach competition, and at the end of Round 3, I made it into the top 1000. I have since fallen way back, but I hope to claw back some of that glory in the tail end of the competition. More significantly, I have been working on a big cricket modelling project. I worked out how to scrape the Cricinfo Statsguru tables into .csv files, and used my script for scraping the basic details of every ODI match since 1 January 2014 involving a team that's going to play in the upcoming World Cup in England. I first painstakingly classified each win according to three grades ("Close", "Comfortable", "Comprehensive") defined by a simple system of my own making. To this data, I have added columns for whether the winning team was home or away, for recording the contemporary rankings of the two teams, and am working on filling the columns for recording the respective 'batting strength' and 'bowling strength' of each team. These other columns are far more painstaking since I can't find an easy way to automate their entry (because the measures do not naturally 'emerge from' the archived player ranking data I'm using (I've lazily (but not necessarily wrongly) used semiannual data with different months for the team ranking and the player ranking data)). I probably could slightly automate this process but sometimes one gets a little afraid of how long it would take to work out how to do something that one shrinks from the challenge altogether. I'm a little worried at the moment that my batting strength measure is slightly biased in favour of Australia simply because Australia seems to have rotated its batters much more than the other top batting nations in recent ODI history (more than SA and India) and therefore has a lot of batters in the Top 100 Rankings at any given time, for which I give Australia more 'points' according to the scoring system I've designed (they're weighted lower lower down but the sheer number still markedly benefits Australia...plus I decided to cap the amount of batsmen for which a nation can be given points to 10 and I filled in a bunch of data on that basis, but now I'm thinking that it should be more like 8... but I'm not going to change this again because this would kill me). I mean, one could very well argue that the fact that twelve Australian ODI batsmen were in the top 100 rankings throughout 2014 is just a testament to Australia's superior batting depth at the time and Australia deserves to have the highest 'batting strength' measure at that time, but that feels wrong to me, when you consider how insanely strong India and South Africa's ODI batting core was at that time (Kohli, Dhoni, Dhawan, Sharma; de Villiers, Amla, de Kock, du Plessis), against a weaker Australia's core (Bailey, Watson, Clarke, Maxwell (not to imply these weren't very decent ODI players at that time, just not as good)). And the core are the ones who play most of the games...

What I am trying to eventually do with all this data is do some statistical analysis to help me sort out what are the most important factors determining an ODI victory (I also need to eventually include toss data, and the significance of day games versus day-night games when it comes to the choices made at the toss) and then from there, I might be able to develop a respectable prediction model for the upcoming World Cup (I probably also want to do a more targeted analysis of the relative performances of each team in England versus their baseline). I would ultimately like to produce something that assigns a probability of victory for Team X against Team Y, and also a probability of each different grade of victory, and then put these on a nice website 538-style. I thought initially I might be able to finish the bulk of this project (ignoring web design or whatnot) in a couple of weeks, but I'm still stuck on fucking data entry.
I mean, on the whole, it's probably a more sensible project than the other one I thought I was going to spend my holiday doing: namely, making Spike Jonze's Her a reality (I mean, of course, I'm not so insane as to think I could do anything remotely like that, but I got excited about the idea of making a rudimentary English-language parser after making a rudimentary parser for a simple LL(1) grammar for a computer science subject... and maybe that is something I should try to work on, but it's probably too ambitious).

Anyway, what I'm saying here is that I feel like I'm 10 years old again. And I'm extremely happy for the most part. No angst, no need to write on this dumb fucking blog. And I have little to no idea why I'm writing this piece of shit post. The only downside of this holiday is that I stopped working at my annoying job just before it started and I haven't had a job now for a while... Which can get a bit boring. I'm hoping this cricket thing can eventually make me money. Fingers crossed.