Penny Arcade keeps track of videogaming culture so I don’t have to. And PA writer Jerry Holkins like words possibly more than I do, so as an added bonus I get the occasional dose of jargon that I’d otherwise miss out on.

For example: cheevo.

Today’s PA strip (which, for those of you lacking context, is a joke about the recently-announced mild price hike for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold online gaming-and-other-stuff service) brought the word to my attention.

A bit about video game context

Cheevo is shorthand for “achievement”, where (again with the context) an achievement in gaming contexts is some sort of badge-of-honor, otherwise valueless, that recognizes publicly that you have accomplished one or another varyingly difficult tasks in any given game. Kill your thousandth zombie? Achievement unlocked! Escape the sandmines without dying once? Achievement unlocked!

It’s an effective reward system for keeping players more engaged — or engaged longer — in the games they play. Microsoft didn’t invent the idea, but they were instrumental in mainstreaming it with the Xbox Live platform, and now basically any online-capable game platform and even many stand-alone games deploy some sort of achievement system. Parodic metacommentary games have been made. Ostensibly non-game mobile apps like Foursquare have used achievements to motivate users to stay active. Andy Baio, waxy of waxy.org, gave a great talk about gamic motivation earlier this year. The concept of achievement-like systems as abstract motivation for tasks, gaming or otherwise, has permeated the tech periphery of pop culture pretty thoroughly over the last few years.

And while the name may vary from system to system (Playstation maker Sony offers “trophies”, for example, while Foursquare offers “badges”), the name “achievement” has pretty much become the standard reference for all such rewards.

Cheevo?

But, so, yes, to cheevo: I read the strip and got to wondering just where the hell that came from, and when.

That the word exists is no surprise: gamers abbreviate and nickname and jargonize as much as any other group, and maybe more so historically than average given the need in online games to communicate with a minimum of keystrokes to keep one’s twitch muscles available for actual shooting/jumping/spellcasting/etc.

“Cheevo” has a entirely buyable ring to it: it’s kind of twee, sure, but it’s also snappy and easy to connect to the word its derived from, and anyway using a word because you know it’s sort of unsettlingly twee is hardly unheard of. So when did it start?

Doing some googling, the oldest cite I could find was this comment from July 5, 2007 on the gaming site joystiq.com by user “xenocidic”:

clearly it’s still shrinkwrapped as it doesn’t offer easy cheevo’s for his streak !

It’s worth noting that the actual word “achievement” appears nowhere on that page — xenocidic’s use isn’t set up by a prior use by either post author or fellow commenters. That suggests to me that the word was in circulation at least a bit before this, for the word to get used without comment, but that may be assuming too much about the longevity of any given joystiq thread (the comment came the day after the post and is the second to last in the thread) or the reactivity of the joystiq commenterbase to nonce words.

That xenocidic fellow uses it again on joystiq a month later, 8/8/2007:

why not just learn to play a real guitar …

i mean other than the lack of cheevos ~ why not …

and another user quotes and responds to the comment without blinking one way or the other at the usage.

By mid-november of that year, however, joystiq users have started to respond. In a post about the lack of achievements for ported older games, an unnamed user remarked:

seriously, achievements are addictive. We all know that. Some like to say “it’s supposed to be about the game!”. I have to admit that cheevos are and awesome thing, and make a game more fun for me. Speaking of that… just hit 10 grand last night with Assassin’s Creed! w00t!

Another user responds to the content of that comment and reiterates the “cheevos” usage, but then folks start talking about the usage itself, in a mix of word rage, defense, and just-to-annoy-the-annoyed repetition and intentional usage:

I wish people didn’t use the word ‘cheevos’.

CHEEVOS!!!! CHEEVEROONIES! Maybe something a little more l337 for you? Like cH33v0z! w00t!

Signed:
Cheevie McCheeverson

Cheevos

xenocidic himself speaks up at this point:

@btex, I didn’t like the word ‘cheevos’ either the first time I used it, but it’s really grown on me.

try it out sometime.

If I truly voiced how I felt about the bastardization of the word “Achievement” with “‘cheevos”, I would be accused of being prejudiced.

Oh and I’ve never heard anyone refer to Achievements as ‘cheevos’ but now that I have if I ever hear anyone say it again to me I’ll slit their throat, or just teamkill them repeatedly if it’s in a game.

@ Anticrawl… CHEEVOS! Run and grab the razor!

Another victory for slang and abbreviations!

I agree that these games will be bought and enjoyed by some (especially Psychonauts, which everyone seems to be on about), but I think they could have reaped a much bigger audience by including cheevos.

(yes, I said cheevos).

Cheevos.

And away it goes

Most of the early cites I found in 2007 were on joystiq, so it’s possible that site (and maybe xenocidic specifically) can claim some credit for the rise of the word into cultural ubiquity among videogame chatterboxes. By 2008 and certainly 2009 the word seems to have come into common casual usage in gaming discussions in general; the site cheevos.com exists for cheev-related bragging, useful tarpit Urban Dictionary has an entry from early 2009, and not just commenters but staff writers are using the word in headlines and copy.

But it remains conspicuously jargony as well, enough so that people start forum threads to complain about the usage or to assert (as in this thread from a couple months ago) that “cheevos is not a word and its annoying when people use as a replacement for achievement. Its just aggravating.”

And there’s backlash backlash as well, as in the sorta-activist blog Ch33v0 Unlocked, which embraces the usage (and the not-surprising transfiguration of “cheevo” to elite leet 1337 alphanumeric style) and basically celebrates it about as much as a blogspot blog could hope to.

Statistical analysis is fun stuff, and you can do interesting things with it when your goals are reasonable and your methodology is sound. One of the things you can’t really do in any meaningful sense, though, is take a small sample of writing and say what famous writer it is most like without providing a whole lot of caveats.

Which doesn’t stop people from putting up silly toys on the web like I Write Like.

And so you get things like this:

The novelty site in20years.com is making the rounds right now — I saw it this afternoon on Metafilter — and after fiddling with it briefly I got to wondering (or, well, got to doubting) whether they were doing anything interesting with their aging software.

And so I started throwing odd things at it: pictures of infants, pictures of people with odd faces, pictures of things like bananas. It made the babies look awful, the odd people continued looking odd when the site could recognize them as having faces at all, and the banana didn’t get past the initial facial recognition check.

And then I tried throwing a cartoon face at it, and got a glimpse of what’s actually going on: it looks like in20years is just blending one of a handful of pre-rendered facial templates onto the submitted face. I got curious about what all those templates look like, and so I found a very simple line-drawing face via google image search:

…and threw that at the site for each of the possible configurations. The site provides three options for manipulation: gender (male or female), age progression (either 20 or 30 extra years tacked on) and drug addiction (are you methed out?); that’s a total of eight possible output images for the original input, so there’s likely exactly eight pre-rendered source images.

Here’s one of those images, for the Male, 20+, No Drugs configuration:

You can see the face behind the line drawing there, faintly. The aging functionality takes this face and apparently paints it onto the submitted photo, like a kind of high-bit-depth facepaint.

Finding the faces

I wanted a somewhat clearer look at the source images, though, so I took the eight output images, cropped out the extra framing, and did a heavy-handed levels adjustment to produce much higher-contrast images of each.

Here’s the matrix of those images, in two sets, the first with No Drugs and the second with extra addiction.

Male on the left, female on the right, 20+ on the top row and 30+ on the bottom row.

Ditto, with drugs:

So there’s your basic Faces Of Aging. The yes-drugs and no-drugs faces have far more in common with each other as a group than any of the drugs-vs-no-drugs matchups for any age and gender category; gaunt cheeks in the template images and a narrowing of the jaw in the distortion of the source image seem like the main ways in which the software elects to turn someone into an addict.

Facespotting

Of course, the site is also doing some amount of scaling and titling and adjusting for the obliqueness of shots that aren’t perfectly face-forward portraits; to demonstrate this positional work, I threw three slightly modified versions of the line drawing at the site, and produced the following output shots, all at the Male 20 No Drugs configuration:

Tilting the head. The software compensates for rotation in the source photograph.

Head height. The software scales the image vertically/horizontally to roughly match facial dimension.

The most interesting of the bunch — I dislocated the nose of the drawing, and the software interpreted that as an oblique shot, distorting the underlying image a bit to follow the feature as if this was an off-angle portrait.

Add those bits of manipulation to basic x/y positioning within the frame and you’ve got some pretty solid where-to-stick-the-face-paint stuff. That the age manipulation bit is itself so low-tech — just, again, blending one of these template images onto every single face submitted — is sort of a disappointment from an image-processing nerd’s perspective but hardly surprising for a dumb little web toy. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, this thing will do a decent job of making you look like you’ve spent a couple decades smoking either tobacco or crack, depending.

Breaking things

Though while as a toy it works well enough within narrow parameters, it falls down pretty badly on the outliers that the software’s “is this a face” functionality isn’t sufficient to screen out — sure, you can’t do a banana, but you can do a line drawing, and that’s not great since, as above, the results are just a revealing bit of a mess.

You can also do babies:

…which isn’t great either. Or is great, if you want a laugh and don’t mind having it at the expense of in20years.com’s “advanced face detection and morphing technology”. And if ten thousand people link to an awful baby photo on their website, they’re probably laughing right along as well.

Aside from screening failures (line drawings, babies), it’s also possible to produce blending errors; the positional recognition and distortion stuff is pretty good but it’s far from perfect, and so especially in situations where it has to handle more than one kind of distortion and so has more chances to make mistakes, you can get monstrosities like these:

…which, well, heh.

Talking with a friend, it occurred to me that quite possibly the most universally conceived blog idea, if not, thankfully, the one most commonly realized in practice, is some variation on this:

“I should keep track of everything I eat and every time I take a crap.”

Taking a walk through the neighborhood today after breakfast at Red Bicycle, I was greeted on one block of Houghton St. by a trio of dachshunds, two of them running toward me while a third held court on a lawn in the middle of the block.

With all the barking and trotting alongside and earnest looks, they seemed to be torn between an instinct to protect their home turf and some larger gut loyalty to anything human that might acknowledge and validate their eager presences. I felt like a diplomat, ferried along by an involuntary but respectful armed escort from one checkpoint to another.

As the story goes, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was rather messily killed by knights of King Henry II of England on Dec. 29th, 1170, after the king asked from his sickbed, regarding Becket, “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Or maybe “…troublesome priest”. Or “meddlesome priest”?

Or possibly pestilent, pestilential, tiresome, meddling, vexing, worrisome, insolent, accursed, cursed, bothersome, dammed [sic], insufferable, or parish priest. It depends on who you google, though “turbulent”, “troublesome”, and “meddlesome” seem to dominate the more direct discussions of Henry’s query and Becket’s death, and to dominate the snowclonish repurposings of same as the results below suggest.

(Or it may have been “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”, according to Edward Grim, but that’s hardly as snappy or as good for riffing. Repeatability is nine tenths of the meme.)

In any case, Henry and Becket are dead and I’m hardly a historical scholar; but the phrase lives on as a popular snowclone, and I am enthusiastic about snowclones indeed, so I decided this morning to do a little googling and put together a list of the first several dozen riffs on this phrase I could find.

In other words, what sorts of things other than priests do folks on the internet wish they could be rid of, and how, exactly, would said folks characterize said non-priests?

OED TUB TIME MACHINE

But first, a little digression. Now, besides being shit at history, I’m the very layest of lay etymologists, so someone with a better grasp of either would be able to provide more clarifying detail here, but one lurking question about the variation in word-choice in the popular phrases is that of whether any given word was contemporary to Henry II when he was committing his sly bedridden speech act in the late 12th C.

The OED’s cites for “turbulent”, for example, only go back to the 16th and 17th century, four hundred years or so after Henry uttered it.

“Troublesome” similarly has plenty of mid-16th century cites, but nothing earlier. “Trouble” itself has cites back to 1230, though, and “some” is an older word still though I’m having trouble making sense of the OED’s citations of this variant of the “-some” suffix form in particular.

“Meddlesome” has nothing before the early 17th, though “meddle” like “trouble” seems to be roughly contemporary to Henry II.

How much of this is a just a natural symptom of relatively poor records before Gutenberg hit the scene in the mid 15th C. I can’t say. I know a whole lot less than I would like about the practicalities of the work the OED and etymologists in general do.

But, in any case, the path from what Henry II did say to what folks are willing to suggest he said is an interestingly twisty one, the road from Early-Middle English (or Anglo Norman or Old French or whatever Henry was shouting in when under the weather and upset at his holy men) probably being as much one of translation as anything. Assuming, again, that he even said this and not what Grim quotes. (Unfortunately, the historical works of Preston & Logan do not address the subject.)

AVOID THE NOID CLERGY

In order to avoid a pile of references to original line, I used the search string “will no one rid me of this” -”priest”, and looked through the first ten or so pages of results.

I’ve organized the results by type — the big three modifiers, miscellaneous other modifiers, and a handful of versions that eschew the modifier entirely in favor of a bare noun phrase, as well as a note about a structural collision.

There’s an interesting variety here. Some citations are explicitly political or bureaucratic in a way that suggests a very strong intentional nod to the historical root (though with varying moral vectors, from “let’s not be hasty or careless with our words” all the way to “for god’s sake, go eliminate the figurative archbishop already”); others are clearly farther from the source, and it’s worth speculating a little about where the reference is a knowing literary play and where it’s a second-hand play on a phrase unmoored from its origins, and to what degree that can be deduced by the form and presentation of the snowclone.

(One otherwise unremarkable citation I saw attributed the line to Shakespeare. It does feel a little Shakespeare-y to me; on the other hand, it doesn’t feel very Twain-y or Franklin-y. There’s a web game waiting to be made here where quotes (actual, apocryphal, or newly fabricated) are presented to the reader who is then asked to pick between which of those three overly-attributed English figures wrote it up. Another day.)

In any case this is necessarily not an exhaustive list of even what google can find; the hitcount for the search is around 13K, and while that is presumably inflated by omitted duplicates and such I don’t have the patience to try and crawl through the whole list. There are no doubt more examples to be found for the intrepid searcher. And now, the list:

MEDDLESOME

meddlesome Duke
meddlesome PIECE
meddlesome Stiftung
meddlesome beast
meddlesome bow
meddlesome judge
meddlesome man
meddlesome marionette
meddlesome monk (a variant quote of Henry II)
meddlesome mouseketeer
meddlesome officer
meddlesome poop
meddlesome problem
meddlesome slump
meddlesome state trooper
meddlesome student worker
meddlesome transcription
meddlesome woodpecker

TROUBLESOME

troublesome Avenger
troublesome Elmendorf
troublesome Friend (of Courtney Cox)
troublesome bitch
troublesome catcher
troublesome chair
troublesome congress
troublesome cough
troublesome government
troublesome hockey player
troublesome lawmaker
troublesome malware
troublesome man
troublesome plugin
troublesome plumber
troublesome pope
troublesome prelate (another variant quote of Henry II)
troublesome press
troublesome weed
troublesome work

TURBULENT

turbulent Democratic Congress
turbulent Loser (of the reality show)
turbulent Prime Minister
turbulent Red
turbulent SFX Deputy Editor
turbulent author
turbulent bird
turbulent central banker
turbulent chancellor
turbulent judge
turbulent penguin
turbulent picnic table
turbulent snow
turbulent splash screen

MISC. MODIFIERS

bothersome 130-pound diabetic
indolent man
irritating modal fallacy
moose-eating harpy bitch
obstructionist Senate
overrated, overblown, omnipresent celluloid stupidity
pestilential beast
stinking town
termagant wife
tiresome coon
ubiqtuitous frontsman
upstart mouse

UNMODIFIED VARIANTS

Dwarf
annoyance
ex-girlfriend
man
stock
access denied

MUHAMMED REFERENCES

There were also many hits for pages using the forms “…woman” or “…daughter of Marwan”, as a point of citation regarding Muhammed and Islam, on any number of pages taking a generally deeply critical stance re: same.

I’m ten-foot-poling that one; I’ll note the curiosity of the structural overlap with the popular rendering of Henry II, but beyond that you’re on your own if you want to explore it. Let me know if you find anything linguistically or historically interesting.

As I was cleaning up a spare computer to give to a friend yesterday, I found a cache of old files that I thought I’d lost to a hard drive failure years ago.

This is the first entry in the worklog, from June 2003, unedited. I had been at this job for about a year at this point.

6/12/03

7:20 am
I’m pretty tired of clarifying with people that I’m not selling anything. Pretty much every time I talk to a receptionist, I say hi, blah blah blah, and they say, but we already have a contract for our printers, and I say, no, when I said market research I meant MARKET FUCKING RESEARCH, and they say oh, hold on, I’ll transfer you.

7:28 am
It bothers me when part of the work I do involves trying to suppress my natural reaction to another person’s reasonable statement.

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If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

- Voltaire, Épître à l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs

If [John F. Kennedy] didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and then shoot him.

- Rob Sheffield, Vanity Fair

The following is a list of some of the people, groups, places, and varyingly abstract concepts that folks on the internet believe would need to be, in the case of their non-existence, invented, according to Google.

I searched only for cases that matched the (seemingly canonical) English translation that leads this post; there are more lax forms, e.g. “…we’d have to invent him”, that turn up many additional hits if you care to go looking, but I wanted to keep things simple and go for the (arbitrarily?) pure snowclone with this one.

It’s interesting that the intention of any given citation may vary: in some cases (especially with political figures) it seems mostly to be used as a jab at the named figure, or at those who depend on that named figure or group for fodder; with less political figures, it tends to be more of a neutral or even laudatory expression.

The list, in as-the-hits-arrived order:

God
The Twenty-First Century
Osama bin Laden
Civic Intelligence
DPRK
The Internet
The founders
Stephen King
Old 97s
The Codex Seraphinianus
Mignon Fogarty
Minivans
Hippies
Archivists
Evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci
Donald Trump
This Potato Salad
McCain
The Stig
Tom Waits
Joe Lieberman
Ayn Rand
Al Qaeda
Rock Bottom
P.Z. Myers
McDonalds
This website
The PC Controversy
The Mafia
In-ear monitors
Manchester United
William “The Refrigerator” Perry
Christmas
Spacetime
Etruscan
Hong Kong
Mobile telephony
Homosexuals
The Roman Empire

(Previous entry — first entry)

Sunday, May 9
21:00

Engaging landed alien craft in Yukon, Canada. By far the largest craft we’ve seen up close.

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(Previous entry — first entry)

Saturday, May 1
13:08

Animal Squad are on return vector to HQ from the alien base they’ve just routed in Fiji when our intel guys report a terror attack in Beijing. Christ on a crutch.

Deploying the squad from Bram. The vamps. They’re armed and armored and itching for some action; I hope they don’t get more than they can handle.

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