Category: General

I had a chance to talk to R. A. Salvatore this weekend, and he was rather excited about taking storytelling online at Green Monster Games. I had forgotten that he was involved. It was one of those press release things that I see and forget in the stream of PR. The main thing I noticed about Green Monster was their recruiting Grouchy Gnome. Is it odd that I mentally skipped the announcements about Todd McFarlane and R. A. Salvatore but seized upon Ryan Shwayder? I never even played EQ, I just like his blog.

Since he brought up the subject, I asked when Green Monster Games expected to have something to announce. Two or three years, they are laying the groundwork now. You have no idea how happy that makes me. We see a lot of games announcing before they have enough funding to get them to release. We see companies writing half their code before they work out their major design documents, then try to shoehorn things together as they can. Here we have a company that is privately financed, can take the time to be satisfied before releasing, and is getting its big pieces in place before developing or announcing everything.

That is what I liked about the Earth Eternal announcement: they have the money and are not talking about vapor four years away (H/T Raph). Let’s have a cheer for companies that are not seeking useless attention!

: Zubon

I received the following message: “[Tell]NAME: do u have timothy raymand???”

Part of me wants to send an unhelpful message back, or taunt him with the fact that I know exactly what he wants but have already exhausted it. I want to explain to this poor, delicate soul what impression you create when you want something from someone but cannot be bothered to capitalize, spell it correctly, or be polite. If you are going to spam everyone in a level range, you can take the time to write out something like, “/tell $target, Excuse me, but I am looking for the Exterminator badge mission (Eliminate Kit’Vul), which I need to finish an accolade. By any chance do you have it or the contact Timothy Raymond available?” Maybe if I just mentioned the effect created by using three question marks?

But mostly I am thinking that this fellow is going to get a date someday. Some poor girl is going to look at him and think, “This is really the best that I can do.” My heart aches for her.

: Zubon

Having been referred to xkcd by multiple sources, I wanted to share some of the amusing strips done there, but I was having trouble finding my gaming link. But wait, City of Heroes players, we have Hami-Os! Or close enough…

And then, while typing this, I remembered that there are several strips about Katamari Damacy and the internet. But hey, why go for the easy link when we can struggle for relevance?

: Zubon

So since the boss here has tagged all of us collectively, plus a few other sites have tagged us, I think I’m officially out of people to tag, assuming I use people I actually know…

That said, I can at least participate in the spirit of the thing, right?

Continue reading Last kid on the playground

[Second Life] My wife gave her presentation about MySpace in libraries in Second Life last night. That part of Information Island has a cap on how many people can be there, to prevent lag/crashes/whatever. Attendance was so high that they had to increase the cap. Yes, my wife beat the level cap in Second Life. No Anshe-esque activity was observed.

I have been wondering what organizations with a Second Life presence will do when the inevitable backlash hits. At some point, the story will be that there is sex! in a game! on the Interweb! that children could be playing! and no one is doing anything to stop it! Do you want your child to be cyber rape porned?! We must do something about it! For the children! “Excuse me, but why has your company/library/whatever set up shop in a ‘virtual world’ that is trying to lure children into sexual games? Is that what your company/library/whatever is all about, child molestation and kiddie porn?” The librarians I know would probably see this as a great educational opportunity, in which we can teach people about the internet and virtual worlds and other things that do not fit in a snappy soundbite like “library facilitates child molestation.” Who wants to place bets on “reasoned discussion and education” versus “internet perverts are coming for your children”?

: Zubon

Our dear friend Grouchy Gnome has said a nice thing about us. Accordingly, Ethic has enshrined it before he thinks better of it. Mike Nichols, director of Spamalot, perhaps said it best:

My love to those who have not won tonight and I just want to remind you of my motto: ‘Cheer up, life isn’t everything!’

: Zubon

Abandoning all pretenses of responsible journalism, I am taking this blog post with no links or sourcing as an explanation of what happened with net neutrality and AT&T. Quickly: net neutrality for two years was a concession allowing a telecom merger. This prevents AT&T from either setting up a protection racket to extract funds from content providers or building additional premium services for those providers. Well, they can add more specifically for Google or Amazon, they just cannot charge more for it. Well, they can charge you more for it, just not the content providers. Also, it does not apply to wireless or video services.

We will see what happens in two years. Re-re-regulating something before it sunsets seems easy enough, so I do not know whether we should expect AT&T to be acting as if net neutrality were permanent or going away in two years. Unless you have a lobbyist of your own, you can wait to see which company’s lobbyists win the next round; AT&T is probably the favorite in that fight. Franchise reform is going better than I had hoped, so it may be moot in two years, but that is currently for cable TV not cable modems. The earlier post seems to think the problem will move in the other direction, with our series of tubes becoming too clogged for e-mail to get through.

: Zubon

Trying to find 5 things you don’t know about me is easy enough as most everyone that reads this site knows nothing at all about me. Generally, I kind of like it that way so when Heartless_, Cosmik and Relmstein tagged me (and the rest of the KTR gang) to participate in this strange game I was a bit perplexed. Therefore I have decided to try to find 5 somewhat interesting things without getting too personal and then I’ll tag a few more people just to keep the world pissed off.

Continue reading Lets Get This Over With

Just got back after finishing my first MMORLG (Massively Multiplayer Offline Real Life Game) called “Walt Disney World”. It took eight full days and it was very fun, but there was a lot of walking involved. We had many quests to do and most of them were a blast. They had transportation hubs that allowed you to take a mechanical “bus” to get from zone to zone without having to walk there first. Made getting around a little easier.

There were a lot of other people playing so we had some lag while walking as well as queues for many of the quests. They did have a feature where you could go to a quest area and get a “fastpass” which basically allowed you to reserve a spot in a group at a later time. Then if you came back at that time you could go right ahead with the quest, skipping the queue.

There was a lot of loot to be had, but most of it required RMT. In fact, after you finished almost every quest, the only rewards you could get had to be purchased with real money. I was able to play in a group with my whole family most of the time and only occasionally did they require us to split up. The funny thing is, the barrier to grouping was based on height more than our individual level.

Now that I am done with that game, I’ll get back on track with my posts here – including the “meme” threads going around. Yeah.

– Ethic

Lake Superior State University has called for the retirement of the word “pwn” in 2007. Those are surely our people on the committee deciding such things, because I promise you that my mother, boss, and state senator do not know the term. Then again, they called for the demise of “blog” for 2005, but I hear this blogging thing is catching on. “LOL” and “bots” are still going strong, but after eight years, large parts of the online world have wiped out “that’s gay,” in favor of “that’s ghey.” Progress!

: Zubon