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Men Are Stupid

You may recall hearing that there is a wage gap, usually something around 27 cents on the dollar. That is the difference between median wage earners, not men and women with comparable qualifications working comparable jobs. Once you take into account things like education, experience, hours worked, and years of continuous work, the gap drops to a few cents (depending on your regression). The remaining difference is explained by the fact that men are stupid.

Men are more likely to sacrifice quality of life for a higher wage. Men take jobs with longer hours, in worse working conditions, and with a higher risk of being killed. Women tend to prefer flexible scheduling, comfort and convenience in the workplace, and fringe benefits. Ask 20 men and 20 women how much they would need to get paid for (1) an additional 5% risk of getting maimed this year and (2) to work without air conditioning, and see which sex comes back with the lower dollar amount. If you said, “My job doesn’t have air conditioning,” you are probably male, and you took the money.

Note which of those things above are taxable. Just one: money. You paid for your new video card with after-tax dollars; the hours you spent earning those, your female equivalent was already logged in and leveling her warlock, tax-free. She found some crafting components while leveling, which you bought at the auction house with gold you bought from a farmer. She won twice before you started playing.

Men are helpless slaves to the big number, the shiny object. You are grinding for hours until you cannot see, while your wife has a good time laughing with people at the tavern. When the raid starts, they will take her over you because she plays a healer. She won twice again.

: Zubon

Recall Team

Positron announced that the 42 month Veteran Reward would be Recall Team, the group summon power you get from the Steel Canyon Safeguard/Mayhem Mission. For those not in CoX, this teleports everyone in your group in the zone to your location. Very useful, even 1/30 minutes.

Given my breaks from the game every few months, I will be getting this in … maybe 2009? Crap.

: Zubon

Why I Need a Job in the Industry

I need to work around programmers or engineers so that I am no longer unofficial tech support for the office. I need co-workers who understand the power of right-clicking. I spent a while today explaining that you can have multiple folders with the same name, and if you save a file in the folder on your C: drive, it will not be in the folder of the same name on the shared drive. No, that is not a conflict between Word and your e-mail program.

At my next job, I am telling them I don’t know how to type. “The computer has speakers, why won’t it respond to voice commands?”

: Zubon

Ultima Online, Mythic Layoffs

According to Destructoid, members of the UO dev team as well as some developers at Mythic have been laid off and the rest of team has been moved from the Redwood Shores, CA studio to Mythic’s Fairfax, VA. UO, Dark Age Of Camelot and Warhammer Online will continue but more layoffs are expected throughout these and other Electronic Arts studios.

Housing Glut?

housesI wish. Take a look at the screen shot and you’ll see how Turbine messed up housing (I know you are all shocked). This is a listing of the available neighborhoods. The first column is standard houses, the second is deluxe houses and the third is Kinship housing. I can only afford a standard house. See all those zeros in the first column? The only two houses that are still available are the same house lot and I don’t like it (it would seem nobody else does either). I’ve got a list of 5 or 6 houses that would be nice to have, but until the deluxe and Kinship houses start selling, I shall remain homeless because they will not open a new instance until the old ones sell (clarification: ALL the houses do not need to sell before they open new neighborhoods. I’m not sure what method they use, but that is not it). I don’t understand why they thought it was wise to put that many Kinship houses in each neighborhood.

Still, the neighborhoods are very well done and it’s fun to run around in them. I just wish they would have put them closer to a real town. Also, the fact they put farmland and a town center in each neighborhood means they are seriously considering adding crafting abilities to them, which would be a Very Bad Idea.

– Ethic

Character Contemplations 2: Zubon (Empathy/Electricity Blast Defender)

Healer for HireIn every game, I have a healer named Zubon. Empathy is the classic healing set in City of Heroes, so Zubon is an empath. I went with electricity because it comes with endurance drain: an enemy who cannot activate his attacks cannot hurt anyone.

The life of a Defender is interesting. As with most healers, everyone wants to have them on the team, but no one wants to be them. As an actual healer, an empath is in great demand amongst people trained on other MMOs. Solo ability is low, but he brings a lot to a team.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 2: Zubon (Empathy/Electricity Blast Defender)

In the Valley, Fer Sure

So, having wrapped up my affairs in Middle Earth, I’ve returned when possible to Azeroth. Sadly, my life schedule continues to allow me little time for playing, but two forced weeks of staying at home let me get into it fairly deeply. I’ve always been more of a social player, and so returning to guildmates and friends was nice. I managed to run the Headless Horseman event a few hundred times to ensure everyone had what they needed (sans a pet for me, or any guildmate *sigh), but what I’ve been doing mostly is PvP, specifically, Alterac Valley by the truckload. Because that’s where honor grinders come when honor grinding is needed. I’ll explain that in a minute, but the wierd part is I’m actually enjoying it.

Ya, I know, right?

Continue reading In the Valley, Fer Sure

Nancy Drew more popular than WoW; EA doesn’t know what a PC is

I have a theory about game industry execs…most of them are pretty dumb. Sure, I’ve met a lot of really smart guys that “get it” and are just totally awesome. There are a few that I look up to and I try to follow their example in business, design, etc. But there are so many idiots out there that have either gotten their position by dumb luck, the ideas and work of others, or simply being in the right place at the right time, that the joke about the stereotype is actually pretty right on the mark in a lot of cases.

This is pretty self-evident in the industry. How many times have you seen a press release that has left you scratching your head and thinking “wtf?”. This usually happens when someone cancels a project or title that everyone is just dying for, or some stupid concept is greenlighted and given an outrageous budget, and the list goes on.

But I digress, lets talk about Nancy Drew for a moment, and then on to EA.
Continue reading Nancy Drew more popular than WoW; EA doesn’t know what a PC is

EVE Online – Security Breached

EVE Online had some unexplained downtime last weekend. Now it has been explained:

…we discovered an anomaly in the EVE Online Database indicating a potential exploit. Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 12:57 that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely dark while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed.

What we discovered was an indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach…

Read the rest here. CCP sure gets their share of controversy.

– Ethic