Now where was I . . .

<saltygirl> these are awesome pretzels
<saltygirl> when i build my 2000ft airship and roam the world in search of treasure
<saltygirl> these are the pretzels i will eat

It's a strange day

No colours or shapes

No sound in my head

I forget who I am

When I'm with you

Now where was I . . .

Apologies once again for the sporadic updating. I've been rather up to my ears lately with my lovely allyring wife completing two masters degrees this month and a deadline of sorts looming for myself as well. Meanwhile I am now calling up Verizon to complain about their DSL non-service on an almost daily basis - no exaggeration.

Verizon really blows

I am going to vent now. You have been warned. Skip this if you don't want to read me venting.

When Verizon materialized out of the merger (cannibalism?) of GTE and Pacific Bell, it seemed for a while that the disgusting incompetence and unprofessionalism for which I've known GTE might be a thing of the past. For instance, the people who answered the phone would actually admit to the possibility of problems existing at their end. Sometimes they would know how to communicate in an efficient way with the people who do actual work for the company. (Answering phones is only work if you have a grasp of the subject matter your customers have called to discuss.) The technicians who came by the house to figure out what was wrong with their lousy system were no longer as likely to complain to me about how incompetent the previous technicians had been.

I'm reminded of the new Sbarro that took something like a year to move into the strip mall at the other end of town. Its impending arrival was posted where it was to be constructed, and they took forever. When finally completed, the big room between Software Etc. and Sharper Image - a room which had formerly a B. Dalton Booksellers - was tricked out like it was God's gift to high class dining. Marble tabletops and floor, stupidly high ceiling, fancy tall chairs and tables set up by those windows whose proper term I refuse to look up. An insane amount of money had been spent to make this place look high class and expensive - a chain pizza & pasta place I used to stop at on drives from Philadelphia to Fairfax and back; a restaurant which shared buffet infrastructure with Bob's Big Boy. Perhaps if you can imagine a Denny's dressed up to look like the UNATCO headquarters in Deus Ex, you can imagine the absurdity of this.

Well of course, in their excitement at creating a Classy Joint the proprietors forgot that not only to objects in the world break, but people go to restaurants to eat food. If you were to walk in there this weekend, you would find somewhere around two dozen fancy pants marble tabletops from which the glass covers have been taken, leaving the torn cork and adhesive which had held them on. If you decide you'd like to sit at once of these tables, you will eat either 1) pizza or 2) pizza which has been folded in half, because you will likely be the only customer they have during that hour. In their excitement and the pretentious act of strutting around thrusting out their youth and all that capital, they somehow ran out of money and can no longer actually provide a service to anyone. This is why no one replaces broken soap containers in bathrooms or fixes their store signs, why no one ever washes the rug at a bookstore unless the actual person who thought up the name of that bookstore lives within walking distance of it. It is why the other day when I spoke with one of the monkeys at our alarm service I was told, in all seriousness, that when Verizon unexpectedly cuts off our phone service for an indefinite amount of time, how will the people who monitor alarms know? because the alarm system has no way of contacting them to tell them the phone line has been cut.

And it is why, after what must by now total thirty or forty separate incidents and calls to Verizon's customer non-service, to this day no one there has thought to leave a note on the account to anyone else there, about anything, even the simple fact that we've now been told thirty or forty times to try rebooting the computer. Or that if they're going to sever our phone connection again in order to not fix the problem, it would be nice for them to warn us first so that we can let the alarm service know we won't be needing them to not do anything about it, should their system happen to do what it's supposed to do on the rare occasion that a human being with a functioning brain is present at the monitoring station to notice.

StarCraft

That's my other excuse. StarCraft. For a while there I was being dragged into numerous giant matches of this game on an more or less nightly basis. Fortunately it by now has broken down into a confusing ruin of bruised egos, hurt feelings, people refusing to play if other people are playing, undignified whining about other people's tactics, etc, etc, etc. The moral of the story is don't play fucking StarCraft. It's a great goddam game, but if you play it with your friends - ever see Storm of the Century? It'll be like that. You'll find out the hard way you have bad taste in friends and that our culture as a whole seems to be held together by a weak framework of nervousness, fronting, and bullshit.

StarCraft

Which brings me to the idea I had a while back which I am thinking of investigating more seriously in the coming weeks. In short, it would be a new series of scenario games based on a closed membership. This would allow us to have as many people contributing to the games as intend to play them. It would remove the potential for confusion and rudeness because players who won't follow directions or observe rules can simply be thrown out permanently, thus avoiding the chaos and time wasting that frankly makes scenario games not worth doing under normal circumstances.

Most importantly perhaps, maintaining an ongoing requirement that players understand the rules of the game they are playing means we can base games upon rules which would otherwise be unenforceable. By that same token, in theory such games could be unlimited by server capacity and scheduling problems - hell, we could hold linked games simultaneously in Subspace and Cosmic Rift if we wanted to. We wouldn't even need moderator status in a given zone or game to hold the events there.

I'd like to start this off with a small group if we do it at all, and expand that group by means of people actually becoming interested on their own rather than having to be sold the idea that something is a special event, and otherwise having to be talked into attending.

If anyone out there is interested by the possibility of playing scenarios in a way Subspace hasn't seen before - a community effort for the simple purpose of having fun and bettering the game culture generally, rather than another chaotic incarnation of another stale game type intended to promote a specific zone - let's discuss it. Maybe we'll wind up doing nothing more than playing All the King's Men on a Heretic II server, but it seems worth a shot to me. Hopefully by the end of June I'll have my recent annoyances behind me and be able to put in real time and energy if there are others who'd like to see something like this start up.