Anyway . . .

<Roseo|Work> The controller looks like someone left a pile of jellybeans in the sun too long

O the dragons are gonna fly tonight

They're circling low and inside tonight 

It's another round in the losing fight 

Out along the great divide tonight

Anyway
They fixed Anarchy Online, sort of. I wrote the preamble to a review some time ago for Gamehacker and never got around to writing the actual review since the preamble mysteriously vanished in the same way that this page mysteriously vanished.

Since I no longer wanted to write the review, I sort of forgot to keep playing the game. It was no fun. Especially it starts out no fun, with new players imprisoned in a non-massive, usually non-multiplayer area I came to refer to as the Newbie Hutch.

Along came my friend Dariakus, purchasing the game on the strength of my lack of enthusiasm for it, and soon it seems like everyone around me is playing the thing. So that's what happened to me. The same bug that gobbled up Rod Humble two years ago finally got around to me. Of course there are major differences between EverQuest and Anarchy Online. The first and - sue me - most important is - finally - the graphics. It's become a little irritating to read comparisons between ugly graphical MUDs and beautifully written text MUDs. Especially offensive to me is the assertion that the imagery communicated by that text is not graphic or vivid, cannot be measured against the content of a graphical mud, and is either superior or inferior because of its form rather than its content.

To my mind, Anarchy Online proves this isn't true. Finally we have a graphical MUD that is more vivid and prettier than its text counterparts, not because it is graphical but because of the stylishness of its design and the professional quality of its execution. A curious thing happens: Players share common points of reference, experience immersion in and respect for the world around them, and the conversations and actions between them become a text MUD of sorts within the graphical context - actual roleplaying, and by this I mean not making stuff up but interacting honestly with what is around them as though those things were real. As a result, mundane details and made-up storeis are replaced with convincing discussion of the world and debate over its events and politics.

It's like Subspace, with cities instead of web pages.

Segue to the all important issue of Cosmic Rift, the last of its kind.

It was with some enthusiasm I learned today that the new zone, whose name has now escaped me, had gone up at some point in the recent past. It sounded somewhat promising based on the description. Sounded as though some interesting things would happen in that zone. So I tried it out.

Shortly after entering the zone I experienced a crushing fatigue such as I can't compare to any recent gaming experience. I remember some years ago I was made to sit at a table full of graduate students in music theory. Watching and then playing in this zone was something like that. I can't criticize the game because I didn't give it even the beginnings of a chance. Other people seemed to enjoy it. I was first struck by the complete lack of terrain (read: "wall in space") in the zone. Apparently the Cosmic Rift team is shooting for gritty realism or something. I'll try and force myself to play it later. Right now things look pretty bleak to me.

Two pithy additional comments about Anarchy Online. It pretty much works right finally, though it literally requires 256 megs of RAM to run properly. (Fortunately, the stuff is dirt cheap right now.) And 95% of the screenshots I've seen from it are terrible, including all the ones on the box. They make a gorgeous game look like another EverQuest or Asheron's Call, and it's not one.

Another months with one update. Let's see if I can double that in this next month.

My thanks to anyone who still checks here.

Where was I?

<Phyrian> You're on jury duty?
<Phyrian> Hmm
<Phyrian> Do they still have laws in California?  

 Met Jesus up on a hill
He confessed I was dressed to kill
Saw fear eternal in his eyes
He's seen what happens when the soul dies

Where was I?
I have this crazy theory. Maybe it's not me who's lazy and boring; it's you, and you just can't see it that way through the tunnelvision of your preconceived reality.

Long story short, my wife recently finished graduate school and I feel like I just got out of prison. Not a normal prison either, but the kind they build on asteroids in the future. Too bad there aren't any movies for us to go see. Remember back when people would get together and make movies, and they would show those movies to other people at a common gathering place, and that second group of people would react with laughter or fright or joy or sadness? Those were the days, weren't they.

I have things to say about stuff other than Subspace, and a little bit to say about Subspace but mainly stuff to do in Subspace. We'll discuss that later. My apologies for not having addressed the missing-ness of this page for a full month now, and many many thank-yous to the Mackieman for taking me in and setting me up here.

By the way, I did update in June; I just forgot to upload one time and the other time I found my account was gone. :P So there's a little bit more in the June archive if anyone's aching to know what I thought during June.

I'm out of time. See y'all in September. ;)

How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?

<repvblic> every teenager should be issued a copy of seasons in the abyss

Can't wait any longer

To see what you see

When I look at the world

How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?
C.M. Forester said that, not me. It's odd how verbose I can be when not updating my own damned webpage. I've been all over the Cosmic Rift boards lately. There's a lot going on with that game and a lot that needs to be addressed, including a few disappointments.

I'm going to keep this update small because I am neurotic about the midnight thing. Hopefully will have something a little more in depth up tomorrow sometime, but there's something important I want to mention here, which is that they are answering the complaints about ship sizes with a new set of smaller ships which apparently go online tomorrow for public testing.

Related to this, Jeff has made the message window and the player listing transparent and easily hidden, so that almost the entire screen can now be dedicated to gameplay.

There should be an open test zone up sometime tomorrow where you can try these out. I urge everyone who gave up on CR because of these problems to give it another try with the new ships.

For now I'll stay off the subject of me objecting to this. :P

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.

Hmm . . .

<saltygirl> but why is it silly to carry a hatchet?
<saltygirl> uncle buck had one!
<saltygirl> but his was bigger than mine
<saltygirl> mine's a small feminine attack hatchet
<saltygirl> the split your skull in two type

We're pilots watching the stars

Who do we think we are?

Hmm . . .
I'm kind of pissed, cuz tho it's my own fault I never got around to updating this month, I thought my most recent update was at least worth getting some feedback over. Only today did I realize I never posted the damned thing for a number of reasons.

Long story short, being married to someone who is finishing a masters degree takes up a hell of a lot more time than one might think. Now that that chapter's pretty much done with and my ongoing connection woes seem to be on hiatus for the moment, maybe I'll be able to consistently play something other than Super Nintendo roms. I'll probably spend the time playing Quake as usual, but you never know.

The update I never posted will go in the archives, but I do have this to say. I'm thinking of doing some new events now that the Summer is underway and I have quite a bit more free time at my disposal, and it's occurred to me that if we were to make it more of a floating, rotating sort of club than an event per se, we could eliminate 90% of the chaos and achieve greater more drama with fewer people. Check the archive if this interests you. I'd repeat it here but I think that's my only other update this month and I'd rather not have the same stuff in every update of the archive.

On that note, I'm going to fuck around some with the SCF main arena. I've been simmering a new Turf variant on the back burner for a while and might jump into that head first. Anyone interested in helping with ideas, give a shout.

Oh, for anyone who ever wondered what happened to Bridge Builder, the page is back up. I heard tell the guy was threatened with a lawsuit over the name. Amazing to me that more people want the new name to be Bridge Constructor than Suicide Train. At any rate the game's available again here.

I've started playing Anarchy Online. God I hate fighting mobs. Running around in a park full of people shooting all the animals or whatever. How gay is that. But I intend to endure it because the game's pretty as hell, I haven't invested any time in a MMORPG since my prehistoric MUD days, and most importantly the core of the game is a factional PvP conflict, though you wouldn't know it from playing the game itself. I'm hopefully it'll evolve into something more interesting than EverQuest with nanotech or Tribes with lagged dice-roll-based combat.

If anyone was keeping track, the new Plaid album is superb. Plaid being 2/3 of the former Black Dog, from the same record label as the Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, and Boards of Canada. After their previous two albums as Plaid I had mostly given up on them as being damned good but no fun - constantly either too intellectual or too goofy. The new album, Double Figure, strikes a good balance and manages to be a great deal of fun in the process. Funky but not stupid funky; full of melodies; decidedly not experimental, which is a Good Thing. I tire of brainy bubble music written with spreadsheet software. Pirate yourself a copy of Squance or Zamami or Sincetta and see what you think.

I probably won't upload this update either, seeing as GameHacker appears to be broken at the moment.

Oh yeah, the Game Boy Advance sucks. In case anyone was curious.