Lots going on in the lives of people around me. Plus, the stuff I’m writing just isn’t blogable (yet? dunno.)
I’ll be away this weekend for happy bunny day.
Have a yippy o/
And go read this: A Message To The Rich by Bill Whittle.
This captures perfectly why I hate these douchy fucks.
Sonic wallpaper. No content whatsoever. No emotion at all. I’ve got to suspect people who attune themselves to this kind of drivel. WTF is going on in their emotional landscape? Are their lives REALLY that fucking grey? Go fucking cut yourself or something.
And now, for the ear bleach:
I’ve struggled back and forth for years with gaming addiction (which unfortunately that makes it sound like a bit more legitimate of a problem than it really is.)
The draw I’ve found with MMOs is, unsurprisingly, the persistence and development of a couple avatars over long periods. You get to watch things progress with steady, measurable goals with very little possibility of backsliding.
The other side of that coin though is that in order to maintain a persistent virtual environment where you can chip away at progress forever, there can’t be an end. It can’t really GO any place.
MMOs try and try to have engaging content, compelling story lines and something approaching a plot. But their very nature prevents them from ever really achieving that.
When you start one of these things, you noodle around in the manual as it’s installing off the dvd and you’re presented with this entirely undiscovered explorative creation process of building a new character. You don’t know yet how the game behaves, what works or doesn’t. You don’t know what kind of things your character will find or what the plot is going to be like. Everything’s new. Everything is potentially interesting. There’s something to learn and have fun with around every single corner. You try different professions and character races. You set up a burly warrior character or a svelte assassin and see how the game changes based on the character’s specialties.
And it’s a BLAST.
But after a bit you start to see that the tasks (be they “quests” or “missions”) start to bleed together a bit. “Kill 10 rats and bring me their hides” becomes “kill 10 orcs” or “kill 10 pirates.” There are a few other varieties. There’s “go talk to so and so over there.” There’s “deliver this.” etc. You see the patterns. You’ve been watching the chat channels go by and talking back and forth with people so you’ve got a feel for what’s coming next. People give out ’spoilers’ to quest lines (chains of tasks that build a more complex plot line.) Discussion about this sword or that spell, how rare it is and where to find it or how to make it pulls all the mystery of ‘finding something new’ out entirely.
And thus the newness of it wears off quickly and all that remains is the progression of a character through stages to the top of the heap, whether that means reaching the level cap or flying huge battleships or whatever it is.
So after a while you get to this point where you’re just sort of lost in “the grind” of progress. Sure, there’s what they call an “endgame” but even that is just an attempt to make the fact that they’ve run out of content somewhat compelling. You can be sure that next year they’ll introduce a new expansion that will push the end farther along so you can keep chasing it.
And that is the thing I miss, that may never be implemented in a real MMO.
I’ve “quit forever” a few times and while I’m no longer quite that naive (’bout damn time) I have, this time around, amped up the process.
See, MMO producers know people like me pretty damn well. We cancel, we come back, we cancel again, etc. They make sure to keep everything just the way you left it, insofar as the game allows. This way when you lose your mind again and come back, you can pick up where you left off.
This time I finally went through each game and manually deleted for all time, my little personae; a couple dozen of them. Space pilots and assassins, wizards, healers, pirates, templars, orcs, elves, soldiers, builders, crafters, buerocrats and yes, jedi.
10+ years of accrued online gaming experience with all the toys and nonsense.
And strangely I don’t feel the slightest pang.
Now I’m not going to start up some giant hand waving proclamation about how I’m done for all time, never again, yadda yadda. NObody who reads this post (let alone the rest of the site) would believe me.
As I mentioned earlier this year in a post that’s no doubt sunk into the mires of inaccessibility, single-player games have become incredibly rich and interesting. It’s as though the market has gotten a strong ennui for quantum leaps in graphics leading game designers to actually, ya know, design games in order to push units.
I love gaming, always have. Sure, I’ve been guilt-ridden at times for what of my life it’s consumed, with good reason I think.
But there’s another whole side to gaming that the recent fervor of MMOs has eclipsed and that’s the normal single-player games. Things like DOOM, Sacred, the Half-Life series, Crysis, Bioshock, Oblivion, Fallout etc. And THOSE are more than capable of picking up the slack.
They have a story arc with a beginning, middle and an end. They’re starting to fulfill the old goals of actually being interactive fiction. The writing is frequently quite compelling. They don’t lose the newness because they don’t have to provide for that “infinite replayability” that MMOs struggle with.
So I’ve not quit gaming.
But at least for now? It’s staying off line. Sure, a couple compelling releases are on the horizon. But I’ll deal with that when they get here.
Until then, RIP Klythu Voronova.
This is creepy shit right here:
My PHP fu is predictably pitiful. I need to extract text from a free standing block of html and make sure I exclude stuff that’s text inside an anchor tag.
Now, to do so with significant alacrity do I invoke a “real” parser? Or do I just play regex games?
Meh.
Great title eh?
I’m just starting out in paying serious attention to equipping myself with the tools required to make a real solid continuous mix CD. I’ve been noodling around with mixes for a long time and just hate the crippleware that is iTunes for doing the job.
With nearly 9000 tracks at my disposal I really need professional tools.
The first candidate is MixMeister Express. I’ve just downloaded and am installing the demo.
This may be what most of my weekend ends up being about.
More as it happens.
UPDATE: Ok. 14:17 my time, I’ve pointed MME at my network 2T drive to slurp all the music. It’s got to recursively read the directories, load and process the tracks for beat patterns and such, so it’ll take a while. The more I think about it the more I realize it’ll probably take hours.
UPDATE: Ugh. 15:17 20% complete. *bangs head on desk*
UPDATE: Good grief. 18:13. “import” complete… Now it’s sampling for BPM readings. uhm… what was it doing before?
UPDATE: This application is pointlessly slow when operating with music files on fast local lan. I’m going to copy everything to the local machine and see if I’m right about the bottleneck being nothing but lan traffic before I write a brimstone laden review.
UPDATE: Ok. Next day. 10:40. I’ve pulled all the music over to the local drive overnight, wiped the library from MME and have restarted the import. As I type this the initial import is 2.5% complete. Encouraging.
My mother is an excellent cook. She’s of Sicilian and German descent and can do things with ground up meat products that will advance you spiritually. So my childhood associations with things like homemade burgers and meatloaf is a wholly positive (pavlov would be proud) one.
As a mathematician is a complex carbon-based mechanism for turning coffee into theorems, I, as a programmer am a marginally less complex mechanism for turning red bull, jolt, and nodoz into software.
So imagine my complete and utterly unhinged delight when my favorite outlet for all things caffeinated, thinkgeek.com announced a couple years ago that they were going to be selling…
Reading the product page I squealed out loud in unrestrained “yes I’m a straight man with the hello kitty gene” delight.
I ordered 3.
Then I spent the better part of a half hour trying to figure out why the “checkout” feature wasn’t working right in utter denial that I’d just been had.
They laughed at me for months where I worked, may they all rest in peace.
*sigh*
Yeah.
Still pissed about that.
And if you’re visiting as a result of last night’s Twitter Outburst, welcome aboard.
I historically have been a LITTLE bit more even tempered than that here. But seeing as how slinging the naked truth while pretending to fall back on being drunk (which I was) as an excuse got me MORE followers rather than LESS I think my tone is going to change a bit.
For all you regular readers…
Yeah, most of you aren’t gonna like it so you might wanna unsub now.
