Unhelpful

And what do we do when the desire to review a movie vastly outpaces the need for a review?

It could be argued that there is about as much need to proselytize about The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring as there is to run a public service campaign about the long-term benefits of breathing. There are only three types of people who will not see this movie: people who do not care for movies, people who do not like fantasy movies, and the most extreme fundamentalist minority of Tolkien purists who had convinced themselves that they were honor-bound to despise this production even before Liv Tyler was cast. It is, assuredly, their loss. Those three groups do not need a review. The majority of regular movie viewers have already seen the movie, or have plans to, and a review is not going to change their minds. Why, then, do I even bother discussing this movie? Read more »

Frosty’s WWII poster fun page

The six of you who read the site regularly have noticed that, for a long time, the link to Frosty’s WWII poster fun page was under the heading “where did this site go”, and for a lot longer than that, it was simply a dead link.

After preserving it for private use via a slow, fairly unreliable archive, I was debating publicizing the archive. As is not too surprising for a cob-web of several years, the provided e-mail link to Frosty has been as dead as the site. Several alternatives presented themselves:

] I could provide an unreliable link to an archive that is very often down, and is terribly slow by 28.8K modem standards even when it’s up.

] I could continue to host a private archive available only to people I correspond with regularly.

] I could host the archive publicly with a disclaimer making it very clear that this is not my creation, and that all credit is due to Frosty - whoever and wherever he might be.

I chose the latter. Read more »

Don’t doubt it for a second.

If we don’t fly to Vegas to spend $3,500, then the terrorists win.
If we don’t buy Britney Spears albums, then the terrorists win.
If we don’t spend money on frivolous luxuries, then the terrorists win.
If we’re forced to care about world events instead of stupid shit like college football, the Grammys, and the relationship of Jennifer Anniston and Brad Pitt, then the terrorists win.

By throwing away our First Amendment rights, however, apparently we win.

Apparently this is what America thinks. Read more »

For your entertainment, I present iGun:

For centuries there have basically been three kinds of guns. Guns that are large and hard to use. Guns that are small and hard to use. And guns called iGun.

Now the company that started the personal munitions revolution is helping parents, kids, students and the Israeli military take advantage of munitions evolution.

Introducing iGun, the gun that combines all the possibilities of munitions with all the magic of high style.

Read it.

Comments?

I am sure that if you’ve ever played any online game; be it a simple MUD, massive RPG, 3D Shooter, or read a Dragonlance novel, you know who Raistlin is. Hell, if you’ve been on the internet you know him. But which one of the 25,000-some Raistlins or Raistlin variations am I talking about? Is it Raistlen? How about Raisslin, or Rastlen? Maybe it’s raistlin00421@yahoo.com? It’s none of those actually.

Probably one of the most popular fantasy novel characters ever. There’s thousands of people choosing to call themselves by this name or a variation therefor of. What does it all boil down to? Elves of course. Elves and the uncreative mind of fourteen year-old boy #3532.

Popular fantasy/science fiction/fiction names being used as handles by people. Idiocy. I guess the genre of game you play, or place you hang out helps determine who is going to be the Raistlin.

Playing a fantasy role-playing game today are we? Raistlin is it?
Science fiction game? You’re Jean Luc Picard, aren’t you?
Ah, but here’s what I wanted to get to all along. There’s a new Raistlin on the block — William Wallace.

How many variations of this can you think of? So far I’ve seen Wwilliam, Will, Wwill, Willium, Willyam, Wiliam, Wilyam, and Wiilliam.

Unique naming system for games are a crime to society. I don’t want to see these dullards, let alone have to actually speak with them. The very sight of a Raistlin makes me want to lacerate someone’s face with a sharp stone.

I used to be a contributor to a site called “The Rantings of Lum the Mad”, and its successor, “Slownewsday.net”.

As the original site went away, followed by its archives, I was reminded of all the interesting discussions I read and participated in from the old 8-bit BBS days. Then, we didn’t value our archives; having an online storage of archival material was expensive (it meant having a separate expensive external floppy drive for each disk you wanted to host simultaneously - 10 meg hard drives were out of the question, as they cost several thousand dollars), and having thorough records of past threads really wasn’t a priority.

Today, there’s no such excuse. We don’t have to carve the present at the expense of our archives. We can have it both ways. In that interest, I’ve archived my own contributions to that site. Sadly, I only have the right to archive my own work online, so most of the truly great moments are gone. At least we still have Kiki.

Update: It is fittingly ironic that while I was in the very process of creating the LTM-era archive, slownewsday.net collapsed in a spectacular conflagration of egoes, unprofessionalism, and bile due to what appeared to the readers to be a very overplayed disagreement between Mythic, developer of Dark Ages of Camelot, and current and past members of the SND staff. Of course, it’s never that simple, is it? My take on the whole thing is that there were far too many people acting far too unprofessionally who presumably should have known better, on “both” sides of the issue. Somewhere along the way, the developers’ and the site’s obligations to the community seem to have wandered off. Hopefully the Diaspora of Lum the Mad won’t forget this.

I’ve added an archive of the SND logos I created for the launch of SND and those created afterwards (some of the holiday logos and unofficial logos haven’t been seen).

[The logos are also in the continuation for your convenience. All ltm/snd articles I archived are also reflected in the current content management system.] Read more »

This article was adapted from a post I wrote which was originally part of the discussion thread in reference to an article about the militarization - literally - of videogames. This response, and the article it addressed, appeared on slownewsday.net, a site I’ve created content for from time to time.

I listen to the BBC World Service regularly. Generally, it’s a good news source, but on certain European matters, it displays some of its English bias more obviously than when it’s covering matters further afoot.

One of the biggest stories of the last few months that isn’t in any way related to international terrorism or the attacks in Afghanistan is, not surprisingly, the upcoming introduction of Euro bills and coins into the European Union states which ratified the switch to a common currency.

If your only source of news about this matter was the BBC World Service, you’d be absolutely sure that the so-called Euro Zone is utterly doomed Read more »

The Ultima series is largely acknowledged for coming into its own when it embraced a gameplay asthetic which had a moral dimension in Ultima IV.

Now it’s time for Ultima. Online.

The problem? It’s not 1997, it’s 2001.

Calandryll has been busy talking up the concept of adding virtue to the formula which constitutes Ultima Online. It’s an ambitious goal. It’s going to be a coding and exploit-ironing hell.

But does it really matter? Read more »

RIAA is trying to legalize hacking and destruction of data for themselves.

According to this Wired.com story (courtesy of Slashdot), RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is trying to get an amendment to the current USA Act (which is of concern in and of itself) that allows them and other copyright holders to gain unauthorized access to your computer and delete all of your illegal MP3s. This is an absolute trampling of Americans’ rights granted by the Fourth Amendment.

There are a few major issues that I would like to address here. Read more »

It’s becoming a regular thing to disable access to the rest of one’s computer system when playing a game. EverQuest is the prime example, and reportedly Dark Ages of Camelot was shipped with alt-tab disabling. Some people don’t like this. I’m one of them.

(disclaimer: I play neither EQ nor DAOC, nor do I use ICQ or AIM).

Here are my opinions for not screwing with alt-tab.

First, I come from a unix background. Applications aren’t supposed to be disabling system functionality in the first place, and flat out aren’t allowed to. This protects the system and other applications.

Second, it’s my computer, not Sony’s, not Mythic’s. I decide what runs on it and what doesn’t. I decide how it operates, and I decide how the operating system is supposed to behave. Your program and your license agreement have absolutely no place in telling me what I can and cannot do with my property. I expect to be able to use my computer and my software the way I want, when I want. I should not, and will not cede my property rights.

I understand that some companies want to have some sort of “immersive experience”. Shutting off the rest of one’s capabilities is not “immersing” one into an “experience”, doing so is more akin to cutting off hearing, touch, taste, smell, then taping one’s eyelids open. While the player has no perception of anything besides what you’re forcing him to watch, it’s not very fun, and certainly not a “complete” experience.

Instead, integrate that functionality that people want and use into the game client. Yes, I do mean add something along the lines of an ICQ or AIM client to the game. I don’t mean the pathetic chat system that Origin implemented with the Second Age expansion. EverQuest does moderately well with its fairly diverse chat capability, but it’s still limited to itself. Don’t limit me. Appeal to all of my senses.

The always-thrown answer is “disabling alt-tab prevents cheating” is a complete misdirection. Making changes to a client machine’s operating system doesn’t have anything to do with whether cheating is possible. If cheating is possible in your game, it’s because your code is defective, either as a direct coding bug, or as a design flaw. Hobbling the functionality of a computer I spent hundreds of dollars on because your code is defective is unacceptable and incredibly laughable. Fix your software and your hardware, don’t cripple mine.

I was thinking about the words “uphill” and “downhill” yesterday.

Why is it that both of them imply a difficult time? You can’t say “Well, my day is pretty bad, but after the midway point, it’s all downhill” to indicate that the day gets better after the middle. It still retains a negative connotation.

You can have an “uphill battle.” Why not a “downhill battle”?

More than 200 years after Thomas Paine made a sound case for an Age of Reason, America finds itself increasingly at odds with the very faculties of such an endeavor.

Read more »

The site’s had some extended down time. It’s been a byproduct of typical issues related to server moves and DNS changes; none of this will be interesting to the casual observer.

I’m writing something which could be the long-form successor to the “Love Letter to Apple” and “Love Letter to Novalogic” at the moment, and as the site was down during several of the most newsworthy weeks in U.S. history, that will probably provide inspiration as well. The only thing I’ll reassure you about is that I suspect I won’t indulge myself the luxury of thinking that you’re terribly interested in what I think of Afghani politics (or more accurately, lack thereof).

The machinery of gaming has run amok. Instead of serving creative vision, it suppresses it. Instead of encouraging innovation, it represses it. Instead of taking its cue from our most imaginative minds, it takes its cue from the latest month’s PC Data list list. Instead of rewarding those who succeed, it penalizes them with development budgets so high and royalties so low that there can be no reward for creators. Instead of ascribing credit to those who deserve it, it seeks to associate success with the corporate machine.

Read more »