August 2006 Entries
“You’ve not been to Apollo?” my friend asked. Text-based communication is a fairly sterile medium, but even I could clearly sense the incredulity behind the question. Having been bumbling about in Second Life for almost a year, compared to my friend’s mere few days, it probably seemed odd that I had never seen what must be one of the most renowned of SL’s virtual tourist attractions. I put it down to my obsession with the tinkering and fiddling with the building tools, and indeed, I can often go for four hours at time without ever actually moving my avatar at...
Second Life is a difficult sell. It’s not a game, it’s not an e-business platform, it’s not a machinima studio, it’s not a 3D chat room, it’s not a development environment, it’s not a social networking space, it’s not an interactive sex simulator, it’s not an architectural prototyping tool, it’s not a live music venue and despite the hype, it’s not the ‘Metaverse’ or Web whatever-point-nought. And yet at the same time, it contains elements of all of the above, reaching out in all of these directions and more, as the feature addition winds change, determinedly evolving toward the future...
Obsessed as I am with a hobby which largely revolves around try to suck as many bytes of data from the ether, so that I can stare at them, and then spit some slightly modified ones back out again, I’m always keen to find new ways to increase the power of my hoovering apparatus. I’m not really that technical though, beyond the basics needed to get online and stay there, so am generally quite wary of immersing myself in the Overclocking Culture, reasoning that the gambling involved – the chance of a better PC versus the likelihood of as PC...
Oops...my bad. This is a few days old now - clearly I wasn't paying as much attention to matters as I ought to. I'm not really a very good primary news source, thinking about it:
GU Comics: Consumer Alert Lifted
Only fair to kick up as much of a fuss about the problem being fixed, as I did when it was caused. We at Van Hemlock do not condone sensationalism! From the look of it, EI Interactive, North American operators of Horizons, seem to have sorted out a more secure and proven payment solution than the one that got them in this...
Carnival time again folks, so fire up the invisibility-suit and skulk on over to Cheap Ass Gamer:
Cheap Ass Gamer: The Carnival of Gamers - (Issue #17)
Remember; Control Console, Spawn Room, Generator, in that order! There's only 18 of 'em, so we should be able to clear the thing. Try to read the whole article before tapping out, and keep an eye out for AMS trucks and paradrops! Johnny Blogger has eyes everywhere!
I'm repairing our turrets!
I’m still playing Planetside at the moment, which manages to retain a great deal of appeal for me as a kind of ‘drop-in’ MMO, of sorts, and gave it a good run around the block last night. However, not being a ‘regular’ there anymore, in that I don’t spend fifteen hours a week in there, I find my sessions are quite different these days.
Loyalty was perhaps the first thing to go, and thanks to their relaxing of the rules regarding how many empires you can have characters on, on any given server, from only two, to all three, I’ve become...
Quite a fascinating section on Prognosticator’s latest podcast.
Virgin Worlds: Podcast #24
Of course the whole thing is quite fascinating as well, but it was the 2Moons bit that got me banging my head of the desk in stupefied awe. Further details can be found in text-form here:
MMORPG.com: 2Moons: Game Announced & David Perry Interview.
I’d not really heard a lot about the game up to now – a quick perusal gives the impression of being just another Korean Grinder. I hope it’s not prejudice on my part, but on the whole, I’m not too enticed by that particular school of MMO design,...
Gosh…not often I get bombshells like this going off in my own metaphorical back-yard:
Second Life Blog: Forums Take A New Turn
It’s another of those spikey ‘free speech’ clampdowns, although to put it in perspective, the kind of free speech one enjoys when someone else invites you into their house to tell them what you think of them, usually by writing it in crayon on their living room wallpaper.
The press release (blog, my arse…) is a suitably elegant exercise in Marketing and Public Relations, and predominantly cites ‘significant maintenance’ and ‘Resident-run blogs and forums have mushroomed’ as the reasons for the...
Decided to take the night off of Second Life the other night, and go for a bit of a wander. I’m still quite surprised how much of a draw the ‘Metaverse’, as they keep liking to call it, has on me actually. Getting on for seven years into The Grind, in various different guises, I sometimes wonder if SL wasn’t the sort of thing I’d been looking for all along.
It stems from not really having the temperament for long sustained repetition activity I guess – I’ve never really been able to knuckle down and actually grind mobs for any...
Just when I’m starting to think I’m actually quite good at Pine-cube-omancy, I see something like this:
Second Life: The Future, The Crooked House
(Found via New World Notes – article here )
One thing that consistently surprises me in my Second Life wanderings, is how many people, despite the setting, tools and potentials of the thing, persist in Late Twentieth Century Realism, as their chief mode of expression.
It’s a world where there are zero material costs, perfect and instantaneous creation and duplication of matter, optional gravity and semi-sentient housebricks, more reminiscent of Banks’ ‘Culture’ or Moorcock’s ‘End of Time’, than any...
Bit of a Public Service Announcement here:
GU Forums: Consumer Alert: Horizons Billing Concerns! (8/2)
(And accompanying cartoon)
Woody strikes me as something of a professional and not the sort given to outrageous rants and vitriolic hyperbole, and indeed, even carries adverts for Horizons on his banners now and then, so something must be *really* wrong for him to just warn people to flat-out stop playing in this manner, and then not explain why. I can only imagine it involves some kind of monumental cock-up at the billing end, one that could be used to steal real money somehow.
This doesn’t bode well for...
I definitely seem to be going through something of a Second Life phase at present. I’m sure I’ve rambled on at length in the past, about how fascinating, and bursting with evocative potential their worldbuild, scripting and societies are. It’s as if I were a kid again, and had been given every Lego set ever, all at once, and then told it was magic Lego, and that if I could just learn the right magic words, it would do stuff! (And I mean Proper Lego, not the ridiculous prefabricated mess of custom parts that passes for Lego today!)
What’s not to...