March 2008 Entries
Quite getting into the stride of it now, or at the least, am now not quite so weird-ed out by the sound of my own voice anymore, which is an important part of the whole exercise. Similarly my Cohost/Producer seems to be doing a lot less confused head-scratching and is not having to fight so much with the software he's using to produce the whole thing. He's opted for something called Garage Band, on a Mac, and it's all quite baffling to me. I just let him get on with it all and concentrate on remembering to actually face...
I'm sure you're all dying to hear all about my latest and recent PC upgrade, and some point last week saw me elbow deep in circuit boards, PCI-E slots and all manner of faintly organic and intestinal-looking disk drive power-cables again. It's a process that always makes me faintly nervous, mostly due to my vague understanding that Static Electricity is Bad for Microchips, and a taste for cheap shoes and a man-made fibres often causes me to...arc somewhat, near metal. Opening the case of my pride and joy then, causes me to fret tremendously, and...
As listeners of the podcast will know, I'm currently spending a lot of my time in EVE Online paying the price for my somewhat cack-handed botching of a set of mineral purchase orders, which through a slight misunderstanding on my part, went spectacularly wrong. This all left me with about 670 million ISK tied up in what Financial Experts might call 'non-liquid capital assets', and what the rest of us call '150 little piles of shiny minerals, distributed evenly across the whole of Tash-Murkon'. It's not a total disaster, I suppose - minerals are always worth money in...
Continuing on with my somewhat presumptuous 'Nifty!' series, of Things I Saw In An MMO Once And Quite Liked. I've actually got quite a lot of these to get out, mostly because I am easily impressed with shiny objects! This week: Nifty! #2: Everquest 2's Heroic Opportunities Launching about the same time as World of Warcraft, Everquest 2 tried a lot of new things. SOE had had a long time running an MMO of the type (Everquest 1) and a lot of...er...opportunities to take on-board feedback, tweak and refine. Not everything new was an improvement...
Still playing Guild Wars, despite the Tuesday N00b Club having effectively 'completed' it all. In celebration of all that, we actually went and set ourselves up as a proper guild - better late than never! This was quite easy, and simply required that I pay some NPC in Lion's Arch a whopping 10gp. I didn't even need to get nine random strangers to sign a bit of paper, and it seems guilds of one are quite allowed. The hardest bit was thinking up the obligatory witty and faintly abusive guild tag. We settled on 'The Tuesday Noob Club [Tue]'...
Another one here, because apparently, a single episode does not a podcast make, or so iTunes says. Speaking as someone who has never owned an Apple product, I don't see what the fuss is, to be honest; manual Direct Downloads of MP3 were good enough in my day! But many of you hip kids have iBoxes or i360's or whatever, so there ought to be an iTunes thingie on the sidebar any day now. The Van Hemlock Podcast; Ep2: In which the Small Green Wriggly Thing of News is Poked with the Sharp Pointy Stick of Uninformed Opinion...again;...
I'm vaguely aware that as an MMO Blogger, I probably ought to do more in the 'Armchair Theorist' category. It's not that I don't think about these ideas and concepts, you understand; of course I do, far more than is healthy and pretty much all of the time. It's just that in this age of Entitlement, Guaranteed Success and the Easier Grind Getting The Subscription, I no longer trust my own opinions on what constitutes a good idea or a bad one in the broader gaming evolution going on around us all today. As a gamer, I...
So there I was, doing my own thing in the low-sec region of "Rockpool". Mostly, this is the occasional Agent II mission, when I had time to play at all, being the multi-game hopper that I am. The vague overall plan here is to increase my standing with the local agent to the point where I can mission grind on IIIs and even IVs, and yet still be on hand if I'm needed. The whole 'needed' thing is turning out to be somewhat optimistic actually, and it seems most of the corp I'm in spends much of their...
Despite what might have sounded like a somewhat critical set of first impressions on Bruce Forsyth's Tabula Rasa yesterday, I am actually enjoying it, managing to get to level 31 in the service of the Allied Free Sentinels; so far conducting a great many missions (quests), and several Operations (Instances) along the way. I've also gunned down a quite staggering number of Bane, a fair quantity of local native wildlife, and a not insignificant number of apparently traitorous humans. Well, I was told they were traitors anyway, which being something of a burgeoning Space-Fascist, as my character is turning...
What ho! So much for the whole extended sabbatical idea then. I did start out okay - being just a Normal Gamer, or a close approximation thereof, for at least a fortnight! But the little essays and diatribes and pontifications started growing once more, along with a need to tell someone about it all, whose eyes don't glaze over at the mention of orcs and internet spaceships. So after just over a month away, its back to it. Aren't you lucky? I'm sure I've remarked before that one of the reasons I do this stuff is that if I don't...
Is this thing still on?
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