GreyPawn.com

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

iPhone Impressions

I am very sorry to say that I am now in possession of an iPhone.

It was totally not my choice, but a required thing for the project I’m on with work.  My first impressions were horrible, to relay the experience.  As it turns out, the iPhone is exclusively with AT&T.  To find one, you actually have to go to an AT&T Corporate Store… you cannot get them from authorized AT&T stores.  The corporate stores are rare, the authorized ones are prevalent. 

So to start, they essentially limit the availability by simply providing iPhones at as few places as possible.  If you want one, you must go in search of one.  You cannot procure one through happenstance, it is a cognitive move.

So I’m in the AT&T corporate store, and this cell phone maven comes up to me and takes my name.  She literally signs me in on a waiting list.  I sit down on the trendy waiting benches and watch as the high pressure salespeople do their best to try and get retirees to buy as many 30 cent pieces of crap, er, I mean $19.99 exclusive accessories, as they can.

After a 45 minute wait, I’m tendered up to the counter where the salesjackass mocks my vocal inflection.  I hate it when people do that.  Yes, I annunciate my words.  It doesn’t make me Thurston Howl the Fourth, fuckwit.  You don’t have to talk to me with pinkys up.  “Oh yes, of course, indeed, quite right.”  Die in a car fire.

It takes a good 10 minutes to figure out whether or not I will be able to make calls on my current plan to and from work or if I can even receive them.  He brings out the iPhone, which is situated in the most assuming box ever built by mankind.  I already feel like an elitist buying the damned thing.  I realize that the screen, touch-based, is likely to get pretty screwed with the way I treat phones, so we go over to look for a case.  My 48 cent case, I mean, my $29.99 custom iPhone exclusive leather holster in hand, I check out after the number is transferred.

So here’s the bad news.  The iPhone is actually cool.  I adore the apps, the interface is elegant, and I can actually type faster on the touchscreen than I could with my blackberry’s qwerty.  I am disgusted at myself for liking the damned thing as much as I do.  It’s so trendy and hip and ugh.  No one as uncool as me should have something as cool as this.  With it, I feel like I should own some bohemian loft apartment and watch indie flicks with my art clique shovin’ buddies.  Dark earthtones and soy chai latte’s pervade.

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Unappealing Food

Quick note.  Am I the only one mildly disturbed by the recent influx of “sliders” and “shots” when it comes to food?  A greasy pile of meat coated in low quality toppings on a mini bun does not appeal in any way to my appetite.  The assumption that I want to slam back a “dessert shot” of chocolate and whipped cream one after the other is somewhat insulting, and entirely disgusting.  Breakfast shots, slider trios, disgusting.  Must the marketing teams across the planet really travel down this path?  I don’t want to think about the chewed glump “sliding” down my throat hole.  They may as well be hocking the croissanwich as a “Pre-Poop you’ll thoroughly enjoy turning into brown waste.”

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

Braid

So, I finally got around to playing Braid on the PC.  I had noticed this little gem on the Xbox 360 through the Xbox Live Arcade, but never followed up on it after going through the trial.  Well, with a little help from gamefaqs, I stomped this game in about a day and a half.  It was an interesting experience.

I’d almost qualify it as melancholy.  The last indie game I played was World of Goo, which made me cry and laugh in places, the sign of a really fucking GOOD game.  But this Braid didn’t seem to have the emotional depth that Goo had.  It started good, it built up slow, and near the end I was expecting some kind of closure, a release or a revelation of sorts.  But nothing panned out.  I have my own theories and ideas about what the game was about, the story it tried to convey, but the puzzle pieces don’t fit right in my head, to strain the analagous feature from the game into metaphor.

I come away from the game feeling “less than”.  Like seeing bits and pieces of a really awesome movie that you’d like to watch later, but can’t remember enough of it to look it up.  In terms of art, certainly stunning.  And some of the puzzles had me waltzing through the fourth dimension like Donnie Darko on crack.  The narrative - not so much.

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

Walkabout

I wrote once about the singular most important yearly ritual holiday that my family practices, Thanksgiving, and the meaning it has attached to it as a result of its excercise by my grandfather.  In terms of rituals, my family truly has very few.  I can count them on perhaps one hand.  The annual ones, like Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most obvious and most frequently experienced.  I had actually forgotten about the Walkabout blessing and the benediction of the new until very recently.

I was on the phone with Mom, and was sharing the news about how the move to the new house was going.  She told me that Pop would be incredibly proud, and then she asked me if I was going to do the walk.  The walk?  What walk?  Well, she explained, when you move into somewhere new, some place that you intend to make a true home, Pop would visit and bless it.  This was accomplished by walking the perimeter of the place, slowly, in prayer.  Prayer to protect, bless, raise a defense, cause to prosper, set aside.  He had done this at the family home, and when my brother moved into his house, and my Aunt’s, and every time my mom moved. 

It is hard enough for me to write this, and when she told me, I broke into tears.  I had never seen him do this.  I don’t think I had ever heard this described.  The thing that got me was that I knew this ritual.  I had performed it before.  Having never seen or heard of it, I had yet performed it, in Baltimore, Austin, and of all fucking places, Moonglow.  I know how this is done.  I know why it is so necessary.  I called my brother about it, he had seen it done and walked with Pop when he did it, and described it to me.  I could not speak.  How do I know this rite?  I still cannot talk about it out loud, nor have I been able to describe it to my partner.

Yesterday, I performed it at our new home.  Circumnavigating the yard starting at the furthest corner, each step is a request and a seal.  To raise a grand hedge of protection against harm or malice, establish a haven and a respite.  To bind, remove and unfetter any dark force which may be arrayed against this home or its inhabitants.  To bless it against disaster, natural and spiritual.  Each step a trace, drawn in land, set aside, owned by a servant to a god of hosts.  And underneath this packaged appeal, this high request for a blessing, a mark of gratitude and humility.  “Look, Lord.  Look at what you have given me.”  That’s why it has to be done in the sunlight, you see.

Each room, room by room, set in and blessed, the walkabout ritual, stupid name for it, is a benediction for structure, land, and inhabitant.  It would be assumptive of me to think that such a blessing would prevent fire, annihilation by hurricane or tornado, destruction or home invasion… but some portion of my heart stands in the middle of my conscience and insists in the loudest voice that “It does.  Trust me, it does.”  The part of my mind that tends to agree with the heart more often than not tells me, what the hell, perhaps it augments some statistical probability through the metaphysics of faith.  The soul reminds me of Job, and that all benedictions are at the behest and grace of the author of the universe.

With the addition of a puppy siberian husky and my relationship remaining very strong with my partner, I have my own little family now, and I have my home.  I am thankful for them, and I know that I am already blessed beyond what I could have imagined just a few years ago.  I know Pop would be proud.  I’m reminded of a tattered little plaque that hung up next to the air conditioner closet in the hallway of the home where we all lived.  It was a quote from Joshua.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the lord.

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Even Now, No.

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Polishing the Brass

From Sakkarah’s latest post from her blog at The End Game -

You’ll ask but what about the bugs that really wouldn’t take a whole lot of time to fix, that wouldn’t create notable imbalances and that have been sitting around for years? Well, that’s when you start looking at point 6: how many players are impacted by this issue. And unfortunately, the good of the many does outweigh the needs of the few. It’s like going to the ER. You’ve been waiting for 10 hours, the whole time watching people that came long after you go right in long before you do. And you’re like WTF?! You are no less important than the next guy. Your pain is no less real. Is it fair for you to suffer much longer than needed just because your injury isn’t as critical? Absolutely not. But when push comes to shove, the critically wounded won’t survive if made to wait, you will.

The analogy hits home, but I don’t quite think the mental state of UO’s vociferous community has quite been grasped.  Prioritization is a wonderful thing, and a necessary thing in any development and on any project.  It keeps the stupid stuff off the plates of the devs and keeps focus from flailing wildly.  There are truly only so many man-hours in a given day that can be dedicated to work on a project.

But the UO playerbase has been around for a long, long, loooooong time.  It is seasoned, jaded, shaken-up, stirred, Trammelized, soul-crushed and lingoed out.  It is literally the oldest consistent MMO player population in existence.  Many of its constituents are fully aware of the intracacies of development team machinations, and have a laundry list of entitlements.  It has been almost 12 years, and a lot of the players have been UOers longer than MOST of the dev team have been working on UO.  Hell, many of the gang I ran with on Atlantic’s RP scene went on to make MMOs of their own in various capacities.  I’m working on one at the moment, integrating lessons hard-learned from years playing the grand-daddy of virtual worlds.

But, the thing is, players aren’t upset that a designer might opt to prioritize the fix for one obvious flaw over another.  Players are upset that a designer might opt to work on refining the KR client while the Virtue system remains half done, a relic of the Renaissance expansion.  Players might be miffled at the huge expenditure it took to “update” and “upgrade” the UO client when, say, Forensic Evaluation, Item Identification, Taste Identification and Camping are skills in the game with no applicable purpose or use.  Tamers for some reason have gotten new tamables in nearly every expansion, while Magery hasn’t seen a new spell since the game went gold.  Mages, in fact, walk around heavily clad in armor from the tops of their heads to their toenails.  Maybe I’m old school, but shouldn’t mages wear robes?

The problem is, many of the issues which are considered legacy, and many of the content desires the aged community has will not be met in any major content push or expansion.  No one seriously expects a wealth of new content with Stygian Abyss.  These are UOers you are talking about.  We’ve had expansions like “Age of Shadows” where the greatest secret to the land was literally that you could drop a rune into a randomly located pouch and gain access to otherwise unaccessable areas.  How spirit-destroyingly underwhelming is THAT?  We’ve had launches like Third Dawn - I don’t even have to go into that one.  A vast new landmass to explore…with not a damned thing to do.  Stop making new clients, by the way, would you? 

The point players have been trying to get across for what on the internet qualifies as centuries is that it is COMPLETED content that is desired, not bug-ridden new methods of looking at it.  How about instead of a new trailer park landmass for housing brokers to plop down their hideously designed 18×18’s you spend an hour or two on boats?  Why not give cooks and beggars a reason to exist beyond the eccentric?  The rage happens because it looks like there are two fronts where designers are concerned.  A) The Latest Expansion and B) Fixing Easy Bugs.  In the mind of the player, it is interpretted that perhaps 60% of development energy is invested in piling new features (loaded with bugs) into the expansion (which will consist of 80% things players have not asked for but that you think are neat).  40% is perceived as being spent on things like fine-tuning the BOD turn-in percentages, adjusting the swing speed modifiers on Nox Ranger crossbows and reducing gold returns on escort quests.  Ultimately pointless minutia. 

Only occasionally does a beacon of light shine through in terms of new content or features, likely punched through by sheer force of will past the tunnel-visioned troglodytes that soak up the rest of the design team’s resources.  New plants, new potions, new craftables - yay!  MORE PLEASE.  No, don’t stop.  That was delicious, refreshing pure water and we’ve been dying in the desert for years.  More, for the love of GOD, MORE! 

But you do stop, because the range on that one thing needs its range adjusted, and between that and figuring out how to keep new gargoyle player characters from mounting an ethereal steed, there just isn’t time.  At this point, from this perspective, the emergency room triage is not so much the metaphor.  More like polishing the brass on the Titanic.  Sure, holistically you’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time on two mostly useless 3D clients with minimal adopt rate, the expansions have been a never-ending march of mild content additions absent any lore or in-game justification for them, and UO’s population has aged to the point where there are more 6-8 year veterans than there are 1 year players, but let’s focus our energies on the Lieutenant Guard Sash drop rate on Lord Oaks.  That’s totally important in the grand scheme of th..*blub blub blub*.

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

Collect Cash, Hire Team, Insert into Dumpster

Tomorrow, a game published by THQ and crafted by Swordfish Studios will come out for the Xbox 360 and Playstaion 3.  The name of the game is “50 Cent, Blood on the Sand”.  I’m not lying, I wouldn’t do that to you, gentle reader.  For confirmation, please visit the following link. http://www.50bloodonthesand.com/us/  Please do not visit that link while you are eating - it may induce projectile vomiting.

First off.  Let’s get the obvious out of the way.  There are no strip clubs in the Middle East.  Second, we have seen these graphics and gameplay before.  It is called Call of Duty.  Third, Saints Row does gang-related action far better.  Fourth, it usually takes a great deal to offend my sensibilities, I’m made of tough stuff, I have to be.  But the towel-head slaughterfest that this game is really doesn’t sit well with me.  No one is a bigger critic of “my own people”, with half my lineage in the country we’ll likely be invading under Palin/Wurzelbacher 2012.  There is literally a screenshot on the site of a guy with his face and head covered in a burka type thing, but he isn’t wearing a shirt.  Rather, he is wearing a crossed “X” strap of bullets on his naked chest.

If you have the stomache to endure the trailer videos, you see “Fitty” is attempting to get his prized diamond encrusted pimp skull back from the towelheads that stole it.  In Grand Theft Auto fashion, he interacts in cut scenes with unscrupulous semi-urban towelheads to find out which towelheads took it, and where they are so he can go blast a cap in their sandy asses.  And blast a cap he does.  In effects stolen wholesale from practically every other FPS since Counterstrike, Fifty Cent goes on a rampage piling up a body count of Middle-Easterners that would make General Petreaus blush.  It is interspersed with random lines of dialogue like “I wants mah skull back!” and “You have whats mine!”.

The levels, if they can be called that, are revisits to the classic “Middle Eastern war-torn village” that you’ve already explored nine THOUSAND FREAKING TIMES in every other FPS set in the mideast.  You know that biege building with the rocket launcher in it?  Yeah, that’s there.  And the cart with the baskets and rolled up persian carpets?  Yup, it makes a guest appearance.  And the bombed out mosque - all of our old favorites!  Oh gosh, I hope the marine helicopter can show up, that way they won’t have to waste any polygons or storyboarding from pointless fucking game to pointless fucking game.

Rest assured there are towelheads that run at your character screaming “FALAFEL!” and “Halamachhgahaghgaaa!” weilding both rocks and fully automatic weapons invariably.

I think the thing that quite possibly burns the most is that the development studio actually got millions of dollars to serve up this steaming pile of cliche’-ridden excrement.  Someone actually went to a pitch meeting, saw the design for this thing and gave it the green light.  They said, “YES, ABSOLUTELY.  I will give you fuckers millions of dollars, probably more than 10, to fashion this abortion of a game from the ether.”  Millions of dollars, an entire development team, with hundreds of man hours invested to power the machine that would give birth to this abomination.  Someone tell me, is Paris Hilton in need of a Real-Time Strategy game with her name on it?  Because if this is the sort of tripe that gets studios going, I’m completely willing to sell my soul to the lords of mediocrity that give these things a solid thumbs up.

Shadowrun Online remains to be made.  There are no plans for a Harry Potter MMO.  Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines isn’t likely to see a sequel, ever. 

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Darkfall Beta

Got into the Darkfall beta.

There is no tutorial.

*logs out*

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Dear GoDaddy

Dear GoDaddy,

I was sorely disappointed to see your advertisement during the Super Bowl this year.  I have been a loyal customer for the better part of a decade now, and I am shamed that a company I rely upon for my domain registration needs has stooped to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Please inform your marketing department weasels that the reason you have been a success in the industry is due entirely to your attractive low prices, fast service and customer-based word of mouth about both.  It is not due to giant jiggling plastic titty-monsters in the softcore porn you insist on airing video of.

If you want to grow your already considerable market share, target your actual user demographic.  You will find most of your users are likely middle-aged technology enthusiasts rather than kegger-slurping fraternity jocks that your commercials seem built to appeal to.  Sure, the old adage is that “Sex sells”, but this generally applies to traditional consumer products like beer and sunglasses.  You wouldn’t try to sell term life insurance with a set of giant perky tits pressed against cold glass, and neither should you be hocking domain names with an unmitigated quantity of scattered ass.  If you want trendy, use the Aqua Teen Hunger Force as mascots, or hire some of those internet celebs from Weezer’s “Pork & Beans” music video.  Either or, get a clue.

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Loathing Football

It never fails to astound me how absolutely ridiculous this country is when it comes to what we call “Football”.  It has got to be the absolute dumbest, over-hyped over-teched excercise in grunt hostility ever conceived of. 

Football is a drain on our country, most especially at the school level.  The stupidest redneck jock in your entire school was typically on the team, a team funded likely through deep cuts in drama, music, art, debate and every other possible extracurricular venue available.  Schools that can’t afford textbooks nevertheless pump hundreds of thousands into outdoor stadiums to train the home team.

Think back to your High School Football Coach.  If you were like me, and went to a school that glorified the sport even more than conceivable, there were actually three coaches.  Each of them an asshole of an asshole, trumping even each other in dickish clipboard-toting self-importance.

Football takes the dumbest, largest idiots in the whole academic system and ensconces them firmly on pedastals to be admired and cheered for.  These miscreants have their coaches massage and pressure true academics, teachers beholden to a system of self-serving “school pride” to go easy on the grades and ignore absence.  School, a social environment which should function as a meritocracy, instead functions as a duracracy - rule by the physically strong.

Men, unidentifiable within their facemasks, bulky from the weight of their shoulder pads, padding, equipment just shy of light body armor, line in formation as an oblong brown sack is hurled through the air.  The hulking masses drive into one another, panting and huffing, attempting to defend the one guy on their team selected for agility rather than actual strength.  The agile one attempts to run past the clash, trotting at full speed down a vast green rectangle towards his objective.

In the interim, there are ridiculous rules and tenets which must be obeyed, such as knees and the ground, ground gained, timing and not to mention the strange rules of off-sides and “the punt”.  All of this is to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our retards are bigger and stronger than your retards.  Despite the wholesale and outright trading of hulking retards from team to team at the professional level.

I’ve never actually managed to figure out why someone roots for a particular team in football.  “I’m from there!”  Yes.  And?  None of the guys playing on your team are from where you are from.  Even the more pastoral Basketball has the same team pride, but do these people literally think the Swahili 8′ footer Minut Bol gives a shit about your quaint little American city?  Something to be proud of, right?

The worst is the announcers.  Madden has absolutely lost his mind.  Listening to him talk is like listening to someone try to explain to a comatose person the legal ramifications of a fixed term life insurance policy.  His baby words aren’t the result of talking down to the audience for all these years, but rather having been a coach responsible for the administration of reta…football players.

I don’t get the pride aspect of it, and I suppose that’s why I don’t get “it” at all.  What’s the point of cheering if it doesn’t matter which team wins, since they are essentially all the same?  There are color differences on the uniforms, and the mascots are certainly varied, but the players don’t vary drastically from big and dumb to big and dumber.  Or fast and dumb, in the case of the quarterback.

I don’t actually know of anything else my fellow countrymen invest with such wild emotional abandon that equates to the success or failure of a particular team.  What precisely is the fan’s stake in either outcome?  The team isn’t going to dissolve.  There isn’t some horrible fate that awaits the losing team.  So you lost.  Big whoop.  GENERIC TEAM A lost against GENERIC TEAM B.  The Muskrats beat out the Potato Shuckers because their dudes were bigger and more retarded.  Gosh darn it, but oh well.

Don’t talk to me about skill.  There is no skill involved.  EA itself has proven this through approximately 900 or so Madden 199X/200X games.  Hey, guess what.  The rules of the game haven’t changed in several decades.  The latest EA Madden experience isn’t going to be that difficult from any other EA Madden experience.  And playing it involves no greater skill than rote memorization of which of the gorillas available are bigger and more retarded than the ones you are going up against. 

“Plays” don’t matter either by any mathematical account.  You may as well be playing blackjack or poker, you’ve got the same chance to analyze and counter the opponent.  Ultimately, I firmly believe it is the same mentally atrophic inclination that makes football enthusiasts fans makes people addicted to The Weather Channel.  91 degress in Phoenix today, hoo boy, that’ll be a scorcher.  *click*