Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Placeholder about Passion
I go home, then I talk some more about why I think it's impt to be passionate abt shtuff. Especially at interviews.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Sad, Relieved and Perplexed Panda
Ok, I found -a- source of the w32.Downadup.B worm.
It was sitting in the Ecolab computer after all.
I ran a test today and jammed the thumbdrive in, brought it upstairs for my sacrificial office PC to check, and voila, w32.Downadup!autorun detected (G:\autorun.inf)
To my mild disgust, it did not detect the worm itself, lying fallow in G:\RECYCLER\s-randomstringofnumbers\jwgkvsq.vmx
Being masochistic, I tried the not-updated-since-19-Nov-09 (which is the last time I caught a worm in the office, from the kitchen lab) Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware program, and though it scanned 3 files, it was unable to detect it as a worm!
Interestingly enough, at the same time it was rifling through the files, Symantec Endpoint Protection popped up and went alert alert threat detected, w32.Downadup.B, and 2-3 minutes later, it was promptly automatically cleaned by deletion.
It may have been brought in from copying over this NUS guy's video files about mosquito larvae... but that was... last week or the week before.
The good news is that I have been slacking on transferring anything out of the thumbdrive after that, so it has been lying fallow, and I don't think I put it into any of my own home systems.
Count me mildly relieved.
Also a little stressed out, since that means I can't rely on just Malwarebytes and maybe I will have to try Kaspersky and/or AVG for the volunteer laptop.
It's currently running the SLOWEST attempt at Bitdefender Online Scanner I've ever seen - either it's already infected and the virus is putting horrible obstacles in its path, or it is a pathetic powerless netbook with a wireless adapter not worth speaking of, or both.
After this, I have to go be more masochistic and check the other lab computer because I am just hopelessly paranoid. I'm not even in MIS, but rrrr, if I don't check these things, who will?
All I need is one brainfart, and I will end up infecting my home system by accidentally plugging in tab A into slot B without realising it's previously been somewhere else unsavory. So it is rational self-interest to have anything my thumbdrive could come into contact with, scrupulously clean. Yeeccch.
It was sitting in the Ecolab computer after all.
I ran a test today and jammed the thumbdrive in, brought it upstairs for my sacrificial office PC to check, and voila, w32.Downadup!autorun detected (G:\autorun.inf)
To my mild disgust, it did not detect the worm itself, lying fallow in G:\RECYCLER\s-randomstringofnumbers\jwgkvsq.vmx
Being masochistic, I tried the not-updated-since-19-Nov-09 (which is the last time I caught a worm in the office, from the kitchen lab) Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware program, and though it scanned 3 files, it was unable to detect it as a worm!
Interestingly enough, at the same time it was rifling through the files, Symantec Endpoint Protection popped up and went alert alert threat detected, w32.Downadup.B, and 2-3 minutes later, it was promptly automatically cleaned by deletion.
It may have been brought in from copying over this NUS guy's video files about mosquito larvae... but that was... last week or the week before.
The good news is that I have been slacking on transferring anything out of the thumbdrive after that, so it has been lying fallow, and I don't think I put it into any of my own home systems.
Count me mildly relieved.
Also a little stressed out, since that means I can't rely on just Malwarebytes and maybe I will have to try Kaspersky and/or AVG for the volunteer laptop.
It's currently running the SLOWEST attempt at Bitdefender Online Scanner I've ever seen - either it's already infected and the virus is putting horrible obstacles in its path, or it is a pathetic powerless netbook with a wireless adapter not worth speaking of, or both.
After this, I have to go be more masochistic and check the other lab computer because I am just hopelessly paranoid. I'm not even in MIS, but rrrr, if I don't check these things, who will?
All I need is one brainfart, and I will end up infecting my home system by accidentally plugging in tab A into slot B without realising it's previously been somewhere else unsavory. So it is rational self-interest to have anything my thumbdrive could come into contact with, scrupulously clean. Yeeccch.
Lost for Options
It's amazing how many things there are to do in a day. It's as if RL is the ultimate sandbox game with many linear-led-around-by-the-nose goals should you choose to participate in them.
I'm kinda still smarting from yesterday, in which I went to work and things began to happen from 9am on, all the way till 6.30pm, keeping me full of busywork and unable to complete (or begin to attempt) impendingly and increasingly more urgent stuff I HAVE to do by Jun 30 - whose timeline has begun to shrink to today and tomorrow.
Not to mention, I am feeling extremely insecure from finding the Conficker worm (w32.Downadup.B) and a Mariposa botnet variant (w32.Pilleuz!gen4) on my thumbdrive ever since I attempted to copy a file from a lab computer, stuck the thumbdrive into an office laptop to copy something else, and then ended up with the dual surprise of having a virus blocked message pop up on my office PC - ie. amazed that the virus scan was actually up to date enough to detect it, and pissed off to the extreme that I now have a virus to hunt.
My MIS department is of no fucking use whatsoever. On describing my issue to one of their worker grunts who happened to be up at my office doing something else, and mentioning I was trying to trace the source, he went, "Oh, those worms are sneaky, you won't be able to find the source," and pretty much shrugged at the thought that there is a potential contaminant lurking around in wait.
Jeez. My thumbdrive, even though I scanned and deleted all the contaminated folders thoroughly, is now off limits from my own home systems for an indefinite length of time.
I have been cudgeling my brain trying to remember the trail of this thumbdrive. Much to my frustration, I can barely do anything with the lab computer because I have no admin rights to it - so I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of any of those worms. The (possibly un-updated) scanner didn't seem to find anything. I sacrificed my thumbdrive again, plugging it in an attempt to get infected, and didn't get re-infected, so maybe it's -not- the source.
The office laptop is perplexing, because it's a mini netbook running on Windows 7. That means the entire layout of Windows Explorer is a new mess to get used to, and hides anything of value - I had to open up help to figure out how to open Folder Options in order to even enable the 'show hidden files' option. The good news is that I have admin rights to it, so there's more stuff I can do with it, given enough time to figure it out. As a quick test, I again sacrificed the thumbdrive, and it did not pick up anything either.
I am officially stumped. 8 hours of simmering in the back of my brain has suggested another potential source - another lab computer that was probably the last previous place I stuck my thumbdrive into. Today, I'm going down to check that one (with no administrator rights yet again) and sacrifice my thumbdrive yet again.
Of course, if that turns out to be the source, I fail to understand how come the lab computer and laptop haven't picked up the virus, since the thumbdrive would have already been infected before then.
This is all assuming that my office PC is the most connected and updated powerhouse of the lot, and hasn't been sneakily taken over too, since I am using IT as the detection mechanism since it has Symantec Endpoint Protection and other such things running. To add insult to injury, since I have no administrator rights, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, which was previously added to my PC the LAST time I found a thumbdrive virus - having picked it up from the kitchen lab laptop, verified its source and mobilized MIS in righteous fury - refuses to update its virus definitions since.
So I am essentially on the warpath with broken tools, and a sacrificial thumbdrive canary. This is going to be one grueling campaign.
To make matters worse, my Windows Mobile phone was plugged into the laptop and charging. I now do not dare to plug my phone into my home computer either. Somehow, I'm going to have to examine my phone on a determined-to-be-clean office laptop, which means I have to determine-as-clean the laptop first, which means I have a LOT of unexpected work cut out for me when I least need it. *sighs*
---
In other news, I have been finding myself with an extreme craving for sleep. And doing so. And losing a lot of potential time at home in the process.
There is a pencil holder full of knocked over brushes on the floor just taunting me to pick them up and put them back properly. I can't bring myself to do so because they've accumulated a lot of dust, and every piece actually needs cleaning, assessment, and brain processing power to decide what to do with them. So much easier to just walk over it on the way to the computer and play Mass Effect 2 instead.
Ok, ok, objectively, I know this is very bad and it is escapism. So maybe I will finally get off my arse at 4.30am after this blog post and do the damn cleaning.
It's a bad time of the month for me. I think it's impending PMS again AGAIN. So I have been walking around with ambient levels of high frustration and pent-up anger and moodiness. I was cursing and kicking tables when I found the virus yesterday (though with no one around to watch, of course.)
On the Mass Effect 2 front, I might finally be losing steam. I dunno what the heck is wrong with me, I get partway through a game, and then I can't bring myself to complete it. It's like I have a finishing problem. Can't close the chapter on anything. Basically I've got every NPC, I'm halfway through getting my ass kicked on finishing up the Legion loyalty mission - and caught in the utterly puzzling dilemma of whether I should rewrite the AI or blow them all into smithereens, and have read ahead again to try and figure it out.
And in reading ahead, I'm sort of miffed at the end-of-game conclusion. What? Some sort of suicide mission and mass combat front in which the meaningful choices are picking the right NPCs in order not to get them killed at the end (or to purposefully get them killed) and presumably a lot more crazy duck-and-cover FPS mechanics ahead? I'm not entirely sure I want to play on here.
Trying to find the words to explain it, but I kind of feel a little cheated and let down. Meaningful choice is when one can predict the outcomes, not 100%, but close.
I enjoyed the Mordin loyalty mission - in which there's a guy doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa, and you can support them either way, and then the little twist-kicker at the end, where you're confronted with whether you want to use the already-ill-gotten data - is it a waste to flush it down the toilet, or do you bend paragon-y paladin-y principles and keep it regardless, and who do you end up giving it to, and so on.
I liked Tali's loyalty mission as well. The setup is that Admiral von Qwib Qwib is your horrible prejudiced antagonist, but it turns out that he's actually pushing for peace with the Geth and so on. The implications are interesting down the road too - do we let the quarians self-determine and enmesh themselves in a war with geth homeworld, potentially wiping themselves out and/or tying up geth resources in ME3, or do we selfishly manipulate them to be a backup fleet for the impending Reaper war in ME3, assuming we might be able to get them to befriend the good geth and be pals later down the road...?
You can't say for certain, but at least there's a 75% chance you can predict the potential course of things later, with room for a twisty kick in the pants.
The Legion choice, on the other hand, feels exceedingly 50-50. I have NO EFFING CLUE wtf I should be doing. Do I go with the ostensible majority, let them rewrite (a bit like brainwashing, and end up with a potentially unstable mix of 1000 good geth + billions of rewritten geth chattering in the network) in ME3, or do I just blow up the heretics and leave Legion as is? Jeez, I dunno, I could be rolling dice here for all the meaningful predictable-down-the-road decision there is, and assigning Paragon/Renegade options to that is weird.
And the last missions, which I haven't done, but appear to boil down to a choice of "Do you know your mission team's specialties well enough?" and a behind-the-hood unpredictable equation that probably involves loyalty, and maybe things like levels/chosen NPC interactions that ends up dictating who lives and who dies. To me, it sounds like I better save my game right before it starts, and end up playing a game of 'pick 15 choices, go through a lot of combat, and find out if those choices yield a conclusion you can live with for ME3' else reload and restart.
Oh dear.
Trust a gamer to optimize the fun right out of anything, eh?
---
The Steam summer sale has been an immense distraction. I'm still kicking myself for having missed out on the 50% GTA Liberty City Episodes offer - having fallen asleep with 3-4 hours before the day's sales ended.
Objectively, I don't think I would have installed it anyway, and I'm sure it's going to go on 50% offer again at some future point in time, and it seems exceedingly likely that the more I wait, the more the price point is going to crash to 66, 75 or even 85% off - as in the sales this time around.
Still kicking myself though. Dumb emotional reactions to the word 'discount.'
Instead, objectively, I have been buying up the 66, 75 and 85% off games that sound interesting. The price point is about there, it's unlikely to drop THAT much further down - 2.99 and 4.99 don't make much difference in the larger scheme of things, whereas 29.99 and 49.99 do.
My hard disk has a limit though. About 49 gigs worth of limit, and with games being hefty 10-12 gigs these days, it means I have to pick and choose and do some deletions at a future point.
More and more, it seems like I need to declare an MMO moratorium and just play singleplayer games for 4 months or so.
Except I still have ATITD on the line, Going Rogue is around the corner, I was entertaining thoughts of messing with Aion before the end of my subscription in July (maybe nix that thought), and I'm more than half tempted to try free-to-play DDO. And yes, Guild Wars. Surely GW2's beta / preview is almost upon us and here I am with nothing worth speaking about in my hall of monuments. (I do have a sizeable amount of not-quite-valuable miniature pets taking up space in my Xunlai chests though.)
I'm doomed.
I'm kinda still smarting from yesterday, in which I went to work and things began to happen from 9am on, all the way till 6.30pm, keeping me full of busywork and unable to complete (or begin to attempt) impendingly and increasingly more urgent stuff I HAVE to do by Jun 30 - whose timeline has begun to shrink to today and tomorrow.
Not to mention, I am feeling extremely insecure from finding the Conficker worm (w32.Downadup.B) and a Mariposa botnet variant (w32.Pilleuz!gen4) on my thumbdrive ever since I attempted to copy a file from a lab computer, stuck the thumbdrive into an office laptop to copy something else, and then ended up with the dual surprise of having a virus blocked message pop up on my office PC - ie. amazed that the virus scan was actually up to date enough to detect it, and pissed off to the extreme that I now have a virus to hunt.
My MIS department is of no fucking use whatsoever. On describing my issue to one of their worker grunts who happened to be up at my office doing something else, and mentioning I was trying to trace the source, he went, "Oh, those worms are sneaky, you won't be able to find the source," and pretty much shrugged at the thought that there is a potential contaminant lurking around in wait.
Jeez. My thumbdrive, even though I scanned and deleted all the contaminated folders thoroughly, is now off limits from my own home systems for an indefinite length of time.
I have been cudgeling my brain trying to remember the trail of this thumbdrive. Much to my frustration, I can barely do anything with the lab computer because I have no admin rights to it - so I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of any of those worms. The (possibly un-updated) scanner didn't seem to find anything. I sacrificed my thumbdrive again, plugging it in an attempt to get infected, and didn't get re-infected, so maybe it's -not- the source.
The office laptop is perplexing, because it's a mini netbook running on Windows 7. That means the entire layout of Windows Explorer is a new mess to get used to, and hides anything of value - I had to open up help to figure out how to open Folder Options in order to even enable the 'show hidden files' option. The good news is that I have admin rights to it, so there's more stuff I can do with it, given enough time to figure it out. As a quick test, I again sacrificed the thumbdrive, and it did not pick up anything either.
I am officially stumped. 8 hours of simmering in the back of my brain has suggested another potential source - another lab computer that was probably the last previous place I stuck my thumbdrive into. Today, I'm going down to check that one (with no administrator rights yet again) and sacrifice my thumbdrive yet again.
Of course, if that turns out to be the source, I fail to understand how come the lab computer and laptop haven't picked up the virus, since the thumbdrive would have already been infected before then.
This is all assuming that my office PC is the most connected and updated powerhouse of the lot, and hasn't been sneakily taken over too, since I am using IT as the detection mechanism since it has Symantec Endpoint Protection and other such things running. To add insult to injury, since I have no administrator rights, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, which was previously added to my PC the LAST time I found a thumbdrive virus - having picked it up from the kitchen lab laptop, verified its source and mobilized MIS in righteous fury - refuses to update its virus definitions since.
So I am essentially on the warpath with broken tools, and a sacrificial thumbdrive canary. This is going to be one grueling campaign.
To make matters worse, my Windows Mobile phone was plugged into the laptop and charging. I now do not dare to plug my phone into my home computer either. Somehow, I'm going to have to examine my phone on a determined-to-be-clean office laptop, which means I have to determine-as-clean the laptop first, which means I have a LOT of unexpected work cut out for me when I least need it. *sighs*
---
In other news, I have been finding myself with an extreme craving for sleep. And doing so. And losing a lot of potential time at home in the process.
There is a pencil holder full of knocked over brushes on the floor just taunting me to pick them up and put them back properly. I can't bring myself to do so because they've accumulated a lot of dust, and every piece actually needs cleaning, assessment, and brain processing power to decide what to do with them. So much easier to just walk over it on the way to the computer and play Mass Effect 2 instead.
Ok, ok, objectively, I know this is very bad and it is escapism. So maybe I will finally get off my arse at 4.30am after this blog post and do the damn cleaning.
It's a bad time of the month for me. I think it's impending PMS again AGAIN. So I have been walking around with ambient levels of high frustration and pent-up anger and moodiness. I was cursing and kicking tables when I found the virus yesterday (though with no one around to watch, of course.)
On the Mass Effect 2 front, I might finally be losing steam. I dunno what the heck is wrong with me, I get partway through a game, and then I can't bring myself to complete it. It's like I have a finishing problem. Can't close the chapter on anything. Basically I've got every NPC, I'm halfway through getting my ass kicked on finishing up the Legion loyalty mission - and caught in the utterly puzzling dilemma of whether I should rewrite the AI or blow them all into smithereens, and have read ahead again to try and figure it out.
And in reading ahead, I'm sort of miffed at the end-of-game conclusion. What? Some sort of suicide mission and mass combat front in which the meaningful choices are picking the right NPCs in order not to get them killed at the end (or to purposefully get them killed) and presumably a lot more crazy duck-and-cover FPS mechanics ahead? I'm not entirely sure I want to play on here.
Trying to find the words to explain it, but I kind of feel a little cheated and let down. Meaningful choice is when one can predict the outcomes, not 100%, but close.
I enjoyed the Mordin loyalty mission - in which there's a guy doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa, and you can support them either way, and then the little twist-kicker at the end, where you're confronted with whether you want to use the already-ill-gotten data - is it a waste to flush it down the toilet, or do you bend paragon-y paladin-y principles and keep it regardless, and who do you end up giving it to, and so on.
I liked Tali's loyalty mission as well. The setup is that Admiral von Qwib Qwib is your horrible prejudiced antagonist, but it turns out that he's actually pushing for peace with the Geth and so on. The implications are interesting down the road too - do we let the quarians self-determine and enmesh themselves in a war with geth homeworld, potentially wiping themselves out and/or tying up geth resources in ME3, or do we selfishly manipulate them to be a backup fleet for the impending Reaper war in ME3, assuming we might be able to get them to befriend the good geth and be pals later down the road...?
You can't say for certain, but at least there's a 75% chance you can predict the potential course of things later, with room for a twisty kick in the pants.
The Legion choice, on the other hand, feels exceedingly 50-50. I have NO EFFING CLUE wtf I should be doing. Do I go with the ostensible majority, let them rewrite (a bit like brainwashing, and end up with a potentially unstable mix of 1000 good geth + billions of rewritten geth chattering in the network) in ME3, or do I just blow up the heretics and leave Legion as is? Jeez, I dunno, I could be rolling dice here for all the meaningful predictable-down-the-road decision there is, and assigning Paragon/Renegade options to that is weird.
And the last missions, which I haven't done, but appear to boil down to a choice of "Do you know your mission team's specialties well enough?" and a behind-the-hood unpredictable equation that probably involves loyalty, and maybe things like levels/chosen NPC interactions that ends up dictating who lives and who dies. To me, it sounds like I better save my game right before it starts, and end up playing a game of 'pick 15 choices, go through a lot of combat, and find out if those choices yield a conclusion you can live with for ME3' else reload and restart.
Oh dear.
Trust a gamer to optimize the fun right out of anything, eh?
---
The Steam summer sale has been an immense distraction. I'm still kicking myself for having missed out on the 50% GTA Liberty City Episodes offer - having fallen asleep with 3-4 hours before the day's sales ended.
Objectively, I don't think I would have installed it anyway, and I'm sure it's going to go on 50% offer again at some future point in time, and it seems exceedingly likely that the more I wait, the more the price point is going to crash to 66, 75 or even 85% off - as in the sales this time around.
Still kicking myself though. Dumb emotional reactions to the word 'discount.'
Instead, objectively, I have been buying up the 66, 75 and 85% off games that sound interesting. The price point is about there, it's unlikely to drop THAT much further down - 2.99 and 4.99 don't make much difference in the larger scheme of things, whereas 29.99 and 49.99 do.
My hard disk has a limit though. About 49 gigs worth of limit, and with games being hefty 10-12 gigs these days, it means I have to pick and choose and do some deletions at a future point.
More and more, it seems like I need to declare an MMO moratorium and just play singleplayer games for 4 months or so.
Except I still have ATITD on the line, Going Rogue is around the corner, I was entertaining thoughts of messing with Aion before the end of my subscription in July (maybe nix that thought), and I'm more than half tempted to try free-to-play DDO. And yes, Guild Wars. Surely GW2's beta / preview is almost upon us and here I am with nothing worth speaking about in my hall of monuments. (I do have a sizeable amount of not-quite-valuable miniature pets taking up space in my Xunlai chests though.)
I'm doomed.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Steam Summer Sale
Ye gods, here it comes again.
It's pretty insane, actually.
I'm still smarting from coming back from Tec-Drome having bought the graphics tablet I've been lusting after (for my birthday, yeah, a month earlier, but still.)
Also I felt obliged to buy -something- from the uncle, otherwise, he will give me the evil eye and not offer me my discounts on hardware anymore... and I still need to cultivate a source for gaming apparati - what if my Razer mouse gives way after 10k mouseclicks from FPSes and ATITD?
So after staring in perplexity at all the games spread out on the table and realising that 90% of them are old and/or can be bought on Steam during a sale at way cheaper a cost, my eye fell on this EA sticker which offered $25 off if you bought two of the stickered games.
Problem was, the stickered games included things like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 - oops, got them! It was almost a relief to see the Dragon Age Awakenings expansion was stickered - having been "stupid" enough to buy the PC retail version, I HAVE to buy the PC retail version of the expansion if I ever cared to expand my game. At $46 sgd, expanding one's DA game was not really appealing, but at $25 off, yeah, I guess it's not too horrible to contemplate.
But what the heck was my other game going to be? There wasn't exactly a compendium of stickered games on offer. Casting about in desperation revealed Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was also stickered, selling for $56.
Ok. I remember that it was pricey on Steam. And the last offer only brought the price down to $29.99, which I was contemplating getting, but decided to wait for a further price drop because I wasn't really desperate to play a multiplayer battlefield shooty thing.
*sighs* Well, it's not as if brick-and-mortar stores are easy to run. (I hear Comics Mart has shut down, fer example. *shamefaced look* GW minis are too expensive to buy often though!) And the guy has to feed his family. So I decided to buy both the games for $75 sgd, approx 30/45 for an expansion and a new game, which isn't HORRIBLE, but I wondered when I was going to ever get around to playing them.
Meanwhile on Steam, it is as if the world has gone crazy. Too bad I already own a ton of the good deals.
I would hasten to highlight stuff like Indigo Prophecy (going for $3.36ish), Torchlight (at $9.99 again), and the THQ complete pack ($49.99 for really fucking good games - Dawn of War 1 and 2, Titan Quest, Full Spectrum Warrior, Company of Heroes, Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, Metro 2033, etc.)
If I didn't already own 80% of the games in the damn pack, I would be all over the damn thing. All I can do is sit there and drool at Metro 2033 included in the pack and wonder if one of the coming days will slash it to half price or more.
I'm seriously contemplating Bioshock 2 and a couple others though. Got about 4 more hours to decide before it stops being 50% off.
It's pretty insane, actually.
I'm still smarting from coming back from Tec-Drome having bought the graphics tablet I've been lusting after (for my birthday, yeah, a month earlier, but still.)
Also I felt obliged to buy -something- from the uncle, otherwise, he will give me the evil eye and not offer me my discounts on hardware anymore... and I still need to cultivate a source for gaming apparati - what if my Razer mouse gives way after 10k mouseclicks from FPSes and ATITD?
So after staring in perplexity at all the games spread out on the table and realising that 90% of them are old and/or can be bought on Steam during a sale at way cheaper a cost, my eye fell on this EA sticker which offered $25 off if you bought two of the stickered games.
Problem was, the stickered games included things like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 - oops, got them! It was almost a relief to see the Dragon Age Awakenings expansion was stickered - having been "stupid" enough to buy the PC retail version, I HAVE to buy the PC retail version of the expansion if I ever cared to expand my game. At $46 sgd, expanding one's DA game was not really appealing, but at $25 off, yeah, I guess it's not too horrible to contemplate.
But what the heck was my other game going to be? There wasn't exactly a compendium of stickered games on offer. Casting about in desperation revealed Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was also stickered, selling for $56.
Ok. I remember that it was pricey on Steam. And the last offer only brought the price down to $29.99, which I was contemplating getting, but decided to wait for a further price drop because I wasn't really desperate to play a multiplayer battlefield shooty thing.
*sighs* Well, it's not as if brick-and-mortar stores are easy to run. (I hear Comics Mart has shut down, fer example. *shamefaced look* GW minis are too expensive to buy often though!) And the guy has to feed his family. So I decided to buy both the games for $75 sgd, approx 30/45 for an expansion and a new game, which isn't HORRIBLE, but I wondered when I was going to ever get around to playing them.
Meanwhile on Steam, it is as if the world has gone crazy. Too bad I already own a ton of the good deals.
I would hasten to highlight stuff like Indigo Prophecy (going for $3.36ish), Torchlight (at $9.99 again), and the THQ complete pack ($49.99 for really fucking good games - Dawn of War 1 and 2, Titan Quest, Full Spectrum Warrior, Company of Heroes, Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, Metro 2033, etc.)
If I didn't already own 80% of the games in the damn pack, I would be all over the damn thing. All I can do is sit there and drool at Metro 2033 included in the pack and wonder if one of the coming days will slash it to half price or more.
I'm seriously contemplating Bioshock 2 and a couple others though. Got about 4 more hours to decide before it stops being 50% off.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Breaking Through
There's been somewhat of a brew-up on the comment threads over at Massively regarding Shawn Schuster's 'Choose My Adventure' Aion Experience. A polite one, but one all the same.
It basically boils down to him not having sufficient time to describe the Aion experience enough to do it justice to its players, especially since Aion's (eastern) game design is purposefully difficult enough to block off a good majority of folks who attempt it casually, in good faith.
This is not as surprising to me as it must have been for the guild leader Ashin, who invited Shawn along to check out the sights. These guys don't game for the sake of the game. They are gaming for 'work' - in order to write an article that they have been tasked to write. All 'professional' reviews have to be taken with a huge amount of salt simply because of this.
In the second place, Choose My Adventure is not meant to be a fair, objective review. It is simply describing one man's dabbling and somewhat bumbling experience in a game - and in following his articles, a very mediocre player at that.
What I did find somewhat revealing is that when he made the decision to stick it through (even if level 23 was the maximum of what he could accomplish in six weeks), he found that he disliked it less.
In a broader sense, one wonders how long one has to give a game (or any other experience) a fair shake, in order to be able to judge it in its entirety.
Obviously, many people are content to judge a book (or anything else) simply by its appearance and thereby pick it up or throw it aside. Reading the summary blurb behind, or skim-reading a couple of chapters might give a slightly more rounded off experience, but who's to say that they don't miss out on some fantastic twist or some subtlety in its construction?
And who's to say that they HAVE to work through it all in order that they taste that wonderful but well-hidden flavor that is the ultimate reward? Maybe they have far better things to do with their time.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that it touches somewhat of a nerve. In my opinion, I tend to play a game long enough that I grok out most of its subtleties, enough to write a very objective review if I wanted (if I could remember it all), and then I mysteriously lose interest and start casting about for something different.
I've 'broken through' but I rarely finish.
Of course, some games (MMOs, mostly) are not meant to be finished either.
Maybe I'm just trying to work out when the correct time to stop a game should be.
I'm nursing a slight guilt factor with Aion. I've canceled the subscription, though I get to play it until the three months run out, some time around my birthday in July. It's not a shabby game. I enjoyed its various aspects - it gave me some cooperative instance and world boss experiences that I've missed out on, having never played WoW in an anywhere-near-serious manner. It has unique and different blends of PvP and PvE between rifting, the Abyss and fort raids. I still dreadfully yearn to get to level 50 on my gladiator, and crave the experience of playing some other classes.
The problem is time and other people. I just don't really have the time at present to devote to Aion, and in return, without time investment, it is hard to recoup any enjoyment either. Aion is also one of those games in which whose experience improves with groups of people, and a) I am fairly anti-social to begin with, having to network and work with other people is a chore, b) my timezone difference makes scheduled group activities even MORE of an agonising challenge.
It's interesting. I have slightly more trouble leaving Aion than I did Age of Conan.
I dropped WAR quite easily, maybe because the graphics and animation were substandard, the writing was nothing to shout home about, leveling was painfully linear and I'd already experienced all the scenarios and all the keep sieges I'd wanted. Maybe it's the theme. Nothing about the Warhammer fantasy universe really holds me to any extreme, and it's not as if WAR is a good recreation of it anyway.
I dropped DDO because I saw no future in it. Though I'd like to try it again casually from time to time. LOTRO was somewhat harder, though I'd pretty much convinced myself it was just an extended break, and that I'm not saying goodbye to it. Even easier now that it is going free to play soon.
I'm in a holding pattern with ATITD, which is worrisome, because that kind of thing implies that I might be done with it. Except I'm not - there's still things I could be doing, if I had the time to. But have I lost the interest to play it?
One never has this problem with single player games because once you've bought it, you own it, and you can go back to it whenever you want.
---
If you ask me what I want to do right now, it is play Guild Wars and see if I can break through further to more missions and see if I can get the Nightfall campaign complete.
In the meantime, sitting in the background in no particular order, I have one or two last missions of World in Conflict I really should complete, there is the Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising campaign, I never did finish Torchlight or Overlord, I had started on this cheesy indie adventure game called Runaway: a Road Adventure, I have the urge to play City of Heroes (except maybe I should stick it out and wait for Going Rogue to launch), it might be nice to attempt some more Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers, I -was- halfway through Mass Effect 2, I never did get anywhere significant with Dragon Age, Fallout 3 looks lonely, there is DDO and ATITD and LOTRO and and...
I'm hopeless. I can never stick to one game. :)
It basically boils down to him not having sufficient time to describe the Aion experience enough to do it justice to its players, especially since Aion's (eastern) game design is purposefully difficult enough to block off a good majority of folks who attempt it casually, in good faith.
This is not as surprising to me as it must have been for the guild leader Ashin, who invited Shawn along to check out the sights. These guys don't game for the sake of the game. They are gaming for 'work' - in order to write an article that they have been tasked to write. All 'professional' reviews have to be taken with a huge amount of salt simply because of this.
In the second place, Choose My Adventure is not meant to be a fair, objective review. It is simply describing one man's dabbling and somewhat bumbling experience in a game - and in following his articles, a very mediocre player at that.
What I did find somewhat revealing is that when he made the decision to stick it through (even if level 23 was the maximum of what he could accomplish in six weeks), he found that he disliked it less.
In a broader sense, one wonders how long one has to give a game (or any other experience) a fair shake, in order to be able to judge it in its entirety.
Obviously, many people are content to judge a book (or anything else) simply by its appearance and thereby pick it up or throw it aside. Reading the summary blurb behind, or skim-reading a couple of chapters might give a slightly more rounded off experience, but who's to say that they don't miss out on some fantastic twist or some subtlety in its construction?
And who's to say that they HAVE to work through it all in order that they taste that wonderful but well-hidden flavor that is the ultimate reward? Maybe they have far better things to do with their time.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that it touches somewhat of a nerve. In my opinion, I tend to play a game long enough that I grok out most of its subtleties, enough to write a very objective review if I wanted (if I could remember it all), and then I mysteriously lose interest and start casting about for something different.
I've 'broken through' but I rarely finish.
Of course, some games (MMOs, mostly) are not meant to be finished either.
Maybe I'm just trying to work out when the correct time to stop a game should be.
I'm nursing a slight guilt factor with Aion. I've canceled the subscription, though I get to play it until the three months run out, some time around my birthday in July. It's not a shabby game. I enjoyed its various aspects - it gave me some cooperative instance and world boss experiences that I've missed out on, having never played WoW in an anywhere-near-serious manner. It has unique and different blends of PvP and PvE between rifting, the Abyss and fort raids. I still dreadfully yearn to get to level 50 on my gladiator, and crave the experience of playing some other classes.
The problem is time and other people. I just don't really have the time at present to devote to Aion, and in return, without time investment, it is hard to recoup any enjoyment either. Aion is also one of those games in which whose experience improves with groups of people, and a) I am fairly anti-social to begin with, having to network and work with other people is a chore, b) my timezone difference makes scheduled group activities even MORE of an agonising challenge.
It's interesting. I have slightly more trouble leaving Aion than I did Age of Conan.
I dropped WAR quite easily, maybe because the graphics and animation were substandard, the writing was nothing to shout home about, leveling was painfully linear and I'd already experienced all the scenarios and all the keep sieges I'd wanted. Maybe it's the theme. Nothing about the Warhammer fantasy universe really holds me to any extreme, and it's not as if WAR is a good recreation of it anyway.
I dropped DDO because I saw no future in it. Though I'd like to try it again casually from time to time. LOTRO was somewhat harder, though I'd pretty much convinced myself it was just an extended break, and that I'm not saying goodbye to it. Even easier now that it is going free to play soon.
I'm in a holding pattern with ATITD, which is worrisome, because that kind of thing implies that I might be done with it. Except I'm not - there's still things I could be doing, if I had the time to. But have I lost the interest to play it?
One never has this problem with single player games because once you've bought it, you own it, and you can go back to it whenever you want.
---
If you ask me what I want to do right now, it is play Guild Wars and see if I can break through further to more missions and see if I can get the Nightfall campaign complete.
In the meantime, sitting in the background in no particular order, I have one or two last missions of World in Conflict I really should complete, there is the Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising campaign, I never did finish Torchlight or Overlord, I had started on this cheesy indie adventure game called Runaway: a Road Adventure, I have the urge to play City of Heroes (except maybe I should stick it out and wait for Going Rogue to launch), it might be nice to attempt some more Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers, I -was- halfway through Mass Effect 2, I never did get anywhere significant with Dragon Age, Fallout 3 looks lonely, there is DDO and ATITD and LOTRO and and...
I'm hopeless. I can never stick to one game. :)
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Placeholder
Linky
Wanted to discuss parallels to ATITD at some point in the future. And figure out if there are any crucial differences.
Wanted to discuss parallels to ATITD at some point in the future. And figure out if there are any crucial differences.
Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. ...This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?
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Of course, people can sidestep the harvesting process entirely by spending real money to purchase in-game items. This is the major source of revenue for Zynga, the company that produces Farmville. Zynga is currently on pace to make over three hundred million dollars in revenue this year, largely off of in-game micro-transactions. Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville.
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It makes sense that some people would enjoy the aesthetics of Farmville, of designing and arranging their farms. No doubt some users want to show off their handiwork, and impress and compete with their virtual neighbors. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing a game that isn’t fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses. After all, we have real life for that sort of thing.
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Even Zynga’s designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow. As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious. M
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Again: if Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.
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Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.
One wonders if this is a good thing. It is difficult to imagine Aristotle or Caillois celebrating Farmville as essential to citizenship. Indeed, when one measures Farmville against Roger Caillois’ six criteria for defining games, Farmville fails to satisfy each and every one. Caillois stated that games must be free from obligation, separate from ‘real life,’ uncertain in outcome, an unproductive activity, governed by rules, and make-believe.[12] In comparison:
(1) Farmville is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility;
(2) Farmville encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it;
(3) Farmville is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill;
(4) Farmville is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Facebook and Zynga depend for their wealth;
(5) Farmville is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple cause-and-effect;
(6) Farmville is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
This Facebook Future
I'm not sure if I should freak out now or bend over and meekly submit to the tidal wave of megacorporations merging game and reality into a dystopian future.
What can I say? It -is- coming. Maybe not as crazy a future as he paints, but I know at least a good 75% of the people in my office have a Facebook account. Especially the young people.
My keen avoidance of Facebook and LinkedIn and other such sites make me a social pariah, a corporate-branded-tech-Luddite hermit, in the eyes of most of the regular Joes at work. Which is somewhat keenly hilarious considering I am probably the nerdiest and geekiest and hardcore gamer of them all.
Despite my attempt to steer away from any invasion of personal RL with the virtual worlds I love to explore, I am not immune to the tsunami of reality-internet merge.
I buy stuff (mostly games) digitally all the time. Any time I use a credit card, I have to register an account with my real name, otherwise questions will get asked as to why I am providing different info.
I am quite hopelessly dependent on Steam... my only privacy defence is a Friends-only profile, a commonly used handle, and a lucky hyphen or two in the name that makes me un-locatable with the current tech of the search engine they are using.
I have reluctantly, if relatively anonymously, signed up onto Bioware's so-called 'social' networking site because I want the 'free' DLC from their games. To a certain extent, I have even admired how the site tracks your characters' achievements and levels from game to game. My only escape is that I have no real life gamer friends to entangle myself into a competitive network of "ha, I got more achievements than thou." This goes, to a lesser extent, for Steam as well.
Yes, I freely admit I rather enjoy the achievable achievements on Steam. Or even, *sobs* the ones Microsoft's Home network doles out for playing Dawn of War II. Again, my only solace is that there is not a second or third or Nth person that I am linked to, to form comparisons about my Gamerscore or lack of it. Right now, they are just personal private markers of where I've been, when I felt like playing the game in question.
They could end up more, depending on how obnoxious companies get about such things.
I did not really know of the existence of things like Farmville, of Club Penguin, of Webkinz. I did not know they were that big.
It is indeed scary, a world where the mundanes play 'games' that bear no resemblance to what we would recognise as such, but instead are gigantic Skinner boxes of real/virtual cash feeding of big corporations.
What can I say? It -is- coming. Maybe not as crazy a future as he paints, but I know at least a good 75% of the people in my office have a Facebook account. Especially the young people.
My keen avoidance of Facebook and LinkedIn and other such sites make me a social pariah, a corporate-branded-tech-Luddite hermit, in the eyes of most of the regular Joes at work. Which is somewhat keenly hilarious considering I am probably the nerdiest and geekiest and hardcore gamer of them all.
Despite my attempt to steer away from any invasion of personal RL with the virtual worlds I love to explore, I am not immune to the tsunami of reality-internet merge.
I buy stuff (mostly games) digitally all the time. Any time I use a credit card, I have to register an account with my real name, otherwise questions will get asked as to why I am providing different info.
I am quite hopelessly dependent on Steam... my only privacy defence is a Friends-only profile, a commonly used handle, and a lucky hyphen or two in the name that makes me un-locatable with the current tech of the search engine they are using.
I have reluctantly, if relatively anonymously, signed up onto Bioware's so-called 'social' networking site because I want the 'free' DLC from their games. To a certain extent, I have even admired how the site tracks your characters' achievements and levels from game to game. My only escape is that I have no real life gamer friends to entangle myself into a competitive network of "ha, I got more achievements than thou." This goes, to a lesser extent, for Steam as well.
Yes, I freely admit I rather enjoy the achievable achievements on Steam. Or even, *sobs* the ones Microsoft's Home network doles out for playing Dawn of War II. Again, my only solace is that there is not a second or third or Nth person that I am linked to, to form comparisons about my Gamerscore or lack of it. Right now, they are just personal private markers of where I've been, when I felt like playing the game in question.
They could end up more, depending on how obnoxious companies get about such things.
I did not really know of the existence of things like Farmville, of Club Penguin, of Webkinz. I did not know they were that big.
It is indeed scary, a world where the mundanes play 'games' that bear no resemblance to what we would recognise as such, but instead are gigantic Skinner boxes of real/virtual cash feeding of big corporations.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Going Rogue - Multiple Games
I recently found the time to browse the City of Heroes board forums.
My search-fu has left me to the point that I have no clue what's in the Mutant origin costume pack besides some costume change emotes (I wanted to see the costumes! :(). Ironic, since there was some kind of contest (that I don't qualify for anyway) to win some of these packs first before anyone else, so you'd think they'd describe the prize.
Still, I found an interesting Prisoner's Dilemma variant run by Marcian Tobay and promptly got sidetreked reading the threads.
Behavioral economics and other predictably irrational (I still haven't read Dan Ariely's book yet, dammit) studies suggest that the crafting of the actual dilemma is quite important - as it has rambifications on how different people come to make their final (often emotionally-based) decisions.
I somewhat skewed my own reactions by reading through thread 2, which stated other people's rationales for the Rogue or Not decision.
On a hunch, thinking backward, my first impulsive decision would have been to cooperate. Mostly because everyone stands to win a small amount that way, and maybe we'd get lucky. I also subscribe to the "most people are nice" (or at least will act nice) philosophy and I've been living in the 75% peaceably cooperative ATITD world anyhow. These are truly emotional and gut-feel reactions.
After reading the first few mathematical breakdowns and conceding that hell yeah, the way the experiment is set up, a miserably small gain even if you cooperate...
(Sidetrek: I believe that civilization is built up on folks standing to win long-term larger gains through cooperation instead of defection, over many repeated non-annonymous iterations of PD. There's an evolutionary advantage involved, imo)
...and standing to win a large amount by Going Rogue. Well, I became convinced that many people, or at least a sizeable enough number to damage the 'everyone cooperates' scenario, would indeed defect.
At which point I grappled with the "Maybe it does make more sense to Go Rogue and hope for an individual payoff then" decision as I continued reading the thread. It's logical, mathematical, rational, self-benefiting.
(I'm avoiding the term selfish on purpose here, as I want to be objective in my account, though that's the word I'd normally and conversationally use. I don't have emotional baggage admitting I can be perfectly selfish when I want to be. I perceive myself as 75% good, but am comfortable that part of me can be 25% selfish as equated with evil cos I'm not a goody two shoes angel... call me a neutral-good Vigilante :P)
Something still didn't feel right though. Maybe because I tend not to want to perceive myself as part of the unwashed masses. Maybe because I don't want to be perceived as a selfish, grabby, opportunistic, competitive (PvP-ish) sort of person. (Though I acknowledge there's a goodly amount of those types of folks who exist in this world and that's okay, we're different.) Maybe because I was convinced in my "expect the worse of humanity and be pessimistic, but maintain eternal hope anyway and be pleasantly surprised" fashion that at least 1 other person, if not 2, would go Rogue and defect, regardless of my own decision.
I hadn't quite worked out the consequences of this yet, but emotionally, I was figuring something like decent probability: I'd get nothing, high probability: we'd all get nothing.
Then I read the other brilliant mathematical calculation - actually the math wasn't that great, but the change of perspective was. On an individual self-profit basis, it made mathematical sense to defect. On a group-benefit basis, it made mathematical sense to cooperate. Supposedly, anyway. I wasn't reading the math in detail now because it suddenly made clear to me, in a very Zen or secular Taoist manner that I had not been seeing the forest for the trees in the way.
If everyone cooperates, everyone gains, a small amount, but it is a gain.
If two people cooperate, and one goes Rogue, he gets the big kitty. Instinctively, we react against this. Chimps do it too. We're biologically hardwired to perceive unfairness and we screech in protest and rather gip ourselves, cut off our nose to spite our face, and reject it all so that we can all be equal in the mud. We punish the defector, the non-cooperative one, because that's how group altruism works. Without enforcers, without enforcement, you get lots of rational self-interest acting for themselves, and anarchy and chaos.
But you know, in this case, punishment of a defector involves defecting yourself? And thus spiting others first before they get to spite you because probabilities indicate a high chance that folks will defect?
It just doesn't feel right.
Just because you expect other folks to play you out doesn't mean you play them out first. That sort of reactionary behavior leads to Mexican standoffs and escalation that ends in a nuclear countdown. Ie. mutually disadvantageous.
So why not take the moral high ground? Especially in this game, which doesn't involve any loss to be adverse to, just a possible (small) gain. What are the personal benefits? There are many. You get to feel good that you're more noble than any others who might go Rogue for whatever reason. Even if they win, you can rationalise it as a happy benefit for them, rather than feeling gipped that it wasn't you gaining.
And if the other two people go Rogue and you were the cooperative one, nobody wins but you come out looking and smelling like an angel. Yea, maybe some people call that being a dummy to be taken advantage of, but those are not the kinds of people you want to hang about with anyway. You want to hang out with the other type, the ones who look out for potential cooperators with good reputations.
(I dunno, maybe it says something about my psyche that I worry about how I look, my reputation, that sort of thing. Maybe it's very Asian cultural.)
So in this case, by cooperating, it is mathematically better for the group, you get the personal benefit of feeling morally superior, and the only place you stand to lose is the loss of personal pre-emptive justice in case there is only one Rogue who wins big and crows that all the rest of you are losers... but that is easily rationalized off as an acceptable loss, you get to feel spiritually good for that guy in a karmic sense, even if he is too small-minded to notice.
So instead of a physical dollars-and-cents kind of win, we've reframed the dilemma into a philosophical, emotional type of victory.
And so we return to square one. I'd cooperate, and shrug my shoulders if someone else wins. Because it really shouldn't bother me if some other guy benefits more than I. -I- am not losing anything here, for one thing, what I stand to gain is only a potential win and leaves me unaffected if I get nothing.
Of course, what's interesting in my consideration is that I have given zero thought to what Marcian Tobay gains or loses, I am not attempting to help or hinder him at all. To me, he has budgeted for all the possibilities, he came up with the game/experiment, and therefore, he does not have to be considered in the equation.
For others, he might be a factor that matters, and that changes the situation as set-up once again.
The whole thing is one nice unexpected thought experiment though.
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I've found an amusing niche in ATITD. The self-sufficient hermit builder. It's an expensive niche, since it's costing me 4 accounts per month now.
Theoretically, I don't have to have the two extra accounts every month, but I think I'll keep it going another month because I am a slacker in-game who works a little too hard IRL to have spare time and having the offlined items every day is exceedingly convenient.
It seems the year I cross into the next decade and into supposed 'maturity' is the year my relative values of time and money switch sides. 15-20 years ago, one had not enough money and too much time. I won't say I have too much money now, but enough for some discretionary 'fun' purchases to make up for the not enough time.
This server works well for this niche. I'm left alone 90% of the time. I've staked out a good portion of the surrounding territory (though one fella has parked his CP near my mines and asked if I could remove them. Hello, they were there first. You chose to build near them yourself.) And by being more or less self-sufficient by dint of throwing cash at Teppy, it removes much of the perceived obligation to cooperate and make nice with people.
Fortunately, I'm not playing the cooperation game as laid out by Tests - those are highly political. I'm just playing the 'gain enough levels to build stuff, and amass tons of resources to plunk down scenery in the landscape' type of Sim-building game. Along with the odd "purty beetle patterns" bad habit.
So you might call me a bit of a Rogue in ATITD too. Just not a griefer.
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I played a bit more of Guild Wars: Nightfall over the weekend. I actually had the sudden urge for a different kind of MMO game, a very old one, but the servers refused to cooperate and update it in time, so I had to look around for another classic. I blame the urge on reading a library copy of 'V for Vendetta.'
I also realised to my chagrin that after they put in the account security check where you have to key in a character name in addition to everything else, that I've completely forgotten anything on my barely-played second account (I think I only made one Nightfall character and ran it to get some heroes, just so I could prove in theory that grouping 6 heroes together would work), and am in the midst of contacting support to cough up a character name for me.
I chose Magrid the Sly. Mostly because I felt obliged to break Kormir out of prison, rather than go off demon-hunting with the uber-cool Master of Whispers. I know, roleplaying in a game that is about build-exploitation for farms or PvP, what will this crazy Rogue player think of next?
And if the above Rogue reference is lame, there is an unspeakably good reason for it. *cough* *hem*
---
I gave in to the Steam sale they were having for EA Games. Most of them were either crud games, or I already owned them, or they were still too expensive.
On Saturday though, they were offering Mass Effect for $4.99 and Mass Effect 2 for $29.99. Or the Digital Deluxe version for $35.99.
Dayum.
What encouraged me was the lack of "YOU MUST HAVE THE STEAM VERSION OF SO-AND-SO GAME TO INSTALL THIS EXPANSION/SEQUEL/DLC/WHAT-HAVE-YOU" requirement notices.
Some creative forum search-fu later, there was a distinct lack of people howling that their PC retail Mass Effect save games were incompatible with the Steam version of Mass Effect 2, and only a few very old references to 'just point your launcher at your save game directory' and it will find the save games, no problem.
The save game directory happened to be in My Documents/Bioware/Mass Effect anyhow, which was promisingly disentangled to any specific Mass Effect game version.
So I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a go. For $50 sgd, which is the normal price of a Tec-Drome game, I could get the digital deluxe version and the goodies - quite a decent steal.
Just in case, I thought, what the heck, Mass Effect 1 is only $4.99, it's not getting any cheaper any time soon, I better get a Steam copy of it too. After all, we -are- expecting Mass Effect 3, it's a long running franchise, and if I want to replay ME1 with different characters, I rather not have to keep looking for a disc to stick in my ailing DVD drive for disc checks.
Save game worked fine. I was a little miffed to see that my precious level 45 character got demoted back down to level 1. Comes of catching a bad case of dead, I guess. *sniffs*
Truth to tell, it's been two years. My Mass Effect 1 game files say I installed it in 2008. I've forgotten a good part of what the heck the story was about. I had to look up who the heck Udina and Anderson was so that I didn't screw up my story continuity.
ME2's story structure looks interesting though. More compartmentalised. It's still linear enough, with choices of which compartment to pick first.
The streamlined combat annoys me a little. Maybe because I don't remember the control scheme of the first game at all. I have to hit the same button (space) to run, to take cover, to climb and so on. This leads to some unpredictable context-sensitive actions. I haven't got the hang of shooting from cover very well, and often pop up in the worst of it to get a faceful of las. Times like that make me rather thankful for my 'prestige' Collector armor which apparently has 20% bonus health, and some 10% regen increase - maybe it helps, I have no clue.
I look truely odd talking to people in it looking like a female version of my insectoid dominator Malentis. I keep expecting them to scream and run away because I look like some kind of demonic Pred-alien but nope, they have X-ray vision and can see that it is me, Sheperd, underneath that getup.
The ME world feels a little darker. Cerberus is an interesting dilemma, being that I'm playing a goody-two-shoes Paragon. I find myself choosing darker Renegade options from time to time. Is it me? Did I change in two years? Am I not roleplaying the same character correctly from two years ago? Is it the story set up as it is? Is it the character finding herself in more morally ambiguous situations?
Hell, sometimes it's hard to predict the results of one's choices, despite the friendly Paragon/Renegade labels. The interrupts are especially annoying.
Take the more police state Citadel I found myself in. Some quarian got accused of stealing some volus' credit chit. Being a good samaritan and seeing that she was going to get dragged away by C-Sec if I didn't do something, I found the silly volus' credit chit for him. End of story, I r a Paragon, right?
Then there was a Paragon interrupt. I didn't think and just hit it, and voila, my character decided to be hot-tempered and confrontational and yelled in the two recalcitrant guys' faces until they ran away.
Maybe I'm roleplaying in a little too fine detail here, but hey, the game encourages roleplaying. A violent soldier with a fiery temper would have yelled, no problem. If I'd called my Paragon character Flame, I'd have no issues. That's what my character Flame does. Be boorish, tactless, in-your-face, but Robin-hoody good-hearted.
I happened to be roleplaying someone with a little more subtle diplomacy here. So the outburst was... slightly uncharacteristic. Maybe I shouldn't have interrupted then. How was I to know? I'm video-game trained. I see a symbol on the screen, I press it. But then if I didn't interrupt, maybe things would have gotten worse and I'd have no chance to fix it and be forced to look helplessly and passively on - which is even more uncharacteristic.
Anyway I rationalized it away as the character becoming darker, more Rogue-like as an effect of the surroundings she found herself in.
I'm almost a little scared as to how much darker, though. While on the mission to rescue Archangel, there was this big humongous mech that I managed to disable via hacking, which was very characteristic. Sabotage sneakily. If they deploy it, their problem. If they don't deploy it, nothing happens to them.
Then there was this big humongous gunship that I was convinced I didn't want flying around at me when I went in for Archangel, and so I was on the lookout for any opportunity to sabotage it further. A renegade action popped up, I hesitated for a split second, and went for it. Well, my Sheperd decided to become an insane serial killer by grabbing a nearby exposed electrical wire and zapping the repairer with it.
WTF.
I could have tossed a screwdriver into the gunship wiring. You know, I'm really good at hacking. I break open wall safes and personal PDAs all the time. I bet I could've screwed up the electronics but good.
Hell, I could have accidentally on purpose discharged my gun (or grenade launcher) into the gunship and sweettalked (or not) my way out of it. The point is to destroy the frackin' GUNSHIP, GUNSHIP, people, that I don't want ever flying again. There are other people that can repair the machine. If the machine is spare parts, then -it- can -not- take off.
Even if you want to force me to kill the repairer - it's a renegade action, after all - there is such a thing as a clean quiet kill. With a knife. Surely everyone on Mass Effect has a handy long knife. Or a silenced gun. Only a clinically insane mind can think it is a good idea to -electrocute- someone in an attempt to silently disable a gunship. You can't even muffle their screams with a hand since you don't want to be part of a live electrical circuit, right?
*sighs* And the stupid gunship took off anyway.
Little late to say I told you so. Next time, try the grenade launcher. On machine. Not person. Harder to find spares. Collateral damage is collateral damage. That's called smart renegade-ism.
I'll admit, I was pleasantly surprised by the twist in the revelation of Archangel's identity though.
And I read ahead, so I fail to be surprised at the twist that the dangerous convict Jack is a female, but it was a nice setup anyway. I was expecting from the dossier that I'd be breaking out some kind of Riddick, and decided not to go for that convict ship first, as a Paragon.
Ah well, guess I'd play on and see how it all turns out.
My search-fu has left me to the point that I have no clue what's in the Mutant origin costume pack besides some costume change emotes (I wanted to see the costumes! :(). Ironic, since there was some kind of contest (that I don't qualify for anyway) to win some of these packs first before anyone else, so you'd think they'd describe the prize.
Still, I found an interesting Prisoner's Dilemma variant run by Marcian Tobay and promptly got sidetreked reading the threads.
Behavioral economics and other predictably irrational (I still haven't read Dan Ariely's book yet, dammit) studies suggest that the crafting of the actual dilemma is quite important - as it has rambifications on how different people come to make their final (often emotionally-based) decisions.
I somewhat skewed my own reactions by reading through thread 2, which stated other people's rationales for the Rogue or Not decision.
On a hunch, thinking backward, my first impulsive decision would have been to cooperate. Mostly because everyone stands to win a small amount that way, and maybe we'd get lucky. I also subscribe to the "most people are nice" (or at least will act nice) philosophy and I've been living in the 75% peaceably cooperative ATITD world anyhow. These are truly emotional and gut-feel reactions.
After reading the first few mathematical breakdowns and conceding that hell yeah, the way the experiment is set up, a miserably small gain even if you cooperate...
(Sidetrek: I believe that civilization is built up on folks standing to win long-term larger gains through cooperation instead of defection, over many repeated non-annonymous iterations of PD. There's an evolutionary advantage involved, imo)
...and standing to win a large amount by Going Rogue. Well, I became convinced that many people, or at least a sizeable enough number to damage the 'everyone cooperates' scenario, would indeed defect.
At which point I grappled with the "Maybe it does make more sense to Go Rogue and hope for an individual payoff then" decision as I continued reading the thread. It's logical, mathematical, rational, self-benefiting.
(I'm avoiding the term selfish on purpose here, as I want to be objective in my account, though that's the word I'd normally and conversationally use. I don't have emotional baggage admitting I can be perfectly selfish when I want to be. I perceive myself as 75% good, but am comfortable that part of me can be 25% selfish as equated with evil cos I'm not a goody two shoes angel... call me a neutral-good Vigilante :P)
Something still didn't feel right though. Maybe because I tend not to want to perceive myself as part of the unwashed masses. Maybe because I don't want to be perceived as a selfish, grabby, opportunistic, competitive (PvP-ish) sort of person. (Though I acknowledge there's a goodly amount of those types of folks who exist in this world and that's okay, we're different.) Maybe because I was convinced in my "expect the worse of humanity and be pessimistic, but maintain eternal hope anyway and be pleasantly surprised" fashion that at least 1 other person, if not 2, would go Rogue and defect, regardless of my own decision.
I hadn't quite worked out the consequences of this yet, but emotionally, I was figuring something like decent probability: I'd get nothing, high probability: we'd all get nothing.
Then I read the other brilliant mathematical calculation - actually the math wasn't that great, but the change of perspective was. On an individual self-profit basis, it made mathematical sense to defect. On a group-benefit basis, it made mathematical sense to cooperate. Supposedly, anyway. I wasn't reading the math in detail now because it suddenly made clear to me, in a very Zen or secular Taoist manner that I had not been seeing the forest for the trees in the way.
If everyone cooperates, everyone gains, a small amount, but it is a gain.
If two people cooperate, and one goes Rogue, he gets the big kitty. Instinctively, we react against this. Chimps do it too. We're biologically hardwired to perceive unfairness and we screech in protest and rather gip ourselves, cut off our nose to spite our face, and reject it all so that we can all be equal in the mud. We punish the defector, the non-cooperative one, because that's how group altruism works. Without enforcers, without enforcement, you get lots of rational self-interest acting for themselves, and anarchy and chaos.
But you know, in this case, punishment of a defector involves defecting yourself? And thus spiting others first before they get to spite you because probabilities indicate a high chance that folks will defect?
It just doesn't feel right.
Just because you expect other folks to play you out doesn't mean you play them out first. That sort of reactionary behavior leads to Mexican standoffs and escalation that ends in a nuclear countdown. Ie. mutually disadvantageous.
So why not take the moral high ground? Especially in this game, which doesn't involve any loss to be adverse to, just a possible (small) gain. What are the personal benefits? There are many. You get to feel good that you're more noble than any others who might go Rogue for whatever reason. Even if they win, you can rationalise it as a happy benefit for them, rather than feeling gipped that it wasn't you gaining.
And if the other two people go Rogue and you were the cooperative one, nobody wins but you come out looking and smelling like an angel. Yea, maybe some people call that being a dummy to be taken advantage of, but those are not the kinds of people you want to hang about with anyway. You want to hang out with the other type, the ones who look out for potential cooperators with good reputations.
(I dunno, maybe it says something about my psyche that I worry about how I look, my reputation, that sort of thing. Maybe it's very Asian cultural.)
So in this case, by cooperating, it is mathematically better for the group, you get the personal benefit of feeling morally superior, and the only place you stand to lose is the loss of personal pre-emptive justice in case there is only one Rogue who wins big and crows that all the rest of you are losers... but that is easily rationalized off as an acceptable loss, you get to feel spiritually good for that guy in a karmic sense, even if he is too small-minded to notice.
So instead of a physical dollars-and-cents kind of win, we've reframed the dilemma into a philosophical, emotional type of victory.
And so we return to square one. I'd cooperate, and shrug my shoulders if someone else wins. Because it really shouldn't bother me if some other guy benefits more than I. -I- am not losing anything here, for one thing, what I stand to gain is only a potential win and leaves me unaffected if I get nothing.
Of course, what's interesting in my consideration is that I have given zero thought to what Marcian Tobay gains or loses, I am not attempting to help or hinder him at all. To me, he has budgeted for all the possibilities, he came up with the game/experiment, and therefore, he does not have to be considered in the equation.
For others, he might be a factor that matters, and that changes the situation as set-up once again.
The whole thing is one nice unexpected thought experiment though.
---
I've found an amusing niche in ATITD. The self-sufficient hermit builder. It's an expensive niche, since it's costing me 4 accounts per month now.
Theoretically, I don't have to have the two extra accounts every month, but I think I'll keep it going another month because I am a slacker in-game who works a little too hard IRL to have spare time and having the offlined items every day is exceedingly convenient.
It seems the year I cross into the next decade and into supposed 'maturity' is the year my relative values of time and money switch sides. 15-20 years ago, one had not enough money and too much time. I won't say I have too much money now, but enough for some discretionary 'fun' purchases to make up for the not enough time.
This server works well for this niche. I'm left alone 90% of the time. I've staked out a good portion of the surrounding territory (though one fella has parked his CP near my mines and asked if I could remove them. Hello, they were there first. You chose to build near them yourself.) And by being more or less self-sufficient by dint of throwing cash at Teppy, it removes much of the perceived obligation to cooperate and make nice with people.
Fortunately, I'm not playing the cooperation game as laid out by Tests - those are highly political. I'm just playing the 'gain enough levels to build stuff, and amass tons of resources to plunk down scenery in the landscape' type of Sim-building game. Along with the odd "purty beetle patterns" bad habit.
So you might call me a bit of a Rogue in ATITD too. Just not a griefer.
---
I played a bit more of Guild Wars: Nightfall over the weekend. I actually had the sudden urge for a different kind of MMO game, a very old one, but the servers refused to cooperate and update it in time, so I had to look around for another classic. I blame the urge on reading a library copy of 'V for Vendetta.'
I also realised to my chagrin that after they put in the account security check where you have to key in a character name in addition to everything else, that I've completely forgotten anything on my barely-played second account (I think I only made one Nightfall character and ran it to get some heroes, just so I could prove in theory that grouping 6 heroes together would work), and am in the midst of contacting support to cough up a character name for me.
I chose Magrid the Sly. Mostly because I felt obliged to break Kormir out of prison, rather than go off demon-hunting with the uber-cool Master of Whispers. I know, roleplaying in a game that is about build-exploitation for farms or PvP, what will this crazy Rogue player think of next?
And if the above Rogue reference is lame, there is an unspeakably good reason for it. *cough* *hem*
---
I gave in to the Steam sale they were having for EA Games. Most of them were either crud games, or I already owned them, or they were still too expensive.
On Saturday though, they were offering Mass Effect for $4.99 and Mass Effect 2 for $29.99. Or the Digital Deluxe version for $35.99.
Dayum.
What encouraged me was the lack of "YOU MUST HAVE THE STEAM VERSION OF SO-AND-SO GAME TO INSTALL THIS EXPANSION/SEQUEL/DLC/WHAT-HAVE-YOU" requirement notices.
Some creative forum search-fu later, there was a distinct lack of people howling that their PC retail Mass Effect save games were incompatible with the Steam version of Mass Effect 2, and only a few very old references to 'just point your launcher at your save game directory' and it will find the save games, no problem.
The save game directory happened to be in My Documents/Bioware/Mass Effect anyhow, which was promisingly disentangled to any specific Mass Effect game version.
So I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a go. For $50 sgd, which is the normal price of a Tec-Drome game, I could get the digital deluxe version and the goodies - quite a decent steal.
Just in case, I thought, what the heck, Mass Effect 1 is only $4.99, it's not getting any cheaper any time soon, I better get a Steam copy of it too. After all, we -are- expecting Mass Effect 3, it's a long running franchise, and if I want to replay ME1 with different characters, I rather not have to keep looking for a disc to stick in my ailing DVD drive for disc checks.
Save game worked fine. I was a little miffed to see that my precious level 45 character got demoted back down to level 1. Comes of catching a bad case of dead, I guess. *sniffs*
Truth to tell, it's been two years. My Mass Effect 1 game files say I installed it in 2008. I've forgotten a good part of what the heck the story was about. I had to look up who the heck Udina and Anderson was so that I didn't screw up my story continuity.
ME2's story structure looks interesting though. More compartmentalised. It's still linear enough, with choices of which compartment to pick first.
The streamlined combat annoys me a little. Maybe because I don't remember the control scheme of the first game at all. I have to hit the same button (space) to run, to take cover, to climb and so on. This leads to some unpredictable context-sensitive actions. I haven't got the hang of shooting from cover very well, and often pop up in the worst of it to get a faceful of las. Times like that make me rather thankful for my 'prestige' Collector armor which apparently has 20% bonus health, and some 10% regen increase - maybe it helps, I have no clue.
I look truely odd talking to people in it looking like a female version of my insectoid dominator Malentis. I keep expecting them to scream and run away because I look like some kind of demonic Pred-alien but nope, they have X-ray vision and can see that it is me, Sheperd, underneath that getup.
The ME world feels a little darker. Cerberus is an interesting dilemma, being that I'm playing a goody-two-shoes Paragon. I find myself choosing darker Renegade options from time to time. Is it me? Did I change in two years? Am I not roleplaying the same character correctly from two years ago? Is it the story set up as it is? Is it the character finding herself in more morally ambiguous situations?
Hell, sometimes it's hard to predict the results of one's choices, despite the friendly Paragon/Renegade labels. The interrupts are especially annoying.
Take the more police state Citadel I found myself in. Some quarian got accused of stealing some volus' credit chit. Being a good samaritan and seeing that she was going to get dragged away by C-Sec if I didn't do something, I found the silly volus' credit chit for him. End of story, I r a Paragon, right?
Then there was a Paragon interrupt. I didn't think and just hit it, and voila, my character decided to be hot-tempered and confrontational and yelled in the two recalcitrant guys' faces until they ran away.
Maybe I'm roleplaying in a little too fine detail here, but hey, the game encourages roleplaying. A violent soldier with a fiery temper would have yelled, no problem. If I'd called my Paragon character Flame, I'd have no issues. That's what my character Flame does. Be boorish, tactless, in-your-face, but Robin-hoody good-hearted.
I happened to be roleplaying someone with a little more subtle diplomacy here. So the outburst was... slightly uncharacteristic. Maybe I shouldn't have interrupted then. How was I to know? I'm video-game trained. I see a symbol on the screen, I press it. But then if I didn't interrupt, maybe things would have gotten worse and I'd have no chance to fix it and be forced to look helplessly and passively on - which is even more uncharacteristic.
Anyway I rationalized it away as the character becoming darker, more Rogue-like as an effect of the surroundings she found herself in.
I'm almost a little scared as to how much darker, though. While on the mission to rescue Archangel, there was this big humongous mech that I managed to disable via hacking, which was very characteristic. Sabotage sneakily. If they deploy it, their problem. If they don't deploy it, nothing happens to them.
Then there was this big humongous gunship that I was convinced I didn't want flying around at me when I went in for Archangel, and so I was on the lookout for any opportunity to sabotage it further. A renegade action popped up, I hesitated for a split second, and went for it. Well, my Sheperd decided to become an insane serial killer by grabbing a nearby exposed electrical wire and zapping the repairer with it.
WTF.
I could have tossed a screwdriver into the gunship wiring. You know, I'm really good at hacking. I break open wall safes and personal PDAs all the time. I bet I could've screwed up the electronics but good.
Hell, I could have accidentally on purpose discharged my gun (or grenade launcher) into the gunship and sweettalked (or not) my way out of it. The point is to destroy the frackin' GUNSHIP, GUNSHIP, people, that I don't want ever flying again. There are other people that can repair the machine. If the machine is spare parts, then -it- can -not- take off.
Even if you want to force me to kill the repairer - it's a renegade action, after all - there is such a thing as a clean quiet kill. With a knife. Surely everyone on Mass Effect has a handy long knife. Or a silenced gun. Only a clinically insane mind can think it is a good idea to -electrocute- someone in an attempt to silently disable a gunship. You can't even muffle their screams with a hand since you don't want to be part of a live electrical circuit, right?
*sighs* And the stupid gunship took off anyway.
Little late to say I told you so. Next time, try the grenade launcher. On machine. Not person. Harder to find spares. Collateral damage is collateral damage. That's called smart renegade-ism.
I'll admit, I was pleasantly surprised by the twist in the revelation of Archangel's identity though.
And I read ahead, so I fail to be surprised at the twist that the dangerous convict Jack is a female, but it was a nice setup anyway. I was expecting from the dossier that I'd be breaking out some kind of Riddick, and decided not to go for that convict ship first, as a Paragon.
Ah well, guess I'd play on and see how it all turns out.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
The Hamster Wheel of Meaning
I'm experiencing an interesting phenomenon this weekend. It's an odd feeling of aimless "Now What?" accompanied by a side of certainty that the "Now What" feeling is misdirected neurons firing.
A couple days ago, I was feeling a great deal of ambient frustration - this is sort of low level anger that doesn't have anyone or anything specific as a target, and I've learned to associate the odd moodiness with probable hormonal PMS causes.
Still, frustration was frustration, no matter the source, and I like to read some self-help articles to help my logical brain talk my glands down before any crisis happened.
I read some random rabbi's article on frustration. In one of the sections, as an offhand metaphor, he was explaining that even on vacations, after two days in the sun, we would get antsy and restless and bored and 'frustrated.' I don't really remember the rest of his point, but I do remember telling myself - hell no, I can go for a week's worth of home vacation and still find stuff to do on a spontaneous fun-seeking, hobby-indulging, general exploratory learning level.
Or so I thought.
Last week has been one on rails in terms of work. Tight schedule, things to do at certain structured times, other things to get done by when, and so on.
The thing that was building up like a pressure cooker in the back of my mind was that I needed to sort beetles in ATITD, and my general straw/onion/cabbage chores were going to be fubar'ed after 2-3 days of neglect.
I hit the weekend running on Friday night to Saturday morning, logging onto ATITD. I cranked through the remaining beetles, and got them all more or less sorted. I even managed to cut down to slightly less than 500 beetles, which means I can now move my character without having to boost stats through herculean means.
As if the steam release valve opened with the completion of that task, I ran around on both my alts in a veritable frenzy of activity, making canvas, spinning thread, tending sheep and camels, growing wheat and barley, making papyrus paper, etc. etc. I even cracked open my 2 RL months-old bottles of wine and had a little celebratory party by myself, scoring several notches on the achievement ladder with wine notebook hits and filling my explorer need with the knowledge of my specific vineyard's flavors.
And then... I took a break for lunch...
And now, the "Now What?" feeling washes over me. The main ATITD pressures were relieved - my other game goals can be explored at more sedate paces. I've been so trained to follow a rigid schedule during my work week, that I've forgotten how to be spontaneous.
Faced with a choice of a number of other games - City of Heroes, Guild Wars, Restaurant Empire 2, Prototype, Dawn of War II, Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Mythic roleplaying, and so on... I don't feel like getting started or making headway on any of them, and the oddly and disturbingly adult thought pops into my mind - why am I wasting my time on this stuff? why don't I do something more constructive instead?
This brings me to a screeching halt in more ways than one.
Is this what happens to most adults? Is that why they don't play games anymore? They think it's not worth their time? (Followed by the gibbering thought - I durn't wanna be a mundane adult!)
And wtf do I mean when I think these games are not worth my time? Then what the heck is? If I sit down and tend to real fishes in an aquarium, is that wasting my time? If I sit down and work through work-related tasks on my weekend, is that a constructive use of my time? Haven't I just chosen to sacrifice my life to the company, and/or to other adult-peer-approved versions of time-wasting?
It's all just differently-colored hamster wheels anyway.
A couple days ago, I was feeling a great deal of ambient frustration - this is sort of low level anger that doesn't have anyone or anything specific as a target, and I've learned to associate the odd moodiness with probable hormonal PMS causes.
Still, frustration was frustration, no matter the source, and I like to read some self-help articles to help my logical brain talk my glands down before any crisis happened.
I read some random rabbi's article on frustration. In one of the sections, as an offhand metaphor, he was explaining that even on vacations, after two days in the sun, we would get antsy and restless and bored and 'frustrated.' I don't really remember the rest of his point, but I do remember telling myself - hell no, I can go for a week's worth of home vacation and still find stuff to do on a spontaneous fun-seeking, hobby-indulging, general exploratory learning level.
Or so I thought.
Last week has been one on rails in terms of work. Tight schedule, things to do at certain structured times, other things to get done by when, and so on.
The thing that was building up like a pressure cooker in the back of my mind was that I needed to sort beetles in ATITD, and my general straw/onion/cabbage chores were going to be fubar'ed after 2-3 days of neglect.
I hit the weekend running on Friday night to Saturday morning, logging onto ATITD. I cranked through the remaining beetles, and got them all more or less sorted. I even managed to cut down to slightly less than 500 beetles, which means I can now move my character without having to boost stats through herculean means.
As if the steam release valve opened with the completion of that task, I ran around on both my alts in a veritable frenzy of activity, making canvas, spinning thread, tending sheep and camels, growing wheat and barley, making papyrus paper, etc. etc. I even cracked open my 2 RL months-old bottles of wine and had a little celebratory party by myself, scoring several notches on the achievement ladder with wine notebook hits and filling my explorer need with the knowledge of my specific vineyard's flavors.
And then... I took a break for lunch...
And now, the "Now What?" feeling washes over me. The main ATITD pressures were relieved - my other game goals can be explored at more sedate paces. I've been so trained to follow a rigid schedule during my work week, that I've forgotten how to be spontaneous.
Faced with a choice of a number of other games - City of Heroes, Guild Wars, Restaurant Empire 2, Prototype, Dawn of War II, Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Mythic roleplaying, and so on... I don't feel like getting started or making headway on any of them, and the oddly and disturbingly adult thought pops into my mind - why am I wasting my time on this stuff? why don't I do something more constructive instead?
This brings me to a screeching halt in more ways than one.
Is this what happens to most adults? Is that why they don't play games anymore? They think it's not worth their time? (Followed by the gibbering thought - I durn't wanna be a mundane adult!)
And wtf do I mean when I think these games are not worth my time? Then what the heck is? If I sit down and tend to real fishes in an aquarium, is that wasting my time? If I sit down and work through work-related tasks on my weekend, is that a constructive use of my time? Haven't I just chosen to sacrifice my life to the company, and/or to other adult-peer-approved versions of time-wasting?
It's all just differently-colored hamster wheels anyway.
Friday, June 18, 2010
The "Holy Cow, It's Friday Already" Post
I wonder where the week went.
Work. Work work. Says the peon to his liddle friend, as I mix Warcraft units and common phrases with cheerful disregard.
After APB failed to satisfy, and having absolutely no time at all to dedicate to hardcore nerdy 12 hour-long ATITD'ing...
(... and if I must be honest, my uncontrollable beetle habit causing inventory weight limit problems is a big thorn in my side to any other progress, as I literally cannot move until I finish filing my beetles. Which are still somewhere along the letter 's'. Considering I started from numbers and the letter 'b', that means I've gone through about 400 beetles with maybe 250 more to go.
Beetle filing and purging takes time and energy which I find it hard to rustle up within the week though...)
...I've turned to some singleplayer-gaming and some hopeful ambitions regarding future gaming instead.
Dreams include someday maybe re-starting Guild Wars and working on whatever character that I can still remember. I've never completed the Nightfall campaign, having been pwn'ed at some point by horrible vicious dinosaurs - or was that the Eye of the North campaign. Except I think there was a horrible vicious dragon head that was prejudiced against solo players for EoTN campaign.
Mostly because Guild Wars 2 hype is ramping up, and Guild Wars has some nice War in Kryta event which sounds like they're inserted Live Event-based changes.
I also thought about doing some solo roleplaying with Mythic. The Yahoo group which I revisited had some brilliant "battle reports" where one guy played Keep of the Borderlands with Mythic emulating players instead of the usual GM emulation. Someone else used Mythic to randomly cook up a campaign world and setting.
I got as far as rolling up a new world to solo roleplay in, and by the time I was done figuring out the world, 3 hours had past, and my brain and body was threatening to become narcoleptic. So I had to shut down and curl into bed before I fell asleep standing up.
Sadly, I no longer have problems wasting time. Where the heck DOES the time go?
Seems like I can focus at home for 2-3 hours at best (because staying back late, dinner, traveling time means I get home at 9-10pm etc.) and then PFWAM, I gotta collapse on bed or else.
Last thing I finally made myself do this week was install Prototype. That game had only been sitting in my computer game DVD files for the past... oh... 6 months?
It's quite fun. It's one of those games that make me glad to have a USB gamepad. It's one of those games that astonish me that it detects the model correctly as a Logitech Dual Action, and that all the buttons have been preset sensibly. It's one of those games that let you run around like an all-seeing all-slaying god of destruction, which I sorely missed after getting butt-f'ed in APB.
More on Prototype later.
Work. Work work. Says the peon to his liddle friend, as I mix Warcraft units and common phrases with cheerful disregard.
After APB failed to satisfy, and having absolutely no time at all to dedicate to hardcore nerdy 12 hour-long ATITD'ing...
(... and if I must be honest, my uncontrollable beetle habit causing inventory weight limit problems is a big thorn in my side to any other progress, as I literally cannot move until I finish filing my beetles. Which are still somewhere along the letter 's'. Considering I started from numbers and the letter 'b', that means I've gone through about 400 beetles with maybe 250 more to go.
Beetle filing and purging takes time and energy which I find it hard to rustle up within the week though...)
...I've turned to some singleplayer-gaming and some hopeful ambitions regarding future gaming instead.
Dreams include someday maybe re-starting Guild Wars and working on whatever character that I can still remember. I've never completed the Nightfall campaign, having been pwn'ed at some point by horrible vicious dinosaurs - or was that the Eye of the North campaign. Except I think there was a horrible vicious dragon head that was prejudiced against solo players for EoTN campaign.
Mostly because Guild Wars 2 hype is ramping up, and Guild Wars has some nice War in Kryta event which sounds like they're inserted Live Event-based changes.
I also thought about doing some solo roleplaying with Mythic. The Yahoo group which I revisited had some brilliant "battle reports" where one guy played Keep of the Borderlands with Mythic emulating players instead of the usual GM emulation. Someone else used Mythic to randomly cook up a campaign world and setting.
I got as far as rolling up a new world to solo roleplay in, and by the time I was done figuring out the world, 3 hours had past, and my brain and body was threatening to become narcoleptic. So I had to shut down and curl into bed before I fell asleep standing up.
Sadly, I no longer have problems wasting time. Where the heck DOES the time go?
Seems like I can focus at home for 2-3 hours at best (because staying back late, dinner, traveling time means I get home at 9-10pm etc.) and then PFWAM, I gotta collapse on bed or else.
Last thing I finally made myself do this week was install Prototype. That game had only been sitting in my computer game DVD files for the past... oh... 6 months?
It's quite fun. It's one of those games that make me glad to have a USB gamepad. It's one of those games that astonish me that it detects the model correctly as a Logitech Dual Action, and that all the buttons have been preset sensibly. It's one of those games that let you run around like an all-seeing all-slaying god of destruction, which I sorely missed after getting butt-f'ed in APB.
More on Prototype later.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The Curse of High Latency
I've just uninstalled APB tonight.
Mostly in nerdrage frustration from getting pwned one too many times by opposing players.
I did figure out before I left, how to display one's ping. I had about 350-400ms.
Now I don't know whether you call that unplayable or not. One man's unplayable is decent in the eye of another beholder. I've had 500-800ms in WoW and Aion and still managed to survive and have a reasonable amount of fun. I've also found 300ms the breaking point limit in FPSes like Team Fortress and so on.
I did know that I was getting pincushioned full of holes by much higher ranked players wielding much faster firing SMGs, sometimes wandering around in groups, and mown down by folks who could mysteriously operate the vehicles more adroitly than my steering of the metal bricks, and the only time I had some success was against another total noob like me who let me shoot him a couple of times from far away before he realised I was there.
Part of the frustration is that I don't know if I should chalk it up to lag or lack of skill. Possibly both, the one not helping the other any.
Problem is, if one lags on a constant basis, one is rarely able to learn to improve either. So the frustration comes from not-knowing. If it's lag, then I should forget the game. If it's lack of skill, then I should stick it out a while longer to see if I improve. Both logical solutions are diametrically opposed, and I end up teetering on a see-saw of "aargh."
I have a feeling it's 40% lag, 30% the MMO higher leveled syndrome and 30% my sheer noobiness.
The latter two are not going to improve if the lag is a factor, which is why the game is off the hard disk, but I just get grumpy thinking about the fact that 'player skill' is as much lucky geographical proximity as speedy reactions and practice.
Ten or so years ago, I started to figure this out when I realized I wasn't moving or murdering as fast on Geandakin the thief in the MUD arena when I was back home in Singapore as opposed to sitting on a high-speed college connection in the US way closer to Toronto, Canada.
And it was somewhat of a nuisance because it was hard to keep up an invincible reputation when you can't move as fast as you normally would have.
Then there was the college year when I spent a good 75% of my waking hours playing Team Fortress Classic on a laptop - which wouldn't be the first machine of choice to produce decent framerates - but had a 40-83 ms ping to some really nice community servers. To the point that I was getting decently good as a soldier class on Hunted, annoyingly awesome as an engineer on any other map, and my handle was recognizable as a regular player who wasn't last on the leaderboard, but hovered between the number 2 to middle of the range mark.
Then I went home on vacation break and realized all my favorite servers were now verboten because I could barely see shit and react to anything before getting blown to pieces with a 330ms ping. Instead I got stuck with the Starhub servers and pre-adolescent Singaporean/Malaysian guys.
Same sad story with Natural Selection by the way, though I managed to find some semi-decent Aussie/New Zealand servers for a time.
It's sad. Annoying. Frustrating.
I guess I'm doomed to playing games where latency doesn't matter. Such as point-and-click ATITD where player reaction times are measured in the days and weeks and months instead of milliseconds.
Mostly in nerdrage frustration from getting pwned one too many times by opposing players.
I did figure out before I left, how to display one's ping. I had about 350-400ms.
Now I don't know whether you call that unplayable or not. One man's unplayable is decent in the eye of another beholder. I've had 500-800ms in WoW and Aion and still managed to survive and have a reasonable amount of fun. I've also found 300ms the breaking point limit in FPSes like Team Fortress and so on.
I did know that I was getting pincushioned full of holes by much higher ranked players wielding much faster firing SMGs, sometimes wandering around in groups, and mown down by folks who could mysteriously operate the vehicles more adroitly than my steering of the metal bricks, and the only time I had some success was against another total noob like me who let me shoot him a couple of times from far away before he realised I was there.
Part of the frustration is that I don't know if I should chalk it up to lag or lack of skill. Possibly both, the one not helping the other any.
Problem is, if one lags on a constant basis, one is rarely able to learn to improve either. So the frustration comes from not-knowing. If it's lag, then I should forget the game. If it's lack of skill, then I should stick it out a while longer to see if I improve. Both logical solutions are diametrically opposed, and I end up teetering on a see-saw of "aargh."
I have a feeling it's 40% lag, 30% the MMO higher leveled syndrome and 30% my sheer noobiness.
The latter two are not going to improve if the lag is a factor, which is why the game is off the hard disk, but I just get grumpy thinking about the fact that 'player skill' is as much lucky geographical proximity as speedy reactions and practice.
Ten or so years ago, I started to figure this out when I realized I wasn't moving or murdering as fast on Geandakin the thief in the MUD arena when I was back home in Singapore as opposed to sitting on a high-speed college connection in the US way closer to Toronto, Canada.
And it was somewhat of a nuisance because it was hard to keep up an invincible reputation when you can't move as fast as you normally would have.
Then there was the college year when I spent a good 75% of my waking hours playing Team Fortress Classic on a laptop - which wouldn't be the first machine of choice to produce decent framerates - but had a 40-83 ms ping to some really nice community servers. To the point that I was getting decently good as a soldier class on Hunted, annoyingly awesome as an engineer on any other map, and my handle was recognizable as a regular player who wasn't last on the leaderboard, but hovered between the number 2 to middle of the range mark.
Then I went home on vacation break and realized all my favorite servers were now verboten because I could barely see shit and react to anything before getting blown to pieces with a 330ms ping. Instead I got stuck with the Starhub servers and pre-adolescent Singaporean/Malaysian guys.
Same sad story with Natural Selection by the way, though I managed to find some semi-decent Aussie/New Zealand servers for a time.
It's sad. Annoying. Frustrating.
I guess I'm doomed to playing games where latency doesn't matter. Such as point-and-click ATITD where player reaction times are measured in the days and weeks and months instead of milliseconds.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Long Time No See MMOs
I stopped reading Massively and hopping about MMO blogger sites random-commenting about the same time I got heavily into ATITD.
As a result, the APB 'Keys to the City' Beta/Preview event came as a huge surprise to me. I only found out about it because I'm a Steam whore and was scrolling down the "News" section admiring the new UI yet again when I saw the headline "APB Beta Event Delayed Until Sunday" or something like that.
I did a "Whuh?" and a double-take, and looked again. Then did the hyperlink clicky thing and found out that yes, APB -is- doing a public beta, it was this Sunday or thereabouts, and best of all, Rock, Paper Shotgun was giving away 50,000 keys. Yes, 50k.
Thinking I was screwed because I'm usually late to the party for this sort of thing, I typed in my email anyway, and lo and behold I was very surprised to actually receive an acknowledgement that said, "Key sent!"
Because I am a kiasu individual, I typed in another of my many emails just for luck, and had another key sent too. So... *dangles key* You know you want it...
---
I checked about, and it seems NDA is lifted for the Keys to the City event. Maybe. I'll just keep my comments truncated as a compromise.
It's not too shabby. This is the first MMO (besides Age of Conan) that does first-person aiming/targeting well. Certainly the first with guns anyhow.
I hated Tabula Rasa turning with the slack-jawed avatar that did a mistimed shuffle step animation every time I turned. I was not keen on the lameness of Fallen Earth in which I had to line up on weirdly moving or weirdly stationary mobs and click once every three seconds to see a little cartoon blood speck appear.
APB feels much more distinctly FPS-ish than the two. Yet it also feels distinctly more MMO than a real FPS.
I'm not sure about the vaunted customisation options. It's not bad. It's not as flexible out of the box as City of Heroes either. It looks like many things are unlocks. Once I got out of the tutorial I was able to put on some decent clothes, and I saw others look way cooler with more gang-style tattoos, so presumably it can be done later.
APB reminds me of a weird cross between GtA and City of Heroes and a opposing team-based FPS.
The game is occasionally sluggish to react to a 'use object' keypress. I could be maybe too far away from it, or maybe it is a lag issue, since in their vaunted wisdom, the developers have made the "Rest of the World" use the Euro servers. In fact, according to Massively, they ain't opening Aussie servers, period, so APB is not going to be sold there. Oh well. I was getting very sick of hanging with the Aussie MMO community anyway.
Ironically, I don't even know which bar in my UI represents my health bar. The rest of it is quite context sensitive with decently functional help tips, etc.
Irrespective of my inability to determine my actual body condition, I had quite a good time, even on PvP missions, and was able to trade kill/death ratios quite evenly. Some girl character mowed me down with a vehicle. I respawned, ran back and shot her in the head and body and head a couple of times until she fell over, narrowly escaping death myself. Then she did the same to me. Rinse and repeat for the next guy, except I was the one who started the Vehicular Slaughter chain (with which, I got one of those shiny achievement badge thingies.)
I get City of Heroes flashbacks running around in this modern city of San Paro or whatever they call it. The whole setting. Except you get to pull open cars and shove out citizens so that you can drive them GtA style, with the lousy control scheme guaranteeing some mown down fire hydrants and postboxes.
The contacts are more proactive with invisible cell phones. Once you meet them and 'pledge' to them, they call you and offer you missions which you can accept or reject. Heck, they are so persistent, I found them rather distracting when I was trying to work out how to do an open-world mugging of a pedestrian. I managed to ignore their phone calls long enough to mug someone for a necklace, find out that I was supposed to drop the jewelry off at an Item-Drop Off, absent-mindedly accepted the stupid contact's mission, and found that my Item-Drop Off waypoint had disappeared in favor of the mission waypoint. Oh...f...
The missions themselves are currently not that exciting. They mostly consist of getting from point A to point B (marked by a waypoint on your map) and clicking the 'interact with object' button to trigger a progress meter and an animation that shows your avatar prying open windows, prying open cars, bombing buildings, spraying graffiti, dropping off loot, etc. Rinse and repeat.
What is very different is that I haven't met a computer-controlled 'mob' yet. Ever. No enemies. Just random citizens going about their day that you could shoot in the head if you wanted, or mug to trigger the open-world mission.
So what is supposed to make this errand boy work interesting? Well, notoriety. The more badass you are, the higher a chance that you will get and be involved in Opposed missions. Think hero vs villain mission pvp that CoH folks always talked about.
In the tutorial zone, after finishing the basic errands, I was given the option to prevent my opposing faction, the Enforcers, from completing certain missions - so the computer set up a Defend/Guard waypoint, and I had to trundle over there and try and shoot a redname player in the head to stop/slow them down.
Perhaps due to lag, or bad aim, or sheer clumsy ineptness, I wasn't very good at this, and the twice I tried it, the other players managed to finish their mission anyway.
It was also suggested that to make things more interesting, that this sort of thing should be done as a group. Open grouping is supposedly available. I'm not sure. I picked the "Let the computer choose me a group" option that popped up, and about five minutes of wandering around later, I ended up grouped with 3 other people who were ostensibly on the same side.
Shortly after, our group leader picked a mission that pit us against another group of 4. This turned out slightly more interesting, a la a much wimpier Counterstrike, in that three of us sort of ran towards the same place together, and shot in the same direction at any red names.
Our opponents were slightly more coordinated than we were, and they came driving by in a car with one guy driving, and three guys leaning out the windows with rifles. Some punk scored a "Drive-by Shooting" achievement on my dead body. *wry grin*
After which, we rallied, and ended up in a little shoot-out, which successfully killed a number of them, half by luck, and half by flanking and to my immense surprise, our firefight delayed them to the point that the timer ran out and they failed to complete the mission, so we won.
Some other guy from the Enforcer faction had been scoring kill streaks of 5 and more and hit a prestige level of 5. This suddenly lit him up on the area map and sent a global announcement to us Criminals that this guy had a huge bounty on his head. Thus we all hijacked cars and zoomed over to him. I was -this- close to running him down with my vehicle, but some other Criminal ran up and AK-47'ed him into the dust, claiming the bounty. Oh well.
Just as randomly, our group of 4 suddenly swelled to a group of 8-10 folks, and there was apparently some other mission to stop that earlier group of 4 (and maybe more). All I know is that there was suddenly a war worthy of the 5th Column vs Council with about 6-8 green name friendlys running about, and swamping the 4-5 red names which blundered into us. We killed them. Rinse and repeat.
Then randomly, our group went back into a group of 4. (By the way, the last person in our team had been driving around randomly and never really came anywhere near us.) One of our guys got into a car. I tried to get in the same car, did, couldn't figure out how to lean out of a window and shoot, hit the button that exited me out of the car. The other guy got into the car with the driver, who drove off.
At that point, nearing 11.30pm, and getting just a teensy bit carsick from the weird acceleration physics, I decided it was time to call it a day too.
I dunno. I might give the beta a little longer to grow on me. I can't see myself paying $15 a month for it personally. Other people might. It's not any shabbier than Tabula Rasa or Fallen Earth and those games had followings... for a little while.
It's semi-entertaining, but ultimately, PvP is not my schtick. Co-op, yes. I tend to last longer on PvP games that support co-op options, and APB leans more in this direction than say, Aion or Eve Online (more griefer friendly), but there are other more appealing co-op games with more depth and better response elsewhere - such as Counterstrike, Natural Selection (the sequel is coming soon! *squeal*).
It's got a unique theme going for it, which might count for something. Time will tell.
---
The other thing that I hadn't heard was the news that LOTRO is going free-to-play!
Eep.
Of course, this necessitates a great long complicated table depicting the differences between a normal member, a Premium member and a VIP member - of which I cannot make head or tail out of.
Especially since I was a Founder member who eventually decided to give up one's Founder privileges and quit. At which point, I guess I don't qualify as a VIP because I no longer have an active subscription.
But if I come back and play for free now, would I be considered a Premium member? I might.
What is most alarming to me are the gold limits. It's 2 gold for normal members and 5 gold for Premium members, and as slackard as I was about collecting gold, I'm certain I exceeded that at least twice over at the level that I'm at.
Does this mean that gold limits no longer apply to my character? I shouldn't lose the gold, but does that mean I better not spend below 5 gold or encounter the limit? Does this mean that I don't earn any gold because of this?
Very confused.
Of course, I can just pop by for a $9.99 VIP subscription (assuming they charge that, and not $15) when I get the LOTRO urge.
Or I could not pop by at all, which leaves me completely unaffected by whatever they choose to do.
But it's an interesting move. I guess subscriber numbers are at an all-time low. I'm sure even Aion is hemoraging them. (Which reminds me I should quit by July before I end up renewing for another 3 months.)
ATITD has quite hooked me on a third account though. Mostly because the untouched account is offlining onions at a decent pace, which can just about keep up with the four sheep pens, and leaves me with NO ONIONS to -have- to grow. The convenience alone is worth 5 bucks a week.
The fourth account has taught me that a day or two or three of neglect yields up to 6000 grass. This is kinda cool too. Maybe less cool as I get more and more greenhouses eventually, but it is currently a decent straw supplement for my camels.
Offlining cabbages is rather miserable. A day's offlining yields around 800. I grow 20 a seed, and can hit 180-240 in one grow, which takes around 7-10 minutes depending on if I'm concentrating or not. So an hour of work > a day of offlining.
Neither am I content to offline wood, as I have a veritable forest near me this around.
Some day I'll try barley or wheat. I bet it's still miserable too.
As a result, the APB 'Keys to the City' Beta/Preview event came as a huge surprise to me. I only found out about it because I'm a Steam whore and was scrolling down the "News" section admiring the new UI yet again when I saw the headline "APB Beta Event Delayed Until Sunday" or something like that.
I did a "Whuh?" and a double-take, and looked again. Then did the hyperlink clicky thing and found out that yes, APB -is- doing a public beta, it was this Sunday or thereabouts, and best of all, Rock, Paper Shotgun was giving away 50,000 keys. Yes, 50k.
Thinking I was screwed because I'm usually late to the party for this sort of thing, I typed in my email anyway, and lo and behold I was very surprised to actually receive an acknowledgement that said, "Key sent!"
Because I am a kiasu individual, I typed in another of my many emails just for luck, and had another key sent too. So... *dangles key* You know you want it...
---
I checked about, and it seems NDA is lifted for the Keys to the City event. Maybe. I'll just keep my comments truncated as a compromise.
It's not too shabby. This is the first MMO (besides Age of Conan) that does first-person aiming/targeting well. Certainly the first with guns anyhow.
I hated Tabula Rasa turning with the slack-jawed avatar that did a mistimed shuffle step animation every time I turned. I was not keen on the lameness of Fallen Earth in which I had to line up on weirdly moving or weirdly stationary mobs and click once every three seconds to see a little cartoon blood speck appear.
APB feels much more distinctly FPS-ish than the two. Yet it also feels distinctly more MMO than a real FPS.
I'm not sure about the vaunted customisation options. It's not bad. It's not as flexible out of the box as City of Heroes either. It looks like many things are unlocks. Once I got out of the tutorial I was able to put on some decent clothes, and I saw others look way cooler with more gang-style tattoos, so presumably it can be done later.
APB reminds me of a weird cross between GtA and City of Heroes and a opposing team-based FPS.
The game is occasionally sluggish to react to a 'use object' keypress. I could be maybe too far away from it, or maybe it is a lag issue, since in their vaunted wisdom, the developers have made the "Rest of the World" use the Euro servers. In fact, according to Massively, they ain't opening Aussie servers, period, so APB is not going to be sold there. Oh well. I was getting very sick of hanging with the Aussie MMO community anyway.
Ironically, I don't even know which bar in my UI represents my health bar. The rest of it is quite context sensitive with decently functional help tips, etc.
Irrespective of my inability to determine my actual body condition, I had quite a good time, even on PvP missions, and was able to trade kill/death ratios quite evenly. Some girl character mowed me down with a vehicle. I respawned, ran back and shot her in the head and body and head a couple of times until she fell over, narrowly escaping death myself. Then she did the same to me. Rinse and repeat for the next guy, except I was the one who started the Vehicular Slaughter chain (with which, I got one of those shiny achievement badge thingies.)
I get City of Heroes flashbacks running around in this modern city of San Paro or whatever they call it. The whole setting. Except you get to pull open cars and shove out citizens so that you can drive them GtA style, with the lousy control scheme guaranteeing some mown down fire hydrants and postboxes.
The contacts are more proactive with invisible cell phones. Once you meet them and 'pledge' to them, they call you and offer you missions which you can accept or reject. Heck, they are so persistent, I found them rather distracting when I was trying to work out how to do an open-world mugging of a pedestrian. I managed to ignore their phone calls long enough to mug someone for a necklace, find out that I was supposed to drop the jewelry off at an Item-Drop Off, absent-mindedly accepted the stupid contact's mission, and found that my Item-Drop Off waypoint had disappeared in favor of the mission waypoint. Oh...f...
The missions themselves are currently not that exciting. They mostly consist of getting from point A to point B (marked by a waypoint on your map) and clicking the 'interact with object' button to trigger a progress meter and an animation that shows your avatar prying open windows, prying open cars, bombing buildings, spraying graffiti, dropping off loot, etc. Rinse and repeat.
What is very different is that I haven't met a computer-controlled 'mob' yet. Ever. No enemies. Just random citizens going about their day that you could shoot in the head if you wanted, or mug to trigger the open-world mission.
So what is supposed to make this errand boy work interesting? Well, notoriety. The more badass you are, the higher a chance that you will get and be involved in Opposed missions. Think hero vs villain mission pvp that CoH folks always talked about.
In the tutorial zone, after finishing the basic errands, I was given the option to prevent my opposing faction, the Enforcers, from completing certain missions - so the computer set up a Defend/Guard waypoint, and I had to trundle over there and try and shoot a redname player in the head to stop/slow them down.
Perhaps due to lag, or bad aim, or sheer clumsy ineptness, I wasn't very good at this, and the twice I tried it, the other players managed to finish their mission anyway.
It was also suggested that to make things more interesting, that this sort of thing should be done as a group. Open grouping is supposedly available. I'm not sure. I picked the "Let the computer choose me a group" option that popped up, and about five minutes of wandering around later, I ended up grouped with 3 other people who were ostensibly on the same side.
Shortly after, our group leader picked a mission that pit us against another group of 4. This turned out slightly more interesting, a la a much wimpier Counterstrike, in that three of us sort of ran towards the same place together, and shot in the same direction at any red names.
Our opponents were slightly more coordinated than we were, and they came driving by in a car with one guy driving, and three guys leaning out the windows with rifles. Some punk scored a "Drive-by Shooting" achievement on my dead body. *wry grin*
After which, we rallied, and ended up in a little shoot-out, which successfully killed a number of them, half by luck, and half by flanking and to my immense surprise, our firefight delayed them to the point that the timer ran out and they failed to complete the mission, so we won.
Some other guy from the Enforcer faction had been scoring kill streaks of 5 and more and hit a prestige level of 5. This suddenly lit him up on the area map and sent a global announcement to us Criminals that this guy had a huge bounty on his head. Thus we all hijacked cars and zoomed over to him. I was -this- close to running him down with my vehicle, but some other Criminal ran up and AK-47'ed him into the dust, claiming the bounty. Oh well.
Just as randomly, our group of 4 suddenly swelled to a group of 8-10 folks, and there was apparently some other mission to stop that earlier group of 4 (and maybe more). All I know is that there was suddenly a war worthy of the 5th Column vs Council with about 6-8 green name friendlys running about, and swamping the 4-5 red names which blundered into us. We killed them. Rinse and repeat.
Then randomly, our group went back into a group of 4. (By the way, the last person in our team had been driving around randomly and never really came anywhere near us.) One of our guys got into a car. I tried to get in the same car, did, couldn't figure out how to lean out of a window and shoot, hit the button that exited me out of the car. The other guy got into the car with the driver, who drove off.
At that point, nearing 11.30pm, and getting just a teensy bit carsick from the weird acceleration physics, I decided it was time to call it a day too.
I dunno. I might give the beta a little longer to grow on me. I can't see myself paying $15 a month for it personally. Other people might. It's not any shabbier than Tabula Rasa or Fallen Earth and those games had followings... for a little while.
It's semi-entertaining, but ultimately, PvP is not my schtick. Co-op, yes. I tend to last longer on PvP games that support co-op options, and APB leans more in this direction than say, Aion or Eve Online (more griefer friendly), but there are other more appealing co-op games with more depth and better response elsewhere - such as Counterstrike, Natural Selection (the sequel is coming soon! *squeal*).
It's got a unique theme going for it, which might count for something. Time will tell.
---
The other thing that I hadn't heard was the news that LOTRO is going free-to-play!
Eep.
Of course, this necessitates a great long complicated table depicting the differences between a normal member, a Premium member and a VIP member - of which I cannot make head or tail out of.
Especially since I was a Founder member who eventually decided to give up one's Founder privileges and quit. At which point, I guess I don't qualify as a VIP because I no longer have an active subscription.
But if I come back and play for free now, would I be considered a Premium member? I might.
What is most alarming to me are the gold limits. It's 2 gold for normal members and 5 gold for Premium members, and as slackard as I was about collecting gold, I'm certain I exceeded that at least twice over at the level that I'm at.
Does this mean that gold limits no longer apply to my character? I shouldn't lose the gold, but does that mean I better not spend below 5 gold or encounter the limit? Does this mean that I don't earn any gold because of this?
Very confused.
Of course, I can just pop by for a $9.99 VIP subscription (assuming they charge that, and not $15) when I get the LOTRO urge.
Or I could not pop by at all, which leaves me completely unaffected by whatever they choose to do.
But it's an interesting move. I guess subscriber numbers are at an all-time low. I'm sure even Aion is hemoraging them. (Which reminds me I should quit by July before I end up renewing for another 3 months.)
ATITD has quite hooked me on a third account though. Mostly because the untouched account is offlining onions at a decent pace, which can just about keep up with the four sheep pens, and leaves me with NO ONIONS to -have- to grow. The convenience alone is worth 5 bucks a week.
The fourth account has taught me that a day or two or three of neglect yields up to 6000 grass. This is kinda cool too. Maybe less cool as I get more and more greenhouses eventually, but it is currently a decent straw supplement for my camels.
Offlining cabbages is rather miserable. A day's offlining yields around 800. I grow 20 a seed, and can hit 180-240 in one grow, which takes around 7-10 minutes depending on if I'm concentrating or not. So an hour of work > a day of offlining.
Neither am I content to offline wood, as I have a veritable forest near me this around.
Some day I'll try barley or wheat. I bet it's still miserable too.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
So that's Avatar. Hnngh.
Technically excellent, black and white moral tale with a saccharine storyline, somehow ultimately soulless.
This musing critique courtesy of me finally getting around to checking out Avatar by virtue of the fact that my dad's Blu-Ray disc came with a DVD copy.
Where to begin... Welp, I like the art direction and set design. The use of colours. What's not to like? I love the deep rich acrylic colours of fantasy painting, and when you put a digital art spin on it, it becomes very reminiscent of Guild Wars colours. I have a great weakness for that sort of look. I could look at Avatar stills all day, preferably with no humanoids in it. The care taken to make alien plants and fantastic (in the sense of fantasy and sci-fi) alien creatures look realistic is really nice. Also the modern, gritty look of the flying machines and mech walkers is also technically excellent.
Where it starts breaking down is when we throw the two at each other. Ok, ok, I know the very premise of this movie seems to be James Cameron's desire to chuck dragons at flying machines, to juxtapose the whole nature vs technology schtick, but the morality tale is a little too saccharine and full of holes for me to swallow.
Plot-wise, it's again technically excellent. Whatever the hell you see at the beginning foreshadows a use of it later near the end. 100% Chekov's Gun-compliant. Great... But it becomes a little too by-the-numbers and soulless after a while.
Seriously, the whole fixation regarding nature vs technology thing did an awful number on the storyline. Alpha Centauri (the game) and a slew of Japanese Final Fantasy-esque stuff did it with more subtlety. "Unobtainium?" Come on, can the name scream plot device any less loudly? The antagonist side was done very clumsily, with the stereotypical hard-assed marine colonel that looked like an import from Gears of War, and the scrawny, runty, stereotypical uncaring corporate joe.
Yet I would hasten to note that tribal natives versus gun technology has a history of being quite one-sided, and so they ended up sneakily using stolen technology (guns + gunship) with the star protagonists, and then adding a hefty blend of Gaia wakes up and strikes back with aliens to make it at least vaguely plausible. Not to mention purposefully making the Na'Vi a lot taller than humans so they would loom and be somewhat physically stronger.
What with the art direction, I kept seeing Avatar as a corrupted version of World of Warcraft meets Mechwarrior.
Blue Na'Vi make me cringe. It's like night elves mated with their cats to create a feline elf. Then at the end of the storyline, the female alien, whashername, Neytiri, gets to bond with the biggest baddest cat-like alien predator of all time. For a while until the badass marine slashes it apart anyhow.
Oh, there's no blood in this damn movie. No gore. Seriously, whuh? Alien animals are biting humans and all they do is chew on the head and fling them screaming into the air to fall down... Lots of fiery explosions, lots of Na'vi dying and what not, but all very PG or G. I think there was more personal violence in an 80's X-men cartoon.
The bond is an interesting gimmick. I see legions of teenage girls (and maybe even a few boys) writing lots and lots of Mercedes Lackey-ish telepathic Companion-like or Anne McCaffery's Pern dragon-esque fanfiction set on the Avatar world, where the aliens get to bond and ride any sort of fantastic dream fulfillment chimera of animals kids can imagine.
I also see lots of merchandising potential in how the protagonists ride bigger and cooler mounts over the course of the movie. Buy Jakesully the untested hunter! Buy Jakesully on Ikran mount as a full fledged warrior! Buy Jakesully, saviour warrior of the People, on Toruk Macto!
Hnnh. It's just occured to me. Mount size as a factor of prestige. Tell me 10 million World of Warcraft fans haven't got something embedded into our racial consciousness now?
I wish the corporate human antagonist side were more deeply fleshed out. The nature vs technology conflict would have been a lot less black and white and a lot more interesting. Instead, the story pretty much encourages you to root for the pretty alien elves and cheer as The Man gets trounced and sympathize with the tree-hugging environmental activists.
It makes the story a lot like Titanic. Watchable once, and then quite impossible to re-watch as the saccharine simplistic morality beats you around the head with a cudgel.
I admit to both being curious about how they were going to resolve the nature vs technology dilemma, and being disappointed by the Hollywood ending - wherein everything is resolved with a good dose of old fashioned violence and explosions, rarrrr, we kicked their pansy non-Earth respecting arses back to their polluted world, yaaar!
Um. I was kinda hoping for some sort of message about peace and communication between two cultures and respect for Nature and what Nature can do for technology, some sort of a civil truce where humans can learn from the Na'Vi and vice versa...
No, it ended up being, we booted the sorry humans back to their world, we let a few friendly humans stay with the tribe (not enough to breed a colony fer sure), the rest of the humans who helped us kinda died conveniently and tragically, and the human protagonist decided to go native and turn into an alien instead.
...
Ok.
I would turn around and call you a Xenos-loving heretic, but that would be way too much Warhammer 40k exposure showing.
Instead, I will just sigh and say that if you want to do a nature vs technology conflict argument, at least get the balls to do it justice properly, and work your brain until you come up with a conclusion that portrays a nice balanced compromise between the two to reflect reality.
Your nature-loving humans use technology all the time. Video logs. Stolen guns. A big gunship. Marine training. Masks that actually let you breathe the air of the place. Or the avatar hybrids themselves? Somehow all of this ends up being taken for granted and slid under the carpet. (I'd like to know what happens when they run out of oxy supplies for the humans who chose to stay on the planet...)
So yeah. Message != congruent with actual action.
Makes for an uneasy movie viewing experience. Landscapes sure is pretty, though.
This musing critique courtesy of me finally getting around to checking out Avatar by virtue of the fact that my dad's Blu-Ray disc came with a DVD copy.
Where to begin... Welp, I like the art direction and set design. The use of colours. What's not to like? I love the deep rich acrylic colours of fantasy painting, and when you put a digital art spin on it, it becomes very reminiscent of Guild Wars colours. I have a great weakness for that sort of look. I could look at Avatar stills all day, preferably with no humanoids in it. The care taken to make alien plants and fantastic (in the sense of fantasy and sci-fi) alien creatures look realistic is really nice. Also the modern, gritty look of the flying machines and mech walkers is also technically excellent.
Where it starts breaking down is when we throw the two at each other. Ok, ok, I know the very premise of this movie seems to be James Cameron's desire to chuck dragons at flying machines, to juxtapose the whole nature vs technology schtick, but the morality tale is a little too saccharine and full of holes for me to swallow.
Plot-wise, it's again technically excellent. Whatever the hell you see at the beginning foreshadows a use of it later near the end. 100% Chekov's Gun-compliant. Great... But it becomes a little too by-the-numbers and soulless after a while.
Seriously, the whole fixation regarding nature vs technology thing did an awful number on the storyline. Alpha Centauri (the game) and a slew of Japanese Final Fantasy-esque stuff did it with more subtlety. "Unobtainium?" Come on, can the name scream plot device any less loudly? The antagonist side was done very clumsily, with the stereotypical hard-assed marine colonel that looked like an import from Gears of War, and the scrawny, runty, stereotypical uncaring corporate joe.
Yet I would hasten to note that tribal natives versus gun technology has a history of being quite one-sided, and so they ended up sneakily using stolen technology (guns + gunship) with the star protagonists, and then adding a hefty blend of Gaia wakes up and strikes back with aliens to make it at least vaguely plausible. Not to mention purposefully making the Na'Vi a lot taller than humans so they would loom and be somewhat physically stronger.
What with the art direction, I kept seeing Avatar as a corrupted version of World of Warcraft meets Mechwarrior.
Blue Na'Vi make me cringe. It's like night elves mated with their cats to create a feline elf. Then at the end of the storyline, the female alien, whashername, Neytiri, gets to bond with the biggest baddest cat-like alien predator of all time. For a while until the badass marine slashes it apart anyhow.
Oh, there's no blood in this damn movie. No gore. Seriously, whuh? Alien animals are biting humans and all they do is chew on the head and fling them screaming into the air to fall down... Lots of fiery explosions, lots of Na'vi dying and what not, but all very PG or G. I think there was more personal violence in an 80's X-men cartoon.
The bond is an interesting gimmick. I see legions of teenage girls (and maybe even a few boys) writing lots and lots of Mercedes Lackey-ish telepathic Companion-like or Anne McCaffery's Pern dragon-esque fanfiction set on the Avatar world, where the aliens get to bond and ride any sort of fantastic dream fulfillment chimera of animals kids can imagine.
I also see lots of merchandising potential in how the protagonists ride bigger and cooler mounts over the course of the movie. Buy Jakesully the untested hunter! Buy Jakesully on Ikran mount as a full fledged warrior! Buy Jakesully, saviour warrior of the People, on Toruk Macto!
Hnnh. It's just occured to me. Mount size as a factor of prestige. Tell me 10 million World of Warcraft fans haven't got something embedded into our racial consciousness now?
I wish the corporate human antagonist side were more deeply fleshed out. The nature vs technology conflict would have been a lot less black and white and a lot more interesting. Instead, the story pretty much encourages you to root for the pretty alien elves and cheer as The Man gets trounced and sympathize with the tree-hugging environmental activists.
It makes the story a lot like Titanic. Watchable once, and then quite impossible to re-watch as the saccharine simplistic morality beats you around the head with a cudgel.
I admit to both being curious about how they were going to resolve the nature vs technology dilemma, and being disappointed by the Hollywood ending - wherein everything is resolved with a good dose of old fashioned violence and explosions, rarrrr, we kicked their pansy non-Earth respecting arses back to their polluted world, yaaar!
Um. I was kinda hoping for some sort of message about peace and communication between two cultures and respect for Nature and what Nature can do for technology, some sort of a civil truce where humans can learn from the Na'Vi and vice versa...
No, it ended up being, we booted the sorry humans back to their world, we let a few friendly humans stay with the tribe (not enough to breed a colony fer sure), the rest of the humans who helped us kinda died conveniently and tragically, and the human protagonist decided to go native and turn into an alien instead.
...
Ok.
I would turn around and call you a Xenos-loving heretic, but that would be way too much Warhammer 40k exposure showing.
Instead, I will just sigh and say that if you want to do a nature vs technology conflict argument, at least get the balls to do it justice properly, and work your brain until you come up with a conclusion that portrays a nice balanced compromise between the two to reflect reality.
Your nature-loving humans use technology all the time. Video logs. Stolen guns. A big gunship. Marine training. Masks that actually let you breathe the air of the place. Or the avatar hybrids themselves? Somehow all of this ends up being taken for granted and slid under the carpet. (I'd like to know what happens when they run out of oxy supplies for the humans who chose to stay on the planet...)
So yeah. Message != congruent with actual action.
Makes for an uneasy movie viewing experience. Landscapes sure is pretty, though.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Whoa
I got off my butt today and forced myself to sit down and do some 'collecting' in GTD parlance. Basically, it's capturing anything you have in your vicinity and in your mind that's taking up mental RAM.
Being that I have way too many bulky objects in my vicinity, I quite fail at that section, wherein you're supposed to collect anything physical that doesn't belong in an inbox for later processing. Nuh uh, it just doesn't work for me. Too much shtuff. I fail at filing.
The closest I've ever come to managing that is to buy myself a supersized Inbox about 1.5 feet cubed. Which admittedly is useful. Except that I didn't bring it to the office today, so that made it a moot point.
So the next thing you're supposed to do, if you have stuff way too bulky to fit physically into your inbox, is to at least make a note of it and file that note away into the inbox as a placeholder. That was doable. So my list filled up with stuff like "clear the mess under my desk eventually" "my computer desk needs cleaning, top and bottom" and "the drawers under my desk need help."
But at least it was more or less tracked.
Then I sat down to do a "mind sweep."
Something that helped me unstick my arse this time around was finding out the proper time estimates for each stage. I guess we all tend to underestimate how long it takes to do anything. The instructions had always said "set aside a block of 2 hours to start with" and if you want to do the whole process from start to finish, it'll take 2 days, back to back, no interruptions...
(Yeah, no interruptions. Right. Ever since I got this managerial role, it's been one interruption after another. *sighs* Apparently, according to this Managing book by Henry Mintzberg, that's exactly what managers manage anyhow, so get used to it...)
Somehow, in my fogged up mind, I had supposed that it'll take 2 hours to finish collecting and processing everything... Well, I had way too much stuff to finish in 2 hours, so I must be terribly abnormal and recalcitrant and GTD wasn't going to work, etc.
Turns out, no, just COLLECTING everything would take 1-2 hours (assuming you were starting from scratch or haven't been keeping current - which I haven't been, at all.)
So I somehow tore out some time at 11am and told myself I was going to just keep going (in between the interruptions) until lunchtime at 1pm to put everything down onto the figurative ThinkingRock page.
I ended about 15 minutes before 1pm, with about 90 items on my collection list.
Whoa.
Yeesh.
This is, apparently, par for the count, with most people accumulating 100 or so of these. So yay, I'm normal. Ish.
Back to my proper time estimate. Now for the Processing stage, the real meat and potatoes of GTD, which forces you to take one item out of your inbox and really LOOK at it until you decide the next physical concrete action that can be taken on it. Not do it (unless it takes less than 2 minutes), and yes you can delegate it, but just figure out wtf it is and what has to be done with it so that you can file that decision away and look at it later to act on it.
This is something far too many people fail at. I fail at it way too often, even though I should know better in theory. My boss fails at it, unless I keep pushing her to figure it out. Many people just never decide what should be done about it and leave stuff to rot until there's a fire that breaks out - then they panic.
Anyhow, another blinding revelation. The processing stage takes upwards of anywhere between 1-8 hours. Aieeeee.
So there was no way I was cranking out decisions on those 90 items today, especially since the braindump had already revealed that I had two things on deadline and I had to get working on the most urgent one, pronto.
Rest of the afternoon spent doing that. Still one more rather urgent item to go, and tomorrow (or today, now) has things that have to get done both in the morning and afternoon, so I don't know if I'll get around to that urgent item tomorrow either. *wry chuckle* I can try.
I guess if I feel up to it, I can try some processing in these wee morning hours...
(Sidetrek: I was reading this public service magazine that commented about Generation Y - we are apparently quite incapable of working early morning hours but very willing to stay up late, so telecommuting is something this generation welcomed - amen to that, brutha. My company needs to hurry up and figure this out.)
...After all, I don't have anything else to do. I should be sleeping, but I'm nursing a cold of some sort which produces serious nose clogging. The moment I lie down, all the mucus plugs up the constricted nasal passages and I'm in the throes of serious gasping sleep apnea and wheezing somewhat asthmatically. This is highly unconducive to restful sleep.
On brighter news, I'm finally into Dawn of War 2: the Chaos Rising campaign, having completed the original campaign -again- with three happy achievements marking my awesomeness for finishing at the 3rd level of difficulty. God, I'm such an achievement whore now. Bloody shiny badges.
There is no end in sight in ATITD except many beetles and lots of straw processing, but having used money for additional alts, I put one of them to work offlining onions and it seems to be keeping up decently well with the sheep so that I don't have to grow so many of the awful things with low yields near my home. I'd like to find more time to offload beetles and actually work on something more constructive, but well, maybe another week.
Steam shineys are tempting me again. The Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers look quite interesting. The current 'buy the game, get the first expansion pack free' deal makes each component USD $5, which isn't too awful for what looks to be a more sophisticated take on those free Flash card game rip-offs of the original Magic. There is apparently limited deckbuilding and customisation possible, which detracts from the true Magic experience, but there is decent computer AI and well-balanced pre-set decks for folks like me who prefer a good singleplayer challenge versus running online and finding real people to get annoyed by.
Except if I buy this, I'm committing to more time playing that instead of something else.
Hmm. Decisions decisions.
Being that I have way too many bulky objects in my vicinity, I quite fail at that section, wherein you're supposed to collect anything physical that doesn't belong in an inbox for later processing. Nuh uh, it just doesn't work for me. Too much shtuff. I fail at filing.
The closest I've ever come to managing that is to buy myself a supersized Inbox about 1.5 feet cubed. Which admittedly is useful. Except that I didn't bring it to the office today, so that made it a moot point.
So the next thing you're supposed to do, if you have stuff way too bulky to fit physically into your inbox, is to at least make a note of it and file that note away into the inbox as a placeholder. That was doable. So my list filled up with stuff like "clear the mess under my desk eventually" "my computer desk needs cleaning, top and bottom" and "the drawers under my desk need help."
But at least it was more or less tracked.
Then I sat down to do a "mind sweep."
Something that helped me unstick my arse this time around was finding out the proper time estimates for each stage. I guess we all tend to underestimate how long it takes to do anything. The instructions had always said "set aside a block of 2 hours to start with" and if you want to do the whole process from start to finish, it'll take 2 days, back to back, no interruptions...
(Yeah, no interruptions. Right. Ever since I got this managerial role, it's been one interruption after another. *sighs* Apparently, according to this Managing book by Henry Mintzberg, that's exactly what managers manage anyhow, so get used to it...)
Somehow, in my fogged up mind, I had supposed that it'll take 2 hours to finish collecting and processing everything... Well, I had way too much stuff to finish in 2 hours, so I must be terribly abnormal and recalcitrant and GTD wasn't going to work, etc.
Turns out, no, just COLLECTING everything would take 1-2 hours (assuming you were starting from scratch or haven't been keeping current - which I haven't been, at all.)
So I somehow tore out some time at 11am and told myself I was going to just keep going (in between the interruptions) until lunchtime at 1pm to put everything down onto the figurative ThinkingRock page.
I ended about 15 minutes before 1pm, with about 90 items on my collection list.
Whoa.
Yeesh.
This is, apparently, par for the count, with most people accumulating 100 or so of these. So yay, I'm normal. Ish.
Back to my proper time estimate. Now for the Processing stage, the real meat and potatoes of GTD, which forces you to take one item out of your inbox and really LOOK at it until you decide the next physical concrete action that can be taken on it. Not do it (unless it takes less than 2 minutes), and yes you can delegate it, but just figure out wtf it is and what has to be done with it so that you can file that decision away and look at it later to act on it.
This is something far too many people fail at. I fail at it way too often, even though I should know better in theory. My boss fails at it, unless I keep pushing her to figure it out. Many people just never decide what should be done about it and leave stuff to rot until there's a fire that breaks out - then they panic.
Anyhow, another blinding revelation. The processing stage takes upwards of anywhere between 1-8 hours. Aieeeee.
So there was no way I was cranking out decisions on those 90 items today, especially since the braindump had already revealed that I had two things on deadline and I had to get working on the most urgent one, pronto.
Rest of the afternoon spent doing that. Still one more rather urgent item to go, and tomorrow (or today, now) has things that have to get done both in the morning and afternoon, so I don't know if I'll get around to that urgent item tomorrow either. *wry chuckle* I can try.
I guess if I feel up to it, I can try some processing in these wee morning hours...
(Sidetrek: I was reading this public service magazine that commented about Generation Y - we are apparently quite incapable of working early morning hours but very willing to stay up late, so telecommuting is something this generation welcomed - amen to that, brutha. My company needs to hurry up and figure this out.)
...After all, I don't have anything else to do. I should be sleeping, but I'm nursing a cold of some sort which produces serious nose clogging. The moment I lie down, all the mucus plugs up the constricted nasal passages and I'm in the throes of serious gasping sleep apnea and wheezing somewhat asthmatically. This is highly unconducive to restful sleep.
On brighter news, I'm finally into Dawn of War 2: the Chaos Rising campaign, having completed the original campaign -again- with three happy achievements marking my awesomeness for finishing at the 3rd level of difficulty. God, I'm such an achievement whore now. Bloody shiny badges.
There is no end in sight in ATITD except many beetles and lots of straw processing, but having used money for additional alts, I put one of them to work offlining onions and it seems to be keeping up decently well with the sheep so that I don't have to grow so many of the awful things with low yields near my home. I'd like to find more time to offload beetles and actually work on something more constructive, but well, maybe another week.
Steam shineys are tempting me again. The Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers look quite interesting. The current 'buy the game, get the first expansion pack free' deal makes each component USD $5, which isn't too awful for what looks to be a more sophisticated take on those free Flash card game rip-offs of the original Magic. There is apparently limited deckbuilding and customisation possible, which detracts from the true Magic experience, but there is decent computer AI and well-balanced pre-set decks for folks like me who prefer a good singleplayer challenge versus running online and finding real people to get annoyed by.
Except if I buy this, I'm committing to more time playing that instead of something else.
Hmm. Decisions decisions.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Too Much Awesome, Too Little Time
PIXAR has leapt a few more levels of awesome in my book ever since the last two days.
I finally managed to free up enough time to attend two talks by PIXAR technical directors - though one of them was punctuated by my boss calling me for an utterly braindead 'sharing session' on the intranet, which was entirely self-explanatory (think simple blog-type announcement posts, uploading files, wikis and forums) and which I flatly refused to attend in the 5 minutes I spent outside the auditorium before dashing back in again.
The really cool thing about working where I work is that such talks (which the hoi polloi have to pay 40 bucks for) are free to staff - that is, if you can scrape together enough time out of your schedule to attend them, which is rarely the case if you have a compulsory die-die-must-go-on class/meeting/discussion/thingy.
Anyhow, I DID manage to catch about 80% of the content, which was really cool to eclectic knowledge ol' me.
The first talk was a very introductory talk about PIXAR's production pipeline, complete with demonstration pictures and animations and so on. This was rather eye-opening, given that I had previously spent zero time surfing PIXAR's website (my boss is a Luddite and biology has very little to do with computers in most peoples' books except for the enlightened geeky few who play with bioinformatics (ugh), nature-inspired digital art/designs (nifty) and so on.)
Turns out there are two parallel routes of development. Shot-based goes like this:
Story => Editorial => Layout => Animation => Simulation => Effects => Lighting => Rendering
Asset-based is via:
Design => Modeling => Rigging => Shading => Set Dressing
Each section was then explained for the utterly-noob layperson (that would be me).
Story I was fairly familiar with. This is the process covered fairly well in "Behind the Scenes" clips where story is king, and a story director does a pitch in storyboards to a bunch of head honchos, acting it out in funny little voices to sell the idea. The head honchos poke a bunch of holes in the story, the story director winces and sucks it up and goes back to whip his story team into a frenzy again, rinse and repeat over and over in an iterative process until the story is refined to precision diamond cut over four years of this.
What I -didn't- know explicitly was that all the other departments at PIXAR pretty much work in the same way. Do stuff, present to the director in a review, get comments, go back, revise and iterate again.
It makes a certain kind of universal sense and 'clicks' in my brain that "Yes, this is really the right way to do things... if only other people did that more often (ie. my workplace, ha!)" After all, other films do it, and any other artistic endeavor does it too. Novels go through draft after draft.
Editorial was a weird kind of department. I'm still not exactly sure what they do, but apparently they are keepers of the current film. All the bits and pieces of the film, they seem to have it up in one gigantic proprietary Adobe Premiere-lookalike program and they tinker with shot edits.
Layout was kinda nifty. They are the digital cameramen. They determine motion of the frame, the camera angles, the shot composition and so on.
Animation are the actors. They bring the camera models to life by making them move. These are the guys who stare at real life references for hours and observe how they move and then do weird walks and so on to get them down.
Speaking of which, another thing which 'clicked' for me in this talk was the amount of references all the PIXAR departments used. Straight from real-life. The artists use it. Other departments use the tons and tons of 2D concept art from artists and also study real life, etc. Too often, ignorant folk like me assume that artists can just do it all out of their imaginations onto a blank page of canvas, and then conclude that since we can't do that, we must suck at art.
Simulation was something I had no clue wtf it was until it was explained to me. This is apparently the uber technical, engineering/programming side of computer generated 3D imagery, where the smart mathematical folks figure out how to get cloth and hair and fur and such thing physically simulated so that they (mostly) obey the laws of physics and react in a realistic, believable fashion in the film.
Effects are the explosions, fire, dust, debris, goop guys. The special effect thingmajigs. Creating the massive balloon canopy in UP. One of the technical directors doing the talk is in this department. While I think I have less interest in this, I'm impressed enough that I might try and turn up for his talk tomorrow to at least understand what he does.
Lighting was the other department the other tech director was from. Amusingly, they are a husband-wife team. Her presentation totally knocked my socks off. I'm a really visual person. I respond well to beautiful artistic images, even though I can't verbalise why the hell I like them so, and I keep wishing I could create stuff like that for myself as a hobby.
Anyhow, lighting does the work of changing this hopelessly bland white light-illuminated scene (think something that looks like ATITD) and turns it into this crazy work of art that looks like a Guild Wars screenshot / acrylic painting thingy. Until she showed us the before and after look, I don't think it had ever really hit me that what I see in PIXAR movies are 3D models, shaded with textures, placed in a scene and made to move with hundreds of animator man-hours, then purposefully hand-lit by the lighting department until it conveys the arty, almost acrylic color look on concept drawings.
I guess I had kind of glommed together my understanding of Disney 2D cartoons - in which a huge amount of artists do lots and lots of frames by hand, some of which do the specific characters, some of which do the backgrounds and things - and assumed 3D was vaguely the same. Hell no, it's like jumping through lots more loops to get 3D done with computers.
Then finally rendering is taken care of by an entirely different team, who send rendering jobs to PIXAR's famous Renderfarm, and fix artifacts produced by the rendering process and so on.
And they have another global group that are called RPGs (Render Production Group or something) whose sole job is to make sure the uberstacks of machines keep running 24/7 and error troubleshoot on jobs from ALL movies in production that choke in the wee hours of the morning and send notices to the respective departments.
Asset-based production meanwhile covers the things and the characters, the elements in a shot. Starting with design - environment and set design, and character design. Every single THING in a PIXAR movie is designed from tons and tons of artistic references, with detailed drawings of specific props and so on.
See the pots and pans and kitchen shtuff in this random blog showing Ratatouille pictures? There's a nice part of our PIXAR exhibition that depicts framed pictures of the art studies done - it's like a catalogue of french pot types in pastels.
Of course, there's the character design. Also iterative, lots of 3D sculpts and maquettes done after the 2D art concepts and so on. I love maquettes, they are super cool. They're like uber-miniatures. If only I knew how to sculpt them. I've always felt I can do decent art with squishy clay, blu-tac, epoxy putty, those thingies by bypassing the 2D stage completely.
A very nice example is the amount of iterations they took to perfect Sullivan from Monsters Inc. It's my favorite part of the PIXAR exhibition, where they show thin Sullivans, fat Sullivans, Sullivans that have tentacles sticking out of them, multiple eyes and a ton of other experiments that look nothing like the furry big guy.
After design, there's modeling. Actual 3D modeling. Maya. Meshes. Extruding. Other more technical jargon. The works. Something I've always wanted to learn using stuff like 3DSMax, Google Sketchup, Blender or what-have-you but never quite got around to it.
Then there's rigging. I had no clue what this was, but apparently models don't move just like that. Riggers have to attach controls to the models so that the animators later down the line can move the models about in realistic fashion. So they basically add the strings on the puppets so that the animators can later pull them and act.
And there's shading. Shaders. Thingies. Kinda like painting for 3D images. Yeah, my understanding of this whole 'shader' aspect is limited to games that ask me 'high' shaders or 'low' shaders, and I note that when my graphics card can support 'high' shaders, stuff looks more realistically cool - which is good from the layman perspective. Love to learn more about this at some point.
Finally, there's set dressing. This part of the production chain is an exercise in "Awesome Jobs I Never Knew Existed". These guys get paid to do something like build SG Bases in City of Heroes. They have all these model assets created by guys up the chain, nicely shaded and everything. Then they pick them up, rotate them around, and arrange them juuuust so to create a wonderfully detailed set for a shot.
Again, they work in iterative stages. The nice lady showed us a blank screen. Then a very basic office in Monster's Inc where the only shapes are basic cubicle, square computer, blocky stuff. Then the next pass added more detail like pencil holders, mugs, books, keyboards, waste basket and things. Then another final pass to add even more details like a framed picture, post-it notes on the monitor, etc.
Bloody hell. I could do that. Obviously, professional set dressers would have a stronger eye for composition and shapes and work from real life references as to what a scene would look like, but it's something conceivably within my reach - like War Witch placing stuff to create Striga Isle, aka level design. And thus, it falls within my bloody awesome category.
And that was just the first talk.
I left with a pageful of notes, full of inspired awe. Yeah, that's me. I just love collecting eclectic esoteric bits of knowledge. (Then afterward, I get amazed that other people don't have a frickin' clue how movies are made... you don't know what greenscreen is? *shock horror* What, you never watch "Behind the Scenes" stuff?)
I had to turn up for the second talk on lighting. More technical, in terms of arty-technical. Of course, due to obligations of work, I missed the first 15-20 minutes, so I have NO introduction whatsoever (maybe tomorrow I can catch the repeat), but it was also full of awesome regarding art tips.
She was describing the Visual Principles of UP that the departments were following, and using stills from the film to describe the purposeful use of color - saturating areas purposefully to symbolise life/adventure/excitement, and desaturating on purpose when the main character was down and depressed.
Color, values, contrast, balance, the use of lines (horizontal lines = rest, vertical lines = power, oblique lines = change) etc.
It was like literature for a movie. Film studies. You don't realize the deliberate choices made in the hope that a specific mood/emotion is evoked until it's pointed out to you.
For example, I had no clue that they had specifically chosen a symbolic color for Ellie (Carl's girlfriend/wife). Yeah, it was pink. Really subtly done though. Any time she appears on the film, there's something pink, just in different shades.
Ellie got the round curves, a very 'light' feel. Carl was boxy and squareish, and his side of the screen was 'heavy' with lots of junk props stacked on his side, half off-frame.
When you really look at it, every single frame in a PIXAR movie is a work of art. A moving painting. It blows the mind.
And to be really honest, when I watched the free 3D screening they had of UP for staff (my first time watching it, I am a horrible movie-goer), I didn't think twice about the art style, nor was I terribly impressed with the look. It just kinda faded into the background, like a more hyper-real Toy Story.
Little did I know that it was a specific conscious decision to have this sort of fantastical realism look.
In fact, PIXAR seems kind of a 3D art purist company. One of the Q&A people asked if they used technology like motion-capture, and both the technical directors reacted with instantaneously with horror. "Oh no, no way, that's not for PIXAR. We prefer more "control" over the process." before rambling on slowly to an agreeable, "Yeah, it may work for some movies, like Avatar, which was good, but we like more "control"
Obviously, the PIXAR way is not the one true way for everybody.
And I think the techniques used in films like Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and so on and so forth have different 'cool' factors about their production process - I love the bigatures and hand-crafted props of LOTR, I saw a behind-the-scenes clip of Avatar (without actually having seen the movie yet) about how mo-cap allowed real actors to physically act and yet look like completely different fantastical creatures.
But yeah, it was fascinating.
So much so that I keep thinking I should at least get started on my wish to dabble in a digital art hobby.
See, I don't actually have to feel obliged to produce something like a complete fantasy artist's work. I'm fascinated with the play of light and shadow and color. That's one of the reasons I love fantasy acrylic paintings so much. What's to stop me from just producing stuff that plays around with evoking mood/emotion like how game artists do concept art? Or film artists producing colorscripts?
I like nature. Doing biological illustrations is also something I've always wanted to do. Still life with a purpose. Not fucking apples and bananas and oranges in a bowl. I wish my school art teachers had been smart enough to drag us out into a garden and ask us to pick a subject we were actually interested in drawing. But I think they were just counting off the hours and following the textbook - which said, syllabus: Still Life: Draw Fruit, and so we got cheap bananas.
Some long months ago, I treated myself to some books on fantastic landscapes by digital artists, because of the whole love of color and light and shade. Right after I absorbed the book and fueled by inspiration, bolstered by the thought that everything is never perfect in the first draft and stuff, even art, undergoes many iterations - I sat down with Photoshop and struggled to get my sci-fi world Ares and Spider City in evocative image / sketchy concept form.
Yeah, the first draft looks like a four-year old drew it. And I cheated heavily with cut-and-pasted photo references. Previously, that would have been it, I would have concluded I can't draw, period. But I treated it as simply the first concept, to plan the composition, etc.
In fact, halfway through, a surprising thought that wouldn't have occured otherwise, came to me about whether the city had some kind of energy shield, and I fiddled around with sketching in the color, while wondering about story/world implications.
Still fueled by inspiration, I went on to do up a second rework on top of the first concept, using it as an underlying layer to hand-draw more lines and so on and play with color as paint.
You know, I'm actually not embarrassed by this one. It has the color of the sky in my mental image down fairly pat. The city has slimmer, more sinister lines, even if it looks too much like a flower now. The sand around it has crept closer to something that feels more right. I lost my patience at the end and started concept-sketching squiggles in an attempt to figure out what the city outskirts might look like, growing organically around the inner city.
It's still not quite right there, story-wise, I'd envisioned the Spire as less tall and gigantically towering over everything than it is in the concept painting, but it kinda makes a cool fantastic landscape visual.
This one surprised me though. I'd previously not produced anything close to what a 'real' artist might sketch as a throwaway color concept. Presumably, if I was so inclined to spend real hours at it, a third layered attempt might add on more detail, or chase around more false starts until I got closer and closer to the image that exists in only nebulous form in my head.
My wrist had started aching from clicking and holding the mouse though.
Slowly, steadily, the birthday present scales for myself are tipping towards an Intuos graphics tablet...
Somewhat of a dilemma because the other thing that had interested my easily-fascinated self was the hobby of aquarium fishkeeping and creating a planted tank.
I'd resolved a month or two ago to clean up my house/room of junk by July so that I'd have enough room to go dabble with a planted aquarium tank and one or two -nice- fish with personality. Before my colleague had scooped up a longkang tilapia to keep as our lab's pet mascot, I had no idea that fish could have such character. Turns out I had no prior experience with cichlids, having only kept short-lived guppies and a greedy but ill-fated 'rescued from dorsal muscle excision' goldfish.
Alas, July creeps closer and closer, and I've barely managed to tidy my room, let alone the house.
Practical fishkeeping might have to wait until next year's July.
Did I mention I have too many games I want to play too?
I've also resolved that I need to get off my arse and learn how to drive, so even -more- time will be lost to all the commute time and outside-home time in addition to gotta-go-to-work time.
I have no idea how I'm going to get my hobby things done besides staying up like this for hours after midnight, but there's a limit to that before I need serious sleep time as well - ain't as young as I used to be, and I develop these awful migraines when I stay awake for too long.
*sighs* All in good time, I guess.
I finally managed to free up enough time to attend two talks by PIXAR technical directors - though one of them was punctuated by my boss calling me for an utterly braindead 'sharing session' on the intranet, which was entirely self-explanatory (think simple blog-type announcement posts, uploading files, wikis and forums) and which I flatly refused to attend in the 5 minutes I spent outside the auditorium before dashing back in again.
The really cool thing about working where I work is that such talks (which the hoi polloi have to pay 40 bucks for) are free to staff - that is, if you can scrape together enough time out of your schedule to attend them, which is rarely the case if you have a compulsory die-die-must-go-on class/meeting/discussion/thingy.
Anyhow, I DID manage to catch about 80% of the content, which was really cool to eclectic knowledge ol' me.
The first talk was a very introductory talk about PIXAR's production pipeline, complete with demonstration pictures and animations and so on. This was rather eye-opening, given that I had previously spent zero time surfing PIXAR's website (my boss is a Luddite and biology has very little to do with computers in most peoples' books except for the enlightened geeky few who play with bioinformatics (ugh), nature-inspired digital art/designs (nifty) and so on.)
Turns out there are two parallel routes of development. Shot-based goes like this:
Story => Editorial => Layout => Animation => Simulation => Effects => Lighting => Rendering
Asset-based is via:
Design => Modeling => Rigging => Shading => Set Dressing
Each section was then explained for the utterly-noob layperson (that would be me).
Story I was fairly familiar with. This is the process covered fairly well in "Behind the Scenes" clips where story is king, and a story director does a pitch in storyboards to a bunch of head honchos, acting it out in funny little voices to sell the idea. The head honchos poke a bunch of holes in the story, the story director winces and sucks it up and goes back to whip his story team into a frenzy again, rinse and repeat over and over in an iterative process until the story is refined to precision diamond cut over four years of this.
What I -didn't- know explicitly was that all the other departments at PIXAR pretty much work in the same way. Do stuff, present to the director in a review, get comments, go back, revise and iterate again.
It makes a certain kind of universal sense and 'clicks' in my brain that "Yes, this is really the right way to do things... if only other people did that more often (ie. my workplace, ha!)" After all, other films do it, and any other artistic endeavor does it too. Novels go through draft after draft.
Editorial was a weird kind of department. I'm still not exactly sure what they do, but apparently they are keepers of the current film. All the bits and pieces of the film, they seem to have it up in one gigantic proprietary Adobe Premiere-lookalike program and they tinker with shot edits.
Layout was kinda nifty. They are the digital cameramen. They determine motion of the frame, the camera angles, the shot composition and so on.
Animation are the actors. They bring the camera models to life by making them move. These are the guys who stare at real life references for hours and observe how they move and then do weird walks and so on to get them down.
Speaking of which, another thing which 'clicked' for me in this talk was the amount of references all the PIXAR departments used. Straight from real-life. The artists use it. Other departments use the tons and tons of 2D concept art from artists and also study real life, etc. Too often, ignorant folk like me assume that artists can just do it all out of their imaginations onto a blank page of canvas, and then conclude that since we can't do that, we must suck at art.
Simulation was something I had no clue wtf it was until it was explained to me. This is apparently the uber technical, engineering/programming side of computer generated 3D imagery, where the smart mathematical folks figure out how to get cloth and hair and fur and such thing physically simulated so that they (mostly) obey the laws of physics and react in a realistic, believable fashion in the film.
Effects are the explosions, fire, dust, debris, goop guys. The special effect thingmajigs. Creating the massive balloon canopy in UP. One of the technical directors doing the talk is in this department. While I think I have less interest in this, I'm impressed enough that I might try and turn up for his talk tomorrow to at least understand what he does.
Lighting was the other department the other tech director was from. Amusingly, they are a husband-wife team. Her presentation totally knocked my socks off. I'm a really visual person. I respond well to beautiful artistic images, even though I can't verbalise why the hell I like them so, and I keep wishing I could create stuff like that for myself as a hobby.
Anyhow, lighting does the work of changing this hopelessly bland white light-illuminated scene (think something that looks like ATITD) and turns it into this crazy work of art that looks like a Guild Wars screenshot / acrylic painting thingy. Until she showed us the before and after look, I don't think it had ever really hit me that what I see in PIXAR movies are 3D models, shaded with textures, placed in a scene and made to move with hundreds of animator man-hours, then purposefully hand-lit by the lighting department until it conveys the arty, almost acrylic color look on concept drawings.
I guess I had kind of glommed together my understanding of Disney 2D cartoons - in which a huge amount of artists do lots and lots of frames by hand, some of which do the specific characters, some of which do the backgrounds and things - and assumed 3D was vaguely the same. Hell no, it's like jumping through lots more loops to get 3D done with computers.
Then finally rendering is taken care of by an entirely different team, who send rendering jobs to PIXAR's famous Renderfarm, and fix artifacts produced by the rendering process and so on.
And they have another global group that are called RPGs (Render Production Group or something) whose sole job is to make sure the uberstacks of machines keep running 24/7 and error troubleshoot on jobs from ALL movies in production that choke in the wee hours of the morning and send notices to the respective departments.
Asset-based production meanwhile covers the things and the characters, the elements in a shot. Starting with design - environment and set design, and character design. Every single THING in a PIXAR movie is designed from tons and tons of artistic references, with detailed drawings of specific props and so on.
See the pots and pans and kitchen shtuff in this random blog showing Ratatouille pictures? There's a nice part of our PIXAR exhibition that depicts framed pictures of the art studies done - it's like a catalogue of french pot types in pastels.
Of course, there's the character design. Also iterative, lots of 3D sculpts and maquettes done after the 2D art concepts and so on. I love maquettes, they are super cool. They're like uber-miniatures. If only I knew how to sculpt them. I've always felt I can do decent art with squishy clay, blu-tac, epoxy putty, those thingies by bypassing the 2D stage completely.
A very nice example is the amount of iterations they took to perfect Sullivan from Monsters Inc. It's my favorite part of the PIXAR exhibition, where they show thin Sullivans, fat Sullivans, Sullivans that have tentacles sticking out of them, multiple eyes and a ton of other experiments that look nothing like the furry big guy.
After design, there's modeling. Actual 3D modeling. Maya. Meshes. Extruding. Other more technical jargon. The works. Something I've always wanted to learn using stuff like 3DSMax, Google Sketchup, Blender or what-have-you but never quite got around to it.
Then there's rigging. I had no clue what this was, but apparently models don't move just like that. Riggers have to attach controls to the models so that the animators later down the line can move the models about in realistic fashion. So they basically add the strings on the puppets so that the animators can later pull them and act.
And there's shading. Shaders. Thingies. Kinda like painting for 3D images. Yeah, my understanding of this whole 'shader' aspect is limited to games that ask me 'high' shaders or 'low' shaders, and I note that when my graphics card can support 'high' shaders, stuff looks more realistically cool - which is good from the layman perspective. Love to learn more about this at some point.
Finally, there's set dressing. This part of the production chain is an exercise in "Awesome Jobs I Never Knew Existed". These guys get paid to do something like build SG Bases in City of Heroes. They have all these model assets created by guys up the chain, nicely shaded and everything. Then they pick them up, rotate them around, and arrange them juuuust so to create a wonderfully detailed set for a shot.
Again, they work in iterative stages. The nice lady showed us a blank screen. Then a very basic office in Monster's Inc where the only shapes are basic cubicle, square computer, blocky stuff. Then the next pass added more detail like pencil holders, mugs, books, keyboards, waste basket and things. Then another final pass to add even more details like a framed picture, post-it notes on the monitor, etc.
Bloody hell. I could do that. Obviously, professional set dressers would have a stronger eye for composition and shapes and work from real life references as to what a scene would look like, but it's something conceivably within my reach - like War Witch placing stuff to create Striga Isle, aka level design. And thus, it falls within my bloody awesome category.
And that was just the first talk.
I left with a pageful of notes, full of inspired awe. Yeah, that's me. I just love collecting eclectic esoteric bits of knowledge. (Then afterward, I get amazed that other people don't have a frickin' clue how movies are made... you don't know what greenscreen is? *shock horror* What, you never watch "Behind the Scenes" stuff?)
I had to turn up for the second talk on lighting. More technical, in terms of arty-technical. Of course, due to obligations of work, I missed the first 15-20 minutes, so I have NO introduction whatsoever (maybe tomorrow I can catch the repeat), but it was also full of awesome regarding art tips.
She was describing the Visual Principles of UP that the departments were following, and using stills from the film to describe the purposeful use of color - saturating areas purposefully to symbolise life/adventure/excitement, and desaturating on purpose when the main character was down and depressed.
Color, values, contrast, balance, the use of lines (horizontal lines = rest, vertical lines = power, oblique lines = change) etc.
It was like literature for a movie. Film studies. You don't realize the deliberate choices made in the hope that a specific mood/emotion is evoked until it's pointed out to you.
For example, I had no clue that they had specifically chosen a symbolic color for Ellie (Carl's girlfriend/wife). Yeah, it was pink. Really subtly done though. Any time she appears on the film, there's something pink, just in different shades.
Ellie got the round curves, a very 'light' feel. Carl was boxy and squareish, and his side of the screen was 'heavy' with lots of junk props stacked on his side, half off-frame.
When you really look at it, every single frame in a PIXAR movie is a work of art. A moving painting. It blows the mind.
And to be really honest, when I watched the free 3D screening they had of UP for staff (my first time watching it, I am a horrible movie-goer), I didn't think twice about the art style, nor was I terribly impressed with the look. It just kinda faded into the background, like a more hyper-real Toy Story.
Little did I know that it was a specific conscious decision to have this sort of fantastical realism look.
In fact, PIXAR seems kind of a 3D art purist company. One of the Q&A people asked if they used technology like motion-capture, and both the technical directors reacted with instantaneously with horror. "Oh no, no way, that's not for PIXAR. We prefer more "control" over the process." before rambling on slowly to an agreeable, "Yeah, it may work for some movies, like Avatar, which was good, but we like more "control"
Obviously, the PIXAR way is not the one true way for everybody.
And I think the techniques used in films like Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and so on and so forth have different 'cool' factors about their production process - I love the bigatures and hand-crafted props of LOTR, I saw a behind-the-scenes clip of Avatar (without actually having seen the movie yet) about how mo-cap allowed real actors to physically act and yet look like completely different fantastical creatures.
But yeah, it was fascinating.
So much so that I keep thinking I should at least get started on my wish to dabble in a digital art hobby.
See, I don't actually have to feel obliged to produce something like a complete fantasy artist's work. I'm fascinated with the play of light and shadow and color. That's one of the reasons I love fantasy acrylic paintings so much. What's to stop me from just producing stuff that plays around with evoking mood/emotion like how game artists do concept art? Or film artists producing colorscripts?
I like nature. Doing biological illustrations is also something I've always wanted to do. Still life with a purpose. Not fucking apples and bananas and oranges in a bowl. I wish my school art teachers had been smart enough to drag us out into a garden and ask us to pick a subject we were actually interested in drawing. But I think they were just counting off the hours and following the textbook - which said, syllabus: Still Life: Draw Fruit, and so we got cheap bananas.
Some long months ago, I treated myself to some books on fantastic landscapes by digital artists, because of the whole love of color and light and shade. Right after I absorbed the book and fueled by inspiration, bolstered by the thought that everything is never perfect in the first draft and stuff, even art, undergoes many iterations - I sat down with Photoshop and struggled to get my sci-fi world Ares and Spider City in evocative image / sketchy concept form.
Yeah, the first draft looks like a four-year old drew it. And I cheated heavily with cut-and-pasted photo references. Previously, that would have been it, I would have concluded I can't draw, period. But I treated it as simply the first concept, to plan the composition, etc.
In fact, halfway through, a surprising thought that wouldn't have occured otherwise, came to me about whether the city had some kind of energy shield, and I fiddled around with sketching in the color, while wondering about story/world implications.
Still fueled by inspiration, I went on to do up a second rework on top of the first concept, using it as an underlying layer to hand-draw more lines and so on and play with color as paint.
You know, I'm actually not embarrassed by this one. It has the color of the sky in my mental image down fairly pat. The city has slimmer, more sinister lines, even if it looks too much like a flower now. The sand around it has crept closer to something that feels more right. I lost my patience at the end and started concept-sketching squiggles in an attempt to figure out what the city outskirts might look like, growing organically around the inner city.
It's still not quite right there, story-wise, I'd envisioned the Spire as less tall and gigantically towering over everything than it is in the concept painting, but it kinda makes a cool fantastic landscape visual.
This one surprised me though. I'd previously not produced anything close to what a 'real' artist might sketch as a throwaway color concept. Presumably, if I was so inclined to spend real hours at it, a third layered attempt might add on more detail, or chase around more false starts until I got closer and closer to the image that exists in only nebulous form in my head.
My wrist had started aching from clicking and holding the mouse though.
Slowly, steadily, the birthday present scales for myself are tipping towards an Intuos graphics tablet...
Somewhat of a dilemma because the other thing that had interested my easily-fascinated self was the hobby of aquarium fishkeeping and creating a planted tank.
I'd resolved a month or two ago to clean up my house/room of junk by July so that I'd have enough room to go dabble with a planted aquarium tank and one or two -nice- fish with personality. Before my colleague had scooped up a longkang tilapia to keep as our lab's pet mascot, I had no idea that fish could have such character. Turns out I had no prior experience with cichlids, having only kept short-lived guppies and a greedy but ill-fated 'rescued from dorsal muscle excision' goldfish.
Alas, July creeps closer and closer, and I've barely managed to tidy my room, let alone the house.
Practical fishkeeping might have to wait until next year's July.
Did I mention I have too many games I want to play too?
I've also resolved that I need to get off my arse and learn how to drive, so even -more- time will be lost to all the commute time and outside-home time in addition to gotta-go-to-work time.
I have no idea how I'm going to get my hobby things done besides staying up like this for hours after midnight, but there's a limit to that before I need serious sleep time as well - ain't as young as I used to be, and I develop these awful migraines when I stay awake for too long.
*sighs* All in good time, I guess.