Brainwaves of Sken

Today was a pretty lame day for reading the internet. Everyone’s bitching about each other in pseudo-obscure references, and it all just falls flat for me, like a play where everyone reveals their psychological bugaboos in awkward ways, or those sitcoms that make me shudder as people entrench themselves in trouble. I’m not involved, and thank goodness.

All I have to say about it is this:

“I backed my car into a cop car the other day.
Well he just drove off, sometimes life’s OK.
I ran my mouth off a bit too much, oh what did I say?
Well you just laughed it off, it was all OK.

And we’ll all float on OK. And we’ll all float on OK.
And we’ll all float on OK. And we’ll all float on anyway.”

Speaking of awesome stuff I’ve done with Carrie, karaoke was canceled today on account of the game (Sports bars are Sporty!), and I made the nasty drive from Detroit to Rochester to hang. I took surface streets from downtown to 10 mile, and there was a 2-lane pile-up on Rochester Road and M-59, so you can imagine how THAT trip went. When I got there, Carrie was in the midst of dying her hair a beautiful shnozzberry, and we hung out with her brother until Jen and Joe arrived – with still-warm and fresh snickerdoodles! Yes!

We had sushi at a funny little place down the road (I get nigiri and a small side of chicken katsu!) and then the four of us sat on her parents’ porch until midnight, chatting and laughing the night away.

It was a small thing, you know, but it reminds me of how good life is right now. How lucky I am to have friends I love, to have friends who love me, and to know people who’ve had nearly a decade to see my flaws, grok the fullness of me, and still want to know me.

I think it’s time to crash out for the night, with blue jeans and a beautiful fiancee to look forward to tomorrow – but that warm thought will be with me as I crawl into bed.

‘night, friends.

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There’s an unnavigable divide between the world of MMORPGs and the art of good storytelling. Not writing, mind you — the gang at Blizzard know their way around a word processor — but rather, the actual sharing of a story. It’s not a genre that supports the relaying of intricate plotlines. Most players are in it for the grind, for social status or notoriety. The option to enable “text skipping” doesn’t exactly lend itself to plot development. Even if the mass interest was there, all of the game’s players are receiving the same storyline. No choice, no branching, no consequences.

Attempting to build a bridge with which to cross this divide would be an extremely ambitious undertaking. Fortunately, Bioware is a studio well versed in ambition — and, if our brief time with the game is any indication, Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to irrevocably change the way MMOs tell stories.

After both watching the game in action at a LucasArts demo and getting our hands on it shortly thereafter, we were left with a bizarre feeling that what we had just seen was not in fact an MMO, but rather, another offline installment in the KOTOR franchise. The familiar elements were there — rich storytelling, clever writing and interesting characters. These elements were presented in frequent cutscenes which appear in lieu of scrolling text quest — a welcome change for the hardcore MMO player with a number of levels notched into their belt. – article

I feel like this was written with my own heart in mind. Ever since I began playing WoW, while I have enjoyed it greatly and dove in with gusto, I’ve felt something missing. I knew it would be missing before I began, so I took it as a given. I was even surprised occasionally at a really great story arc within a group of quests. But ultimately, the quests are completely divorced from the raids that give the end-game meaning, and it is rare that anything really feels connected.

Phasing, a new thing in Warcraft that allows the region to change as you complete quests, is a great start, but ultimately, this has the feel of a sandbox world, and I want an epic.

Here’s where the aforementioned ambition comes into play — each of the game’s classes will have its own personal story arc that lasts throughout its entire lifespan. Beneath this umbrella is an epic class-specific story as well as a few serialized mini-arcs which include a ton of tied-together quests and instanced dungeons. Daniel Erickson, The Old Republic’s lead writer, explained that the game’s quests are so linked to a player’s personal story that no one quest will be embarked upon by two different classes.

Or, in other words, two characters from two different classes won’t receive any of the same quests. The replay value here is going to be mind-boggling.

Yes. Yes.

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“Lately, I’ve been hard at work writing a book entitled Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. …

“But here’s the cool thing. I found that moderate, rational, risk takers, that is, those with scores between the mean and one standard deviation to the right are the people who are most satisfied with their lives. I call that area “the golden third” because it’s roughly 1/3 of the population. Studies (and there are several) show that people who take just a bit more risks than average, that is, those who live their lives in the golden third, tend to do better than average. They tend to be more satisfied with their lives and more fulfilled. To me, that’s a stunning conclusion.”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/HPtGBruJDMs/the-art-of-living-dangerously.html

Thoughts?

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Sounds like some peeps found some potentially meaningful text on the new Xbox 360 controller that’ll be bundled with Halo 3:ODST’s collector edition when it comes out.

At least, that’s according to bungie and Joystiq:

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/02/halo-3-odst-controller-pics-hold-clues-into-new-mombasa-mysteri/

I didn’t see a thread relating to it on unfiction (unfiction! It’s been forever!) so I went ahead and started one. :) let’s see some kloo-sleuthin’!

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=619029#619029

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Getting a new phone ’cause your old one is too busted to transfer addresses? Not so awesome.

I spent most of this evening transferring numbers into my gmail contact list, because it conveniently exports as outlook CSV, which my new phone can import. If there’s one thing that regularly annoys me about gmail, it’s the inability to consolidate email addresses without deleting one and adding it to another.

Bedtime (like an hour ago)

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So, about last night.

I think we need to sit a few seats back from where we did, though, ’cause I was entirely lipreading for half of it, and by the end of the night I was trying to be subtle with my finger in the ear pointing toward the speakers.

There were some incredible highlights. I sang duets with Melanie and Carrie (two of my three “best chicks”) and met a friend of KT’s. We had a bunch of people show. I sang and gestured wildly to Mr. Roboto. We had an older man singing The Killers, in a Shatner-esque way, and it was amaaazing how the bar rallied around him, both literally and vocally. I mean, 80% of the people who sing there do a fairly admirable job of it, and yet we were all behind this guy, and we helped him carry the song. How fun is that?

Near the end of the night, this woman gets up there – kinda squarish, with maybe a bit of a barrel chest, long face. Holy shit. Carrie and I spent almost her entire song with our mouths agape. She got a standing ovation. It was an incredible performance (I don’t know the song), and gave you the feeling you were at a concert listening to a professional. Which she may have been, I don’t know.

There were a fair number of same-gendered middle-aged couples there, sometimes dancing, but all clearly feeling relaxed there. Our waitress, who is clearly gay, rocks the hell out of Me and Bobby McGee every time we’re there, and sang the hell out of the girl part in Paradise by the Dash Board Light. Something about that kind of puts me at peace, there – maybe it reminds me of playing pinball in the basement bar of my grandma’s sister’s house while their softball team caroused.

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Not really.

But today is an amazing day for all druid-kind.

New Druid Forms in v3.2:

yay!

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Are you puzzled as to why visionary director Steven Spielberg recently made the leap from managing motion pictures to creating block-n-ball Wii games?

The answer can be found in a recent NPD study: According to the NPD research group, 63 percent of Americans have played a video game in the past six months — but only 53 percent of Americans went out to the movies over the same time period.

Mr. Spielberg is jumping off a burning ship. – article

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