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Looking for Recommendations on Real World Things March 1, 2013

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, General, Hardware.
Tags: , , , , , ,
31 comments

I am going to lump together a few things I have been looking for into a single post to see who recommends what in the hope that it might help break a log jam or two.  Normally I save these sorts of “not quite gaming related” posts for the weekend, but I figured I would try to catch some of you bored at work on a Friday.

USB Headset Replacement

I have a five year old Plantronics .Audio 510 USB headset that performs very well.  The sound is good and the mic boosts my very quiet voice so that people can actually hear it.  And it kills background noise very well.  Using it was a requirement when appearing on podcasts, back when I was getting invited to appear on podcasts.

And as a unit, it remains simplicity itself.  One USB plug and you’re done.

For the visually oriented

For the visually oriented

The only problem with the whole thing is that they are a bit too small for my head in just about every dimension.  I can wear them for an hour at a stretch no problem, but after that they start to annoy, irritate, and eventually hurt at about the three hour mark.

I replaced the Plantronics set with a Turtle Beach Ear Force X11 set a while back.  The new set was very comfortable, I could wear it for hours on end.  The mic was decent and sound was okay, even if connections were a bit more complex.  It isn’t just a simple USB plug.

X11 Exposed

X11 Exposed

So I started using that at home while I brought the old set to work where having the USB powered mic helps with speech app work I do and lets people actually hear me on conference calls.

The problem is that the X11 has not proven to be a very durable unit, and less than two years down the road, the headset was coming apart, the mic was crackling (much to the annoyance of the rest of the instance group), and the volume adjust/mute fob on the cable was clearly on its last legs, feeling loose and likely to break at any moment when I used it.

So the X11 set had to go.

As a stop gap, I now drag the Plantronics set back and forth with me to work.  But I would really like to get a headset that works as well and is as durable as the Plantronics.  I would buy another one of the same model, except that they don’t make it any more (I am not buying used) and all of the new Plantronics models are different enough that I won’t buy them sight unseen.  And, of course, there is no place I can go to try them on.  I am not one of those people who can rip open sealed boxes at stores just to see if something fits, and my wife won’t return things to Fry’s for me.

So, I am looking for, high quality, durable, USB powered, headset with noise cancelling mic.  Comfortable for fat-heads like me would be a bonus.

Video Editing Software Upgrade

Over the last couple of years now I have have created a few video for YouTube related to gaming.  They have tended to be pretty simple  Part of the reason for that was because simple was what I wanted;  import video, trim video, add credits, add music, and upload to YouTube.   But another part is that the video editing software I use, Windows Live Movie Maker is really geared towards simple.  It doesn’t do much more than I have already done with it.

But now I feel I want to do more.

That means going out and spending some money on some better software.

However, within my budget, which is the ~$99 price range, there are a number of options, and choosing between them is hindered by my inability to articulate what the “more” I want to do really is.  I’ve only been in the video editing kiddy pool so far, so I am not sure what the options really are.  The only aspect I am pretty sure I don’t need is any high end audio editing, as I have a couple of such packages for doing just that sitting on my shelf already.  Audio I do at work.

And, of course, I don’t wholly trust the end user reviews (when did shipping problems become a reason for a 1-star product rating?)  or the glossy data sheets one finds at the company web sites.  So if you used a video editing package in my price range and are happy (or even unhappy) with it, let me know.

Should I Sell My Soul to U-verse or Xfinity?

I think I have a quorum  now that agrees that our seven year old DSL plan is not giving us the bandwidth we clearly need as a household.  Basically, even my wife is complaining about interned speeds now, while my daughter thinks YouTube is a radio and streams videos just to listen to the music while she draws on her iMac.

Due to where we live… Silicon Valley FFS… I cannot just call up AT&T and ask them to boost my DSL package.  I have all they offer for losers like me who dare live so far from their local CO.

So, to get a speed increase, I have to buy into one of the separate upgraded services.  This leaves me with only two choices at my address, AT&T’s U-verse and Comcast’s Xfinity.  Both can theoretically bring me an internet only upgrade, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find strings attached or other barriers in place.

Battling for my immortal soul...

Battling for my immortal soul…

The question is, which one to choose.  Having the phone company on one hand and the cable company on the other is clearly a no-win situation.  I have no love for either company, neither the reassembled AT&T deathstar nor the Comcast cable anaconda.

So the question probably is, which one will hurt me the least?  I have heard bad tales about both running with “up to” bandwidth numbers that are nowhere near what you end up getting or that either company will screw you on bandwidth if you try to order without their TV package.

Thoughts and/or experiences with either service?

Bonus Questions

Anybody have any experience with devices like the Lag Buster that Cringely wrote about a while back?

And, to totally leave computers and electronics, is anybody else in the market for a new dog kennel… I mean a new mattress?  My wife’s work and research has come up with the Simmons Beautyrest as the most likely candidate for us at this time.  But to me, buying a mattress seems to be somewhere just behind buying a car in anxiety about making the wrong choice.  The end result, in this case, is literally “you made your bed, now sleep in it!”

Sixty Signatures and the Title Company Staff February 10, 2013

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, General, In Person.
6 comments

We recently finished refinancing our home again.  It is part of the homeowner’s tradition in the US.

The dance is a little different these days.  Back in 2006 when we bought the house, the loan company was happy enough to let me finance it 100% before we had even sold the old place.  For a month or so I was in debt in the seven figure range.  Do I get an achievement for that?

Since the boom, interest rates have come down.  The last time we refinanced, the rate was low enough that we told the finance guy we work with that he would probably would only ever hear from us again via a yearly Christmas card.

And then rates went down even further, so that we could shave off more than a full percentage point from our rate, which in turn would peel a decent chunk of money off of our monthly payment.  Some of that comes from resetting the 30 year clock and the fact that we have paid off a chunk of principle as well, but the low rate helps too.

Getting documentation together took more effort this time around, all the more so because I had been self-employed for the last couple of years.  I had to document where all the money came from since 2010.  The years of really easy money are over.  It is back to the way it was in 2000 or so, and then some.  But we managed it.

The whole refinancing effort culminates in the signing “ceremony” at the title company.  You go sit in a conference room with your loan guy and a title company representative and sign all the documents the loan company wants you to sign.  The title company verifies this, tells the loan company you have jumped through all of their hoops, gets the money, pays off your old loan, and gives you whatever is left over.  That is pretty much how escrow works.

We had our daughter in tow this time around, and while I had the iPad handy for her to play with, she wanted to sit and watch what we were doing.  So I asked her to count how many times I had to sign my name during the process.

The answer: More than 60 times.

That number includes pages I just had to initial.  For every multi-page document, I had to initial each page and then sign the final page.

But given my scrawl of a signature, writing out my initials takes about as much effort as signing something.

Some of it was the usual stuff.  The multi-page document with all of the loan details.  The special document with the interest rate, which includes an explanation of how interest rates work, for people who missed it in the previous document.  The line in the notary ledger.  The detailed list of where all the money was going.

Some of it though was kind of silly.  I had to sign no fewer than three documents that basically said that the house being financed was my primary residence.  There were a few cases of signing documents that seemed to have the same purpose as some other document. And at one point I had to sign a photocopy of a signed document I had submitted on a previous occasion in order to verify that I had indeed signed it.

My wife had to sign and initial nearly as many documents.  There were a few just for me, but she was still over the 50 mark.

This is what happens when you make people accountable for their practices.  They make you sign a bunch of forms to “prove” that they have done everything required by law, whether or not you know the law or the relevance of any given document.  I recall back when a federal regulation came out saying that doctors could not share you medical history without your express written consent.  At my next visit to the doctor, I had to sign a form authorizing the doctor to share my medical history with whomever he damn well pleased or they would simply refuse to treat me.

That is how it always plays out.

Anyway, during a lull in the signing, I asked the woman from the title company if I could ask her a stupid question.

She laughed and asked me if I wanted to know why I had to sign so many documents.

I said no, my question was much sillier.  Besides which, I have worked at big companies, I know about papering over processes with documents and signatures to CYA.

What I wanted to know was why title companies seemed to be staffed entirely by women.

This was my sixth or seventh time to the title office for signing papers in my lifetime, and I could not recall there ever being a man working in any of them.

At this point our loan guy said he hadn’t actually noticed that in all his years of hanging out at title companies, but that in hindsight I seemed to be right.

The woman from the title company told us that, basically, the job involves getting yelled at a lot.  Pompous real estate agents, shady loan officers, cranky buyers, they all seem to target the title company staff when things aren’t going right or closing fast enough or what not.  She said that they do get men in the office from time to time, but that they do not have the temperament for that sort of thing, so do not last very long.

At least that was her theory.  And it certainly has some merit.

Based on what she said, I suspect that pay enters into it as well.

In financial organizations, the people who actually do the customer facing work tend to be paid poorly.  Go ask a bank teller how much they make.  This, along with the fact that she said that the sales end of the business (where commissions come into play) and management over a certain level (where the pay is good) were heavily staffed with men makes me think that, among the things she and her colleagues have to put up with, mediocre compensation might very well be on the list.

But I did not say the part about pay aloud.  That is just my theory.

And my sample set is just title offices in Silicon Valley, so it could be a regional thing.

Anybody out there with title company insight that can confirm or deny my theory?

Happy New Year from Maui January 1, 2013

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, General.
Tags:
8 comments

No chilly New Year’s Eve for us!

The view from our room

The view from our room

Happy new year from a sunny, warm location. Back to colder weather tomorrow, at which point I’ll think about what passes for new year’s predictions around here.

Farewell Steve Jobs October 6, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in General, In Person.
Tags: ,
9 comments

He grew up just a couple miles from where I did in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, the valley that became Silicon Valley in his youth, and in mine.

He was one of the founders of a company that influenced me greatly.

There was a small Apple II lab at my junior high school, which backed up to Apple’s Mariani Avenue campus, back in 1978.  It had been donated by Apple.

I was 13 at the time.  He was only 23.

Being able to use that lab, loading programs with cassette players, was a seminal experience for me.

I finally wrangled my own Apple II a few years later.  It was the gateway into my future.

But even as I acquired that precious machine, the next wave at Apple was emerging, the machine shaped by him, the Macintosh.

My goal was to some day work at Apple.

My own career followed the Macintosh, and I worked closely with Apple at different companies, but never for Apple.

At times that was a disappointment.

At other times that was a relief.

It was especially a relief in the dark days of the mid 90s, when Apple was faltering.  The companies I worked for started slowly developing Windows products.  At low ebb, in early 1996, having a resume with all Apple focused experience was a serious liability.

And then he came back to Apple.

Micheal Dell at the time said of Apple, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

But Apple flourished.  Michael Dell has since had to eat those words.

Legends were born, stories oft repeated in the valley, rumors and the like, about him.  There was Fake Steve Jobs, which gave voice to what we thought was going through his head, and the legendary reality distortion field that seemed the only explanation at times as to the fierce loyalty people had for Apple products for people who failed to grasp the “less is more” design philosophy.

And while I moved away from Apple products professionally, I do not have to look far around our home to see things that he influence, my wife’s iPhone, the iMac in the family room, a selection of Pixar films on the shelf.

And, of course, the memory of half a lifetime’s worth of influence.

So when my wife called me at the office to tell me that Steve Jobs had died, it was a blow.

It was like somebody in the family had gone.

Steve Jobs Announcement from Apple

It is hard now to imagine a world without Steve Jobs.

It is hard to think of someone who has had as much influence on my life.

9/11 – The More Things Change… September 11, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in General.
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5 comments

My daughter will turn 10 before the end of the year.

For her, what happened 10 years ago today is just part of the reality of her world.  There is no before and after, there is just the way things are.  Onerous security check points and having to remove your shoes at the airport, or getting pulled aside for a full pat-down and luggage inspection because it is a slow period at the check point and the TSA people find it easier to meet their quota of such checks when they are not busy, that is just part of her world.

There has been a war going on in Afghanistan forever as far as she knows and there was another one in Iraq, which I guess we won in the end.  It is the Middle-east and just because something looks one way on a given day doesn’t make it the long-term reality.  And the Afghan conflict is the just pointy end of a whole global war on terrorism that has bred an anxiety that we might be victims at any time.

And I think about this and wonder how strange that is as essentially a starting point for ones own personal reality.

How different from my own.

And yet how similar.

Because when I was nearly 10, planes were being hijacked in the Middle-east.  Security checkpoints were being put into airports to keep people from getting on to planes with weapons.  Granted, things were less serious.  I remember coming back from a trade show about 15 years ago and one of my co-workers realizing he still had a 4″ folding knife in his pocket while we were at the check point.  The agent looked at the knife, unfolded it, and held it up so his supervisor.  The supervisor looked at it and shrugged.  The agent folded it, handed it back, and away we went, better armed that any of the 9/11 hijackers.

And there had been a war going on in Vietnam forever for as far as I knew.  It was there on the evening news every night.  But that was just the pointy end of the stick in relation to the whole cold war, a war that we seemed to be losing.  Countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle-east seemed to be falling in line with the Soviet Union while NATO quibbled over details as the French tried to distance themselves from the whole thing.

And over this hung the specter of nuclear war, sudden instant death that might fall on us with at most a 30 minute warning.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I was able to make sense of much of what was going on when I was 10.  There I was able to see how hollow the advance of the Soviet Union in the third world really was.  Turns out a lot of people will mouth your philosophy if it legitimizes their dictatorship and gets them some guns.

And there was plenty of stupidity to go around in the west as well.  There were plenty of examples demonstrating that merely being against something, like Communism, was not a viable political philosophy.  Being an enemy of our “enemy” should not necessarily make you a friend, as any number of our past friends should indicate.  The same goes for some of our current “friends.”

But all that was only easy to spot after the fact.  Hindsight is a much more exact science than seeing into the future.  At that moment in time in the past, as with any given moment of time now, the government felt the need to be “doing” something and most people accepted that something needed to be done.  But did we do the right things?

The judgement of history takes time.  And for something like 9/11, a polarizing event like Pearl Harbor, history almost has to wait until all of those affected… which is almost every one of us… have passed on before a real assessment can be made.  Those of us with an emotional point of view to defend cannot write an objective history.

So I wonder how the history of this time will be written, though I will no doubt be long gone before the whole thing can be seen in a broader context.

And I wonder what the children of my daughter’s generation, those to be born 10-30 years from now, will see as normal facts of life as they are growing up.

Rash Generalizations or Why Are You So Defensive? March 18, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, General.
Tags:
21 comments

Englishman: I don’t really like the Welsh.  A nation of whores and rugby players the Welsh!

Neighbor: My mother was Welsh.

Englishman: Really… What position did she play?

-Paraphrased from Dave Allen at Large

I’m going to pick on Syp for a moment because he sent out a tweet that illustrates one of those basic problems we face when talking about games.

Of course, I’m a WoW player and felt I was being unjustly accused of being defensive.

Which made for a self-fulfilling prophecy as I was then feeling defensive for being accused of being defensive merely because I play WoW.

But I still felt he was wrong, tarring a player base of millions of people with a trait to which they neither demonstrably share nor hold any exclusivity over.

In this situation there is always the temptation to reply in kind.

Syp plays Rift!  And I am going to guess that this tweet had something to do with Rift and WoW.

Oh, and SynCaine plays Rift!  And so does Bhagpuss!  And none of them play WoW!

It is a conspiracy!

The Rift player base is made up of WoW haters!  I find it amusing how Rift players all hate WoW!

And look how defensive they are!  See those Rift players going after Tobold for saying he doesn’t want to play Rift.  Defensive! Totally!

And so on and so forth.

But that would just be demonstrating that the same silly coin has two sides.  And while it serves as a quick attention getting device, it hardly changes anybody’s mind about anything.

So, on the list of rules for being taken seriously as a member of the community, right after the one about not pretending you speak for the community as a whole, can we put in something about not generalizing about a given community?

Players of a given game are not a mass of like thinking/ like acting people.  If we were, we wouldn’t get on each others nerves so much in game, now would we?

Of course, this rule would be covered by the umbrella clause that allows use in special circumstances, such as attempts to make a point via humorous or satirical means. (Appropriate tagging is still recommended.)

We must, after all, protect our peers who eschew the simple declarative sentence and who choose instead to communicate solely via over-wrought analogy or heavy sarcasm.

Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom September 12, 2010

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, General.
Tags: , ,
12 comments

Today is the fourth anniversary of The Ancient Gaming Noob.  While I couldn’t come up with a really good title for this post, at least I steered clear of the death reference of last year.

And, as with every such anniversary, I take a few minutes to haul out some vague statistics about what has gone on over the last year as well as the lifetime of the blog.

So as I did with the first, second, and third anniversaries…

Basic Statistics

What has happened here and how has it changed from a year ago?

Days since launch: 1461 (+365)
Posts total: 1,640 (+383)
Average posts per day: 1.12 (-0.03)
Comments: 10,306 (+3,025)
Average comments per post: 6.3 (+0.5)
Average comments per day: 7.0  (+0.4)
Spam comments: 138,603 (+24,321)
Average spam comments per day: 94.87 (-9.4)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 13.5 (-2.5)

I am always surprised at the end of the year as to how many posts I have put up.  I start off any given week with one regular post planned, the instance group report, and maybe one additional item.  The others just seem to appear.

Demographics

Something new to look at.  I’ve been running that flag counter widget for about a year now, so by this point it can give a reasonably accurate read on from where my readership hails.

The geographic distribution of readers

While people from 185 different countries have hit the site at some point, the majority of readers come from countries that speak English.

Deep insight, I know.

And the percentages of the key English speaking countries on the list represent almost, but not quite, the ratios of their populations.  The US is a little over represented.  And that a bigger English speaking population means more visitors from that country is, again, not exactly a deep insight.

So I looked at the other end of the spectrum.  Here are the locations (not all of them are countries) from which I have had exactly one identifiable visitor since I installed the widget.

Generally speaking, if you are from a rich, western country that speaks English, you are more likely to visit my blog than if you are in a poor, equatorial nation.  Who would have guessed?  Obviously the marketing department at Blizzard still has new worlds to conquer.

Incoming!

Or who sends traffic to The Ancient Gaming Noob.

All time

  1. virginworlds.com
  2. blessingofkings.blogspot.com
  3. eq2-daily.com
  4. keenandgraev.com
  5. wordpress.com
  6. letrangeeve.blogspot.com
  7. westkarana.com
  8. killtenrats.com
  9. cracked.com
  10. commonsensegamer.com

Over The Last Year

  1. virginworlds.com
  2. blessingofkings.blogspot.com
  3. wordpress.com
  4. keenandgraev.com
  5. cracked.com
  6. letrangeeve.blogspot.com
  7. playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com
  8. wow.com
  9. westkarana.com
  10. killtenrats.com

VirginWorlds is still number one.

Cracked.com made the list by virtue of linking one of my posts last month, as WordPress.com did with that whole World Cup octopus thing.

Outgoing!

I have to leave the WoW Guild Name Generator post off the list, as it skews the totals.  It is still number one by a long shot.  Aside from that, here is where people go from the site.

All Time

  1. pokemon.com
  2. evegeek.com
  3. syncaine.wordpress.com
  4. potshot.wordpress.com
  5. keenandgraev.com
  6. commonsensegamer.com
  7. killtenrats.com
  8. blessingofkings.blogspot.com
  9. tobolds.blogspot.com
  10. westkarana.com

Over The Last Year

  1. pokemon.com
  2. syncaine.wordpress.com
  3. evegeek.com
  4. keenandgraev.com
  5. biobreak.wordpress.com
  6. blog.weflyspitfires.com
  7. killtenrats.com
  8. blessingofkings.blogspot.com
  9. forums.runicgames.com
  10. commonsensegamer.com

This is less precise.  A lot of times I link to individual posts at a site, versus the main site.  Still, it is approximately correct.

Most Viewed Posts

All time over the history of the blog.

  1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
  2. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
  3. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
  4. Five LEGO Video Game Titles I Want
  5. Is There Hope for a Science Fiction MMORPG?
  6. My LOTRO Video Crash
  7. LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
  8. 2008 MMORPG Progdictionations
  9. We’re in the Summer News Doldrums Now…
  10. Upgrading: Golem or Raven Navy Issue?

The Accidental Salesman

Posts that have made people offer to buy stuff.

Strange But True Tales From Google

What search bring people here

All Time

  1. wow guild names
  2. onyxia
  3. ancient gaming noob
  4. guild name generator
  5. thorin
  6. tagn
  7. dire maul summoning stone
  8. blizzard april fools
  9. balin
  10. hulkageddon
  11. evemon

Over The Last Year

  1. onyxia
  2. blizzard april fools
  3. hulkageddon
  4. heroic deadmines
  5. tagn
  6. wow guild names
  7. ancient gaming noob
  8. bolvar fordragon
  9. thorin
  10. blood elf porn

For a while now, I have been trying to figure out how searches on “Thorin” and “Thorin Oakenshield” have been leading people to the site.  This blog is not anywhere in the top dozen pages of sites when you do that search.

Then I noticed that on the first page of the search there is also a set of pictures of Thorin.  Among those pictures is one from this post, which has Thorin and Gandalf.  And when you do an image search, I rank pretty high for Balin as well.

What Does It All Mean?

Who knows.

But at some point in the next year I’ll be able to change the tag line for the blog to “25+ years of online gaming and still a noob.”  Won’t that be exciting?

To those who stop by regularly and leave an occasional comment, thank you for visiting!

If you like what I write, it probably won’t change much in the future… and if you don’t like what I write… well… consider that a warning.

That is Not My Beautiful Flying Car July 3, 2010

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, General, Random.
Tags: , , , , , , ,
4 comments

One of the quintessential promises of “the future” is the flying car.  It is the stuff of legend, George Jetson had one, Kevin Smith made a film short about them, Blade Runner featured them, and we all want one.

And every so often an item shows up in the new announcing a Flying Car has been created.

One such article showed up on Yahoo this past week about the Terrafugia Transition.  The headline was quite clear in calling it a flying car.

But one look at it shows that it is not a flying car.  Even the manufacturer does not call it a flying car.

Terrafugia Transition in Flight

No, this is a yet another case of the press going for sensation and/or clearly not understanding what they are reporting.

What we have here is an airplane you can drive on public streets.  In the terminology of the manufacturer, a “roadable aircraft.”  There have been a number of such designs over the years, including one based on the Ford Pinto.

Pinto Readies for Take Off

The AVE Mizar flying Pinto was even the subject of a recent Air & Space article. (Photo above from here.)

And I am not down on the concept.  If you are a pilot, having a plane you can drive home and park in the garage is a significant benefit.  You could use it to commute via air without having to have multiple vehicles.  You can also bypass the cost of having to hanger the aircraft.

But this is not the flying car, so shame on the media yet again for using that term in your headlines.  I realize it is Summer, the slow news season, but still.

No, the flying car is something you or I could drive daily without requiring anything much more complicated than a drivers license.

Fortunately, NASA has been looking our for those of us futurists who long for the flying car.  They have defined some guidelines for a real flying car, or personal air vehicle, so we’ll know when we get there.  They have even funded some prize awards to stimulate research in that direction.

But today we’re still many miles away from the flying car.

Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower September 12, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, General.
Tags: ,
23 comments

I hope I am not foreshadowing with that reference in the title.  The number three seems to be under represented it literary titles once you begin to exclude things like  “Now We Are Three.”  And even Bill Wordsworth can use a link now and again.

It has been three years since I set out to start a record of my gaming hobby, both past and present.  I think, for the most part, I have succeed in my modest goal.  I haven’t written as much about ancient gaming as I would have liked, but I have gotten a few of the tales I planned on written.  And I have kept up with the current goings on, including the occasional news item or press release to serve as a sign post on the road that is this virtual gaming journey.

And, as I did at the end of the first and second years, I will take a few minutes to see where I have ended up.

Basics Statistics

What has happened here and how has it changed from a year ago?

Page Views by Month - Growth Has Slowed

Page Views by Month – Growth Has Slowed

  • Days since launch: 1096 (+365)
  • Posts total: 1,257 (+360)
  • Average posts per day: 1.15 (-0.08)
  • Comments: 7,281 (+3,239)
  • Average comments per post: 5.8 (+1.3)
  • Average comments per day: 6.6  (+1.1)
  • Spam comments: 114,282 (+28,662)
  • Average spam comments per day: 104.27 (-13)
  • Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 16 (-5)

So over the last year I wrote a few less posts per day, people commented more, and spammers spammed just a bit less.  All probably good things!

Incoming!

Or who sends traffic to The Ancient Gaming Noob.

All time

Over the last year

Outgoing!

And then there are the sites to which I send traffic.  There is some overlap between inbound and outbound that shows that I share a readership with some of these sites.

Of course, the site I send the most traffic to is Nick Yee’s guild name generator, thanks to an accident of Google.

But that site aside, we have:

All time

Over the last year

Most Viewed Posts

The most viewed posts over the history of the blog are:

  1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
  2. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
  3. Shaymin Event at Toys R Us
  4. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
  5. What Is A “Tank” In EVE?
  6. Rotom Secret Key Event
  7. Is There Hope for a Science Fiction MMORPG?
  8. Five LEGO Video Game Titles I Want
  9. 2008 MMORPG Progdictionations
  10. LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga

A few expected items on that list, but enough that aren’t just accidents of Google to make me happy.

Items Aged 20 Years or More

Writing about my older gaming experiences has been a challenge, mostly due to the failings of memory.  Still, I can sometimes dig out enough information via various sources to put together something credible to help me recall the past.  So I have a few posts in that area:

Inspirational Blogs

And then there are blogs out there that I should probably link to more often or comment on more frequently because I read them regularly.

Measuring Success

I said at the top that I think I have succeeded in my goal so far, but how does one measure success with such a nebulous goal?

I think the fact that I post regularly is such a measure.

But more than that, the fact that I like to go back and look at what I have written.  If I am sitting around I will often just click the Random Post button just to see what comes up.

Or, alternatively, I will look through some of the tag listings, like those for Toril MUD or the Instance Group to see where I’ve been.

And What Now?

Well, just a big thanks for stopping by, reading my stuff and commenting on occasion.

I don’t have any plans to change what I write about or how I do it.  Real life may interfere from time to time of course and once in a while I realize that I spend more time writing about games than playing them, but that to shall pass.

A Castle and a Dollhouse April 11, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, General.
Tags: , ,
21 comments

After watching all of the series “Firefly” through NetFlix, my wife and I started looking for what the creator, Joss Whedon, and the cast members were going to do next.  We enjoyed the series enough to give them all a chance with whatever shows they came up with next.

This season we got our chance with two different shows.

The first was “Dollhouse,” which had Joss Whedon at the helm.  This looked to be very interesting.

The second was “Castle,” which had Nathan Fillion, the captain from “Firefly,” in the title role.  This show looked to be more than a bit contrived and I wasn’t convinced it was worth the effort, but there was Nathan Fillion, so it got a season pass on our Tivo along with “Dollhouse.”

“Dollhouse” started off strong, but started losing us after a couple of shows.

For me the show seemed to suffer from one of the classic “Star Trek” problems.

Back in the original “Star Trek” they introduced a lot of cool future technologies, key among them was the transporter.  Beam me up Scotty and all that.  It certainly saved us from a lot of “away team flies down to the planet in a shuttle” cut scenes.

On the other hand, it had the potential to eliminate a lot of common plot complications.  If anybody got in trouble, just beam them up, problem solved, and spend the remaining 40 minutes playing tri-dimensional chess or something.

So transporter technology had to be made quite fragile.  The transporters broke down a lot.  They were subject to interference from a seemingly endless variety of atmospheric and geologic conditions.  Advanced aliens could even divert and grab people from transporter beams, thus proving that they really needed a better encryption scheme.

But at least the transporters were part of the environment of the show, usually just tangential to the plot.

In “Dollhouse” we have the whole personality creation technology to make the “dolls” into whatever person they needed to be for a given assignment.  If it worked perfectly, the show might have been just a series of doll assignments with the occasional unexpected quirk in the personality mix along with the exploration of the morality of the whole thing.  The right team could make that interesting.

Instead the whole technology seems to be deeply flawed, the dolls crash and burn on a regular basis starting with the mysterious “Alpha,” leading to “what will go wrong next” being the major plot theme of the show, and an unsatisfying one for my wife and I.

Meanwhile the major antagonist for the Dollhouse is an FBI agent who is so discredited in his own agency and so owned and led around by the Dollhouse and its dolls that one wonders why he was even included.  Sure, they throw him a bone every so often, but he always ends up two steps back for every step forward.

And we really did not end up identifying or sympathizing with any of the main characters.

The dolls?  They made their deal with the devil, they’re getting paid, or so we hear. The Dollhouse might just put them in the wood chipper when they are done with them, and given how unreliable the technology they use is, that might not be the worst plan.  We got a glimpse of Sierra’s past, so maybe we should be sympathetic

The Dollhouse staff?  Topher is amusing but represents science gone awry.  Boyd seems strong and moral and we often see things through his eyes, but he is such a cog in the machine that he doesn’t change anything.  Plus he signed up with the Dollhouse, so he has his price. Ms. DeWitt and Mr. Dominic are the ruthless exploiters who will do whatever is necessary to protect the Dollhouse… or make a customer happy if the price is right.

Agent Ballard of the FBI?  He is incompetent and ineffectual and being led around by the nose.  He is surrounded by dolls by can’t seem to find them.

After two shows we were to the point of “give it another week and see if it gets better.”  After episode 8 (“Needs”) we canceled the season pass and gave up.  And, in a similar note, it appears the show itself may be getting canceled.

Meanwhile, our lesser choice, “Castle,” has turned out to be quite a gem.

Yes, it is completely contrived.

Richard Castle is a famous, rich, divorced, and spoiled crime novelist who lives in a New York apartment even bigger than you see in Woody Allen movies and who hangs out with James Patterson, Stephen J. Cannell and the mayor of city.  But when do we let that get in the way of a good story?  Who begrudges Bruce Wayne his riches?

Richard Castle gets some of the best dialog I have heard in a long time and Nathan Fillion is so totally believable in the role that you just have to give him a pass on the whole unlikely scenario of him being allowed to follow around a New York City murder detective for “research.”  His boyish charm, which works on almost everybody except detective Detective Beckett, and she is fighting it, makes you go along with the whole thing.

So “Castle” has become the must watch show in our house of late.  My wife can’t wait to watch on Tivo later, she has to watch it when it is aired, and now she has me up sitting through commercials, when I should be headed to bed, watching the show.

And rumor has it that “Dollhouse” is set to be cancelled.

Well, we own the “Firefly” DVD set now.  We can always go back and watch that.

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