LeMU.waterbottle

It is a true story.  Through my so-far enjoy­able expe­ri­ence in EVE Online, none was encap­su­lat­ing as my first (seri­ous) w-space oper­a­tion; risk and reward, I’ve got­ten both.  The expe­ri­ence fur­ther incites my desire of becom­ing one of the worm­hole dwellers with con­struc­tive (and hope­fully, sus­tain­able) PvP lifestyle.

I orig­i­nally posted this on my corp’s forum, titled “When the inevitable comes, care­bear­ing saves the day!” Also, wall of text warn­ing :p

con­tinue reading…

As of now, the col­lec­tive voice of the WoW gamers have claimed a vic­tory against Blizzard-Activision’s noto­ri­ous RealID plot.  Although I do not play the game and con­se­quently I could care less about the whole thing, such attempt made by an MMO indus­try leader shall remain in infamy for­ever as a dark antithe­sis of MMO genre itself.

I have found a com­ment by Jane, on Mas­sively, over the issue that echos pretty much my stance.  Read it here.

Never can I under­stand the men­tal­ity of pun­ish­ing rule-abiding posters by expos­ing their real-life iden­tity just to reduce the amount of spam and trolling on a large gam­ing forum.  That aside, I am more alarmed at the fact that Bliz­zard, respon­si­ble for run­ning the most pop­u­lated MMORPG on the planet, is mak­ing a delib­er­ate action like this.  I was afraid that if Bliz­zard could get away with pulling bull­crap like this, other online game pub­lish­ers would have funny ideas of stag­ing a fad that is rad­i­cally oppos­ing to a more gen­eral trend of recent years, which is the ris­ing aware­ness on restrict­ing the flow of per­sonal infor­ma­tion over the Internet.

Things turns out to be bet­ter.  Game­First stood up and gave Bliz­zard a well-deserved slap in the face back.  Then, of course, Blizzard’s bail.  Although look­ing at the non­cha­lent tone of Blizzard’s announce­ment, with­out words of apol­ogy but actu­ally stated the retrac­tion is “as of now”, I have to agree with Jane doubt­ing whether the dragon will stay dead. 

Rumors say Bliz­zard wants to some­how link their Battle.Net user­names with Face­book.  As of now, the valid­ity of the rumor is not a con­cern of mine.  But I think peo­ple should be reminded that MMORPG is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from Face­book: the two enti­ties are pro­jected onto the two oppo­site of the Real/Virtual spec­trum.  Face­book serves its func­tion by bridg­ing and expand­ing real-life con­nec­tions with other peo­ple.  Indi­vid­u­als on Face­book inter­act sim­i­lar to any real-life sit­u­a­tions because every­thing ties back to one’s name and the net­work one belongs to.  On the other hand, play­ing MMORPG, note the bolded let­ters, is about cre­at­ing a char­ac­ter which the player role-plays in a pro­grammed envi­ron­ment where the true vari­ables are play­ers themselves.  In game, a player is not judged by his/her sta­tus in real-life soci­ety but purely by their ways and actions in game.

My reli­gious belief aside, numer­ous argu­ments have been made against RealID on how poten­tially dan­ger­ous it can be when vir­tual vendetta is car­ried over to real-life.  Although RealID doesn’t seem to be vio­lat­ing laws in most gov­ern­ments, I do wish to have the Big Brother keep an eye on any com­pany that decides to release their cus­tomers’ real names in mass.  I’d also like to sug­gest peo­ple who don’t feel vio­lated by RealID to name their char­ac­ter and forum user­name to their real names, while those who wish to remain a sen­si­ble level of anonymity will remain unaffected.

If I have a Face­book page, you’ll never see it posted on this blog :p

Echo­ing recent event (in rl), I think it is a less than per­fect tim­ing to cook up a regional tour to be a more patri­otic citizen… of the Cal­dari State.

In EVE Online, Stand­ing with the four major Empires is a numeric indi­ca­tor of how much they like you, the cap­suleer pilot.  A higher stand­ing with a par­tic­u­lar empire fac­tion doesn’t do a lot: granting you access of higher level mis­sion agents; use­ful if you decide to do mis­sions for another NPC corp within that fac­tion.  A neg­a­tive stand­ing will, induc­tively, will make your life a tad bit mis­er­able in spaces con­trolled by that fac­tion.  If your stand­ing hits –5.0, your very intru­sion to that faction’s ter­ri­tory will sum­mon NPC police force whose goal is to destroy your ship and laugh at your wreck.

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It appears that I have played Mabinogi on the wrong side of the hori­zon.  The above incred­i­bly com­posed cos­play is the alleged event win­ner in Mabinogi Tai­wan.  This piece is cer­tainly among the most fab­u­lous multi-character cos­play I’ve ever come across… and yes indeed, my uminkeo fan­bo­ism also prevails.

Though I am not play­ing Mabinogi any­more at this moment, I am con­stantly look­ing for signs of that would reju­ve­nate my faith in dev­cat so one day I may once again be moti­vated enough to resume my Fan­tasy Life.  I made three conditionals:

• When I have time
• When dev­cat revamps party sys­tem so the game is no longer “Solonogi”
• When dev­cat fixes abuses/exploits in end-game stuff (such as black­smith near-perfect)

So I say to myself, if two of the three above con­di­tions are met, I’ll be back to the game; sadly I don’t see that hap­pen any­time soon.  Or… worse, dev­cat became demented–for intro­duc­ing Ham­let into C4G13’s main­stream.  Yes, Ham­let, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

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Exten­sively brows­ing pixiv is a good way of wast­ing spare time.  Ocassionally the pleas­antry blos­soms when bril­liant artists such as yajirushi (やじるし Home­page; Pixiv) shows up on my radar.  After acquir­ing per­mis­sion from yajirushi-san, I am hon­ored to present some of his works.  I was gen­uinely sur­prised to find out yajirushi-san is in fact, male.  Some­how the recur­ring female char­ac­ter in almost all of his draw­ings led me to believe that the artist is relat­ing “her­self”.  The strong res­o­nance of the image of self and the warped per­cep­tion of the surrounding–both in space and time–are most intrigu­ing, per­son­ally speaking.

Snacks for the psych -> yummy.

con­tinue reading…

One com­po­nent of EVE Online’s back­ground story-building mech­a­nism is the numer­ous offi­cial short fic­tions named EVE Chron­i­cles post on the offi­cial web­site as the offi­cial canon of the game.  Though I feel the sci­en­tific arti­cles are gen­er­ally more inter­est­ing to read, some of the Chron­i­cles no doubt have stood out for being bril­liantly written.

All These Lives are Fit to Ruin, writ­ten by CCP Abraxas, is one of the bet­ter chron­i­cles.  It addresses some of the curios­ity regard­ing the sup­pos­edly imper­sonal rela­tion­ship of Cap­suleer and his crew mem­bers.  The impres­sion of “pod pilots can fly­ing all size of ships solo”, is a jus­ti­fi­able one, how­ever it is incor­rect in theory.

And… the fol­low­ing copy&paste of the Chron­i­cle is for those who find read­ing a white wall of text over a black back­ground an excru­ci­at­ing activity.