LeMU.waterbottle

Par­ents just got a new Acer Aspire and mov­ing the old eMa­chine to office.  The eMa­chine had Win­dows XP, and intu­itively, I thought  Win­dows 7 would have no prob­lem restor­ing the files and set­tings cre­ated using Win­dows XP’s built-in backup pro­gram.  Just like almost every other expec­ta­tion I have for the pro­gres­sion in the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tems, I was wrong, again, this time. 

Hail for Microsoft earn­ing another metal for screw­ing stuff up.  Of course, for every such screw up, there got to be a solu­tion.  The idea is: how much time do I have to waste search­ing before I find some­thing that is sup­posed to be obvious?

The frus­tra­tion did not just end here.  It then appeared that Acer had mas­tur­bated the hard drive by leav­ing an ugly 13GB recov­ery partition–undeletable under nor­mal method, com­pletely igno­rant of the fact that I have already made recov­ery disks with writable DVD.  By “undeletable” I meant that using nor­mal pro­ce­dure under Win­dows 7, which is by run­ning Disk Man­age­ment.  Appar­ently Acer, or some higher force of Evil, decided that I must be pro­tected from my own stu­pid­ity.  Yes, I agree that wip­ing the recov­ery par­ti­tion is extremely unwise with­out any sys­tem back up… but come on, any­body who has the abil­ity to look up how to start Disk Man­age­ment in Win­dows 7 has to have the abil­ity to under­stand the con­se­quences of their actions.

Finally, there is a solu­tion that does not (or not yet) involve using another OS.  This time the search time was well over 30 minutes.

How­ever, the logic comes back to: why the hell can I not eas­ily free the gigan­tic 13GB of space for a bet­ter use, when I already made the god damn recov­ery disks?

I have seen enough Fail from the man­u­fac­ture to the OS maker for the past two hours.  I cer­tainly do not want to deal with any of this kind of bull­crap when my new net­book ships in.

Or maybe it’s not that tragic; the mas­sively unpop­u­lar changes in Mabinogi NA’s pre­mium pack­age pol­icy seems to stand firm in the sea of crit­i­cism and dis­con­tent.  I have naively thought that, maybe, Nexon isn’t that regres­sive and maybe, just maybe, given time, the in-game items that have since become unob­tain­able will be brought back.  Since I’m con­vinced that things will not get bet­ter any time soon, I shall ded­i­cate this post to my favorite attrac­tive micro-transaction sys­tem for all times that no longer exists.

To make this as con­struc­tive as pos­si­ble, I strongly rec­om­mend a Mabinogi player like you–whether you’ve been caught in the wave or not–to read this neat lit­tle essay first.  It gives a good intro­duc­tion on the sit­u­a­tion and focus on impor­tant impacts which new ser­vice could inflict to the com­mu­nity.  Though (by the look of it) the essay is writ­ten some­time right after the announce of the new ser­vice, hence the more the­o­ret­i­cal word­ing.  Allow me to elab­o­rate the argu­ment by list­ing some casual obser­va­tions on how the Mari server has changed since the G9 update.

con­tinue reading…

Got mod?

Fri­day before the week of year 2009’s Christ­mas, Nexon NA has announced a “warn­ing against hack­ing” as the following

You’ve raised your voices about the hack­ing and packet edit­ing in Mabinogi, and we’ve heard you loud and clear. This is some­thing that has poi­soned the well and we are work­ing to resolve this as quickly as we can. To start, we are research­ing the var­i­ous pro­grams that are being used to under­mine Mabinogi. Addi­tion­ally, we are work­ing closely with the devel­op­ment team in order to close the exploits these dis­hon­est play­ers are using to cor­rupt the game.

 

While we work to close these exploits we urge you not to use hacks, mods or packet edit­ing pro­grams. While we under­stand many con­sider them harm­less, please keep in mind that they are a vio­la­tion of the Terms of Use. Addi­tion­ally, it has been our com­mon expe­ri­ence that these pro­grams increase tech­ni­cal risk for the users. All too often play­ers request tech­ni­cal sup­port, only for us to dis­cover that a mod is the source of their crash­ing and freez­ing up. Remem­ber, if you use mods, we can­not pro­vide full tech­ni­cal support.

Going for­ward, we will be tak­ing a tougher stance on hack/mod users through sus­pen­sion or pos­si­bly even ban­ning of accounts. So we strongly encour­age our users, if you have access or knowl­edge of Mabinogi exploits, please refrain from using them in the game.

Lastly, if you come across any hacking/modding sites, please report them via our Cus­tomer Sup­port tick­et­ing sys­tem. If you can, include steps to how the hack/mod is used, what they do, and any other infor­ma­tion you can pro­vide. This will help us bet­ter track and stop these play­ers from harm­ing the game more than they already have. Please sub­mit your infor­ma­tion to the Mabinogi Feed­back cat­e­gory under Gen­eral Game­play with the title “Hacking/Moding Infor­ma­tion”.  All hack inves­ti­ga­tion tick­ets will be inves­ti­gated fully, but please under­stand that due to the sen­si­tive nature of such inves­ti­ga­tions, we will not be able to respond to the ticket unless fur­ther infor­ma­tion is requested.

Thank you, Mabino­gians, for your time. We hope to work together to push these peo­ple out and cre­ate a bet­ter Fan­tasy Life for all of us!

–The Mabinogi Team–

As of this moment, almost 36 hours is past since the thread is made, and it is now aggre­gated with 28 pages of 408 replies.  The actual impres­sive part is: among these replies, the con­tent qual­ity is higher than your aver­age poster on that spam and troll infested forum.

But the real ques­tion is: what is Nexon going to do.  I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure Nexon doest know what to do after their “bold” state­ment, either.  Here’s my reply to the thread, was writ­ten when I was bored.

It’s hard to pick a rep­re­sen­ta­tive CG from 12Riven that 1) is not a spoiler and 2) actu­ally appears to be within indus­try standard–so the choice of the cry­ing Makoto in her Sec­tion 12 uni­form.  The les­son of life learned after com­pleted the game: the only way not dis­ap­point­ing one­self is to not hold any expec­ta­tions.  Here, I will try my best to be sub­jec­tive and try not to sum­ma­rize  this review with “omg this game is bad”.   But after I fin­ished writ­ing I found this “review” basi­cally can be seen as a form of rant, hence the title change~

Some basic info:
Orig­i­nally by KID, fin­ished and pub­lished by Cyber­front
Sce­nario: Uchikoshi Koutarou (打越鋼太郎)
Graph­ics: Taki­gawa Yuu, bomi
Music: Abo Takeshi

Links: Offi­cial Site, 批評空間

con­tinue reading…

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Since this is still an ongo­ing inci­dent and looks like it will last as long as I live in this incred­i­bly bad dorm, I feel I already put too much effort worry about the ser­vice which I sup­pos­edly to enjoy, not frus­trate over with.  So, after the Spring Break our entire building’s Inter­net speed is like being infected by AIDS (use your imag­i­na­tion), and it took our ISP, eLeisure two weeks to iden­tify the prob­lem, and another two week ATTEMPT to fix it.

I have to crown them the title of Most Inef­fec­tive and Most Incom­pe­tent peo­ple I’ve ever talked to.

Even talk­ing to them makes me feel that, it is ME who is being messed up, not them!  I guess y’all can learn from my expe­ri­ence: when you are con­sid­er­ing mov­ing into a place where they offer you “free high-speed Inter­net con­nec­tion,” do con­sult some cur­rent res­i­dents on the issue whether the ISP is wor­thy or not.