Now World of Warcraft private servers are fairly common, and some are fairly interesting variants that do things Blizzard would never be able to do and remain commercially viable (for example, running servers that replicate what the game was like before the Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King expansions). For the most part, Blizzard doesn’t appear to have gone after private servers in general, presumably because they serve an extremely small niche market.

But unlike most private servers, Reeves/Scapegaming was run as a for-profit business that made (apparently a lot of) money off of microtransactions for its private servers. That’s just asking to be sued into oblivion.

Hopefully this won’t lead to a wholesale backlash by Blizzard going after every private server out there, but given Activision’s pressure to monetize, monetize, monetize across all of their products, it seems more likely that the days of openly running WoW private servers are numbered.

Update: here is a 1.3mb PDF version of the original complaint filed by Blizzard against Reeves. In it, Blizzard alleges that Reeves/Scapegaming collected approximately $1.5 million in donations from players accessing its private servers

Everyone who has used a web browser has been interrupted by the “Are you sure you want to connect?” warning message, which occurs when the browser finds the site’s certificate unacceptable. But web browser vendors (e.g. Microsoft or Mozilla) should not be responsible for determining whom (or what) the user trusts to certify the authenticity of a website, or the identity of another user online. The user herself should have the final say, and designation of trust should be done on the basis of human interaction. The Monkeysphere project aims to make that possibility a reality.

. . .

When you direct the browser to an https site using the Monkeysphere plugin and validation agent, if the certificate presented by the site does not pass the default browser validation (using standard, hierarchical X.509), the certificate and site URL are passed to the validation agent. The agent then checks the public keyservers for keys with UIDs matching the site url (e.g. https://zimmermann.mayfirst.org). If there is a trust path to that key, according to your own OpenPGP trust designations, the certficate is considered valid, and a browser ‘security exception’ is put in place to allow connections to the site.

Edit the comment and wrap the offending text in [shush][/shush]. Example: [shush]FIRST!!![/shush] or [shush reason="Boring"]FIRST!!![/shush]Readers can choose to read the buried comment by clicking on the “Show” link.

No other culture appears to regard its electric fans with trepidation, yet the belief that these air circulating devices are capable of killing in their sleep even adult men is rampant among Koreans. It doesn’t help that the Korean media continues to report “fan deaths,” citing this form of demise every time an otherwise healthy-appearing individual is found dead in his bed.

As to how seriously the threat of fan death is taken in South Korea, fan users there are cautioned to always leave a window open to counter the otherwise deadly effects. Korea’s largest fan manufacturing concern, Shinil Industrial Co., issues warnings with its products telling customers to keep fans pointed away from people at night. “This product may cause suffocation or hypothermia,” the warning reads. The Korea Consumer Protection Board advises that “Doors should be left open when sleeping with the electric fan or air conditioner turned on. If bodies are exposed to electric fans or air conditioners for too long, it causes bodies to lose water and hypothermia.” Many fans sold in South Korea are equipped with timers so people don’t fall asleep with the units running all night. Fan death fear is so prevalent that some Korean drivers have made it their practice to open car windows a crack before operating their vehicles’ air conditioners.

This, of course, would never gain traction in the United States where we prefer to believe myths like “water boarding is not torture” or “Lindsey Lohan’s latest escapades are news.”

For the record, I regularly sleep with a fan pointed at me in a closed room and have yet to suffer ill effects for it. On the other hand, I think my cat is trying to suffocate me.

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

Steve Spalding reminds us of just how amazing the age we live in is (at least for those of us privileged enough to be enjoying it),

Right now, right this very second, hovering above your head is a series of satellites that can tell you, to within a meter, exactly where you are located at almost any point on this planet. To access this magic, all you need is a device about the size of a deck of playing cards that you can pick up at your local Best Buy for $100.

In your pocket or by your bed, or socked away inside your glove compartment is another device that allows you to call anyone on the face of the planet, surf the web, write an essay, or shoot HD quality video. This device costs you about $70 a month, and you recently bought one for your 8 year old daughter so you could keep track of her at soccer practice.

On the other hand, can you image telling someone at the start of the 20th century that there’d be this worldwide network of computers that would be used extensively (primarily?) for transmitting explicit sexual images around the world?

When I was a kid, I had to guilt trip my parents into getting me an Apple IIe and then a Commodore 64 and thought I was uber-1337 for pirating the hell out of games for both systems (passing floppies of Archon around at lunch — good times!) Kids these days don’t realize how good they have it with torrents … at least that’s what I’ve heard …

Damn I’m glad I grew up to live in the future.

.

Seriously, I type about 150 WPM and detest most keyboards made over the past 10 years. I finally got fed up with this a few weeks ago and decided to go find an old school clicky keyboard. After a bit of research on the Internet, I hit up the Unicomp site.

Unicomp makes keyboards based on technology from Lexmark International which manufactured all of those wonderful keyboards for IBM back in the day. And their keyboards are every bit the awesomeness that I remember from hacking away at an IBM PC during a summer job at the Department of Defense in 1984.

I bought the space saver keyboard below for $69. The “space saver” designation is a bit of a misnomer as this keyboard is larger than most of the recent keyboards I used. Its just not as ginormous as the full-sized IBM-style keyboards which are fraking huge.

It definitely has that clicky-ness to it that some people apparently find annoying, but it is not so loud as to disturb anyone unless you have extremely oversensitive coworkers or roommates. Otherwise, the bottom line is this is simply how a keyboard should be.

HMM: University of Texas regents take KKK organizer’s name off dorm. Does that mean that all those buildings named after Robert Byrd in West Virginia will have to change?

UPDATE: Reader Mike Ferrante writes: “Seems like we’re getting like the old Stalinist Russia where we erase the people who have become unfashionable. WTF.”

Now personally, I’m not a fan of Robert Byrd and, yes, his name should come off all those public buildings. By his own admission, Byrd’s infatuation with the KKK was short lived and he apologized for his involvement in it repeatedly, but it also seems clear that Byrd was most upset about what the KKK association did to his political career more than any actual intolerance he perpetuated (as late as 1997 he warned aspiring politicians not to get involved with the Klan because of the albatross it would place around their careers!)

But Byrd’s sins are relegated to the awful, bigoted things he wrote in letters and said in public forums. William Stewart Simkins, the lawyer who had the University of Texas dormitory named after him, was an out-and-out terrorist. As Dr. Tom Russell, who wrote a paper on UT’s history, notes,

After the Civil War ended, William Stewart Simkins dishonored himself by becoming a criminal and terrorist. In late 1860s Florida, Simkins and his brother Eldred were Klan leaders. A masked, armed nightrider who admitted terrorizing freed slaves, William Stewart Simkins proudly spoke of beating a “darkey” with a barrel stave. He robbed a train of rifles intended for the state militia, and the Klan used these guns to terrorize African Americans. Simkins threatened an African-American legislator and kept blacks from the polls. In just one of the Florida counties under his command, Klansmen murdered 25 freed slaves during a three-year period.

It is obscene for Mike Ferrante and Reynolds to suggest that renaming a building to register disapproval for a terrorist is making us like “the old Stalinist Russia” and to bizarrely suggest that Simkins’ acts of violence and terror have merely become “unfashionable.”

WTF indeed.

I want to love the DC Universe Classics* series of toys, but too many times the frustration of finding a specific figure is just more than I’m willing to deal with so I basically just ignore the entire line. . . .And time and again Mattel shows a complete lack of concern for the fans — kinda like the Masters of the Universe Classics line — and way too much love for retailers like Wal-Mart.

I think I’ve got every figured from the DCUC line through about Wave 8 when I gave up on it. I’ll still occasionally  by figures I happen across, but trying to get a complete set of even a single wave is becoming ridiculously hard and expensive.

But as one of the commenters to Reed’s story notes, a big part of the problem is the sheer popularity of the DCUC line. Bottom line is that if the Toys-R-Us near me puts a new case of figures out overnight, by 5 p.m. the next day most of the figures in that case are bought and already listed on EBay.

My local comic book store always gets a small number of action figures that also show up in mass retail chains, and usually there’s a 40-50% markup at the comic store as compared to the mass retailers. On DCUC, however, I’ve seen figures marked up 200 to 300 percent immediately — that’s not the store being greedy, but rather a recognition that this is what the market price for this figures really is. If they put them at MSRP they’ll be gone in a day and up on EBay.

For the most part, if I really want a DCUC figure these days I’ll just preorder online. Otherwise, I just don’t worry about it anymore.

Personally, I’d like Nethack a lot more if it had an achievement system, but that’s just me (*ducks*).

A volume can now be configured to be automatically mounted whenever its host device gets connected to the computer (provided that the correct password and/or keyfiles are supplied).  (Windows)

Note: For example, if you have a TrueCrypt container on a USB flash drive and you want to configure TrueCrypt to mount it automatically whenever you insert the USB flash drive into the USB port, follow these steps: 1. Mount the volume. 2. Right-click the mounted volume in the drive list in the main TrueCrypt window and select ‘Add to Favorites‘. 3. The Favorites Organizer window should appear. In it, enable the option ‘Mount selected volume when its host device gets connected‘ and click OK.

Also note that TrueCrypt will not prompt you for a password if you have enabled caching of the pre-boot authentication password (Settings > ‘System Encryption‘) and the volume uses the same password as the system partition/drive. The same applies to cached non-system volume passwords.

That is very cool. I use TrueCrypt for WDE on all of my laptops, and then also encrypt any Flash drives or external USB hard drives using the same passphrase I use on the WDE drives. I assume (though am not an expert on cryptography so I could be wrong) that this probably increases the risk that someone could guess or compromise my passphrase. On the other hand, I’m just trying to protect myself against snoopy passers-by and the worst case scenario where a drive or laptop is lost or stolen. I’m prepared to concede the NSA is probably going to pwn my drives if they really want to.

Enabling pre-boot authentication and then auto mounting drives that use that passphrase is a nice addition to the system.

Auto tracking of computer usage – Manictime sits in the background and records your activities, so you can just forget it is there and focus on your work. When you are finished you can use collected data to accurately keep track of your time.

Keep track of your work hours – After you have finished working, you can use MT to keep track of your hours. That means no more “punch-clock” like software, where you always forget to start or stop the clock. Just sit back and do your work. After you are finished, you can easily use collected data to accurately keep track of your time.

Again, I’m not so interested in the software for the time management/billing aspects as I am of the incredibly detailed activity stream it creates in its database (see the screenshot below). I’ve got it installed on every computer I use, and it produces a permanent record of everything I’ve done on those machines — how much time I really spent playing World of Warcraft; every website I visited and for how long; the subject line of emails and how long I spent reading them, etc.

This is like crack for those of us who obsess over activity streams and self-tracking. It uses an SQL variant database to store data, so it is relatively easy to get the data out for repurposing elsewhere (I’d import it all into the WordPress lifestream I’ve got going, except a lot of the data is private in the “hell on, I don’t want that on the Internet quite yet.”)

ManicTime comes in both a free version and a commercial version that goes for $67. The free version works fine for what I do; the commercial version makes backups and a few things related to the billing/timesheet aspect of the program easier to manage.

What works best for me may not be what works best for you. A lot of people prefer applications like Evernote, which lets you capture nearly any form of text or media you want and is accessible via the web, desktop applications, and smartphone apps. Personally, Evernote’s a bit too large (and sometimes too bloated) for my taste. All I’ve ever wanted is the ability to create plain text files on my computer, sync those files to my phone and other computers (without any extra effort on my part), and the ability to edit or create new files from any of those buckets. That’s what I describe below.

And Simplenote does the above almost flawlessly. There are clients for it for Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, Linux and maybe even the BeOS for all I know. I typically create a number of set text files from templates each morning on my Windows laptop and then update that throughout the day from whatever device I have closest, usually my Nexus one. The various clients sync with the Simplenote online service, and the result is, as Pash emphasizes, text capture becomes ubiquitous and easy.

Which is not to say the client software is all made equal. One thing I wish the clients would add would be a basic “insert timestamp” option. I use a text expander software fto handle that with Windows-based ResophNotes client, but I’m not aware of how to accomplish automatically inserting a timestamp in any of the Android clients.

On the other hand the Android client I use, AndroNoter, has a convenient “Email” button which lets me email the content of a textfile to whatever email address I want. That works for me because I use Simplenote mostly for files that I’m still editing and then forward the finished file to one of my Gmail accounts for archiving.

Simplenote is free, but for $8.99/year there is a premium version that, among other things, eliminates all adds, provides automatic backups, and lets you forward emails to Simplenote to create text files that way if you’d prefer.

Simplenote has become one of those tools I use so frequently it has just become a background process in everything I do throughout the day.

The solution is the FeedWordPress plugin. Essentially, FeedWordPress is just an RSS/Atom aggregator. You give it RSS/Atom feed URLs and then set up a cron job to call the update function. After that, it goes through on a regular basis reading the feeds and adding new entries to WordPress as posts.

You can see the result on my lifestream subsite. I’ve got FeedWordPress checking about 40 different RSS feeds and then adding each new item as a separate post. FeedWordPress makes it trivial to do things like automatically tag posts, so I can easily drill down and look at just my main World of Warcraft character’s stream.

FeedWordPress does pretty much everything I wanted a lifestream app to do.

More than 100 clowns have taken to the streets in El Salvador to protest against the murder of a bus passenger killed by two “impostor clowns”.

Apparently in San Salvador, clowns regularly perform on public buses, picking up tips from passengers — that must be how public transportation works in hell, too. In early June 2010 a couple of thugs dressed up as clowns, boarded a bus, and shot a man who refused to give them money.

The clowns responded by organizing a protest to point out that, hey, clowns are people too. Carlos Vasquez, who was described in press reports as the clown union leader [insert joke about union leaders as clowns here] told the Associated Press and Sky News that the union was working on a plan to issue ID cards to real clowns.

The only thing that would have made this story more surreal is if they had referred to one of the killers as the Clown Prince of Crime.

This is an e-mail I sent to HTC’s public relations department as well as The Consumerist,

Back on February 3, I purchased a Nexus One through Google, with the understanding that HTC would be responsible for repairs.

A few weeks ago, my phone developed a problem that according to reports on the Internet and from your CSRs is fairly common with the phone — the power button
began to fail. I would press it, and it wouldn’t turn off or on immediately. Finally, on June 20, 2010 the power button failed altogether.

Not a problem, I thought. I’ll just call up HTC and get it fixed. I was offered a chance to get a new/refurbished phone shipped to me and then ship my existing phone back, or do an “express repair.” Since I was told “express repair” was typically 4 to 5 business days, I opted for that.

HTC scanned my as received on June 23, 2010 (HTC Ticket: [omitted for blog post]). And, as far as I can tell, hasn’t done a damn thing with it since.

I began calling support for updates the following week. Typically, I’d call on a Tuesday and be told call back on Wednesday. I’d call back on Wednesday and be told, oh it will probably be done Thursday — call back then. Then I was told, don’t worry, it will probably be finished by July 5, but things just aren’t being updated in our database, so call back then.

Alas, despite repeated calls, no updates beyond “yes we received your phone.”

Today, however, I talked to a nice CSR who explained to me that HTC had me ship the phone to their repair center in Texas at PRECISELY THE TIME THEY WERE MOVING THAT REPAIR CENTER TO STAFFORD. Are you kidding me?

But it gets better. So I’m told by HTC CSRs that phones that were sent to Houston for repair have basically not yet been looked at. That they just sat at Houston for awhile awaiting to be redirected to Stafford. According to your CSR, if I’m lucky a technician at your Stafford center *might* finally take my
phone out of the box and examine it on July 8 or July 9.

That is, frankly, a ridiculous timetable and the lack of accurate information and tracking in this case has been absolutely bizarre. I’m tempted to just say screw it and grab a Samsung Vibrant when T-Mobile releases that on July 21, as it appears increasingly unlikely I won’t have my Nexus One back by then.

Is there anything you can do to rectify this situation?

Thank you,

Brian Carnell

P.S. you may want to reconsider your Twitter engagement (or complete lack thereof). It is very frustrating to try to engage @HTC on Twitter and realize its just a corporate PR tool account … even my cable company engages me (very helpfully) when I try to communicate with it on Twitter.

• Wikipedia entry on Voluntaryism
• The End of Work by Bob Black – workers of the world, relax (seriously)
• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Anarchism But Were Afraid to Ask
• Mutualist.Org

The Pocket Edition is basically just a slimmed down 5″ version of Sony’s larger e-reader products. The screen is awesome (though comparable to other e-ink devices), and the Pocket Edition is one of the few e-readers I’ve used where the battery life actually comes close to the manufacturer’s claims.

The relatively small form factor means I can easily take it anywhere I could take a paperback, whereas with the Kindle and Sony’s larger e-readers, there were times I would leave it behind due to the large size (and, with the Kindle, because the damn thing was constantly needing recharged).

There is no SD card slot, which I miss, and I have no clue how well Sony’s software/bookstore work as I only read non-DRMed epub files on it.

Currently, the Pocket Edition reader can be had for $150-$170, and is a steal at that price.

Found at Piceslate.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the VPN partly because I didn’t have much of a use for a VPN at that time, and in the past I haven’t found such solutions very helpful — specifically, my previous attempts at using commercial VPNs was that they were too slow.

Anyway, a couple months ago I bought myself a new ultraportable and very quickly found a use case where I really needed to encrypt the traffic going to and from my new computer.  So I configured my system to use VyprVPN and have been very pleasantly surprised.

I haven’t actually done much in the way of speed comparisons, but at least for the sort of activities I normally do, I hardly notice any difference in speed or latency. And I feel a lot safer at reducing the risk of someone snooping on what I’m doing on the unsecure WiFi networks I need to use fairly regularly.

an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications.

As the OpenLike website puts it, for consumers the protocol allows individuals to determine which networks they want to share their data about what they like, and for websites allows users to promote things to different social networks without the website operator having to know the details of each network.

A much needed alternative to the closed social networks such as Facebook, where data goes in but never comes out again.

VideoPress is a commercial Automattic product that you can enable in your WordPress.com blog. The cost is $59.97/year to enable VideoPress on your account. If you need storage above and beyond the 3gb of space that comes with your WordPress.com account, you can purchase additional storage: 5gb for $19.97; 15gb for $49.97; 25gb for $89.97 per year. There are  currently no bandwidth limits.

Although the service is targeted at WordPress.com users, there is a VideoPress plugin for self-hosted blogs that lets users easily insert VideoPress-hosted videos into their self-hosted sites.

Lovingly recreated in a fashion that would have been acceptable in 1986 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, this de-make stands as the flagship title of the upcoming Pixel Force series from Eric Ruth Games.  Go alone, or invite a friend for 2 player co-op against the zombie apocalypse in all 4 of the original game campaigns.  2 difficulties and all 4 of the survivors make a glorious 8-bit appearence, complete with first and second tier weapons scattered along your path to escape.

Awesome.

The study, published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, asked 342 participants whether they would donate a kidney with varying payments of $0, $10,000 and $100,000. The study called for a real-world test of a regulated payment system.

The possibility of payments nearly doubled the number of participants in the study who said they would donate a kidney to a stranger, but it did not influence those with lower income levels more than those with higher incomes, according to Scott Halpern, one of the study’s authors and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

As the article notes, almost all live kidney donations occur where there is some family bond. Less than 100 people become live kidney donors for strangers each year. The result is that in 2009, 6,475 people died while awaiting a kidney transplant.

Yet the ethicists opposed to paying live kidney donors quoted in the USA Today story largely rely on the “ick” factor — since we pay people for blood, unfertilized eggs, and for surrogate motherhood today (to mention nothing of compensating people to become human targets by entering the military) but we don’t pay people to donate kidneys, well, there’s just something wrong with compensation for kidney donations.

George Annas, professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at Boston University’s School of Public Health, predicts a payment system would result in an increase in health care costs for transplants. He says the study raises the question of whether the United States really wants to put body parts on the market, even a regulated one.

“I would not be against a reasonable trial to see how it works … (but) we do not want a society in which the rich literally live off the bodies of the poor,” Annas says.

Of course the study in question found that income levels weren’t not a major factor in deciding whether or not individuals told researchers they would be willing to become live donors given enough compensation.

But more importantly, the question is not whether Annas will get to live in a world where people are compensated for becoming live kidney donors, but whether any of those 6,475 people who died last year — and the thousands who will die this year — might have a chance at living in a world where there was financial compensation for live kidney donors.

As one of the study’s authors, Scott Halpern, told USA Today,

There’s no real reason why that model [the current Organ Procurement and transplantation Network] has to be continued. There’s nothing intrinsically unique about organ donations that requires it to be a truly altruistic act.

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, “feeds,” “activity streams,” “event streams,” Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.

16. Your own information — all your communications, documents, photos, videos — including “cross network” information — phone calls, voice messages, text messages — will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

While I’m not so certain I want this information in the “cloud” (depending on what you Gelernter means by the “cloud” — I’d be happy to have it all on a hosted machine that I control, but I already have too much information residing on computers of companies who do not necessarily have my own best interests at heart).

Back in September 2008, I installed Sweetcron on this server to accomplish some of this. Sweetcron is basically a tool for taking syndication feeds and combining them together in a single lifestream in much the way Gelernter describes.  At the moment, my lifestream app checks 43 separate RSS feeds every 15 minutes and imports any new items it finds. Over the past year and half, it has imported an average of 58 items each day.

And that, of course is, is just the tip of the iceberg as there is a lot of information I can’t import there because it is not easily available in feed form, and information I won’t include due to privacy/security concerns.

Just a couple of thoughts on what a really robust lifestream application is going to need:

1. Lots of storage. If I included all of the information I’ve logged offline, including audio/video/photographs/screenshots, that would easily approach 20TB of data. That could probably be cut down to 5-6 TB using lossy compression, but that’s still a lot of data.

2. A robust database. Moreover there are probably 5 to 6 million data points in that collection rather than the approximately 35,000 points in my online lifestream. In order to be useful, I’d need to be able to do sophisticated searching to quickly include and exclude data by stream, keywords, text, date, etc.

3. Very strong security/privacy considerations. If someone has access to all my email, that’s a problem. If someone has access to all my photographs, that’s also a problem. Once someone has access to all my email, photographs, receipts, documents, call history, SMS/IM messages, calendar records, etc…that’s increases the problem far more than access to one or two additional accounts. After maintaining a lifestream like that for awhile, you begin to think of all the black hat ways it could be used by someone who wishes you ill.

The article is surprisingly interesting, and his point cogent, but there’s a whole meta discussion that he seems to have missed: regardless of whether the video game you’re playing is skill based or treadmill based, it’s still a video game. Far be it for me to judge a person’s choice in entertainment media, but no one who watches reality TV labors under the illusion that they are achieving anything substantial. Any achievement in a video game is a “fake achievement.” And video games aren’t alone.

Michaud goes on to label a number of real-world achievements, such as academic progress through grade systems, as achievement porn as well.

I actually agree with him on his larger claim, but Michaud doesn’t take his argument far enough, apparently believing their are achievements that aren’t fake,

This explosive growth in “achievement porn” is why it’s more important than ever to get your mind right about what you’re doing with your life and why you’re doing it.

The easy part to culling the bullshit is to ask yourself: Is this activity making a positive, tangible difference in my life or anyone else’s life? Is it a real, true prerequisite for a tangibly effective activity? Alternatively, am I totally okay with doing this just because I like doing it, laboring under no illusion that it benefits me or anyone else?

This is simply relativism despite what Michaud claims in a follow-up essay. Maybe for him, garnering achievements in World of Warcraft doesn’t add up as making a “tangible difference in my life” but for me it does. Similarly, I don’t see the point at all of those treadmill-like Facebook games, but I know quite a few people for whom they are extraordinarly tangible and have a very positive effect on their lives.

Or put differently, life is meaningless aside from the idiosyncratic and relative meaning that individuals choose to assign to it. Sure my WoW achievements are fake. So are my promotions at work, my degree, and whatever meaning readers will ascribe to this essay. If earning video game achievements are your thing, go for it. If sitting around meditating on the nature of the universe is your thing, go for that. In the end, none of it has any objective meaning or point, but rather only relative value to you, which you’ll have to decide.

I read the crap out of that comic over the next couple years. I would do anything to have this statute on my bookshelf…well, anything except pay the $250 asking price. What we really need is a Superman vs. Ali double pack of DC Universe Classics.

It offers three basic classes, along with typical MMO feature such as leveling, upgradeable stats and skills, etc.

It has been getting very good initial reviews. Space Time’s free to play model seems to be selling additional content/areas beyond the initial area for a fee, though at the moment there isn’t much available at all for purchase for the game.

Nice, and clearly just the beginning of the transition of MMOs to mobile devices (along with the increasingly prevalent mobile enhancement of traditional PC-based MMOs).

In OOTP 11 a storyline engine has been added which one of the developers describes this way,

Of course, just like in past versions, certain events will only happen after a specific year. However, unlike before, events may also stop after a certain year. So you won’t have stories about players falling off their horse on the way to a game in 2010. Plus, events may now be era-specific. So if you’re playing during the early 40′s, you’ll likely see stories about players going off to fight in the war, or if you’re playing in the 20′s, you might read about a player being arrested for bootlegging!

Still other storylines may be determined by a player’s age or even their physical condition. (Older or more out-of-shape players will be more likely to suffer certain illnesses.) Other stories may pertain to a player’s nationality. (A player takes personal leave to help with relief efforts after his homeland is struck by a hurricane.)

I’ve already explained that players’ morale may rise and fall as a consequence of certain events. But it may also be a cause for certain events, as well. So a player with extremely high morale might decide to go out for a night on the town, but his excessive partying might result in him missing the next day’s game with a bad hangover.

Furthermore, a team’s success on the field (or lack thereof) may determine whether specific storylines occur. So if a team is in the midst of a prolonged losing streak, the manager might go ballistic during a post-game press conference or a player might injure his hand from punching his locker in the clubhouse.

Additionally, storylines may only involve players who are in a contract year, are currently free agents, are on the active roster, or are in the minors. Don’t wanna read about Joe Nobody in the low minors missing a game because he overslept? You can even eliminate storylines regarding insignificant players altogether by attaching at-bat or innings-pitched conditions.

And these examples are based on what’s already been coded. There will be even more triggers, conditions, and results, not to mention a multitude of new complete storylines, added over the coming months! But remember, what’s truly great about storylines is that you have the power to customize them to your liking. Yes, there will be a finite number of triggers, conditions, and results, but as many as there are and will be soon, I seriously doubt many people will feel limited by what’s available.

Given the active community involved in OOTP, this means there will eventually be plenty of story engine-related files available, and of course the custom-story lines make it possible to add anything you want. Want a series of storylines set around a late 19th century invasion from Mars (as I do) — not a problem.

Man, I love OOTP.