The Sims Online dies

I actually found an online-related thing to post about today. This blog doesn't have a stated agenda, really, any more than my thoughts, but this is in keeping with the cyberpunk-theme that it has revolved around a bit.

EA Games is closing down The Sims Online. (The article calls it EA Land, but the game used to be called The Sims Online, which is what I assume most of us will know it as.) And what are they giving to all those people who paid $9.99 a month since 2002, hoping that the game would get better? The people who believed the hype at the end of last year that the game would be significantly improved and all those things they had been promising would finally arrive? A $15 gift certificate.

Now, I only ever played this game's free trial, so this is no skin off my back. But consider the ramifications: EA Games, a huge game company, is just dropping a game like it has the crabs. Well-loved old games like Everquest and Ultima Online chug on even in the face of new competition (read: World of Warcraft), but something like this only plays on one of my oldest fears:

Scenario: I spend thousands of hours online. I pour my heart and soul and waking hours into a game and a character, developing a person that is real in all but body, giving him the very best gear, position, stats, and everything else I can. I make friends, real friends, people I share ups and downs with, share my thoughts with, spend hundreds of hours with.

Then, it's all gone. The character, the world, the time is as though it never happened, except for the memories. Some of my friends go one way, some go another; we try to keep in touch, but it goes away.

I felt this a little when World of Warcraft supplanted Neverwinter Nights, but at least I can go back and play a bit for nostalgia, and I never had to pay for online play. But imagine when this happens to World of Warcraft, which I'm sure it will, sooner or later. What then?

This is why I'm terrified of falling in love with an MMO. I know that, sooner or later, it will go away, and then I'll be hurt.

Blog 30

That's really not a benchmark, but I'm making it one! Because after all, what significance does any number have that we don't give it?

I promised before that I was going to use this space to give ideas for possible stories, so it's about time I did that. And the idea is this:

The story is set during the Crusades, and it has three main characters. They are two knights and the Muslim woman they are escorting back to the Holy Land. One of the knights is a veteran who has returned from the Crusades with the ransom for her, as she's the daughter of a Muslim lord, and she was taken captive during a previous campaign. The other knight is the son of the lord who took her captive and is holding her for ransom. Aftre the ransom is paid, the two knights, for varying reasons, agree to go with her to ensure her safety, since a single Muslim woman traveling alone would be in big trouble through medieval Europe.

The story begins with how they leave the castle, as neither knight is initially willing to do it. The first is a callous and war-weary young man, a crude man-at-arms knighted on the battlefield, and the second is the chivalrous, idealistic son of a rich lord who doesn't think the safety of a Saracen is worth the life of a Christian knight. One is swarthy, dangerous, and rough, while the other is fair, brave, but untested.

And there would have to be all kinds of stories, from corrupt lords to traveling gypsies to witches to tournaments and jousts. And maybe a story or three borrowed from The Canterbury Tales!

I'm also thinking that the young lady herself will have, in her time of captivity, trained herself in the ways of cunning, stealth, and swordplay, so she'll have her own tricks up her sleeves! That is, if she wears sleeves. I'd really have to research medieval fashion. Because a hot medieval assassin woman is just about perfection.

And of course I'd have to call the series Knight Champloo. What do you think?

Nicole Kidman!

I had a dream Nicole Kidman was dead. I think it was some kind of accidental overdose. I guess in my mind Heath Ledger and Nicole Kidman are connected. Well, they've both been in Batman movies and they're both Australian, so there IS a connection....

That being said, it's been almost ten years since Moulin Rouge. I know Nicole was still looking foxy in The Golden Compass, but that was more of a "my best friend's hot mom" kind of look, rather than a "that cute girl I'd pass notes to during class" look. I really need to update my mental list of hot women. I think Sharon Stone is still on there.

Help me, Keira Knightley. You're my only hope.

By "help" I mean "stop making Pirates of the Carribean movies" and "do something interesting with your life."

Blog dream

I had a dream last night that involved this blog. I checked the blog's comments (as I do at least once a day) and found that I had ten comments on several posts. This came as a great surprise! Other than people telling me how fantastically witty I was, there was some girl with a name that was C...Aardvark, although I don't quite recall the nick. I wish I did, so I could check to see if this person is real or not. She was getting very personal, telling me how my different blogs made her see me, and even sending me private messages. She was even critiquing my writing style! It's a blog, for crying out loud, not freaking Shakespeare. Hmm... odd. It goes to show, I suppose, that even someone as lonely as me should beware strange online people. Then again, as much as people fear people who become obsessed with them online, I have a lot of sympathy for that kind of person. I can see where that kind of loneliness and need to connect on any kind of level comes from.

In other news, I'm still in my pajamas and it's almost one in the afternoon. Take that, schedule!

Dream on....

I happened across an old write-up I had done of one of my dreams. I often think back to this dream, struck by its strangeness and generally striking creativity and story. I keep meaning to write a story based on it, but then I put it off (as I do so many things). Whenever I think of it, I think of it as a dream I had recently. But today I checked the date of the actual dream, and it was more than three years ago. Has it really been so long?

Sometimes I have the feeling the world ended for me in 1999. I still see things that came out in the 90's and think, "That was only a few years ago!" New Year's Eve 1999-2000 was perhaps the high point of my life. It wasn't anything that happened to me: I was at a party my parents went to full of people I didn't know. But there was a feeling that the world was going to be fresh and new, and the entire world was celebrating just being here and having something to celebrate together. It was before 9/11, and I sincerely thought that if the world could move past all of that hate and pettiness for a day, as we did on December 31, we could do so forever, and have a better world. It was a naive feeling, but a beautiful feeling, too, and one that I miss so much that sometimes I just want to cry. In those days, the Internet felt fresh and beautiful, like a meadow after it rains, a meadow with a creek and moss.

Because those are the most beautiful.

Enter Douche

I had a good post written up about this, but then the internet ate it, thinking it was a carrot.

Have you ever wondered why you're all alone? Why it seems like all the beautiful women in the world have gone away, perhaps to a mystical, magical place called Narnia, or perhaps just across the sea to where the elves go? Well, the fact is, they're still here on the material plane. They're just hanging out with douchebags. And the proof is a site that draws together pictures from all over the place (although, apparently, New Jersey is a favorite) and proves once and for all that beautiful women, for one reason or another, are attracted irresistably to assholes. Here's the site. Enjoy, particularly the Hall of Scrote section.

Quicky

Just checking in quickly because I have to teach a class tomorrow. Every now and then, I feel inspired to do things I have no time for. Right now, I wish I could be writing to you about some stories that are floating in my mind. Instead, I must go sleep, so that I can return tomorrow to the grind.
In the morning: teach.
During the day: read for class.
In the afternoon: class
At night: flop into bed, dead-dog tired

I have heard a legend of a time called Summer, when the the drinks are free, the days are warm and dry, and girls are pretty (and SINGLE, thank-you-very-much, Utah).

The Dustiest Place on Earth

I've been watching a Chinese television series, Laughing in the Wind, that's in the same vein as movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's also thoroughly chop-socky, in that characters spin like tops in the air and make statements like, "Your Purity Sword technique cannot best my Paper Tiger Style!" (The Purity Sword technique is really something they reference frequently on the show.) Also, even though it was released in 2004, its camera appears to be either something from the 1950s or someone's home camcorder. While I'm on the subject of production quality: maybe it's just my computer, but one of the episodes doubled up every sound effect. When swords hit, they clanged twice, foosteps beat twice, a cup smacked down on a table thumped twice. It hurt my head.

The translations are pretty bad, but generally decipherable, even though it's hard to take a show with an "evil party" at all seriously. Then there's the plot, or what there is of it. Although that's uncharitable of me to say: I get the feeling that there is a plot, which makes it all the more difficult for me to attempt to follow what's going on. New characters are tossed in without any background, and the main plot appears to completely vanish while the show spends half an hour on a group of characters you haven't seen before.

Then there's the martial arts. It looks kind of cool... sometimes. Other times it's people whirling around waving their swords in the air while the sound effects go TING TING TING TING TING! It's almost like watching little kids pretend to swordfight. The costumes are elaborate (albeit appearing to have come straight from a modern sewing machine) and the sets are typically good, even though some of the forest shots appear pretty plasticky.

All that being said, the characters are charming (if very one-sided), and so far that's been enough to keep watching. Netflix, what hast thou wrought?

Could this be for real?

One has to wonder whether this is all just a pipe dream, the way jet-packs and flying cars were in decades past, but I found an article through my friend's blog that claims we may soon have holographic communication and virtually instant downloading through something called "the grid," which makes the Internet look like analog mail. Sound too good to be true? Yeah, it probably is. But wouldn't it be awesome if it was?

Maybe I'll have to change "the Second Web," the superfast cerebral internet in the cyberpunk novel I'm working on, to "the grid."

Inconsequential Moment

Today, as I was walking home from my class, a girl ran by me and dropped a pen on the side of the road. She didn't just kick a pen that was already on the ground; she dropped it from her pocket. I saw her drop it. By the time it occurred to me to pick it up and run to her, say, "Excuse me, but I think you dropped your pen," she was already at the door of the building she was running to. But I should have done it anyway.
Maybe I didn't want her to be late; she was already running. Maybe I wasn't sure it was her pen. But two seconds wouldn't have mattered, and I saw the pen drop from her pocket.
The truth is, for those few seconds, I was lazy. For those few seconds, I failed to do good.

Avatar, no!

I've heard a rumor that Avatar: the Last Airbender might be ending. This came to me through Facebook; apparently, the group that does the music for Avatar said that they were wrapping up doing the music for the "final episodes," which "will not disappoint."

Does this mean I won't give up hope for a fourth season? No way. But still, realistically, it looks like this might be the end for our heroes! I have to admit, I've been getting a bit of a weird vibe from the latest episodes. It seemed at the end of the second season that they were setting up for a much longer story. No spoilers, but things weren't exactly going the way our heroes might have hoped. Now, in the third season, it does feel like things have shifted to a much more direct (and, if I may say, a bit hurried) conclusion. Does this mean the show isn't awesome? Absolutely not; it's still my favorite show in television, even more than Battlestar Galactica. It does mean that it's going to break my heart if it ends, and particularly if it doesn't have an end worthy of the show. I want something epic, yet profound. Adventure and story all mixed together. And no "remember who you are!" nonsense.

More than anything, I'm really worried that the end will feel rushed or will leave plots unfinished. They should just take their time and make a fourth season. Water, Earth, Fire... we need an AIR SEASON! It's only obvious.

Wikipedia says that Avatar is making a lot of money as a franchise. Why end the cartoon now? So they can make a live-action movie? Give me a break.

Appa! Yip, yip!

On an unrelated note, they did finally publish the writing contest awards. They actually did it later the same day that I wrote my gripe. Did they listen? I call it coincidence. I didn't win in any other category. I'm very disappointed. As much as I want to keep up appearances as the artist himself and just shrug it off, I can't help but think that if I can't even place on a University-level, how am I ever going to write something that's loved by millions?

The Czechoslovakian Legion in Russia

So, I've been reading on the Internet about something amazing. If I would have heard yesterday that, near the end of the First World War, there was an army of about 50,000 Czechoslovak soldiers in Russia being transferred east along the Trans-Siberian Railroad so they could, through Vladivostok and the USA, fight on the Western front, rather than the Eastern Front which collapsed in 1917, I would have thought it was something from a bizarre alternate-reality story. Can you imagine a bunch of Czechoslovakians just stranded in the middle of Russia, trying to go to France to fight the Germans? To make it even more interesting, throw in eight train-cars' worth of Imperial Russian gold falling into the hands of the Czechoslovak legionnaires and being demanded by the Bolsheviks. Well, it turns out it's true. What's even more amazing is that most of them made it out alive: although they started out all spread out over the railway, they managed to regroup in Vladivostok and, with the help of mainly American and Japanese troops, evacuated and returned home (the First World War was over by then, although the war in Russia was still raging).

In other news, here's a little blast from the past:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE-1RPDqJAY
and an "interesting" combination of two memes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3TK0MEtM-E
Speaking of combining memes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP4uUnOJL2M

That's all for today.

It Finally Happened: Video Games in Movies

I watched Avalon today. If a movie made in Poland by a Japanese crew with Polish actors about a virtual-reality war game sounds like a terrible waste of time to you, that's because it is. BUT something remarkable occurred while I was watching this movie. I realized it was the first time I have seen an accurate portrayal of what a video game is really like in a movie. They correctly used phrases like "experience points" and the levels really were video game-like levels. They even had different classes of characters, although what, exactly, those different classes do was kind of vague. There was a Mage class, for instance, that never did anything magey. No, I don't think that's a word, either.

The movie itself was just a SFX movie with pretty mid-range SFX. Watch The Matrix on one TV and Tron on the other, and you'll have a much better experience without missing anything.

Catching Up

It's been a couple of days, and what a couple of days! On Friday, I attended the Intermountain Graduate Conference here at Utah State. Because I didn't cancel my classes, it was very hectic going from teaching to registering to teaching again to presenting my paper to sitting in on part of a session to running to a poetry panel discussion. Wow, it makes me almost tired just writing about it! The paper I presented was a short story that I wrote around an issue of modern life, technology and the soul, the influence technology has on the sense of self and on culture, all those topics that deeply fascinate me. I worked with the idea that the story would be told just where technology comes into play, hence the story jumps between three scenes, and leaves out much of what happened.

On Saturday, I had a couple of friends over, and we watched an episode of the TV show Firefly followed by the movie Serenity. Ah, why do they cancel such good shows, when something like Friends runs forever? The Sci Fi channel should really have bought it. Then again, thinking of shows that really do run too long, maybe it's better to die before you're huge than to die long after you're interesting.

I value the TV shows that mean something. A good TV show, like a good book, should say something about how to live. That's why I much prefer a show like Firefly, with its messages of family, honesty, and courage, and even shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender, to something more mainstream (and much less meaningful) like any number of cop dramas I could mention. A good TV show should show something about what makes a hero, and whoever doesn't aspire to being a hero seems like a waste of space to me.

Yet Another Gripe: Writing Contest

Today's gripe is closer to home. At Utah State University, we have a writing contest every year. This year, they were supposed to announce the winners by March. It's April now, and I've only heard about the poetry winners, and that may be because I actually am one. I've heard from an anonymous source that there have been certain snags in getting the word out.

Let me just cut right to the chase. This is a giant steaming load of bull. I can't stand this kind of hypocrisy. It's one thing when a professor shows up late to class every now and then, because we're all human, but the fact that they were very strict about getting the entries in not only on time but in a certain format, and now they're assing around with making the announcement, is just ludicrous. This kind of doublethink in standards is completely unbecoming an academic institution. What the heck is so difficult about sending out an e-mail saying, "Congratulations to these people, who won the following places:"? I'm not saying we go out and grab out torches and pitchforks, but I'd like something like some action to be taken, even if it's just an announcement that the real announcement will be delayed. And I want it to be delivered to me written on the shaved back of a faculty member, so he has to take his shirt off and sing a song as he presents it. The song, of course, is just to show the level of apology we're dealing with.

grar.

In other news, I really don't know how tomorrow is going to go. I have my evaluations scheduled for that day, and I'm also presenting a paper at the local graduate student conference. When all is said and done, it should be a very eventful day. When it's all over, I expect to find a hot Asian hooker of indeterminate age at my front door so I can snort fine Columbian cocaine out of her navel. That should help with the stress.

Because I believe in the spirit of internationalism, and supporting the finest exports of foreign countries.

Now That's How It's Done!

Today, all props go out to an unnamed boy who, when his mother was being attacked and strangled, jumped into action by slashing the throat of the man attacking her, killing her attacker. The boy was twelve. And what had he been doing prior to his heroic act? Playing video games. Yet more proof that you just don't mess with gamers, even twelve-year-olds.

The story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080402/ap_on_re_us/boy_stabs_man

My young friend, my hat is off to you.

WTF

Fable 2 is going to be exclusively for the XBox 360. I really liked Fable for the PC, and I was looking forward to a new fable, one with multiplayer! That was the feature I missed most in the original game, and with it, I imagined Fable 2 would be simply breathtaking. Now I find out that Lionhead has crawled into Bill Gates's capacious pockets (finding a nice cozy place between money and more money).

Wait, that doesn't make any sense. Microsoft owns Windows as well. What the heck is going on?

On a more enlightened level... no, I can't. I'm blown away.

And yes, it's April 1st, but I only wish this wasn't true.