TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

World Of Lifecraft

Rich pointed me to a post putting forward the concept of Massively Multiplayer Productivity, and I haven’t been able to find anyone who’s actually come up with a formal system for how it would work. The concept is that, in order to give the menial tasks you do in real-life the same addictive quality as the menial tasks in World Of Warcraft, all you need to do is assign experience-point rewards to them. Your To-Do list becomes your Quest Log, and every few thousand points you level yourself up – you have become a superior human being by getting things done.

So all it needs is a fair system of assigning experience points to the different kinds of things life requires you to sort out, and some markers to indicate when you would level up. I suggest:

Level-ups are awarded for the following XP amounts:

And so on. (If you didn’t spot the pattern, you’re probably not geeky enough to need to turn your life into a MMOG in order to get anything done). Notice that you start at level 0, just to emphasise how worthless you are until you’ve done something.

Well, I’m level one already and I haven’t had breakfast, so I think a bacon sandwich is in order. Any suggestions for more quest types or rewards?

Elsewhere

None of my photos of fireworks came out, so here are some various strangers around the world took last night.

John, Leonardtown

Adam, Poland

Joel, New Mexico

Matt, Canada

Stephen, Melbourne

Serdar, Sydney

Sorry

For a while there NaNoWriMo was consuming my spare writing time, starving this blog, but then I stopped doing that too, and now the less creative pass-times that I engage in to avoid Wri-ing my No-vel are replacing posting here. Shame, because I enjoy posting here, and I don’t enjoy writing my NaNoWriMo book. Curiosity: SATISFIED.

Meaning, I no longer have novelist ambitions. I fundamentally disagree with the format. I don’t read many books myself. The only thing that excites me about the form is that anyone can do it on their own, but now I realise I can’t. Most of all, I don’t like it. I feel like a fraud, covering for the fact I don’t have any real ideas, I don’t honestly care what this character looks like or how he phrases things, I’m just making stuff up to get the story over. I haven’t decided whether to give up entirely or just try truncating it dramatically – I still like the idea behind my novel, but it no longer seems novel-worthy. It could become a short story, though I’m too late for WriAShorStorWe.

Anyway, I am a bit late with this news, but I’m now officially a professional writer. The new disc ed, James commenter Graham, is settling in well, and I am making words from magical brain waves instead. It is very cool. More than the change in the type of work, what I’m looking forward to most is being able to pitch ideas for features and the like without the grim dread of involuntarily volunteering to write them, thereby neglecting the disc for just long enough to create a chronic crunch period out of thin air. One random idea I had this week – last weekend, actually, in preparation for my first day as a writer – just paid off dramatically today. I have fantastic new information on the next games of two of my favourite developers of all time that no-one else in the world has. I keep studying the screenshots of one of them, gleaning new joy out of tiny figures or details that hint at wonderful aspects of the game. The other, by N creators Metanet, is less specific and unillustrated, but will feature at its heart a mechanic I have loved since almost the start of my gaming life, and only ever seen attempted twice before – both with brilliant results. Metanet are more talented and intelligent than the developers of either of those games, so this is going to be something super-special.

I can say absolutely nothing revealing of either, so I apologise for teasing, but my excitement is desperately seeking an outlet here. The full skinny, also known as the straight dope, will be in our next-but-one issue (the next to hit the shelves has already gone to press).

Also in Awesome this month, I was visible on the BBC six o’clock news last night, in the background of an interview with the Deputy Editor of Edge magazine, for some reason conducted at a PC Gamer desk. Mr Walker theorises that this is because the story would otherwise be largely true, so some form of misleading element had to be manufactured. We propped up our latest issue and plastered stickers all over the desk beforehand, so we ‘pushed the brand’ appropriately. You can watch it here – I do have a link for a better quality video that doesn’t require the hateful RealPlayer, but it’s at work at the moment. If anyone has it, could they comment?

The BBC are bravely covering games more and more, but this report rather suggested that they should attempt to grasp the English language first. If Hugh Pym’s last few sentences made sense to anyone, could they draw me a diagram? And has anyone ever seen an ‘internet site’ that was made of cardboard bushes in a physical room? I know it’s easy to get your language in a twist when talking about the metaverse, but shouldn’t their reporters at least be told what a website is before they go on the air? Anyway, I’m not really complaining, except in the sense that I am. My forehead was on TV. Someone even recognised me and e-mailed us.

NaNoWriMo – Hard FAQs

I wrote the chapter plan for my National Novel Writing Month novel tonight, and in two minutes it’ll be November and I’ll write the first sentence. Then I’ll pass out because I’m really tired.

I’ve decided I will post it online, but not here. It’ll be to an unlinked page on this site, which won’t get indexed by Google, but absolutely anyone who’d like to read it should e-mail me or comment here (and fill in the e-mail field – it won’t be published) and I’ll send them the URL. In other words, it’s not secret but it’s not public either. The first chapter will hopefully go up two nights from now. I’ll upload it chapter by chapter I think.

Mockba

Mark: Who wants to go to Moscow?
Me: What’s the game?
Mark: It’s not just about the game, it’s about getting to go to Moscow.
Me: I just want to be sure that I would be the best person for the job.
(All laugh) Continued

Disappointing Results

9 people found this site, last month, by searching for the word ‘disappointed’. I’m not sure they found what they were looking for, but in a sense, doesn’t that mean they did? Is it logically coherent to be disappointed by the results for the word ‘disappointed’? In fact, is it even logically coherent not to be?

I decided, once, that all logical paradoxes were solvable. If a barber can only cut the hair of men who cannot cut their own, can he cut his own? No. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg. Whatever the immediate evolutionary ancestor of the chicken – i.e. the parent of the first creature that would satisfactorily meet our definition of a chicken – it laid a chicken egg, even though it was not itself a chicken. The type of an egg is determined by its contents rather than its parent.

In this case I think yes, you could be disappointed by your results, and have found what you were looking for – disappointment.

Hey, I had a mind-expanding adventure in a virtual world last night – one so fascinating that I had the (missed) oppourtunity to say “Do you want to blog this or shall I?” Although the person I was talking to doesn’t have a blog per se. Details, naturally, later.

Maths Cop!

Holy shit, they finally made a TV series about cops who solve crimes with maths! This is like all my dreams come true at once, except only one of them, and one I haven’t actually had yet, but totally would have if I’d thought to. It’s called Numbers (ignore unreliable sources such as the official site calling it ‘Numb3rs’ – that would mean it was stupid), and I’ve only seen five minutes of the first episode so far, but already there’s been an educational speech on the relevance of mathematics over the credit sequence, and straight off the bat some dude with odd eyebrows is correcting a woman on her use of the word ‘exponential’. Now he’s said “We can create a Bayesian filter!” and I am sold.

In other news, I have this week off, then next week I’m going to Moscow. Having masses of free time seemed like a good chance to try Black And White 2 (as did getting Black And White 2) and so far it is surprising me. I thought it would be pleasant but insubstantial, but in fact it’s got more substance than Colombia. But it’s extremely irritating. I thought it would again be an aimless playground from which no satisfying game could be sculpted, but in fact it’s alarmingly close to a truly brilliant RTS. It’s just definitely not one in its current state.

I have uncensorified my Serenity thoughts now that the film’s out. I may go and see it again in the middle of the day at some point this week – I used to love being able to do that at university; it’s just you and a few old ladies, and you emerge blinking to discover that the day is still in progress. But if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to CSI: Mathematics.

NaNoWriMo

I’m going to write a book in November. That sounds pretty ridiculous, considering I’ve never finished a book in my life (despite repeated attempts), and November – while not a short month – is not a reasonable time-frame. But I’m not the only one planning to do this, and nor am I expecting it to be a good book – more of a fictional blog. I’ve signed up for the pleasantly concatenated National Novel Writing Month, in which chumps and wannabes claim they will pen 50,000 words in thirty days flat. Interesting things about this are that the site itself tracks the cumulative word count of everyone involved so far, and a few of us are planning to launch our works in the extraordinary blacklibrary.

You’ll notice I sound optimistic, and also that this patently isn’t going to work. True enough, but there is one not entirely unrealistic expectation that appeals to me: I might end up writing the story I have in mind into a novella, way short of the word minimum but getting to the ultimate point. The plot is something that rose from the ashes of my old book, which was floored by a fatal flaw in the sci-fi reasoning. This new one is a sci-fi private detective type of yarn, and not as fanciful in some ways as the basics of the last one, but larger in scale and more diverse. The weird thing about it is that I haven’t written a word. Usually I start these things soon after having the idea, then stop for months at a time after every chapter. I think the main thing stopping me from writing a book is the way that I stop writing books or don’t start them at all. Solving that would really help.

This Month In Awesome

1st: New PC Gamer Out

My contribution to this one was the Long Play on Darwinia, in which I essentially beg people to buy it. The weird thing is, it seems to be working. I still play Darwinia regularly and it remains my favourite strategy game of all time, and it genuinely hurt to find out hardly anyone bought it. I’m happy to discover that plenty of them just needed a bit of friendly cajoling from someone with strong feelings on the matter. It also feels surreal and wonderful to have an effect – it’s not good to get used to the idea of having your words in print, and realising that people actually read them and pay attention jars you out of that nicely.

I’ve had a chance to play the new Darwinia demo they’re working on – a level not seen in the game – and it’s incredible stuff. Doesn’t just blow the last demo out of the water, it’s actually one of my favourite levels ever. I’ll link it as soon as it’s finished and up properly.

3rd: Tim’s Birthday

This one’s in the past now, and it was great. I discovered Chicken Tikka Taka Tak, sang Dandy Warhols in some kind of demonic kareoke console game (I believe the game scathingly classified me as a ‘hopeful’. Jon Hicks, however, said only my “Woo ooh ooh”s needed work – my baritone lounge crooning was fine. Damn straight) , dehatted a Nintendog and swung another around the room on the end of a rope. It seems there may have been other people present too.

8th: The OC

Yeah, everyone is straight out of an advert for one thing or another, but Seth is wittier than some of the best Whedon characters, and the constant sunshine is oddly addictive. It’s melodrama, it’s trash, but it’s frequently very funny and prominently features astoundingly good music. I am genuinely looking forward to its return.

9th: Discs Finished

Sweet, sweet release. The monthly deadline gives this job a kind of rhythm that builds to a kind of wild panic right up until the envelope containing the masters leaves my hands. Then I suddenly lose thirty kilograms and go and have a Carrot Cake Milkshake. I’m actually going to miss that when I stop being a Disc Editor. The pains of being wholly responsible for a big, important thing do pay off when it’s finally over.

12th: City Of Villains Beta

Some months back now, I accumulated so much experience debt from repeatedly dying on my way through a high-level area between me and my mission that I realised it would be quicker to start a new character than continue with this one. Experience debt is a huge, hideous, gaping wound in the otherwise unbroken awesomeness of City Of Heroes, and I felt pretty okay about giving it up until someone told me they’ve halved it now. Issue Five just went live, and now I’m longing to get back in and see what else has changed. Unfortunately my account has expired, so I’m not sure if I should re-register so soon before getting to play what is in effect the sequel.

Anyway, the point is, I’m pretty excited about City Of Villains now. I’m not expecting it to be massively different to CoH, I’m just expecting it to work.

Sometime: Fahrenheit

I can’t imagine I’m going to like this as much as its reviewers have so far, but there’s no doubting its perfectly pitched atmosphere and tactile control tricks. I intend to enjoy it as pulp – a sort of scienceless CSI.

21st: Lost

Will we find out a damn thing about anything? Craig says he heard we will, but it seems almost too much to ask. My main hope from the new series is that The Others will regain the sinisterness they had when all we knew of them was the super-human, super-unsettling Ethan. The last glimpse we had of them was too ordinary – we need to find out something namelessly horrifying about them to make them scary again.

I’m also hoping for more on the response to Boone’s call for help just before he tumbled off that cliff. If you haven’t listened to it carefully yet, do so now. It is interesting stuff.

23rd: Winter Assault

Dawn Of War was great. This will have new stuff. It will be great. END PREVIEW.

23rd: Fable

People keep telling me I’ll find this interesting, so I will play it. The voice-acting seriously risks ruining it for me, though – I found it unbearable in Black And White, and from what I’ve heard it’s the same mockingly insincere stuff here. In other respects, too, it looks a bit like a child’s drawing of an RPG rather than one made by RPG lovers. I don’t mind some streamlining, but it looks like it’s lost all the character of an RPG, leaving everything generic and placeholderish. I haven’t played it for even a second, so this is just scepticism.

Various Times: Other Birthdays

Mark, Ross and Beast all have birthdays (apparently on the same day) this month, as do at least two friends from outside of work and my gran. Literally fifty percent of everyone I know was born in September.

28th: My Birthday

I might like to go up in a balloon. Seems like a birthdayish thing to do. I also like the idea of silent flight. Engine noises ruin travel for me.

30th: Kieron‘s Birthday

I am quietly hoping to just do whatever other people are doing for this, instead of doing something sociable with lovely Gamer people for my birthday (short of working with them, if I go to work). You’re kind of responsible for people’s enjoyment if they’re out because of you, and that’s the kind of pressure for which mere Disc Editing cannot prepare you. I’d feel better if I wasn’t the main event, more of a niche side-show.

30th: Serenity

The spectacular finalé to what is sure to be the best September ever. If you haven’t seen Firefly, see this. If you have, you’re already going to see this. If you’ve already seen it through ‘connections’, I hate your face.

Rain

It was pretty dark when I left work tonight. It felt odd because it’s summer, and I left as early as I could (six) (after a quick bout of Ragdoll Kung Fu) (/self-important brag). Clouds – that’s what I blame. Absurdly the guy walking out of the building ahead of me immediately turned back when he reached the door, nearly knocking me over, and waited with what I suddenly realised was a small crowd of people apparently unable to cope with the outside world while it was raining. Some of them had coats.

I’ll tell you what’s good music for this: Sketch Show – Chronograph. One of those from-nowhere gems John Peel used to unearth, brush off and show to us proudly. It is pointedly headphone music, a willful disconnection from your surroundings – which should ideally be modern, wet and sickly with electric light.

That is atmosphere. It’s weird how long you can go without experiencing any atmosphere to speak of, and without noticing that you’re comparitively numb during this period. The second a mood like tonight’s early storm wakes me up, everything becomes interesting, refreshing and promising. Today was completely different to yesterday, it had its own feel. Consider the following exchange from Seinfeld:

Kramer: What’s today?
Newman: It’s Thursday.
Kramer: Really? Feels like Tuesday.
Newman: Tuesday has no feel. Monday has a feel. Friday has a feel, Sunday has a feel.
Kramer: I feel Tuesday and Wednesdays.

Today is a Wednesday, and I felt it. I’m not sure anything but Fridays have a feel for me normally, and it’s a shame. You remember days with feels. I remember lying on my back with a friend from uni, listening to Seymour Stein with the windows open on a summer day on which we had one lecture each. I remember turning up to those same lectures on another day, late, in winter, biting my gloves off as I locked up my bike and bustled into the orange lecture theatre with an aura of unwelcome cold air. The difference between these days and forgettable ones is not what happened, just the weather. Sometimes it’s memorable, and everything is interesting.

Last night had atmosphere too – walking home from a meal made uncommonly cheap by a combination of special offers and the plastic prong of a salad fork found in Rich’s lettuce. Bath at night, like any British city of a certain size, is usually post-apocalyptic with pockets of angry, red-faced public druggies. But when it’s a warm, still night and all you can hear is the dark, sinister serenity of Coaxing Méche from the Grim Fandango soundtrack, it’s suddenly the soft stone of the ancient buildings, the park by the river and the wide open spaces that you notice.

The short story is that an MP3 player is necessary to slow the passage of time. I suggest an iRiver of some description, but only ever buy the international versions of their players from now on – the American ones are crippled by the forced introduction of ‘MTP’, a Microsoft protocol the device has to use to connect to your PC, designed to support Digital Rights Management (file copying restrictions to enable new ways of paying for downloadable music). The problem with it, apart from that, is that it’s sickeningly slow, bans you from copying file types Microsoft doesn’t understand – even if the player itself supports them (most notably the wonderful OGG) – only works on PCs with Windows Media Player 10, won’t let you open files straight from the device or even Explore them in the normal way, hides the directory structure and the firmware from you, frequently hangs when copying files to the player and occasionally corrupts the ones it does claim to have copied successfully. The international versions still use ‘UMS’, which means they work as a fast, restriction-free removable hard drive. And there’s virtually nothing you can throw at an iRiver that it can’t play. Just so you know.

You also need to stop eating so much. I think I was even putting on weight as my existence became comfortable. This is no way to live. Everyone should spend at least half of their life hungry and listening to music. Comfort is a bit like death, you just exist and decay. There’s nothing wrong with improving your situation to a satisfactory level, but you can’t just stop once you’ve done it – you need to keep exploring, feel like you’re traveling whether you go anywhere new or not. We are all pretty stuck in our geographical ruts, but with new music for when we’re in the world, and new everything else for when we’re not, we ought to feel like we’re at the frontiers of human experience. All the time.

Another good one for rain – anything by the Postal Service. Ben Gibbard – the common factor between them and Death Cab For Cutie – is the only person writing romantic things that don’t leave me cold. Plans, the new Death Cab, is wonderful. I’m kind of a neophile with them (and music in general), in that Transatlanticism was the first album of theirs I wholly loved, and this is frequently better. Marching Bands Of Manhattan is the one to try if you get the chance.

Let me clarify something rather suddenly and unnecessarily: we regularly have great conversations at work. Our business is a ridiculous one, and so consultations with colleagues tend to be about other-worldly matters or puns. I intend to write some of them down. But since we’re not all philosophy students, looking back at one exchange I transcribed at university still induces mild pangs of nostalgia.

Andrew: Does anyone want this last piece of cake?
Ben: Nope.
Andrew: Well, you’re wrong, because I do.
Ben: Then I misunderstood the nature of the question. I thought you were calling for each of us to say whether or not we wanted it.
Andrew: Ha! I knew you’d think that!

Me: If you wanted him to think that, that’s what you meant by it. What you mean is just what you want the other person to understand by your words.
Andrew: No it’s not! If that was true, how could anyone lie?
Me: Well, you can mean something you know isn’t true. Like, if I said my face was blue, I’d mean that my face was blue even though I knew it wasn’t.
Andrew: But I had mental pictures…
Me: You can’t go the mental pictures route. Rob doesn’t even have mental pictures.
Katy: Yeah, that’s weird.

Andrew: Who said I wanted him to think that, anyway?
Me: I guess we got that from the way you were shouting “Ha! I wanted you to think that!” whilst jumping up and down and pointing at him.
Andrew: I didn’t say that!
Ben: Yes you did.
Andrew: No, I said “I knew you’d think that.”
Me: Yeah, he’s right, actually. So are you saying you didn’t want him to think that?
Andrew: Yeah.
Me: But you knew he would, and you said it anyway.
Andrew: Yeah.
Me: So it was with a heavy heart and a deep sadness that you said this, knowing you’d be horribly misunderstood.
Andrew: Yeah.
Me: And that was why you were jumping up and down and pointing at him?
Andrew: I was angry!
Me: And laughing?
Andrew: With anger!

State Of Things

I’d just like to say, this comments thing has been awesome. Thanks to everyone who’s added words to this page – they’ve been consistently clever and well-spelt. I knew you were all awesome, of course – I looked at my stats very carefully before deciding to have comments on the main page. According to the percentage of you using Firefox, James readers are approximately 1800% cooler than the general populace.

To celebrate I have worked out how to make Firefox realise I have an RSS feed, so that little orange broadcast icon should appear down the bottom. You can add it at as a Live Bookmark, or cram this link into a feed reader. You can even feed that feed to your personal Google page.

I am excited. We are about to get hit by a tsunami of amazingness, and I don’t see it stopping before the end of the year. Next month sees the return of Lost and The OC – the two most addictive programmes ever – and finishes off with the release of Serenity, the film of the third-best series ever, and a pretty much guaranteed entry into my elitist top films list. October is FEAR month, and given that I’ve now played the bizarrely early demo through about thirty-six times, I see myself getting lost in that pretty hard. Somewhere in that interim Hitman: Blood Money and Call Of Duty 2 are both due, but take that with a pinch of salt until you hear it from someone who knows anything. Contracts left a bitter taste in my mouth, so excitement over Blood Money is running low, and Call Of Duty 2’s promise is basically that it’ll put you through living hell, but both are bound to be an experience. I feel like I am owed Dreamfall fairly soon, but I don’t know where that’s coming from.

Let’s hope all that happens before mid-November, because in all probability subsequent events will be rendered irrelevant. I will not be playing other games for a few months. For the purposes of that claim, ‘reality’ counts as a game. I am waiting, of course, longing for sweet, sweet Oblivion. Which has Wonder Woman in it.

Quest Que C’est?

The missions are rubbish in San Andreas. I’m sure there are good ones, it’s just that they are, on the whole, as I say, rubbish. They seem blissfully unaware that the AI is egregious, and repeatedly force you to rely on NPCs whose incompetence is so complete that it often seems like suicidal depression.

The quests in World Of Warcraft are rubbish. Again, some stand-outs, but 97.3% of them are utterly mindless, even if they are prefaced by some awkwardly strained attempt to dress the brain-killingly monotonous formula in some kind of fantasy trappings.

But those are easy targets – two games I’ve played a lot but have no great love for. Let’s stab closer to my heart: Eve’s agent missions are rubbish. I enjoyed one once, but in Eve it’s not even a case of similar or formulaic ones. You get the same mission, word-for-word, time and time again.

City Of Heroes has the best missions of any MMOG I’ve played. They are, nevertheless, rubbish.

/cry

Back in the days when the denominations of our time were ‘levels’, bad ones were things you hit and got stuck on – they were chips on a smooth surface. With MMOGs and GTA games, we occasionally run into good ones. And we have this sad little thrill of pleasure, and like the game more for it. We’re being- what’s the opposite of spoilt? Unspoilt? Things suck.

The First Rule Of A Positive Blog

I’m not allowed to complain about anything except as a precursor to saying what we should be doing instead. I only let myself bitch about Elite Force 2 and Jedi Academy because I was leading into describing the ideal Star Trek and Star Wars games. Additionally, I must keep the solution very short, specific about alternatives, and universally applicable. This is the checklist for good quests. Every quest must be a good one, since quests are 91.2% of what we do in these games.

1. Why The Hell Should I?

Guild Wars was a revelation for me. It’s not a MMOG, but if it was I couldn’t have said what I said about City Of Heroes. I loved the missions. I hungered for them, completed them with relish, happily retried if they proved too tough. Were they better missions? A little, not enough to account for this difference in attitude. I loved them because they said “Primary Quest” in green next to them. I was saving the world. Remember that? The thing we do, in all games? When you step down from “Because the world depends on it, man! Save us!” to “Because an irritating prick told you to,” or “For 10 copper pieces and a piece of cheese,” excuse us for pressing Alt+F4 and having a cup of tea if at first we don’t succeed.

In World Of Warcraft, you have absolutely no goal. It is a completely aimless game. You just trundle around talking to people to see if you can do favours for cheese, or a sword you can’t use. It’s not a deal-breaker if the quests are good, but whenever you’re on one you don’t like or find frustrating – which for me was all of them – you’re seconds from giving up. It’s just cheese. You don’t have to do it. Find someone else to do a favour for.

The lesson: tell me what to do. Give me a million sidequests and let me roam the world at will, but give me a categorical imperative, a meaning to my life, something to work towards. In WoW it could be as simple as highlighting one quest-giver in green and saying that’s your guy, make sure you do all his misions eventually.

2. I Do Not Care That Jeffrey Is Dead. Jeffrey Was A Moron Who Got What He Fucking Deserved.

If Jeffrey can’t fucking hack the mission, why doesn’t Jeffrey stay at fucking home and let someone with actual fucking cognitive abilities do the fucking mission? And if he won’t, when Jeffrey dies, it is not my fucking fault. I’m sick, sick to death – we are all sick to fucking death – of babysitting digital idiots. Sick to fucking death. Death. Sick. Fucking. Cut these missions. If they’re central to your game, kill yourself. We hate you.

But wait! In Guild Wars a quest-giver will frequently accompany you on the quest! Yes. It was brilliant. I loved all these missions, and I never got frustrated with them. It helped that the AI was good, the NPCs tough and effective, but the lion’s share of the difference was that I could resurrect them if they did die. If their good AI and high hitpoints failed them, it still wasn’t mission failed. A masterstroke. If you’re thinking this couldn’t be carried across to GTA, perhaps you’ve never died in GTA. In fact, none of us have. You can’t. You’re incapacitated, and you get revived in hospital. Why not give me that revive ability? I don’t even need defibrillators or a medkit, I could do CPR or even just help the guy up. The mission is only lost if I can’t do that, because I failed.

3. Don’t Make Me Repeat Myself.

If I’ve done a mission, Eve, City Of Heroes, it goes on my permanent record. This guy has done that. That information is as precious as what level I am, what items I own. Never, ever ask me to do it again. GTA – your new travel skip feature is a baby step in the right direction, but falls woefully short of eliminating the repetition that makes your missions such a chore. What you fail to realise is that the huge drag is not driving from the quest-giver to the quest, it’s driving back to the quest-giver to ‘get’ the quest again before you can retry it. If I die, let me drive from the hospital to the mission. Let the mission be as I left it. If I fail – and I strongly advise against missions with fail conditions – reset the location and start me just outside it. That is, if you’re not going to let me save. MMOGs have an excuse for that, you don’t. Not even console memory limitations – you’ll let me save, but not when it would actually save me some time. You also force me to spend ten thousand dollars on a nearby house just so I can save the game when I need to quit – which is usually because I’m so fucking sick of repeating myself.

That’s it, actually. Quests already have ideas, content, characters – they only need to avoid three things that make them dull and frustrating, and they’ve made it to goodness. We could be spoiled again. It’s all obvious stuff, but I and every angry forumite around aren’t going to shut up about it until they are recognised as rules, not suggestions to try on one or two.

Still to come: I have totally had some awesome ideas for interesting new types of quests that someone should try.

WordPress Wizard

Reasons To Freeze To Death

John Walker lauded my musical taste when he heard The Mountain Goats coming out of my speakers a few weeks ago, but in fact it was not my doing. Soma FM’s consistently excellent Indie Pop Rocks (But College Rock Sucks) station was choosing my music at the time. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t even noticed that a particularly good song was playing, such is the usual standard. But I have now investigated, after he enthused so keenly, and lo, they are le awesome.

Rainy – before you ask – wistful, impossibly pretty acoustic indie folk, is how I would crudely characterise it. It made me think of Molasses and Neutral Milk Hotel, but they have all the earnest charm and arcane lyrics of The Decemberists and when they get silly, as they do on Dance Music, it’s as much fun as when Jeffrey Lewis does. If you don’t know who any of those people are, you might not like them. But since you can get an MP3 right here, you don’t have to risk it. And if you do like it, check out all those other people. The linked track, You Or Your Memory, is one of the softest, but firmly a grower and my current favourite. Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod is a close second.

I’m basing all this on their latest, The Sunset Tree, since that’s all I know. That’s what you should get, by your preferred method, and listen to immediately. I haven’t found myself so absorbed by the atmosphere of an album since discovering the Ugly Casanova one a few Christmasses ago. It’s one to get lost in.

Phew

Turns out the last item on my Redesign To-Do List – “Shoehorn old text into new template” – was the hardest. I still have bits to add to the Film and Television sections, but they’re bits I don’t care an awful lot about, so it’s debatable that I should waste your time with them.

Checklist for the new design:

• Fills screen
• Co-opts ‘trendy’ rounded corners
• Mutilates WordPress to own evil ends
• Heavy Flickr exploitation
• Comments over-promoted

I think that’s most of it. The last one means that your comments appear on the front page, letting you graffiti and deface this site as you please. The main purpose of this drawn-out conversion to WordPress was to enable comments, so please scrawl on everything, especially the ‘Best X’ type pages. You don’t need to log in, all fields are optional and comments are unmoderated so they’ll appear right away.

If I could also direct your attention to the rewritten Games section, the three new Philosophy sections, and the new Comics and Blogs links. The free MP3s linked in the top right there will get updated (in fact, they already have been before this went up, so I’ll switch the old ones in after a while). Brace yourself for the odd broken link there, because I’m pointing you to other people who’ve uploaded them, and they may get scared. To my knowledge they’re legally free tracks, but you never know.

I discovered there’s been a new trailer for the Firefly film, Serenity, since the one I saw. Head over to Television for a link. I could paste it here, of course, but I’m trying to get rid of you.

Apologies to anyone who disliked the crazy-long nature of the old design – I honestly thought WordPress would automatically curtail the main page and archive old posts, but it doesn’t seem to. I’ll work out how to do it manually before it gets too long.

Lastly, the reason all the posts here are about specific things is just that I’ve been posting and reposting the content for the media sections – normally it’ll be mostly more traditional blog-style posts here.