Elonian Nomad - 3rd Strike

I’ve been too busy to post anything this past while, but I’ll take some time for this.

On behalf of my SO and our friend, we would like to thank all of you who graced us with your pressence in last night’s “The Dark Knight” Private Screening to celebrate our respective birthdays.

We hope you all had a good time.

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Yep, this week’s been so busy that I don’t even have the time to browse the internets for news.  I don’t knwo what’s going on in the world, except for the fact that “The Dark Knight” is already out in theaters here in the Philippines.

No, I haven’t seen it.  I’ll be seeing it next week with my closest friends and colleagues.

I’ve been so busy in fact that the only time I could steal for Warcraft 3 was some hours earlier, and Kalimdor was down at the time!  So I decided to upgrade my Wordpress, but the freakin’ internet connection kept DCing on me!

Kongai was the only thing I was able to squeeze in.  Unfortunately, the internet connection somehow knew when I was on the winning side and conveniently decides to take a breather in the worst possible times.  Given the bad luck, I was ironically lucky to get a new card!

In spite of fate messing around with my internet connection, I thank the heavens that Kongai was designed to be casually playable.  All the long days, it was the only thing that kept me sane.

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Short answer… pretty damn hard.

Last week, with urges to buy books I don’t need, I thought of reviewing what I really wanted to get.  Strangely, although I could come up with a lot of crap “I’d like”, I honestly couldn’t think of anything “I’d need”.  [my SO interrupting my typing: "dont worry baby, ill help you make your wishlist.  1st;   you want wiii, next, flat screen tv, then topshop..."]

[continuing the following day, without interruptions :P]

Well, yeah, a Wii would be nice, and so would a flatscreen TV.  Still, let me try this again…

Last week, I was considering reviewing what stuff I’d want to get for myself.  Among the things that popped in my mind were the following:

/*

in case the flash slideshow above doesn’t appear, here are the items in it:

• Iron Kingdoms World Guide: Full Metal Fantasy, Vol. 2
• Hobby Games: The 100 Best
• Keep on the Shadowfell (Dungeons & Dragons, Adventure H1) (Amazon link)
• 40 Years of Gen Con
• Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games
• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
• The Complete Far Side 1980-1994 (2 vol set)
• ASUS Eee PC 901 20G
• Starcraft: The Board Game
• Arkham Horror Boardgame
• RPG dice sets (like the D&D 4E Premium Dice Set)

*/

And here’s some additional stuff not in that slide-show of wishes:

• any Foxtrot anthology
• a new desktop computer
• at least 1 TB external storage
• A Touch of Evil, The Supernatural Game

It annoyed me that they were mostly personal fads, prohibitively expensive, or just impractical.  Sure, having them would be nice, but very few of them are useful. Even the most practical and useful items in the list have some serious flaws:

• any of the books - Yeah, any of these would be really cool.  Unfortunately, none of ‘em appear to be available locally.
• any Foxtrot anthology - As reasonable as this may be, I can’t seem to find this in any of the local bookstores either.
• a new desktop computer - Expensive, and I can survive with my current one (it’s chugging along, the keyword is “chugging”).  I’m planning to buy a new one when Starcraft 2 comes out in December (and I’ll make sure it’s Diablo 3 ready).  Until then, it’s impractical to upgrade (as prices keep dropping as time goes by).
• EEEPC 901 - I can surf the net AND read PDFs anywhere I want!  (and then some!)  I’d probably lug it around everyday ‘coz it’s small and it’s gonna be so bloody useful.  Unfortunately, it’ll (it’s not out yet) most likely cost more than PhP 25k (since the EEEPC 900 is already around that range).  That’s already the cost of a really cheap (and possibly impractical) laptop.  Not to mention that MSI will be releasing a competitor, and that the battery life is still questionable.  A portable internet surfing machine with a battery life of around 3 hours, even with PDF reading capabilities, might not be worth the 25k.

• at least 1 TB external storage - Very very useful to me, it’ll make backing-up of data much much easier.  Unfortunately, it’s still a bit expensive.
• Starcraft: The Board Game - It’s actually very reasonably priced (if you know where to look), and I think that I might enjoy the gameplay quite well.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure if it’s the right game for my gaming group.  Our 6 player Catan games (which my gaming group loves) already occupies quite a bit of space, this one is expected to be bigger.  This will be a minor problem compared to the possibility that they won’t like the gameplay the way I do.
• A Touch of Evil, The Supernatural Game - This would be an awesome co-op games tester for my gaming group (particularly since it seemed to be designed to have the co-op part as removable) and probably be very reasonably priced, but it won’t be out ’till September.

So I decided to change focus and think about the stuff “I need” rather than the stuff “I like”.  Removing the usuals like love, food, shelter, friends, more money, and A LOT MORE MONEY, I came up with this list:

• <none>

I already have practically everything I need, and quite a bit of what I want.  The items I came up with in my wishlist are just that… wishes… icing on the cake.

I guess I have a lot to be thankful for, and I am.

Tenacious Games, the producer of The Spoils CCG, is closing shop.  Patrick Meehan, founder, Creative & Art Director, and Chairman of the Board, posted last 2008.05/22 in The Spoils website forums about the difficulties in the past while.

The game got me curious a year ago because of all the positive feedback, and because Jon Finkel helped in its development.  It’s personally annoying because I’ve been wanting to try the game out since then and I’ve never really had the time to go to the play/demo sessions around the metro.  But I guess it will be much harder to the converts it made in the past while.

You can read Patrick Meehan’s post about the situation here.

[source] ICv2 - Tenacious Raises the White Flag

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I had several things in mind when I was planning on my day off. Now that my day off is over, I thought I’d recap what I managed (+) or didn’t manage (-) to do.

+ Wake-up late
- Eat some form of breakfast (particularly the Cheerios I got over the weekend)
+ Replace the toilet tissue roll holders with new tissue roll holders embedded with air fresheners (ain’t it cool?)
+ check the news (which is kinda cheating ‘coz I do it every day anyway)
+ pick a topic and check news on that (robots)
- Practice using the multi-tester.
+ Play Warcraft III
++ Win some games at Warcraft III
— Win more games in Warcraft III than lose (I think I got 1 loss net)
+ Write a post for the day.
++ Write a post that wasn’t news
— Write an opinion or review post
- Backup stuff in my computer
+ Play with Hanachi-e
+ Do some website maintenance.
++ Fix no-www support.
Yes, I switched to no-www, as opposed to my last post regarding the matter. Around two weeks ago, my host had to do some changes that automatically set me up for no-www. Given that, I’ve been constantly working on migration to no-www since then. Today, apparently they made modifications that returned thing to the way they were before. Unfortunately, I never was able to perfect either yes-www or no-www before, so it took me a while. After some trials, and some help, I managed to find hot to do no-www correctly (and basically how to reverse this easily as well).
- Watch some pending DVDs
- Read Necronomicon
+ Read A Game of Thrones
~ Eat somewhere different (I just ate at Cafe Mediterranean, not the norm, but not very unusual either)
- Clean some stuff up around the house
~ Sleep in the afternoon (I napped, but I can’t say I slept)
+ Have dinner with my SO
+ Watch the show/s of the day (in this case, it was AoTS)
+ Reflect on my life so far. This activity ended up making me feel thankful, happy, melancholic and afraid. Happy and thankful for everything I’ve gotten in my life so far. Melancholic because I know that I have to bite the bullet and accept that I can’t live forever. Afraid because I know that the end will come sooner or later, and you never really know which it will be.
+ Write about what I did for the day

[sigh] A day off goes by so quickly.

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Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) criticizes J.K. Rowling for suing a small publisher who made “The Harry Potter Lexicon”.  If you’re not familiar with the various legal disputes over Harry Potter, I suggest you read up on them.

It would’ve been really nice if the fan site link Card provided in his article worked, but since it didn’t when I tried it, check out the link above to give you a taste of what he was trying to say in that part of his piece.  I also recommend reading the comments in Slashdot to help provide a broader picture on the issue aside from the points from Card.

I agree with Card in many aspects of his piece.  I mean, Timothy Hunter anyone?  This issue, however, is not simply on Harry Potter’s “questionable originality”, it also tackles on fair-use and what would constitute as derivative work.  I do believe that the copyright holder should have the say-so over derivative work.  It is arguable, however, if a lexicon, which is research/commentary on a subject, is actually derivative work.  Perhaps excepts from the source material are, and I don’t really know if the Lexicon had any excepts.

Funny thing is, Rowling herself appears to have supported the effort when it was in it’s free-website/blog form.  It would appear that publishing contents of the site in print form for profit gave her a change of heart.

To be honest I loved the Harry Potter series.  I didn’t feel it was overly original or well written, but it struck the right chords personally, and I loved it.  Which is why I’m very very disappointed that Rowling is getting herself into things like these.

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I read this very long story/article about Lu Yang and her gaming experience with Giant Interactive’s ZT Online.  I’d rather quote article’s overview for a summary since it pretty much nails the whole piece.

“The main Southern Weekly article on ZT Online follows a gamer as she first becomes interested in the game, through her rise to power, and her eventual disillusionment with the money-sink it had become.”

The original article has apparently been removed from Southern Weekly and among the other reposts.  This article is an English translation.  Given this, it’s pretty tough to reference the original.

Regardless of it’s origin, I wanted to share this piece because I feel that it describes very well the high an MMO player gets from playing a game, and how similar this high is to gambling high or other forms of addiction.

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