And that was Halloween

Wow that exciting...

Why don't we have Halloween in Australia? Maybe it's just a stand against importing American holidays. Or that its too damn hot for costumes.

I have a cool replacement - water balloon fights with candy in the balloons. Somehow I can see injuries eventuating. Awesome.

Hey, Bikini's are a costume.

What did I end up doing for Halloween.

Well, it was raining so I didn't make it to the zoo. And I tried to watch Evil Dead 2, but got interrupted midway. Then, with a loan from a guild-member I finally got a mount for my Warcraft character. Going fast is cool. So now that goal is acheived I need to slow down the WoW usage.

*halloween*australia*water balloon*bikini*evil dead*wow*warcraft*mount*

What Would Be The Most Awesome MMORPG Ever

So, I have been playing World of Warcraft for about a month and a half now. Dealing with the "noob" and "fucking shit healer" comments I get while playing (and now the "Go play Hello Kitty Island Adventure" taunts) and learning UBER lingo like Gank, HOT, tank and sheep; I've still leveled my lowly priest up to level 35 (ding).

WoW does have lot less repetitive feeling that froob Anarchy Online had after about 3 months of playing. WoW lets you actively participate in a storyline, has raids and a broader history to it.
I think that it could benefit from a few lower level raid quests and snakes; and to that being the end of my complaints, well it must be good. (You see how much I whinge here).

Anyway, today I had the best idea for a MMORPG that would be guaranteed a hit - Pirates vs Ninjas, or Ninjas vs Pirates. I mean OMFG!!!!! It would L33TZOR UR HAX0R FTW. Ninjas would be all ninja-ed up with jutsu, pets and katana; while pirates would have cool gear, pets and cutlasses. Failing that a OnePiece or Naruto based MMORPG could serious p0wn the gamer market.

Anyway, can't blog too long, the servers might be back up soon.

The Internet Has Videos

And most of them are probably porn.

But as my first video shows that's what the internet is for. This video is semi-safe for work, in the sense of no nudity... but be warned you may be stuck with the catchy tune of a singing and dancing Warcraft Troll and his friends for a while. In the words of a friend of mine, "This video is really piss funny".

To slowly turn us away from the porn element, Ghastly from GGC has a video showing he is actually being productive while on a break from being blackmailed into drawing yayoi hentai for B-tards. Oh, the dedication it takes to create a hubjo (much more safe for work).

Enjoy the zany adventures of Japanese speaking Gaijin with video cameras with Yamato Damacy. Find the one where an ALT gets his kids to make a melodramatic high school drama with not-so subtle lesbian undertones ... the things that won't get you fired and ostracised for life in Japan.

I don't know if this is a parody or an ode to the myspace phenomenom. Or what? Maybe it's just someone's college assignment...

SPORE: Awesome game, shit biology

Don't you hate it when a great, I mean abso-lutely great, idea you had, but did not really do anything about, gets taken up by an already crazy-rich superstar in that field. I swear i came up with the idea of creature->civ "life" game that is Spore back in high school.

I found this link in Pharyngula comment to a post about boob physics - unlike boob physics, spore doesn't really have any real science behind it. If anything its supports the anti-thesis of science, Intelligent Design. Fuck! I have to boycott this game on principle alone.

My idea was totally unfeasible, because it was to be based on actual science. Which means you have to wait around about 300, 000, 000 hours (with the speed ramped up to cheetah) just before that first non-living self replicating protein forms in a proto-biotic soup. While I'm sure a small clique of maybe under 100 evo-devo scientists might appreciate the algorithms behind that, I doubt it would win as many brownie points as literally "playing god" to the universe. I mean Black and White sucked, yet it sold millions based on the promise of that alone.

Spore has no biology behind it. Biology is undoubtably the most fundamentally simplest of the three core sciences (chemistry and physics) - yet all sorts of media, and computer games the most continually manage to fuck it up big time. Just look at the reality of Spiderman (be sure to watch the directors cut). I mean gene splicing, radioactivity, and killer viruses sound cool and fancy - but it doesn't give you a liscence to just make shit up.

I think the biggest biological blunder I have seen by far (if we sort of allow absolute fantasy like Resident Evil "regenerative anti-ageing cream that just happens to turn you into a zombie" pass by) was Carrie II: The Rage, where the new carrie's telekinesis powers are explained because she shared father's with the original carrie - fair enough - but because it was a recessive trait on the Y chromosome. Hang on. Carrie was a chick, right? What is she doing with a Y chromosome, let alone two of them to allow the expression of a recessive trait?

*Sigh*

I think Snakes on a Plane probably had some of the best biology in film going for a long time.
That really says something bad about biologists' role in Hollywood.

...

anyway, back to spore. It looks good. But amazingly prone to catassing. I just started a free trial of WoW, and while it is awesome and great - it is sufficiently repetitive and tiresome to encourage breaks. And I applaud Blizzard for acheiving this without sapping the sould out of gameplay. There really needs to be legislation against making games to complex or interesting. It's just a Catch 22 of keeping people grounded in reality.

Apart from being too good, having crap biology, Spore also suffers from unfeasibility if it tries to go permanently online to share content. What steps towards n00b protection will there be? I don't want to start a new world, raise a craeture to tribe level, and then have it anhilated because a twelve year old twit who has reached UFO comes over and razes my civilization to dust. Will there be PVP limitations - that sort of impinges on the whole "playing god" pitch. I want to have that right to raze insolent n00bs. I am immature as a twelve year old, razing peons is fun.

This could be solved, by keeping the game offline - or allowing semi-private servers - but then it won't really be massively multiplayer.

Succinctly, SPORE, looks too good to be true, but lets see how it works out. But don't connect it with biology, whatever you do.

WoWed to Death

One of the things I've been greeted with since I got home is that a lot of my friends are now big WoW fans. It's not so much a geek thing, it's more that there isn't much to do out in regional Australia. And at least we get broadband coverage. And computer violence is much better than street violence (though, they still occasionally still practice that).

I'm not going anywhere near anything as beautiful as WoW until I have a job. I would get addicted way to quickly without anything else to root me down. But I have been doing research. And it does look cool. It means I can't play Anarchy Online anymore (even though its free).

But alarming is a spate of deaths related to WoW addiction and obsession. Whether its age old catass-ing, violence springing from online disputes (okay link is not WoW),or probably the most disturbing one I came across was a South Korean couple who let their baby starve to death while they went out for "or just an hour or two" to the local Internet Cafe for WoW, and instead ended up staying there over 24 hours. Say What?

And they laugh at me when I say I'm a bit wary to start playing it just yet.

(Side note: a lot of these incidents come out of Asia - I don't know if this says something about people's growing addiction to technology there, or that they more likely to be crazy urban legends)