andr00's blog

63937356b7dab2ecfe16f13d90204038cfb2b5be

This isn't me or anyone I know, personally. But I think we know that guy in the back, or someone like him.

Testing out my playlist sharing mechanisms here
Songs I don't own that I listen to at work
1. Face To Face - Siouxsie and the Banshees
2. Peek-A-Boo - Siouxsie and the Banshees
3. Kiss Them For Me - Siouxsie and the Banshees
4. Freak Like Me (We Don't Give A Damn mix) - Richard X
5. Situation (U.S. 12" Mix) - Yaz
6. Chewing Gum (Vocal mix) - Annie
7. Insight - Kramer

What was the last game you played?

Ohohoho. It was EVE Online, which is a spiritual evolution of games like Elite, Federation, Lightspeed, Privateer, TradeWars, Freelancer, and more lately Earth & Beyond. These games are tactical economic sci-fi games with a lot of interstellar travel, trade goods, ship modifications, warfare, and made-up words.

Eve also has a lot of people playing with you. There's only one game universe, and every single player is in it, unlike games like City of Heros and World of Warcraft, where you will never meet the majority of players because only a thousand or so people can play in your server at once. Last weekend, Eve hit its record of 30,000 players playing at once. This is a lot of people to deal with, and if a large fraction (like, say, 600) of them get into the same place at the same time, the servers start to complain. Fortunately there are a lot of places to be (more than 3000 systems), so this doesn't happen too often (unless large alliances get into fleet battles, and even then it isn't common).

It has a very steep learning curve and is entirely player vs. player. That is to say, most of the time you will be killing and out-trading your fellow humans, who are much smarter and more dangerous than non-player "mobs" ever could be. You will be tricked, harassed, lied to, stolen from, trapped, and repeatedly killed until you take direct measures to counter these things.

Ship destruction in Eve is fairly serious, as your ship and equipment is lost to you, and a typically equipped Battleship can take weeks to fund. Getting your escape pod destroyed is even worse, as you then lose your cybernetic implants and possibly suffer brain damage (if your backup clone is not of sufficient grade), losing skills.

Ah yeah, skills. So, there are no experience points or player classes in Eve. There are hundreds of "skills" which allow you to use things, do things, or just do things better. You set up one skill to train and it slowly completes in real time, even if you aren't playing. Because of this, there is no massive advantage to "power gaming" style play, and people with full time jobs and social obligations can easily keep up with the 23/7 players, at least in terms of potential fighting/trading/industrial power. I'm not sure, but I think this is responsible for the large number of older players in the game. The average age of players in my eve corporation is something like 29 or 30.

I can come up with lots of meta-commentary on the game, but I have aforementioned full time job to attend to. It's fun, combat causes actual adrenaline to flow, brains are involved, that's it.

If you could get someone in your life to start a blog, who would it be and why?

This question is fraught with awful cultural baggage about blogs, so it's a little hard for me to answer simply. I think too many people have goddamn blogs. They don't do a good job of writing in them and they might as well not be there. Let us not even start with the implications of the word "blog". Some blogs are just press releases. Some are just cool link of the day-a-likes.

If the question was more like, "If you could get a blogger writer to start putting some real thought and effort into their webpage, who would it be?" I'd have all sorts of answers. First and foremost, me! I really wish I would write more often and with more focus. But as for non-me people (and I know you're out there), if you have even one original thought clinking around in your skull, I sure wish you'd write it down and upload it to some web page somewhere, because I love that stuff.

with the functionality of the system. Thus far it seems to be slightly quirky under Opera 9. For instance - this text I am entering, instead of wrapping, has started to appear above the first line I entered. Fascinating, no?
I have created a vox account thanks to an invite from Z. I have since been upgraded to the regular user level and can experiment