Last October, video game players from all over the world came together to raise money for Extra Life, a 24-hour gaming marathon to support the cause of pediatric cancer research and treatment. Overall, we raised an astonishing $120,000 dollars for the Texas Children's Hospital. Well, it's that time of year again, and we intend to blow our previous total out of the water -- and for that, we need your help.

What is Extra Life?

Extra Life is a 24-hour charity gaming marathon that aims to raise money to fight pediatric cancer. Extra Life is working in partnership with Texas Children’s Hospital and all funds are earmarked for the Texas Children’s Cancer Center.


When does it take place, and is there a certain location where Extra Life will be happening?

This year's event will take place on Saturday, October 17 beginning at 8:00 am and ending at the same time Sunday morning. While there aren't any large scale gatherings planned by the Extra Life organizers, Team Limit Break Radio, which is the group I'm a part of, will be holding a live fundraiser in the Timbuktu Cafe internet and LAN arcade at the Great Lakes Crossing Mall in Auburn Hills, MI. This will be open to the public between 10:00 am and 9:00 pm; there are a lot of activities planned, along with a streaming audio webcast of the whole event. Come check us out if you're in the neighborhood! After the mall closes, fundraisers will be locked into Timbuktu until the marathon ends Sunday morning.


How does it work?

A whole lot like a "walk-athon", only instead of being sponsored to walk a certain number of miles on the specified day, I have committed myself to playing video games for the entire twenty-four hours of the event.





Visit my donation page! There, you can donate any amount that you wish via a secure, encrypted connection. This money will go directly to Texas Children's Hospital, and can be spent immediately in the fight against cancer. Also, if I personally manage to raise $5,000, I will be donating my hair to Locks of Love.

https://waystogive.texaschildrens.org/netcommunity/ashcraft


Times are tough right now. I can only donate $5 or $10. Is that okay?

That's not okay -- that's great! Times are hard, and five dollars is a whole lot better than no dollars. If a lot of people donate a few dollars, it adds up, so give what you can!


Is there any other way that I can support Extra Life?

Yes! If you donate -- and perhaps especially if you aren't able to do so -- please spread the message by forwarding this to your friends and family, or posting a link to it on your blog or social networking site. We need the word to spread as far and wide as possible to ensure Extra Life's success!

You can also become a fundraiser yourself by signing up at the Extra Life website. You can raise money on your own behalf, join an existing fundraising team, or start your own team. Then, on October 17 you can join video gamers all over the world in the gaming marathon.





Where can I find out more information about Extra Life, Texas Children's Hospital, and Team Limit Break Radio? Links, please!

My donation page – donate now!

Extra Life Home Page

Team Limit Break Radio

Texas Children’s Hospital

Sign up to be a fundraiser!

Timbuktu Internet Café


THANK YOU!

Today out of four runs, we:

Got Jerik floor 55
Got Jerik floor 60 and kicked Khimaira's ass for Goli hands (MINE)
Kicked Cerb's ass even though he spammed GoH for the last 10% of health and got Askar head (Jerik)
Kicked Adamantoise's ass for Denali legs (super guest member Musashie)

We really needed a run like today. 0 death + everyone having fun = happy white mage.

Marquisdesade has left the group, pretty much to nobody's surprise. He says he is moving to his wife's Nyzul group. I wish them luck. I wanted to replace him with someone who was at least as high in floors as Jerik; we're all sick of backtracking. Honestly, at this point I want to get Jerik to 100, farm all the gear everyone wants, and move on to other events. I do not want to spend the rest of my life doing Nyzul Isle. I asked Azarelle, who has floor 100 and is a kickass RDM (also DRG, WAR, and PLD) and she agreed almost before I hit enter. So -- yay. Hopefully the transition will go smoothly.

I became an aunt last week. Which is relevant to gaming because... um... there were those little evil mutant babies in Parasite Eve 2 that would EAT YOUR FACE if you didn't shoot them really really quickly, preferably with a shotgun. I really hated those evil babies.

Anyway, news is here and pictures are here. A warning notice to humanity is here.

I logged on immediately after the maintenance ended, and rushed out to the Dunes without even stopping to change to /thf. There was one other person there, but he quickly got bored and left. Roughly one hour after I started camping him:

Happy birthday, meue_unicorn! Just for you, today, my icon is not wearing pants! <3

I finished The Last Remnant over the weekend. My thoughts:

Visually, this game is impressive. The world is enormous and colorful, which is a nice change after the recent trend of Serious Games™ all having nearly identical dull brown color palettes (bloom effect optional). The characters wear clothing that actual people might not mind being caught dead in. The animations look realistic, the monsters are big and scary... basically all the things you expect out of Square Enix, graphics-wise. On the downside, it is clear that they pushed the XBox 360 hardware to its limits, resulting in occasional lag, glitches such as invisible characters, and slow-loading textures.

The story is a large scale political drama reminiscent of Final Fantasy XIV, but this time the developers didn't neglect character development. All of the main characters had fully fleshed personalities; it was easy to care about their struggle against The Conqueror. There were a couple cheesy plot twists, and if you are paying attention the huge reveal at the end of the game should be anything but a surprise, but overall it was a satisfying, if hardly groundbreaking, storyline.

You either love the battle system, or you hate it. Either way, it's going to take some getting used to. Rather than micromanaging a single party of plucky adventurers, you are in control of a small army. Each group within your army, called a union, can be made up of up to five individuals, and you can field up to five unions at once, although with a total maximum of only eighteen individual fighters ("units"). You can recruit highly talented leaders from a guild, and fill in the remaining slots in your party with less-skilled grunts from the Athlum army. Various battle formations allow you to strengthen your attack, defense, magic attack, and other stats depending on which ones you select. The sheer number of options can be really daunting at first. Once actually in battle, your job as the "general" is to give orders to your various unions, then sit back and watch how those orders play out. Instead of telling individual units to attack, cure, etc., you must give one command to each union. These can be as vague as "Give it everything you've got!" (use your strongest attacks) or "Help the others!" (cure another union who needs it). If you give one union an instruction to use physical attacks, it doesn't matter how many healers are in that group; they won't cure themselves or others. And with various commands available or unavailable seemingly at random, it can sometimes be frustrating to get your army to behave exactly how you want it to. Also, with even normal field battles against monsters being army to army, fights can get long. Expect boss battles near the end of the game to take upwards of an hour.

Side quests and other diversions are plentiful. Quest givers normally hang out in pubs, and each town has at least one pub. The rewards are rarely particularly impressive, though in the beginning when money is scarce quests can make you some decent cash. Some quests must be completed before specific points in the storyline, so it is best to complete them as soon as they become available to you. There are also guild tasks. Unlike quests, which must be flagged by their respective quest givers, guild tasks are always available. They usually have simple objectives along the lines of "Kill 15 spiders". Once you've completed a task, just visit the guild for a reward.

The downloadable content is all free to my knowledge, and consists of a series of extremely difficult optional boss battles. If you're planning on attempting them, it is probably best to download them at the end of the game when you're ready to challenge them, as several of these can impede the spawning of lower level rare monsters needed for guild tasks.

Overall, I enjoyed it. With a unique battle system, challenging boss fights, memorable characters, a solid story, and literally hundreds of side quests and monster hunts, The Last Remnant is a great inaugural game for Square Enix on the 360.

I just went back and friends-locked all of my Ridley posts. I'm not happy about it, because I pride myself on keeping an open journal, but recent circumstances have forced my hand.

For the record, several months ago Ridley said some things to me and behaved in ways that made me very angry. I had it out with him in April when we met at the Deathsquad DL Disneyworld trip, and he apologized to me. Some of what had happened was due to a misunderstanding, some of it was due to him shooting his mouth off, some of it was intended to be humor that fell flat. The bottom line is that, after Disney, Ridley and I have been cool. He left Nyzul after getting to 100, but still comes to assault. The problems I was complaining about no longer exist, and haven't for months. No anger, no residual bitchiness, argument over.

The reason this is apparently still relevant at all is because there are several people in my former dynamis LS who don't like Ridley for their own reasons. They enjoy giving him a hard time, talking trash inside of dynamis, mpking him in Campaign and Besieged, stuff like that. Silly high-school antics. That is not my problem. Rid's a grownup and is perfectly capable of fighting his own battles. Where this does become my problem is when people start linking and quoting my rant posts from six months ago on Deathsquad's guildportal site, and, for all I know, other FFXI community forums as well.

I do not appreciate my posts being used as weapons in someone else's little flame-fest. I doubly don't appreciate having my old shit being stirred in DSDL's official forums. I left Deathsquad on very good terms, and only because after getting 5/5 of Cleric's I'm still nowhere near achieving level 75 in a second job. If and when I actually manage to level Puppetmaster past 65, I'll probably rejoin the shell. The thought of being the cause of extra drama for DSDL makes me ill, whether it was intentional or not.

Hence, f-locking. I don't believe in revising history so I won't delete anything, but I'm taking the posts out of the reach of people who like to cause drama and hurt but are too cowardly to use their own words to do so.

I apologize for any grief my angry venting has caused.

Mom needed chips for her airship fight, so we headed out to farm them. In the first tower, there was a BST but he was fighting diremites on the first floor, so we fell down the hole to the first basement. We started fighting a lizard.





Thing is, before the misstell I was going to offer to focus on diremites and leave him the lizards. After the misstell... he was pretty much gonna have to fight me for every single one of those scaly bastards. But apparently he was embarrassed by the MT or had to go write an emo poem or something, because he left and logged out.

Mom got her two chips. I didn't, but I can solo those guys later. Besides, I won't be at CoP this week on account of Distant Worlds.

Ok, I'm pretty sure this one isn't my video card's fault. I mean, there's artifacts, and then there's this. It went away when I zoned into my mog house, though some of my menus still have screwed-up icons and other weirdness.

( Seriously...WTF? )

For the first time since eating Maxis, EA Games has been able to develop a Sims franchise game completely on their own. How did they do? Here are my thoughts:

The first thing that pretty much everyone does in a Sims game is create a Sim. This, to me, turned out to be one of the most disappointing aspects of TS3. The Sims have been created to be much more cartoonish than in previous games, with overly large bobble-like heads and round faces. Through the various slider tools it is possible to make a less pudding-faced avatar for yourself, but be prepared to spend a great deal of time doing so. There are also very few outfits and hairstyles included with the base game, and many of them are... well... seriously ugly. On the positive side, Create-a-Sim has lots of options. You can assign up to three different outfits for each clothing type (casual, formalwear, pajamas, etc.) and customize each with its own hairstyle, shoes, and accessories such as earrings, gloves, or glasses. Any hairstyle can be dyed literally any color imaginable; you can have a Sim with purple hair, black roots, green highlights, and pink tips if you want. You can also choose your Sim's voice and pitch.

Personality points are gone, having been replaced by selectable traits. Each Sim can have up to five personality traits, which range from kleptomania to absentmindedness, from lazy to neat. While some are mutually exclusive -- you can't have a sim who is both family oriented and a hater of children, for example -- most traits do overlap and allow you to give your Sims fairly unique personalities. My test Sim was given the Friendly, Hopelessly Romantic, Over-Emotional, Good Sense of Humor, and Evil traits. She tended to watch romantic movies, over which she would cry, then go make friends with the neighbors by keeping them entertained with her repertoire of funny stories and celebrity impersonations. Afterwards, she would kick over the same neighbor's trash on the way home and laugh evilly as they sobbed.

Memories have also been replaced by "moodlets". These are short-term conditions which have an impact on your Sim's overall mood. Your Sim can simultaneously be happy because she is outside in a beautiful park, sad because she lost her job, having fun from playing chess, and nauseous due to morning sickness. Each of these has its own timer and positive or negative point value, which added up will determine how happy or upset that Sim is overall. It's a good system, and pretty much ensures that your Sim will never just sit around sobbing over having been burgled a year and a half ago.

On to building and decorating. Build Mode is pretty much Build Mode. You get a bunch of stupid sparkles when you make walls now; other than that not a whole lot has changed. Perhaps the biggest improvement is that you can shrink or enlarge rooms by click-dragging the walls, which saves a lot of time if you realize that the room you made isn't as big as you thought it would be. There are a ton more landscaping options, and the trees are shrubs are genuinely beautiful.

Buy mode is improved over previous Sims games. Not so much in the categorization, which is still strange (how is a birthday cake an Outdoor Fun activity? Shouldn't this be under Kitchen Miscellaneous?), but in actual object placement. Small objects like a box of tissues, a candle, and a magazine only take up a quarter of a tile, so you can have a realistically cluttered desk. Speaking of tissue boxes, there are lots of sundries like that: toilet paper hangers, towel racks, spice racks, utensil jars... all that stuff that every home has but didn't show up until late into the Sims 2 expansion cycle. Oh, and did I mention that you can place furniture and objects diagonally now, and center things on half-squares? This is unvarnished awesome.

Speaking of awesome, I'd be remiss if I didn't spend a few minutes gushing over Create-A-Style. EA is proud of this feature, and justifiably so. By using this tool, you can copy any texture in the game onto pretty much any object or outfit, creating -- DA DA DA DUNNNNNN! -- matching furniture. Better yet, you can copy individual colors in the same way, taking accent colors from your couch and adding them to the lampshades. Gone are the days with a perfectly lovely coffee table goes unused because its wood grain doesn't match any other piece of furniture in the game. Unfortunately, this infinite customization ability seems to have made EA lazy as far as the number of objects, outfits, and hairstyles that came with TS3. There are fewer unique meshes (meaning, not recolors but individual items) than were included in the base game of The Sims 2. And it seems as though this was a deliberate omission to get customers to pay further money to EA in the form of microtransactions in the Sims 3 Store. Make your own judgment as to whether it's worth it; me, I'm voting with my credit card and refuse to spend a cent on content that should have been included with my game.

Gameplay itself has changed quite a bit from prior games in the series. EA's Rod Humble has a background in MMORPGs, and it shows. The gameplay is extremely "quest oriented", with "Opportunities" popping up at random intervals, along with the ability to collect items such as insects, seeds for gardening, and rocks. Fulfilling your Sim's wishes and completing various tasks that are required to advance their careers will likewise keep you busy. Jobs and various other buildings are "rabbit holes", meaning that you don't get to watch your Sim as they perform whatever activity takes place in that location. On the one hand, this is nice because watching your Sim putter around at work or buy groceries isn't exactly riveting stuff. On the other, it means that you spend an inordinate amount of time staring at the outside of buildings, which is equally boring at the very least.

However, falling in the Utterly Fabulous category and deserving of a mention: there are autonomously gay Sims, and there ain't no such thing as a civil union. Marriage is MARRIAGE and everybody can do it. Good job, EA.

One of the most touted features of TS3 was the open neighborhood. Other than the aforementioned "rabbit holes", your Sims can go anywhere and do anything. If you want them to meet a neighbor, rather than waste time hanging out in public areas hoping they'll happen by, you can walk over and ring their doorbell. All Sims age and die at the same rate as well; time flows for everyone, including service NPCs such as maids or repairmen. Sims who are not in the family being controlled will live their lives as they see fit, taking jobs, falling in love, having children, and even moving out of the neighborhood altogether. Yes, this includes Sim families that you have made. You can globally set the level of free will for all of the Sims in your neighborhood, but I believe that this deals with regular day-to-day meeting of needs. If you want to stop non-controlled Sims from making major life changing decisions without you, you're pretty much SOL; there is a toggle for "Story Progression", but it is utterly borked and the goggles do nothing.

Right. Borked stuff. There's a lot of it. Story Progression aside, the big one is genetics. I miss the TS2 genetics. You will, too. Part of the new Create-a-Sim system for TS3 allows you to make Sims in a rainbow of colors. That's not a euphemism for diversity, I'm talking about people with blue skin and orange eyes. Which is cool. The part that's not cool is that EA apparently decided that the new system was too complicated for any kind of dominant/recessive alleles. All hair and eye colors are equally as likely to show up in future generations. Sims with different skin tones will only have blended children if they happen to both be on the same skin-tone slider bar. If they aren't, all children will either be born one color or the other. All twins seem to be born the same gender; not necessarily identical, but nobody I know of has reported an instance of M/F twins. Worst of all, dyed hair becomes genetic. For example, say you have a Sim who was born with brown hair. At some point in her life, you make her blond with red streaks. If you get her pregnant, the children may be born with red-streaked blond hair. Oh, and while this is more of a "feature" than a bug, be aware that a pregnant Sim's diet will influence the gender of the baby. Eating food made with apples will produce boy children, and eating food made with watermelons will produce girls. I hate this and wish it were random.

The other bugs are pretty Sims-standard. The game is crash prone, so save often. Babies can be "kidnapped" if a neighbor decides to go home while he is holding the child; if this happens, the cheat code "resetsim Firstname Lastname" will get your baby back. Traits have been known to disappear from the GUI. Outdoor weddings may result in at least one spectator getting stuck, throwing rice forever. This is all stuff that should have been ironed out in beta, but a Sims game just isn't a Sims game if it isn't buggy as hell at release.

Custom content and modding is going to be very different for TS3. Modders have reported that the game code is encrypted specifically to make it difficult for the game to be modded. This isn't stopping them, but it does pretty much mean that you have to choose one modder and only use their stuff or suffer conflicts and game breakage. This, more than anything else, has me crying. My Sims 2 game runs some 175 hacks from a multitude of sources, and the variety of new features that came with them dramatically prolonged my interest in the game. Right now, I'm sticking with Pescado's Awesome Mod, which fixes Story Progression among other things. We'll see what if any furniture and custom items are produced.

Bottom Line: TS3 is an enjoyable game. I'm enjoying it. It's not OMG TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR LOLLOLLOL, but what is? The good points are very good, but the bugginess, lower modification capability, and outright greed displayed by the Sims 3 Store do impede my enjoyment. It's also, as community members have been saying, more of a game than the toy that TS2 was, and once you have beaten a game there isn't a whole lot left to do with it. I don't know if I'll still be playing by the time the first expansion comes out.

Last week's Nyzul started out as a train wreck. One of our LS members disconnected mid-run (it turned out that he lost cable for six hours -- yay). We would have tried to keep going but it was a single lamp floor, and he hadn't touched it when he lost connection. We couldn't win the floor without every member activating it, so all we could do was kill a couple NMs that were on that floor and exit. I called a GM, not expecting much. I got a lot of "I'm sorry" and "I realize how frustrating that can be", etc. At least he didn't give me any "Hail and well met, White Mage Droewyn from San d'Oria" crap while he was telling me we'd just wasted a tag. meue_unicorn offered to replace the missing member, so we did a bit of job shifting and went back into the fray.

Run #2 was flawless. It was my tokens, and I opted to farm floor 100. We had two spec single floors, and one same-time lamps floor. There was a spec multi Chariots floor that had everyone cringing, but it turned out to only be two chariots very close to the rune. At the end of floor 99, we still had nearly 20 minutes left so we decided to kill Simurgh for the chance of Trotters Boots before we went up. The floor 100 boss was Khimaira, and after a full rest we totally flattened it. I think I did two hastes and a regen 3 over the course of the entire battle. It died right after we got the ten minute warning and BAM! Goliard Chapeau. Meue passed, Serkand had gotten the last drop so was ineligible to lot for this one, and nobody else cared; that baby was MINE ALL MINE. The ??? boots turned out to be garbage, but who cares when we actually got some gear for once? There were many jokes about the GMs flipping the "easy win" switch as an apology for us getting screwed out of our first tag.

The third run was our last, due to Meue and at least one other person being on their last tag. I forget who paid for the run, but it was another 96-100 hat farming expedition. This run wasn't as perfect as the first -- we had a spec multi with five frogs that wasted a lot of time -- but we made it to the top with somewhere between five and ten minutes left on the clock. This time the boss was Hydra. It wasn't quite as weak as Khim had been, but we dispatched it in fairly short order. In addition to the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects two pieces of gear to drop in back-to-back runs... but that's exactly what happened. Yawnswithpower got his Askar Zucchetto, and everyone left Nyzul pretty happy.

****************

Limbus, on the other hand, hasn't been going so well lately. We've shed a lot of members (not for any drama-related reasons; they've just quit showing up) and have had to low-man a lot of things. In addition, the people who do show up are coming very late -- almost a half hour for some people. This makes those of us who are normally on time cranky. We've instituted a bonus point for people who are at the soap at the scheduled time, but what we really need is new members. We had to change Wednesday's planned Omega run into a temenos farming run due to lack of warm bodies, which caused a lot of grumbling. I did manage to get the Benedict Silk I needed to match my Yarn, so the next time I head over to Jeuno I'll be sporting Healer's Mitts +1.

****************

We were missing a person for CoP night. The LS leader wanted to call it off in favor of a Soboro run, but we argued him out of it. The fight was 5-3 against the Mithran Trackers. We went in with PLD DRG RDM WHM BLM SMN, and after two trial runs managed to take them out pretty handily. Props to Xenos for getting off three Judgement Bolts. I remember my fight against these ladies. We had no SMN, no sleeper... it was a lot of death and kiting. Sleepga + Astral Flow is clearly the way to roll. We'll try and catch the other person up sometime this week, so we can all do the snoll fight together on Thursday.

****************

( Time for some screenshots! )

It seems that a copy of Sims 3 has already been leaked to the internets and piratey-type people are happily downloading/playing it as I type this.

And it contains SecuROM.*

There is some speculation that the leaked copy may be a beta or even full version of the game dating from before EA's decision not to use third party DRM. We don't know, and we obviously won't know until the game hits store shelves in two weeks, unless EA makes a statement before then (not too likely).

Now, I pre-ordered a copy of TS3 on the strength of EA's promise to stick to serial-number-based copy protection. I wasn't going to; I was going to wait until I saw the first reviews like a sensible person, but the promise of the shiny proved too great and I caved. I don't really want to cancel my pre-order now on a maybe, but I'll be watching my favorite Sims sites very closely on June 2. If SecuROM exists on the retail copies, it'll be all over the community and I can mail the unopened box back to Amazon easily enough. And send a letter to EA that includes pictures of the box I'm returning and a copy of the invoice, along with a detailed explanation of exactly how hard they fail.

But... I do have hope, you know? I mean, as bad as the explosion over Spore was, surely the EA execs have more than the two combined brain cells required to realize that including the exact same DRM and then lying about it will cause a giant firestorm of gamer rage that will be visible to the naked eye from space... right? I mean... nobody's that stupid and still able to feed themselves, much less run a large corporation, right? Right?

...

On second thought, don't answer that. If you need me I'll be over here in my fantasy world where everyone can has logic and bills get paid and stuff.





*easily circumvented via the included cracked .exe file, natch. For the billionth time, DRM. Doesn't. Freaking. Work..

So I have this new kitten. We also have some baby robins and geese in our yard. There are pictures at the links.

And this is totally on topic because... well... um... because there are chickens in Zelda and they're kind of like geese and they have kittens in Chrono Trigger! Yeah! So there.

With The Sims 3 no more than a month away, I've been obsessively reading news sites. This has led to looking over some old TS2 sites that I used to frequent, which in turn has led to me finding The Asylum Challenge and deciding to give it a go.

The very long list of rules is at the link, but I'll sum up for the tl;dr crowd:

1 house containing 8 sims, only one of which is controllable in any way by the player. There must be no more than: 1 toilet, 1 bathtub or shower, 1 sink, 5 beds, and seating for 6 (only one item of which can be nappable). Also an accessible stove. The goal is to achieve your 1 controllable sim's Lifetime Want in as few days as possible, while keeping the rest of the inmates alive and as happy as possible. There's a complicated scoring system, too.

One of the rules is "no hacks", which I'm following the spirit but not the letter of. There's no way I'm getting rid of my bug fixing mods, and some of my hacks do cool things without making gameplay any easier. So, other than the bug fixes, here is what I am keeping in my game for this Challenge:

Autonomous Casual Romance - Sims will autonomously perform romantic actions on other Sims, with all the inherent consequences. These are supposed to be unsupervised crazy people, after all...

Age Duration Hack - A lot of people who wind up with job-related LTWs can only win this challenge by using anti-aging cheats. This hack extends the life span of the adult stage and correspondingly reduces the elder stage. Same thing, different method.

Fitness 4 All - This won't affect the challenge in any way; all this hack does is make townies get fat/thin based on their actions when they visit a home or community lot.

No Humble - One of the challenge rules is that the inmates don't get computer access. I definitely don't need Rod Humble dropping one off on my doorstep. This hack prevents him from showing up at all.

No Telepathy - Another one that won't really affect the challenge, only other sims in the neighborhood. Basically, it prevents Sims from telepathically knowing that something has happened to one of their family members without actually seeing it or being told about it.

No Xylophone Pee - Eliminates that stupid xylophone noise that kid Sims make when they use the toilet. Because it's stupid.

Romance Mod - I debated before leaving this one in, because crazy sims *should* exhibit irrational behavior. However, the 7 unplayable sims are going to be miserable enough without constant jealousy fits. This hack basically tweaks the jealousy rules, lifting them considerably for romance sims, and slightly for sims who aren't in an actual relationship.

Same Sex Marriage Mod - I don't expect to use this during the course of the challenge, but all of my Sims neighborhoods allow equal opportunity marriage. So there.

Alien Pregnancy For Females - This is such a rare event that it's not fair that only half the available abductees get to bring home a little green baby as a souvenir. I doubt this will come into play (especially given that I *did* take out my Increased Odds for Alien Abduction hack), but it's there just in case.

Quiet Pregnancy - Gets rid of the "lullaby" sound effect when someone gets knocked up. You won't know it's happened until someone races to the toilet.

Risky WooHoo - Because no birth control is 100% effective. Adds a small chance of pregnancy to all WooHoo interactions.

Teen Savage Hack - Allows werewolves to savage teenagers, and teen werewolves to savage anyone. Who ever heard of a werewolf who didn't attack teenagers? Not that I think this will come into play for this challenge.

The Fight Club - This hack keeps score during fight animations, so that the Sim who looks to be winning the fight during the animations actually winds up as the winner. Also adds body skill as a modifier.

Triplets & Quads Random - Adds a random chance of triplets or quads when a sim gives birth.

Wolf Watchers - You know how a sim will be in bed, ASLEEP, when a werewolf wanders on the property and suddenly the sim gains/loses aspiration points for "seeing" the wolf? Yeah, this fixes that. Sims actually have to SEE the wolf in order to "see" it.

Yellow Pee - Makes pee yellow instead of blue. Because I want to know what exactly that puddle is made of.

Preg For All Genders - Anyone can get anyone else pregnant. I love this hack... it means my gay sims can have actual biological children instead of being forced to adopt deformed mutants.

Reduced Chance Pregnancy - Cuts the chance of Try For Baby (plus Risky WooHoo) in half. While I'm not going to have anyone Try For Baby, I did set my Risky WooHoo percentages with this in mind, so it needs to stay in.




And now for the rule changes. I am cancelling the "no babies" rule and adding the following to the scoring:

For each child born: -20 points
For each skill learned by the child (learning to walk, potty training, learning to talk, learning to study, etc.): +5 points
For the child growing up well: +5 points
For the child growing up badly -5 points
Aspiration points and skill points will be scored the same as the adults.

Note: The ONLY things that can be bought for a baby are one toy and a potty, which must go in the same room as the adult toilet (the potty, not the toy). No beds, changing tables, etc.


The baby rules can, of course, only come into play if one or more of the inmates dies.

I've been playing FFIII on my DS during lunch at work lately, and it occurred to me that handheld is pretty much the perfect format for classic RPGs. So I decided to start collecting the GBA and DS versions that I don't already own. (The Boy: "And this makes it how many times you've paid for the same game now?" Me: "...shut up.") And what better place to start at than the beginning?

I found a copy of Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls on eBay that had a current bid of $1.50. Though the seller listed the item quality as "acceptable", the pictures and description indicated that the original packaging and manual were included. The game cartridge was even in the original plastic baggie. It did mention that -- oh noes -- one corner of the cardboard box was a little crumpled, but overall it appeared to be in fantastic shape. So I bid $20, and wound up winning it for $10. Go me! And the seller was located in Imlay City -- about an hour's drive from me -- so I figured I'd get it in no time.

A week passed. No game. Sent the seller a "hey, where's my stuff" email, and got a note back the following day apologizing and explaining that she'd been on vacation. Some kind of communication letting me know that shipment was going to be delayed would have been nice, but whatever.

I received my package the following day. When I opened it, there was the original game box as promised. I noticed a perfumey smell, kind of like strawberries. It was nice, and I wondered if the seller burned incense a lot at home.

Inside the box was the instruction manual, and the little plastic baggie with the game inside. The manual was in perfect condition. The game baggie... squished. There was some kind of liquid in the bag with the cartridge. I sniffed it cautiously. OMGSTRAWBERRY. I pulled the cartridge out of the bag. It was coated in the stuff, which appeared to be some kind of perfume oil. The oil had soaked into the label and discolored it, and had definitely gotten inside the slot where the contacts are.

I cleaned it up as best as I could with tissues, then The Boy swabbed the innards with rubbing alcohol to clean the contacts. The game works, with no apparent problems. Oil is a lot less of a problem than water would be, I guess. I'm not going to demand my money back or anything, but I'm definitely Not Amused. Plus it took 3-4 hand washings to get that shit* off my hands, and I had a headache for the rest of the day from the odor.

Maybe when I start collecting the other FF games I'll just go for MIB from Amazon. The extra expense may very well be worth not having to deal with getting a goo-covered game cartridge.





*please let it not be Motion Lotion, please let it not be Motion Lotion, please let it not be Motion Lotion...

On Friday, I got together with a couple friends and tried an experiment we'd been talking about for a while: Under Observation with me as PUP. The first thought was that I'd be helping kite, but that didn't seem like it would work; automatons don't do anything unless they're engaged with a mob, and the deploy/release/run away/activate/deploy method seemed fraught with danger. There weren't a whole lot of descriptions of Puppetmasters taking on this BC that I could find, but what I did read suggested that having Caprice straight-up tank one of the Compound Eyes was the way to go.

I knew I wanted the Valoredge frame, but after looking at my options it seemed like the Soulsoother head was the best choice with its 3 added water and light slots. I loaded Caprice up with as much Def and Magic Def as I could, the Flashbulb, Stoneskin, Blink-When-HP-low, and Regen attachments, and Optic Fiber. I also had two stacks of Automaton Oil +1 (it's good to have a mother who levels Alchemy).

The first run was a disaster, mainly because I left my brain in my other pants. Not only did my deploy macro have a typo in it, but I forgot to RR myself as well. Ay ken plays reel gud, ay swears. But after that first try, things worked out great. Rather than have me and Caprice on our own mob, we decided to have me assist the NIN while the RDM gravity and sleep kited the other two. I stayed at the blob's back as much as I could, so was able to avoid most of the Paralyze. Caprice was basically taking no damage from the spells, and I never needed to use an oil to heal her. I'd gone /DNC, so was able to keep the NIN and myself in good health while the RDM was kiting.

By the end of the afternoon, we'd pretty much gotten our routine down, and were finishing the BC in 5-7 minutes. Sadly, the drops were nothing particularly great. The best item of the afternoon was a 60k Phalanx scroll. I was hoping for an Utsu:Ni; I need it for my NIN sub but don't particularly feel like paying for it. But since the three of us are talking about doing UO runs regularly until we all run out of seals, I'll have plenty more chances.

Maybe next time I'll try Sharpshot, since Caprice isn't tanking. As long as she doesn't steal hate, it could make the runs go even faster.

I wanted to post these before I left for Florida, but I just didn't have time.

( Moar FFXI Easter Eggs! )

And, of course, the original Moogle Egg pictures are here.



...I really need to sit down and make some more icons.

I have this theory that the price of gil on RMT sites is going to spike because of the security thingamajig, perhaps permanently. To test this, I'm going to start periodically checking several of the big gilseller sites, and recording what they are charging for 1 million gil on the Unicorn server. I'm using the top five results on a google search for "ffxi gil" to determine which sites to track, plus brogame.com, which is a site that advertizes like crazy via random /tells from free trial characters. I hate them so very, very much. Anyway! The data as of today:

4/8/09 - Began tracking. Security token went on sale this week.

IGE $37.99
gil-ffxi $32.17
ffxigilvip $31.99
ffxi.igxe $34.61
ff-xi $36.74
brogame $33.19

Average Price $34.45

The second round of the egg competition seems to have ended; although there are no announcements up, all of the voting threads are now locked.

Carbuncle beat Hakutaku

Elvaan beat the Lycopodium

The Nomad Moogle beat the Dragoon

Aw'Zdei beat the Fortune Egg

The Other Lycopodium Egg beat Souleater

Kweh! beat Orc and Moogle

Altana pantsed the Galkan Subligar (sorry, couldn't resist)

and... The Tonberry Kinq beat me.

Other than my own obvious disappointment, I'm generally happy with the results. The joke entries that were doing so well in the first round got knocked out in the second, which pleases me to no end. I really didn't want to see something as goofy and slapdash as the Souleater egg win out over real artistry because "it made me lol...lol". I am sad to see Orc and Moogle lose; I thought it was utterly incredible given the technique used to dye the egg. I think that egg suffered from the same problem mine did: that a single picture really isn't enough to properly display that level of detail.

( Fortunately, now that I don't have to be all Sooper Seekrit anymore, I have lots of pics. )

So that's it for me. I'll be voting for the Lycopodium Egg now... I think that one is AMAZING and deserves to win!

Hello everyone I wanted to share news with you regarding our copy protection plans for The Sims 3.

We’ll have more information for you as we get closer to launch about everything we’ll have to offer on TheSims3.com and The Sims 3 Store, but we have heard your requests over the past months and here is our plan for The Sims 3.

The game will have disc-based copy protection – there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed.

We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future.

We’re really excited to bring you the game for the PC and Mac starting June 2, 2009. The extra time we’ve taken to polish the game has resulted in an even better game experience for you to enjoy and we can’t wait for you to see for yourself!

Thanks for your passion and your loyalty.
Rod Humble



Ok, so I'm not going to declare that EA can be taught just yet -- I'm definitely waiting until what the DRM situation looks like after the game hits store shelves -- but this is looking like a pretty good sign.

I might be buying this after all.

Allakhazam posted the entries to the Easter egg contest today. The artistry on some of these submissions is amazing! I can't say which one is mine, but I think I have a reasonable chance of winning. Maybe. I can't wait for the judging to start!

Thursday night I helped Mom and the social LS with CoP... 4-2? It was the Ouryu fight. This wound up being a really messy battle, mainly because the LS leader wanted to do Sacrarium immediately after Ouryu and insisted that everyone save their 2-hrs for Professor Mariselle. Why, I don't know, since the Prof was never all that tough. At any rate there was a lot of death, sleeping, raising, kiting, and more sleeping, until we ran out of what should have been a more than ample number of mistmelts, he was still at 50% health, and there were only five minutes left in the BC. At that point I said "We can has 2hr?" and the LS leader agreed; the SMN and BLM went into overdrive, and we had dragon kebabs about twenty seconds later.

We'd only farmed one coral crest key so as not to get too much fomor hate that we'd have to clear before the Sacrarium run. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that the people who had agreed to come help out with Sacrarium didn't show so we only had the six members from the Ouryu fight. This party consisted of WHM (me), DRG (LS leader), BLM, RDM, SMN, and ... um... I want to say PLD. The only people who didn't need the fight were myself and the DRG, so he told me to go help with the fight and he camped the door. What a mess. The SMN and BLM were without 2-hrs, and so was I because I'd tried to do a COR reset on them and failed before the run. If we'd had even one solid DD we would have been fine, but they just couldn't damage the thing fast enough and we mages were constantly scraping the bottom of our MP pools. I tend to overpack meds for mission fights, probably as a holdover from my own CoP days, and I completely burned through all the yag drinks and hi-eths +3 I had brought with me. I think we fought the stupid thing for nearly a half hour before the mages finally ran out of mp items and we wiped. By this time it was going on 2 am and we were pretty much all falling asleep, so we farmed another key and decided to try again next week. Hopefully we'll get more helpers to show up this time.*

On Friday, I got my PUP up to level 41. Later that evening I helped some friends with the ToAU Gessho fight, and afterwards they helped me kill the NM for my AF1. Yay Turbo Animator!

Saturday morning we needed a filler person to help with Nyzul because of someone's family event. I wish LS members would tell their relations to have the decency not to get married on Saturdays; it completely screws with the whole group. We had decided in advance that this would be a gear farming run so we wouldn't have to worry about catching the missing member up on floors. I shouted for a DD and got one. We had back to back Cerberus fights, won both, and saw our very first Nyzul gear drop as an LS. Sadly, the Goliard Saio wound up going to the filler guy, who lotted nine hundred or a billion or something. Fair's fair; we did tell him he could free-lot gear if it dropped, but it's really sad that nobody from our shell got to keep our first boss loot. The other two runs failed due to time loss on spec multi. I hate hate hate hate hate psychflayers. And we always wind up getting five of the bastards. Next week will also be a gear farming run, as a different LS member will be on vacation. I already have a temp lined up, so we should be good to go.

Later that afternoon, I was getting ready for a Temenos farming run in Limbus when I got a tell from someone I knew asking me if I needed Storms of Fate. I allowed as I did, and asked when they were planning the run. "now lol" was the response. "But I have Lim... fuck it I'm skipping! OMW" I replied quickly. What a fun fight. The BLMs were on top of stunning, everyone managed to stand where they were supposed to, and the fight mostly went like clockwork. There was a bit of craziness at the end when hate was bouncing everywhere, and he gigaflared while turning, and a bunch of people who should have been safe died, including me. But the remaining people unloaded on him, and we got the win very quickly after that.

On Sunday, I stalked a Promy-Mea party up to the fourth floor and got my key item for Shadows of the Departed. I read in the wiki that a pup/war can solo all the memory receptacles with the soulsoother frame, so I'm going to give that a try for the other two areas. I'll also be able to get my map for Promy-Holla finally, which makes me unbelievably happy. I hate not having the map to an area.

Sunday afternoon we had a ToAU 42 planned. That's the mission against the BLU who throws gears at you before turning into a soulflayer. For once, everyone who said they were going to come actually did, so I got to form the party based on what would be useful. Of course nobody had a tank job leveled, but after dealing with two years of tank-free assault missions, I'm very comfortable with the concept of SAM tanking. Dual SAM tanks = even better. So our party consisted of WHM SAM SAM RDM THF BLU, and the plan was for the RDM to sleep the BLU, and each of the DDs to solo a gear. The first time we tried it, it was a chaotic nightmare. Unclaimed gears ganged up on one of the SAMs and then took down Naja; I think we were actually fighting for maybe ten seconds before we got booted from the battlefield. So we decided for the first set of gears, the BLU would use his aoe flash move (I'm far too lazy to look up the name), which would hopefully buy enough time for everyone to claim a gear, and for the second set of gears the THF would 2-hr and let everyone peel the gears off her that way. It worked... okay, I guess. Honestly, I could have wished for another WHM instead of the RDM; Naja was very squishy and useless as npcs go, and needed a dedicated healer. I was doing what I could, typing cure spells while keeping Naja targeted, but it wasn't as fast as macro casting would have been. The first room was the worst, and 5/6 of us were weakened when the BLU finally gave up and ran off. We really needed that rest period! The second room was much easier, but there were still some deaths. We had less than 10 minutes remaining when we finally made it to the soulflayer fight. That went smoothly, right up until a badly timed -ga took out most of our party. The RDM wound up kiting the 'flayer around the room while Naja followed him around and hit him; that knocked off the remaining ten percent of health and we got the win.

And that was pretty much my weekend.





* The LS leader seems to be under the impression that we can get Sacrarium and Promy-V done in one night. That's ... a fascinating worldview, and just as valid as many competing concepts of reality I'm sure, and I'd be interested in subscribing to his newsletter. But seriously? This group? If everyone was actually ready to go at 8 pm like they're supposed to be and not 9:30 as usually happens, we might be able to do all of Promy-V in one night. Definitely not anything else, though. And I wouldn't actually lay money on finishing more than 2-3 floors, to be perfectly honest.

I bought a copy of Street Fighter IV for $10 last night (rewards certificates ftw!). It's fun, and nostalgic, and seeing Chun Li's "Ha ha ha ha! Yatta!" just plastered this big old goofy grin on my face. Good times, no question. The problem is that the 360 controller really rather sucks for this kind of game. I like to abuse the the hard kicks and punches, and after about an hour and a half of playing, I just couldn't make my fingers mash fast enough anymore. And even when I was fresh I was having trouble perfecting the combos and special moves with the analog stick. That's when I had this blinding epiphany and remembered the Tankstick that's lovingly stored in its place of honor under the coffee table in the TV room. What could possibly be better than playing SFIV using real arcade controls? Well, besides neural implants, I mean.

So this morning I skipped happily to my computer and went straight to the X-Arcade main site, where I found this:

( Squashing third-party peripheral development makes the baby gamer Jesus cry. )

That would appear to be that, except that there were a few links to sites that had managed workarounds. X-Arcade presented them in a "This is very naughty, but if you would like to see them, remember that this is very naughty and you didn't hear it from us" sort of way. The first link was dead, and the second involved buying, disassembling, and soldering a 360 controller to the tankstick, which looks expensive and scares the crap out of me. But the third link looks promising:

( How to Connect an X-Arcade Controller to your Xbox 360 )

The problem? The cheapest I could find this little dohickey was $85. That's a lot of zorkmids, and I frankly would have a hard time justifying the expense. Guess I'll just have to work harder at turning the analog stick into my bitch. I can always re-map the buttons when I play so I don't have to use the triggers as often, too...

But sad gamer is still sad.

On Thursday nights, my social shell does missions for the members who need them. Lately, we've been working on CoP, and last night was Mammet Night. You know, like Manwich Night only with less beefy and tomatoey goodness and more -aga death.

The main problem with forming LS parties, at least in our shell, is that we don't always get the best job balance for the task at hand. It's a lot better than it used to be, when three quarters of the group were main white mage, but it's still not great. And we do have occasional issues with people only showing up to the events they need. We wound up with an adequate but hardly exciting party consisting of pld, nin, blm, whm, rdm, drg.

Now, I normally don't work on Fridays, so late mission parties are usually fine. But this week, I swapped my day off to Monday so I could recover from my inconsiderate brother's Sunday evening wedding reception, and I really needed to be in bed at something resembling a reasonable hour. Last week the party ran until almost 3 am, and there would be no way in hell I could function on that little sleep. Fortunately, Altana was with us; when it was time to farm giant scales we found them on the first two wyverns we fought. The rest of the trip to Monarch Linn was fairly uneventful, and we found ourselves ready for the fight around 10-ish.

We cobbled together a basic strategy -- pld sight aggro everything, nin and drg each voke one off the pld. The pld and nin would each kite a mob, I would keep them cured, and the drg would drag the last mob back to the portal for them to fight. It was a good plan, except that the drg, rdm, and blm couldn't kill the first one fast enough. Eventually I'd wind up with hate, and once I got hate we were pretty much toast as I'd have to keep curing myself and the other two. After two tries, we were talking about giving up and coming back the following week with different jobs. The pld and drg had 37 nin, and both mages had whm at least at 37, so we were thinking of trying the 3 nin / 3 whm strat on the wiki.

Then the pld mentioned that he'd read a pld could kite two mammets. I'll admit that I wasn't really optimistic, but we were already there. We agreed to try it, but I pointed out that this would be my last run, win or lose, because it was already 11 pm.

And hey -- it worked. There were a few scary moments when I got hate from the kited mobs and nearly died, but the pld kept voking and I managed to keep the two of us alive. The rest of the party took out the first mammet with little trouble, and things got a lot easier for me once they grabbed the second. By the time we got to the last one, it wasn't even a challenge; we all just piled on and squished it.

So... yay. Congrats to Patrika, Slayersc, and Yunaa. Diabolos is already scheduled for next Thursday, assuming everyone gets the easy NM fights done on their own between now and then.

Muled
Bought yellow liquids
Bought ethers
Gathered in Tavnazia
Farmed giant scales
Ran to BC
Did three dry runs to nail down strategy
Rested for Real Thing
Mom dc'd
Mom could not log back in
Mom gave up trying after 30 min of not being able to log back in
Teleport-Altep'ed
Going to bed

Score: LS 0 Mammets 0 PlayOnline 1

The other day, someone posted the following advice to new players on a community site forum: Home point = Max EXP loss. Don't ever home point if you die in the game past level 5, unless you are in a hurry to get back to a party, can't find a raise in 1 hour, or in a really bad spot with mobs everywhere that will kill you.

Given that I'm an admin on that particular community site, I didn't feel free to tear him into quivering shreds. Setting a good example for the users by not flaming, and all that. I did respond with some heat, but nowhere near the amount of pwnage I wanted to heap. But hey -- that's what private blogs are for.

Mean White Mage Rule #37: Only rude, selfish asshats (who, by definition are drooling morons unable to do simple grade-school math) make an entire party wait on his raise.
Corollary to MWMR #37: Anyone level 50 or under, whether naturally or via level cap/sync, who refuses a Raise because they want R2 or R3 instead deserves to be left naked in Tahrongi Canyon, tied to a cactus, with a sign reading "Yagudo Do It With Dhalmels" hanging around his neck.

I am just a little bit passionate on this issue. You wanna know why Dunes parties suck so badly? Because people die occasionally, and the party comes to a screeching halt for twenty minutes while the other party members are forced to shout, check their social linkshells, and chat up random anonymous players to find someone willing to drop whatever they're doing and come raise his sorry ass¹. Then there's another five minutes of weakness on top of that. Never mind that the maximum experience point loss a Dunes-level character will take is 460 (I'm assuming you'll move elsewhere after 20) points², which is, what? Three mobs? Five if you're chaining toughs? Remember that even with a raise you still lose 230 exp, which means your party has to kill one incredibly tough and one tough in order to make up the difference in exp loss. If you have your homepoint set either in Selbina or in your hometown near the outpost warp NPC, there is no reason why you shouldn't be back with your party and ready for action within five minutes. Dunes parties average about 4k exp per hour, for me anyway. That means it will take roughly seven minutes (4000 exp / 60 min = 66.667 exp per min, 460 / 66.667 = 6.900) to recover from a death and homepoint. Meanwhile, instead of your party members folding laundry and doing their taxes away from their keyboards while their characters glare at your lifeless corpse, they're gaining experience points too. This means far less downtime, which means more exp per hour. More exp per hour means more productive parties, and more productive parties mean happier players. Happier players take their mood out of the game into real life, where they are happier and more productive students or workers. More productive students and workers produce more and better goods and services, which improves the economy and ends the global recession, leading to a golden age of world peace and free internets and cookies raining from the sky. Or it would, if those rude, selfish asshats didn't keep insisting on holding up everyone for two mobs' worth of exp loss. Hello, dumbass! You are losing more exp in downtime than you would if you just ate the Altana-damned homepoint! Use the maths, Luke! Bastards.

With Fields of Valor, this kind of behavior becomes even more inexcusable. For a paltry 10 tabs, you can buy yourself a two-hour Reraise effect. There is no reason why parties should not take advantage of free RR, if you're leveling in a zone that has a FoV manual.

By the way, although this is mostly a low-to-mid level problem, it can apply to high level parties as well, even merit parties should events go tits up and your healer manage to die without reraise up. A good merit party gets 20k an hour. Say you die and homepoint at 75; a 4.4k experience loss seems nasty but it can be made up in a mere thirteen minutes (20000 exp / 60 min = 333.333 exp per min, 4400 / 333.333 = 13.200). Now, my merit parties tend to be a little closer to 10k than 20k; twenty-six minutes (13 x 2, duh) to recover from a homepoint is a bit harsher, but it would take at least that long to drag one of my friends out to the bird camp or whereever and get me up and unweakened. Again, homepointing is at least as efficient as having to find outside help to raise, even at 75. Of course, if you actually face a situation in a merit party where you have to either homepoint or find someone to get you up, your party has other issues.

Oh, and the R1/R2/R3 thing? If. You. Are. Under. Level. 51. There. Is. No. Difference. In. Exp. Regained. None. Raises 2 and 3 will actually increase the amount of hp and mp you have while weakened over R1, but that's the only difference. For serious. If you are in a level capped zone or in a party using level sync, you lose exp based on the level you're capped/synced at, not your actual level. It doesn't matter if you're level 75, if you die in a level 13 synced dunes party, you will lose a maximum of 300 exp if you homepoint, not 4.4k. And R2 and R3 will return 150 exp back, just like R1. Because at that level, they are exactly the same.

So, in conclusion: If a raise is immediately available, take it. It would be silly not to. Use reraise when available, and Fields of Valor makes it available in lots of places. If you are offered a Raise 1 and are either below level 51 naturally or were somehow capped below 51, take it. R2 and R3 will do nothing for you in that situation. And if no raises are available, suck it up and do what needs to be done to get the party back on its feet and killing stuff as soon as possible. It is in your best interest to do so, and your party will love you for it.

Here endeth the lesson. And the rant.





¹ Assuming no powerleveler. Obviously, if there is someone who can raise you on hand, take it.
² And since everyone over level five is almost certainly using some form of exp+ ring, you'll regain exp even faster than this, but for simplicity I'll stick to the base numbers. I'm not even going to try to get into Moghancement: Experience. If you're interested, this effect means you lose 5% less xp when you die than without it.


ETA: fixed an incorrectly apostrophed possessive. I'm so ashamed. ; ;

Yeah, so I decided to jump on the "Aretha's Hat" bandwagon. Frankly, I can't think of anyone better suited to wear it.

It's been a while since my monitor caught the Pink Death (pink ghosting, pink snow, and pink rolling lines), and it's only been getting worse over the last several months. And given that I've got a nice fat tax refund burning a hole in my bank account, I think it's more than time to give the old girl a decent burial. So I headed over to Best Buy.

Yeah, I know. I normally like to buy hardware from Tiger Direct, but LCD screens are fragile enough that I didn't want to trust one to UPS (or worse: Fed-Ex. I've had way too many packages chucked carelessly in the flowerbed to trust them with anything delicate). I also wanted to buy some extended warranty coverage, considering that the old monitor started up with the ghosting pretty much right as the manufacturer's warranty expired.

I examined their selection, made my choice (Samsung T240 -- on sale), and discovered that they were out of stock. Another local store did have it, and I drove out there quick like a bunny and snagged their last one.

It had a dead pixel. Just one, and pixels are really tiny these days, but once I noticed it it drew my eye. Besides, if I'm spending $400 on something, it should be perfect, right? I packed it up and took it back.

It turned out that the reason that particular model was on sale was because they were discontinuing it, and the one I'd bought earlier that day was the last one to be found in southeastern Michigan. I spent another several minutes re-examining the monitors, and decided to go with the upgrade model (Samsung T240HD). It had the same basic features as the discontinued model, as well as being an HDTV in its own right. It was more expensive than the other one, but seeing as how I was paying for this with gummint money anyway, why not?

I examined the screen carefully when I got it home, and everything looked fine... until I spotted a flicker of motion at the lower right corner of the screen. The picture was rolling. It was very subtle, and only in that lower right corner, but it was there.

It's not the DVI cable; I switched that one out. Besides, the rolling was still there when I hooked up my DVD player via component cables. I moved my speakers. I turned off my subwoofer, and then every other piece of electronic equipment on the desk. Nothing seemed to affect it in any way.

The way I see it, Samsung has one more chance with me. I'm going to exchange monitor #2 for the same model this evening, and before I leave the store I'm going to have the customer service people open the box and demonstrate that it works to my satisfaction. If it does, yay. If not, I'll take the closest comparable non-Samsung monitor instead. I believe that would be an LG.

ETA: Monitor #3 - dead pixel. DAMN IT. Clearly, the moral of this story is "do not buy Samsung monitors". I'm sure the Geek Squad people will be most pleased to see me -- again -- tomorrow.

I wrote Samsung a letter of complaint.

I really hated giving up regular assaults in favor of Nyzul Isle. We were only two missions away from the coveted Captain rank... but even when everyone showed up we were only a five-adventurer team, and First Lieutenant missions are hard. We needed a solid six people. We did have a couple Captain friends who were willing to help us out, but both of them lived on the west coast, and we're a Saturday morning group. At any rate, one of our members was being eaten by college and had quit showing up to runs. Not that I begrudged him his education, but some kind of formal goodbye or even "fuck you" might have been nice.

So after a lot of internal struggle, I bit the bullet and converted the group to a Nyzul static. We recruited a couple people and started moving up the floors. We all swore that we'd get those last two assault missions done someday, but "someday" felt a whole lot like "never".

Then one of our members said she had to leave the static. It turned out that when we'd recruited her originally, her own assault static had just broken due to a real life tragedy: one of their group members was diagnosed with cancer and was leaving FFXI while he underwent chemo. And, now that he was doing better, he had come back to the game and wanted to get the band back together.

So she left us, and we got someone else to fill her place. But she and I kept talking, and I learned that their group was really close to Captain as well. I suggested that we might combine our teams for a week or two and clean up the First Lieutenant missions together. They wound up finishing the ones they needed on their own, but several of their members agreed to help us out with ours. With many apologies for the inconvenience, I told the new Nyzul people they had the weekend off, and we set up a joint assault run.

( Insert Boss Battle Music )

Many, many thanks to Meue's new assault shell for the help. I could kick myself, but I didn't write down their names. I know Posis from DM and ZM16, and Volatilegecko from dynamis, but not the other two. At any rate, they are all awesome and they should know it.

{Config}ulations on Captain rank to Jayden and Yawnswithpower! Jay and Yawns are the only two people to be with me all the way from the birth of AndBattery almost -- yikes! -- two years ago and I'm thrilled that we were able to finish out Assault together. 50/50 assaults and 55/100 floors on Nyzul and counting... not bad for a little Saturday morning linkshell.

As for me, I'm *mumble*notcaptainyet*mumble*. See, I was only on ToAU 22, and you have to beat the Aht Urhgan missions to be eligible for Captain. So I've been pounding through them as fast as my schedule has allowed, shouting in Whitegate and whining at friends to get party members. I'm currently on ToAU 35 "Legacy of the Lost", and I'm hoping to have that one on my belt by Friday. Maybe I'll even be ready for Alexander before next week. Which, even though pretty much everyone I know has gone twenty or thirty losses to a single win on, I will beat on the very first try. Yeah. It's totally gonna happen. Yup yup yup.

Why are you laughing?

Why did nobody ever forcibly sit me down and make me play Katamari Damacy before now? I've been missing out for years and years!

I recently downloaded one of those torrents that contains eighty gajillion NES and SNES roms. There are actually more roms than games that were officially released for either system, and my goal is to slowly play through them and decide what would be worth buying for the Virtual Console on my Wii. I am selecting which games to play more-or-less at random, by spinning my mouse wheel and double-clicking the file that it lands on. Once played, either to the end of the game or until I start entertaining happy thoughts of sweet, sweet suicide, the file goes into one of two folders; "Still Fun" and "OMG Please Drive to New Mexico and Deposit in the Same Landfill as All Those Copies of ET Kthx". And while I'm playing through every NES game ever made anyway, I figured I might as well review them for posterity. Aren't you lucky?

( Double Dare, Where's Waldo, and Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego )

Dear Electronic Arts,

I wanted to let you know that I've been looking forward to the upcoming release of The Sims 3 so much ever since I found out it was in development. The screenshots and movies I've seen look amazing, I'm thrilled with the concept of applying textures to any piece of furniture or clothing (creating, dare I say it, matching furniture in the base game..!), and just thinking about a Sims neighborhood where time flows for all characters and npcs at the same time makes me do a little dance in my seat. I even have faith in your ability to finally create townies that don't look like they've spent their lives drinking runoff from the nearby nuclear waste dump. There's just one little thing interfering with my fangirlish squeeing, and I think you know what it is.

DRM.

SecuROM is, to be blunt, a non-starter for me. It's invasive, creates security holes that can leave a system open to attack, and has been widely reported to cause hardware and software failures, including disabling CD/DVD drives and anti-virus software. It leaves itself behind even after the software it's attached to is removed and, virus-like, can be extremely difficult to eradicate once installed. Then there's the simple and undeniable fact that it doesn't work. Spore was hacked and available via bittorrent before it even hit store shelves in some areas, where it was eagerly snapped up by people who didn't want their computers infected by malware. Let me restate this for emphasis: The hacked, pirated version of this software is generally considered to be less likely to contain harmful trojans than the official release. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

You're undoubtedly also considering using the same system of activation and limited installs as you did in Spore. Three or even five total installs, especially when any change in the computer's hardware is incremented as a seperate installation, is another non-starter. Not only do I actively upgrade my computer on a semi-regular basis as I can afford to, but... well... let's face it: games in the Sims franchise have historically been a little less than stable. Reinstalling the software in order to correct something in the game that suddenly went foom is a standard troubleshooting procedure, and I have no desire to purchase a game that will turn itself into an expensive coaster in a few short months of normal use. It would help if the installation count could be deincremented if the game is uninstalled (and not incremented at all just because I decide to add some extra RAM to my computer!), but given that it didn't seem to stop Spore from winning the Metallica award for the most copies illegally downloaded solely out of spite, this whole activation thing seems to just be another unnecessary punishment inflicted on the paying consumer.

I want to buy your product, EA. I really do. I've been happily nattering on about all of Sims 3's features to my long-suffering partners for months, and I really want to experience them for myself firsthand, but I won't do anything to compromise my system's integrity. And I'm quite frankly sick of being treated like a criminal when I've always supported you by buying your games. So I have to draw this line in the sand. If TS3 has any version of SecuROM on it, or an activation / limited installs system that does not allow for deactivation when the game is uninstalled, I won't be buying it. I'll miss playing TS3 something awful, but if you respect your customers so little that you have to cripple the games we buy and the computers we run them on, you don't deserve my money. And there are always other games out there.

I hate writing intros.  They always seem so pretentious and unnatural.

I decided to create a second LJ so I'd have a place where I can exclusively blog about gaming in general and FFXI in particular.  My normal LJ has a lot of non-gaming friends reading it, and I found myself constantly trying to explain simple gaming terms and concepts so that the non-gamers could follow along.  In some cases, this really helped me to get my ideas straight in my head and write better blog posts.  In others, I really just wanted to bitch about being mpk'd by the bst with the gimped /nin sj (I mean, wtf?).

Hence, this journal.  It will sometimes contain jargon that I may or may not explain.  I'm assuming that anyone who's actually interested in reading a gaming blog will get most of what I'm saying, whether they play FFXI or not.  I might post in character occasionally.  I'll probably rant a lot, since my usual inspiration to blog comes because something, somewhere, pissed me off.  I get bored with "Leveled pup, then did some fishing -- go me!" type posts really quickly.  I also intend to take forum posts and essays that I've already written and posted elsewhere and copy them here, so I'll have them all in one place.

That's about it, really.  Thank you for reading, and I'll see you in Vana'diel.