George Lucas is a monster....

Not in a good way. Hollywood Reporter reports that Lucas plans to rerelease all 6 Star Wars movies in 3D. This is bad on so many levels. First, I don't like the forced 3D thing at all. I saw Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D a couple years ago and at best it looked like a diorama. Then take into account that he's "testing the waters" with Phantom Menace. I hated Jar Jar in 2D, what makes you think I want him popping out at me? The reality of this is that he wants to put the movies in yet another format- so I'm willing to bet this will be the first time in over 30 years that the original theatrical release will be available. This is complete conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if Lucas tried to get us to buy this new tech version by waving the TR carrot in front of our faces.
I'm interested to hear what he has to say for himself. Certainly he's claimed that these are HIS works and he feels that he can do with them what he wants, but previously he's tried to sell us these changes under the guise of "it's what I wanted to do originally, the tech just wasn't up to speed..." The only way I'm buying that argument is if his 3D is like R2's projections of Leia, or the Rebel maps of the Death Star...

We ARE in a class war...

But the wrong side is winning. From http://www.slate.com/id/2268872/

Norton and Ariely focus on the distribution of wealth, which is even more top-heavy than the distribution of income. The richest 1 percent account for 35 percent of the nation's net worth; subtract housing, and their share rises to 43 percent. The richest 20 percent (or "top quintile") account for 85 percent; subtract housing and their share rises to 93 percent.

Absolutely stunning. If you don't take the value of property into account, the top 1% of Americans possess 43% of the wealth in this country. The article goes on to say that when presented with a pie chart showing the top 20% possessing 85% of wealth, an even distribution among the quintiles, or the top 20% possessing 35% of the nation's wealth 47% of respondents* selected option 3: the top 20% should possess 35% of the wealth. That pie chart was based on Sweden's economic distribution. Sweden. Like the very socialist Scandinavian country. Respondents' second choice? Equal distribution (with 43% choosing that chart). That means that only 10% of Americans believe that the top 20% of Americans should hold 85% of American wealth... if those 20% are equally represented in the study, this means that only HALF of those in the top quintile believe they should be there (I say that because I doubt a single mom with three kids living below the poverty line is really going to think that the top quintile should possess 85% of the wealth... I sure don't)

Noah's article is excellent for one other reason, he vividly demonstrates the cluelessness of this top 1% when he discusses the blog post of a Chicago law professor (who wrote the piece as sort of an open letter to President Obama) lamenting that he only makes $250K per year, adjusted (which other bloggers point out means he makes at least 300K but probably closer to 400K). I strongly encourage you to read Mr Noah's post and the linked blog postings. Very enlightening for anyone who has been asking why the rich would be against the repeal of the Bush tax cuts (I mean, yeah, it's obvious that no one wants to pay mroe taxes, but the point is that Chicago Law is way, way better able to afford a tax hike than I am, and I'm better able to than the family on foodstamps...)

* (the author at Slate, Tim Noah, reminds the reader that these are all AMERICANS in the survey and that the charts were not labeled as to which country/idea they represented)

Considering antidepressants?

Who hasn't? We live in a fucked up world full of stress casued by shit we can't control, while the people who make our lives a collective Hell seem to be rewarded at every opportunity (I'm looking at you, bank CEOs).

I've never believed in the magic bullet theory of pharmacology. Having done just a little research about people's experiences with SSRIs has made me think about 6 times (three times more than thinking twice!) about taking them: paranoias have cropped up, addictions are common, massive weight gain, worse depression (I recall one person saying "I was just a little sad before, now I can't even fathom getting out of bed- my doc says that's just the pills 'fighting the depression' "), suicide, and hyper-aggressive behavior. I was on Prozac for about three weeks in 1994 and my mom made me stop because she said it made me even angrier than before I'd started, and I distinctly recall getting into an actual fight with my brother. If I've never believed in the MBToP then why take them? Becasue my pediatrician thought they might help me feel better when I was kinda bummed, thinking that this world was frequently a steaming pile of shit (once a realist...) I guess it's better than his alternative solution- he was accused and convicted of molesting male patients a few years ago. I wasn't one of them. Had I been, I wouldn't be wondering how to pay for grad school.

Then I came across a link to this article via Slate today. Just wow. Now I'm wondering if a few weeks of SSRIs 16 years ago might have been enough to put me in the occasional funk I run into (not really, but it's good hyperbole). So I guess I'll stick to slamming down the epsresso to beat the blues. Plus caffeine is supposed to be at least a little good for you...

D&D 4E, Wow, and Simulacra & Simulation...

Here we go, let's crank up the crazy.
I agree- from a marketing standpoint, revamping D&D to be more like WoW is brilliant. But I don't think you even need to press 1,1,2,4,2,1,1,4 anymore. I'll bet you can hotket all of that to "Alt+F" if you want to.

I can't help but think of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation." Wargamming was the simulacrum. D&D was a simulation of that, but with different rules and ended up superceding the rules it was based on (this was back in 1974). Then AD&D simulated this new simulacrum and in turn became the model for RPGs. For a short time we had a battle between the simulacrum-cum-simulation (AD&D 3.5E) and the simulation-cum-simulacrum (WoW). Wow has seemingly won that round, with D&D* 4E attempting to usurp the throne, or at least get a piece of it by making rules and using terms that are more familiar to WoW players. 


(*s/be AD&D 4E, really, but now that Gygax is dead and can't defend his D&D rights WotC figures they can take it back to the old school)

Guest contribution: S C S on D&D 4E and WoW

Yes, he posted this in the comments to that post, but it offers enough to the conversation that it warrants its own entry:

WoW is the worst thing to happen to the MMO market. It went the extreme opposite of games like Everquest and decided that everyone should always be getting something for doing everything. The game is the essence of min/max and people who won't do a damn thing if there's no reward or if the group isn't doing X amount of DPS. It's full of noobs who need every class to have the same fucking strategy (1, 1, 2, 4, 1, 1, 2, 4). There, I just played WoW without actually playing it.

The problem is they get bored with WoW (because like any MMO it's the same thing over and over) and they come to other MMOs with a huge chip on their shoulder because they were "uber" in WoW which relates to being able to push 1, 1, 2, 4, 1, 1, 2, 4, over and over for hours at at time. Then games like DDO have this glut of people wondering why the quest givers don't have giant hovering markers over their heads or why they have to read quest text or THINK while playing.

And from the $ standpoint it's stupid not to appease the WoW people because they flock in droves to new games trying to find the "new thing." Everquest 2 is exactly the same thing, except its playerbase is full of bitter people who hate WoW.

Godamnit I miss playing Everquest.

I'm going to stop now.

D&D 4E and WoW

The Mrs had a coworker/friend come over last night. Friend plays WoW. The Mrs played occasionally until she went back to school and stopped having time, and has (since PAX) taken up D&D. This is a paraphrase of the exchange between the two:

In D&D you do this
Hm. Sounds like WoW
D&D has this
Oh, like WoW?
D&D has this other thing
Oh yeah, just like WoW
Only D&D came first. But you do this and this
Oh, that sounds like WoW. Do they have shammies?

As a D&D player since the Original Red Box (yes, initial cap on that- respect) this was an extremely irritating conversation. I get that WotC reworked the D&D rules to be more accommodating to WoW players (to the extent that a player last Saturday night didn't know what class of character she was playing and could only refer to her Psionicist as a "controller" (despite not controlling shit...)). But is this what I have to look forward to? WoWies who can't relate to a different set of rules, thereby making D&D live up to its current reputation as WoW with dice? Fuck. Me.

Holy Crap! JoCo, JoHo and SpiJo collabo?!

According to John Hodgman he will be working on a project involving Jonathan Coulton and Spike Jonze which will be aired on HBO. Epicness is about to be witnessed.
If you can get to the hangar in NYC by 3PM on the 28th, you could be part of said epicousity. Check it out:
http://www.areasofmyexpertise.com/2010/09/good-evening-my-name-is-john-hodgman/

Redhook Sausagefest

The Mrs and I went to the first Redhook Sausagefest on Saturday. We think this is their attempt at a tongue-in-cheek Octoberfest. Sausagefest is usually used negatively, and this definitely lived up to what one might expect when one hears the term.

The good:
tickets were only $5 through their online ticket vendor
We each received a souvenir (plastic) mug with the discounted ticket purchase
It didn't rain
The music was decent
The Oberto Tent. No lines. They lowered their prices. The people were kinda cool to hang out with. The new Southern BBQ Pork flavor is really good, though we ALL agreed that the very best Oberto Jerky flavor is the thin original.

The bad:
Woodinville. This is a HORRIBLE town to hold any kind of event. Parking is almost non-existent and the entire economy is based on fermentation. You'd think I would be excited about that, but with shitty parking and narrow streets I became acutely aware that everyone on the raod was either coming from or going to a drinking based event.

There were only two lines to get in: one for VIPs and one for everyone else. So if you prepaid you had to wait in the same line as the people who decided they would just show up.

Lines on the inside: Once inside there was a line for everything. Beer, soda and water were all sold at the same booth and it took 17 minutes to get to where we could buy a drink. At a brewery. At their event... I wanted a beer (becasue we drove to the damned brewery!) and the wife wanted a Dr Pepper (they only sold Coke and Sprite). Did I mention 17 minutes. Oh, but the smart ass employee bitch who knew the people pulling taps walked by to talk to her friend in line and rubbed in all of our faces (her "friend" included) that she didn't have to wait in lines becasue she was an employee. That's fucking classy Redhook! We knew instantly which of the food vendors would be worth a damn- their lines were 20 minutes long, and that is assuming that their equipment worked sufficiently to meet the demand (which wasn't the case with Uli's sausages). The most popular stand was Dante's Inferno Dogs. They looked awesome, but there was no way I was going to stand there for that long.

Prices: Now I didn't expect to be getting a screaming deal on anything, but I didn't expect to have to pay $4 for a beer. At Redhook. On their property. $2 got the wife half of an Uli's sausage, which was about four bites, total. And that was after we had to come back to their tent becuase of power problems. $2 also bought a crappy cheese plate (nothing was identified and the cheeses were bland) or a "slider" made with tough, thick cut beef, bleu cheese and "bacon jam." That was meh but I ate two because the wife decided to not risk the gluten hit to her system by eating the white bun.

Girls: Despite assurances on the website, the didn't have Sausagefest girls there. The wife was sorely disappointed because she likes the serving wenches at Octoberfest celebrations and there were none to be found. She pointed out that there was a dearth of hotness from the attendees as well. I say there were a few pieces of eye-candy, but not enough to satisfy a sweet tooth.

The Ugly:
The majority of the event took place on what was essentially a soccer field. It was muddy and wet from the rain we'd had earlier in the week. The Mrs decided to wear flip-flops and quickly determined that was a mistake becuase her feet were caked in watery mud in seconds. Women in knee-high boots (the hot kind, not fishing waders...) didn't even bother trying to go anywhere for fear of staking a heel in the muck. A few chairs may have been provided, but I got the distinct impression that we were expected to sit on the wet ground if we didn't want to stand.

Conclusion:
All in all, I want my $40 and afternoon back. That's probably the worst part- we weren't even there for an hour, but we were there longer than we wanted to be. All told, finding parking, being there and leaving took about 2 hours. How to fix it? $3 at most for beer. Throw in a free beer with the mug (actually, hand people mugs that are already full of beer!) Separate lines for non-alcoholic drinks (though have water and sodas available in the beer line, too). Something needs to be done about the space, but I don't really have any good ideas. The popular vendors had enormous lines, the less popular vendors didn't have lines- for a reason.

*$ not in M$ dictionary...

My Outlook dictionary thought "Starbucks" was spelled wrong and I had to add it to the dictionary. Really Microsoft, you've never heard of these coffee guys down the street?

Of course he's happy,,,

Here's the Yahoo headline:
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Happy Making $36,000 A Year Working For Amazon

Here's the obvious conclusion from having read the article: Dude was paid $260M+ by Microsoft for his LinkExchange business, and Zappos was bought by Amazon for $1.2B So he's not exactly LIVING on $36K a year, that's just what his salary is (though the article doesn't mention stock options, benes, perks, or retirement funding...)

So the headline could have just read:
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Happy, Making $36,000 A Year Working For Amazon
or
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Happy Making $36,000 A Year Working For Amazon
or
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Happy Making $36,000 A Year Working For Amazon

But to imply this guy is some kind of Zen master, living off of $36K a year, eschewing material possessions or the trappings of the corporate culture is misleading at best.

I LOL'd

I love Scocca's blog at slate.com. This is why-

Discussing how Tom Coburn thinks the expansion of FDA authority would be too expensive:
Coburn's concern about the deficit is one-sided—he's not asking for taxes to go up to cover the cost of the bill, which is a scary-sounding $1.4 billion, or a considerably less scary $4.67 per American citizen. Taxes are bad. He is expressing the political opinion that removing disease-ridden feces from the food supply is a responsibility that the government should not take on. This is what Tom Coburn stands for: he believes that, on top of everything else, you can actually go eat shit.

Fixing USPS

I'm tired of hearing how the United States Postal Service can't do its job. I get that they both have a lot of mail to process AND they don't have as much mail as they used to because of email and private carriers. But, there's no justification for raising the price of their service while simultaneously reducing services. So here's what I propose:

Do away with the bulk rate for "junk mail."

First it will keep a lot of this shit out of my mailbox, which means it will also keep it out of the recycling stream (because 99.999999% of it goes immediately into my recycle bin without my looking at it). That will make me happy. Qdoba for example emails me coupons that I can choose to print out if I'm going to eat there, and Big 5 Sporting Goods has their 4 page ads online. I don't see why others can't folow their lead.

This then reduces the amount of mail the postal service has to bundle (this stuff is supposed to be presorted, but once it gets to the post office it has to go through some manner of bundling with the rest of my mail). This is turn reduces the number of mail crates USPS has to keep/replace. It further reduces wear on USPS vehicles AND increases gas mileage because of the weight reduction from not having to haul the junk mail around.

If companies decide they STILL have to mail me something I'm going to throw away, USPS collects the same money from them that they would from me. Actually, USPS could charge a premium for these loosely arranged bundles of mail- they must be a pain in the ass to keep together during this process, becuase they're a pain in the ass to keep together once I get them out of my mailbox.

USPS can keep the bulk rate for catalogs and whatnot, and non-profits should still get a hefty discount. But these companies have basically been taking advantage of a pricing loophole and it's time we close it.

Corn Sugar

Be on the lookout- High Fructose Corn Syrup is getting a name change: to Corn Sugar. The Corn Refiners Association* claim that HFCS and cane sugar are nutritionally identical. I have my doubts. Cane sugar ain't great in the quantities most people consume it. But, my wife was telling me about a study in which houseflies were given access to HFCS, sugar and some kind of real food. Every fly ate only HFCS and died of malnutrition. Their brains are wired to eat the sweetest food they can find, but there's no food-value in HFCS so they died. That was actually the point of the study- to show that despite starving to death, their brain wiring was so strong that they could not not eat the HFCS, even when nutritive food sources were available.

* It's telling that they refer to their assn members as "refiners"

Ice Field Archaeology

Alright, I'm not a global climate change denier, and I don't doubt that all of the gasses we emit via transportation and industry are contributing to the change. But I do have to put my foot down when alarmists say we're "causing damage" that hasn't been seen in human history.
For example- Scandinavian ice fields have receeded so far that archaeologists are finding pre-Viking tools and hunting weapons LAYING ON THE GROUND. Which is awesome. I'm thrilled to learn about the technologies used some 1000-1500 years ago.

So chillax. Climates change. Maybe not as fast as they are now, and maybe not all at once like they are now, but it stands to reason that what we're experienceing isn't new. The only reason we're afraid of these changes on a global level is that we can communicate with any spot on the globe in seconds. When these pre-Viking artifacts were deposited, most people didn't travel more than 5 miles from their home so they only had that very small area to know about.

Steve Jobs- ninja?

Well, if you're like me and think that Apple is overpriced, overhyped, hipster tech that goes against the very ideals Jobs and Wozniack were working toward in the 80s AND you are on the Pirates side of the pirates/ninjas debate then you'll love this. According to Bloomberg News Steve Jobs was stopped in Japan while trying to board his own plane because he had ninja stars in his carry on. I'm a stickler for accuracy when avaialable and I would have demanded that the term shuriken be used, but that's me.

The point is, Jobs is NOT the pirate of Silicon Valley, he's a ninja. Which means he fails.

Guilt Machine

Tycho at Penny Arcade posted the Wiki entry for the album from Arjens Lucassen's Guilt Machine "On This Perfect Day." At least 4 tracks are avaialable through Grooveshark.com if you want to give a listen. I like it. It reminds me of Queensryche (like immediately, out of the box, this could be a Scandi followup to Operation Mindcrime). There's some Machines of Loving Grace in there, a little Rush, maybe some Pink Floyd. But no one sounds like they're pushing themself like can be heard from these other bands, though. I think they want to be "dark" but aren't as successful as any of the aforementioned predecessors. It's a great debut from what I've listened to, and I might listen to a follow up album more than once if it's a bit more of a stretch.

[edit: their song "Perfection?" reminds me of A Perfect Circle, but again, not as edgy. The singer is competent, but not very emotive. It sounds like he's singing someone else's words without trying to get into the headspace that summoned the lyrics forth.]

Why the PAX thing bothers me so much

As I've pointed out (and others on the PAX forums have pointed out) there's a disconnect between the content of the comic and what's being declared "acceptable" at PAX. The users and mods of the forums state that the booth babe policy and cosplay decency standards are being set by the community itself and they don't want to talk about it anymore. I notice that attitude a lot from people who are getting their way.

I guess my problem is that I hoped the PAX community was gonna be cool. I know, not everyone is going to like the dickwolves joke, or cardboard tube samurai, twisp and catsby, etc. But, I thought there would be more of a "live and let live" attitude than what I'm seeing from those who are active on the forums, and that disappoints me and makes me feel like these aren't really my peers. If you're worried about your kid seeing something "objectionable" then you need to figure that out. If you're worried about someone else's kid seeing something potentially objectionable then you need to get a freaking life and mind you own damned business.

PAX Prime 2010 videos

PA strips not suitable for sani-PAX

Alright, so I'm a little obsessive about this right now, but I went back to the beginning of 2008 to find ladies in Penny Arcade comics who wouldn't be allowed at PAX if the cosplay Puritans have their way. Aside from the more recent strips, I only looked at the comic to find boobs/bare skin. Keep in mind that not a lot of PA comics have women in them, and frequently when they do, the lady in question is married to one of the PA founders (so of course the wife in question is portrayed as the great lady I'm sure she is).

The point here is that even in the comic these Puritans claim to LOVE sooo much that they HAVE to go to the conference, we have busty ladies showing cleave and skin. Also, very inappropriate (read: not child friendly) content. If it's good enough for PA, it's good enough for PAX.  BTW, all strips are copied from www.penny-arcade.com and the image name indicates the date published in YYYYMMDD format.

[EDIT: Also this: http://www.sumolounge.com/sumosac-gamer.php?re=na  SUMO has been a long time advertiser on Penny Arcade and those sweater puppies only serve to reinforce the idea that the bean bags are soft and inviting]

PAX 2010 Overview (crosspost)

Here's the promised crosspost:

The embedded blogging didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped. For the record, a 17" Vaio is heavy (especially when it's in a backpack with event swag, keys, wallet, phone, PSP, dice, chargers for all of the electronics I'm carrying, etc.) So I have a lot of respect for the folks who manage to do this.

The wife went crazy and decided that we MUST get a PlayStation 2 and a PS3 so she can play all of the God of War games. I’m fine with that. We picked up an indie game called Zombie Pirates that is a lot like desktop tower defense, but with pirate ships (you may need to wiki tower defense). I loaded it Sunday afternoon at about 6:30 and I've probably put in about 12 hours with it already. It's very very addictive.
I also bought the reboot of the dungeons & dragons red box, which is now based on the current 4th edition rules, but eliminates a lot of the clutter. I don't need a lot of what I've heard about the rules for 4E. I'm fine with the old-school, basic human, elf, halfling, dwarf races that can be fighters, rogues (formerly thieves), mages and clerics.

The Mortal Kombat reboot looks awesome, too and I have video of the wife and I playing it. I’m going to post it to YouTube as soon as I get a few minutes to edit the footage. So yeah, 2010-11 is the year of the old-school reboot and multi-player (in general, if the game wasn’t an update of a classic, then they were adding multiplayer to it).

There were several variations on dance and music games, too. Microsoft’s Kinect looks like the Wii but without the controllers. They didn’t do anything too impressive at the booth, but a couple of developers had made yoga/dance based games that looked pretty cool.

Are you tired of Guitar Hero and Rock Band? Never fear, you’ll have about four other choices to do more of the same, and one company is already using 6 string guitars as controllers (I believe this will become the norm, and people may be able to actually learn these instruments by playing the games).

The table-top gaming area (specifically D&D and Magic cards) was awesome. It was almost a refuge from the noise and crowds of the main exhibition hall. Plus we met up with Maxhavic, half of the team (and store) of Wandering Havoc. We haven't seen Dan in years and it was nice to get a couple of minutes to catch up. I hadn't seen this (or heard of it) before, but players were given chits that could be redeemed for items at the game registration booth. They had T-shirts, small backpacks, string backpacks, and game-related cards that could be "purchased" with these chits. I think it's an awesome way to draw people into multiple games. That said, this area needs to expand next year to accommodate the crowds. For a brand that was all but dead a few years ago, the interest in D&D was very encouraging.

The only game I played that I was really not impressed with was Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest. This is completely attributable to how the Wii systems were set up. Players need to be a few feet from the sensor bars, but PAX pretty much squeezes people right into the screens they're playing on. This made control difficult, at best.

I'm sure there will be more as the photos and videos are gone through. I will definitely post the Mortal Kombat footage, and may have to split the LotR:War for the North demo footage into pieces.

PAX Prime, booth babes and cosplay

I'm not going to write a novel about this, but the background is that there is a vocal minority at the Penny Arcade Expo forums who are adamant that booth babes be banned, and some are even calling for costume decency standards.
Long story short, this is a gaming convention that centers around a comic that itself occasionally has female characters showing cleavage, and recently joked that miners in an in-game quest needed saving because they were raped to sleep each night by dickwolves (the hero of the story said he'd already saved the 5 he was sent to save, so meh). The morality and decency argument is invalid.

There's another argument that it degrades women. But these women aren't forced to be here- we're talking about adult women being paid to do a job, these aren't Asian sex slaves. The women are "on display" as advertising for a game and they can take action against anyone who gets "creepy." Saying these women are not free to express themselves is possibly MORE misogynistic than any "degradation" these women suffer by wearing a skintight spandex bodysuit that covers them from neck to wrist to ankle with no skin showing (and being paid to be sexy in the name of a corporation is self expression because they could just as easily NOT do it).

As for cosplayers- they're dressing like characters from comics and videogames. If there's anger at THEM then it's displaced and should be directed at the people who buy the games and comics (because the developers and artists wouldn't make characters that look like Kitana from Mortal Kombat if they thought people really really didn't want to see some DDs in a bikini). That is to say, the people complaining about cosplayers at a gaming convention really only have themselved to blame because they support the industry as much as the cosplayers do.

These folks "don't want to see boobs or butts" at these conventions. A couple have even said that tank tops would be unacceptable (by saying that no cleavage is acceptable under any circumstances). Are these the same haters that walk around talking shit about the cosplayers? Are these the 400 pound women who take the handicapped elevators becasue they're too lazy to take the escalators? (there are no stairs at the Washington State Convention Center- they're escalators) I'll tell you what- you ban cosplayers or booth babes showing some skin under any context and I will demand that we ban anyone with a BMI over 40.

[edit- I just talked with a fellow PAX goer who likes the current "rule" for booth babes which states they need to know the source material. I can get behind that for the booth babes, I guess. But compared to just having sexy women at the convention, is it less degrading to walk up to a woman and say something like, "Excuse me, but I noticed you're an attractive woman. I can't continue to ogle you until I'm certain you know the errata of the product you're advertising. If you can't answer my questions in detail, I'll succeed in embarrasing you by showing you're nothing more than an attractive woman standing in front of a video game, and are thereby in violation of this nebulous "rule" that has been sort of discussed. I will then continue to stare at you, but with derision equal to my lust. To prove your worth, I'll begin with the complier language used to build the game. How would you debug these lines of code..."]

Perhaps, folks, you need to reconsider your choice of vacation venue. I hear Disneyland is nice for much of the year... but then you might see Hannah Montana's underage cleavage, which is actually WORSE (for several reasons) than what you're complaining about at PAX.

Son of a Bitch...

I just did a sizable overview post of PAX at brain-bottle.blogspot.com and went to edit it so I could copy it here. The entire fucking thing is blocked by my office's servers as "gaming content." Well, I guess that means SOMEONE is paying attention to it... I'll do the crosspost from home tonight. There aren't any juicy asides, but I may post pics of costumed hotties here :)

[EDIT: for Steve, my loyal blogfollower (I removed the dude from the WoW elves for you ;) )  ]

PAX 10 Day 1 1517

Wow.

There are a lot of people here today, and Friday is usually a slow day for PAX. I took video of the demos for LOTR War in the North, Assassin's Creed's new multiplayer offering and Gears of War 3.

LotR:WitN looks really good. The graphics are impressive and the multiplayer is mandatory. If one of your characters dies (or the AI, if you don't have 4 players) then the quest is a fail. The game looks tough, too.

I didn't get a lot of info about Assassin's Creed, other than the multiplayer aspect. It seems to defeat the concept of the lone assassin, but this seems like the natural progression for the series.

Gears also looks to be a multiplayer, capture the flag type of game. I didn't watch that too long, I was looking for my wife.

WB Games had an interesting idea: of you want a shirt or aluminum water bottle you have to collect 5 badges. Badges are earned by demoing a game, or watching the demo video for LotR:WitN. We played Lego Universe, which is an interesting concept. It's an MMO where users can create their own content (hence universe). The first thing I thought of was the user generated world in Snow Crash. It has a very slick interface, which was designed and refined by kids according to the WB games rep who was handing out the badges.

Alright, so open note to people who attend these conferences: if you're overweight, that's not a disability on the same level as, say, someone in a wheelchair. You SHOULD feel like shit when my wife rolls up to the elevator and you're pressing the "down" button because you're too lazy to walk 20 yards to the escalator.

I would like to thank the ladies who dressed in costumes, and the ladies who dressed to impress. It's a nice offsetting of the stinky nerd guys in attendance (of which I am one).

I'm going to rest for a little while and then head back in. It's intense!

PAX 10 Day 1 0852

We have a late start here for getting to PAX. Our internet connection was ridiculously unstable last night- we would have moments of 1MB/s download and then it would shut off. As a result, the Mrs had to go in to the office this morning to send some data. It's good that the building we work in is on the same street corner as the convention center, so this morning was just like any other Friday for her.

the crowds were non-existent on the main floor. I imagine everyone is on floor 4 with the vendors and the queue for goodie bags and whatnot. The energy in there from excitement over new games, meeting new people and seeing friends from the last PAX was almost tangible.

I'm going to post more here at CC than I do at the blog for brain bottle. I obviously feel more comfortable in this space to drop some "inappropriate language" and to generally talk some shit.

The jokes about Starbucks are true, BTW. The wife wanted me to get a triple grande soy pumpkin spice latte and the goddamned thing was $5.85 AFTER the discount for the upgrade to soy milk. That's a lot of money for a coffee. My iced tea ended up being $2.42 but I can get refills from this store all day- and they start making my drink as soon as they see me, instead of when I place the order (we have some non-verbal communication going on to indicate that I'm getting my regular drink).

Hopefully I'll have a follow up post around 1100.