I stood again in Middle-earth. In was in Archet, one of the small towns around Bree, and the forces of Sauron prepared to strike. I was in Lord of the Rings Online. My new character was set to start out on the long… six years long at this point which, if we were following the […]

Just about two months back it was announced that Google Reader was going to be shut down. The reasons given were declining usage and the Bizarro world excuse that killing it would lead to a better user experience. I cannot speak to the former, except to say that Google pushed a lot of people off […]

Whatever happened, we need to find out why it happened. But clearly it should not have happened. -Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) We are reaching that time of the year when the sun is shining and various members of our regular Saturday night instance group are sometimes lured outside to see the world, visit relatives, or […]

A few years back, at the height of the housing boom, we decided to move.  We listed our house at the market price for our neighborhood, and the first day on the market we got an offer for roughly 60% of what we were asking.  Somebody sensed, as we all were beginning to at that […]

Or so says the press release. My ambivalence towards the game continues however. I like the connection with EVE Online, the idea of continuing the struggle on the surface of planets, the possibilities of the combined in-game markets, and, most of all, the idea of bombing DUST players from orbit while in my spaceship just […]

I was wrong. Another subscription MMO caves in, unable to make a go of things on monthly fees alone.  Or they feel that the grass must surely be greener on the free to play side of the fence. Of course, my prediction was back when Scott Hartsman was still on board and before they put […]

Last week my focus was a huge game of Civilization V. Early in the week I started a few games on the largest map size (going with the Lakes option, so lots of land warfare) with a dozen competing civilizations and the usual complement of city states until I got a situation that looked good.  […]

There is a horribly worn out old book on the book shelf in my office.  It is a soft-bound copy of The Twentieth Century – An Almanac. I used to pick up that book and read through sections all of the time, to the point that the book looks very worn out.  There wasn’t anything […]

So far this week has not bee full of good news for Blizzard. There was the 1.08 patch for Diablo III, rolled out on US servers the day before yesterday, which was touted as bringing serious improvements to the game, including changes to the surprisingly popular auction house. Unfortunately, one side effect was the introduction […]

It was just a year ago that Syp kicked off his Newbie Blogger Initiative plan. The idea was to inflict blogging on as many newcomers as possible by getting a bunch of old cranks to give semi-useful and often contradictory advice about blogging.  And link whoring. As is clear from that, I went for a […]

It was just a year ago that Syp kicked off his Newbie Blogger Initiative plan. The idea was to inflict blogging on as many newcomers as possible by getting a bunch of old cranks to give semi-useful and often contradictory advice about blogging.  And link whoring. As is clear from that, I went for a […]

So far this week has not bee full of good news for Blizzard. There was the 1.08 patch for Diablo III, rolled out on US servers the day before yesterday, which was touted as bringing serious improvements to the game, including changes to the surprisingly popular auction house. Unfortunately, one side effect was the introduction […]

There is a horribly worn out old book on the book shelf in my office.  It is a soft-bound copy of The Twentieth Century – An Almanac. I used to pick up that book and read through sections all of the time, to the point that the book looks very worn out.  There wasn’t anything [...]

First, the bad news: EA bags Star Wars games rights Still waiting for the good news -Headline over at The Register The word has gone out that EA has acquired the rights to the Star Wars franchise when it comes to video games, something garnering about as many cheers as a wicked step-mother in a [...]

Why stop the party when it is going so well? Sure, the invite said April 19-21, but everybody is still having fun, nobody has any place better to be, and the targets keep wandering into the system, oblivious of their fate. So it looks like ganks will keep on well into the work week. All [...]

Lord of the Rings Online is in the midst of its six year anniversary celebrations. Six years ago Vanguard was sputtering along, with Brad McQuaid speaking up about all the problems as I was speculating on how they might get out of their mess. (And two of those came to pass.)  I was past level [...]

I did not spend too much time tanking this past weekend, and when I did, I was focused on the KV-4.  Thanks to it being a double crew experience weekend I managed to get all of the crew, save that one lagging loader, into their second skill/perk. On the advice of many, I went with [...]

Apps for editing and modifying pictures seem to abound in Apple’s App Store.  You can spend a long time wandering through that section. But while I find many of these apps interesting, I don’t actually use my iPad to take pictures.  To start with, the iPad is kind of bulky.  And then there is the [...]

Well, the party did not last too much longer. There was apparently some attempt at deception in declaring the Burn Jita event over before everybody went home in hopes of luring some more freighters back into the system.  But things now appear really over, with some of the key players off to Iceland and FanFest. [...]

Earlier in the month I was moaning about the Storm Legion expansion for Rift. I had not been actively avoiding the game.  But whenever I was looking for a game to play, I would get to Rift, give a little dejected moan internally, and move on to something else. I just wasn’t that into it, [...]

Dammit, I meant to pick Mullen, not Hardaway! -Heard in the test lab, circa 1994 After last week, I figured it was time to fill in the gap in my posts about consoles I have owned. Is It The Shoes? I started off in video game arcades and such, with Pong and Tank, Space Wars, [...]

My experience with WoW private servers has been pretty much limited to the Emerald Dream server, about which I have posted a few times. So I am always surprised when I run into things that indicate that not only are there more such servers out there, but there are enough that somebody would have found [...]

Okay, maybe a little less than $400K, but the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter campaign is coming down to the wire. It could happen.  In looking at the records of similar campaigns on the various sites that track them, projects can pick up as many pledges in the last two days as they did on the opening [...]

The Site A Google moment turned April into a record setting month for the blog pretty much out of the gate.  My quick coverage of April Fools at Blizzard for this year managed to get on the first page of results for a number of salient searches and… well… sent a lot of traffic this [...]

I was pretty much set.  I was working up a few different branches on various national trees.  I was rotating through the ARL-44, the Jagpanther, and the KV-4, slowly accumulating the experience necessary to advance to the next tier on each. All three of those tanks are now fully upgraded.  It is just a matter [...]