Apparently, there are other things to do on the Internet than play Guild Wars: Factions, it seems. Normally I have several different little things on the go at once, but to be honest, right now it's just various campaigns in Guild Wars, and my usual low-grade minor tinkering in Second Life at the moment.
For those who are interested, (and not many are), I'm currently spending my time in there seeing what I can do with these interesting and well detailed solar system planetary survey textures, with vague ideas about creating some kind of working orrery. Purely a fun thing for my own amusement, and almost certainly something that has been done before, lots and better by more motivated Second Lifers, a long time ago. I just like the handicrafts of it all, even if it is only pixels and pretend, rather than actual woodwork. I don't have a garage, and there isn't room in my flat for lathes and workbenches, so SL is an agreeable substitute I find, and involves much less sawdust!
It's a funny old world really. Everywhere I look, I see people going ballistic about Virtual Taxes, Virtual Porn, Virtual Economic Meltdown, Virtual Gambling, Virtual Rights and Virtual Freedoms and to be honest, most of all the exciting cutting edge digital frontier stuff completely passes me by. I'm a terrible journalist, I think, and should probably be right in there, on the front lines of cyberspace, and writing all sorts of lengthy dissertations about...whatever transhumanist truths there are to be had in SL. Instead, I just chat with friends and play with the pine cubes.
Mind you, it seems that it's that time of year again:
Official Linden Blog - Burning Life 2007!
In which we are advised to start getting our installation proposals in for the somewhat bizarre and anarchic Burning Life Festival that SL holds in concert with the real life Burning Man one. Always interesting, whatever else you might also think of it, and if last year was anything to go by, it'll be a kind of cage-match between 'Pretentious' and 'Surreal', with no holds barred. You can read my ramblings on last year's offerings here and here, and I'll definitely be making an effort to go and poke about this years event, with a view to making some word-shapes of various legibility here too.
Couple of interesting other stories lately that piqued even my monomaniac tendencies.
1UP.com News: Anarchy Online Live Concert Rescheduled
In which the folks at Funcom seem to discover for the first time many technical issues that the SL live music community have been struggling with for quite some time.
I actually popped in to AO last week, briefly. Logged in, did one mission, visited Omni Ent Plaza, "Yup, still empty", logged out again, although I did visit an entirely new zone on the original RubiKa worldmap - something I'd not seen since release! I've no idea when this went in, but I ran all the way down to the south coast, south of Lush Fields, to visit the new (to me) 'Coast of Peace' zone, only to find that it has no monsters, no outposts, no quests or anything, and seems to exist purely because they ran out of places for the remaining players to put player cities up - overspill housing zone, basically. Meanwhile, the enigmatic dark areas on the world map that have been off-limits since launch, (Three Craters in the north, Bay of Rome in the south, large parts of the west of the worldmap, etc) remain elusive and unfinished, still!
Naturally, all the new cities I saw in this coastal area were utterly devoid of players. I suspect there is now one city per player at this late stage. Player cities are a bad idea, mostly because no-one actually needs to live in one.
Anyway, saw an announcement about the concert in the launcher and thought about going along. I have no idea who "All-American Rejects" actually are mind, but the nostalgia kicked in and I started getting misty eyed about the early AO, and the sheer novelty of spending several hours of a night in 'Baboons', Omni 1's separate nightclub instance, doing nothing productive whatsoever, watching folks in social clothes, just dancing! I think they even had some guy doing the streaming DJ thing at it's height, all around the time early SL Cavemen were still being shown how to place one pine cub atop another, by sinister black rectangular prims.
How the tables have turned, and from the interview, it seems I didn't miss much, what with the entire server population all turning up at the venue at once, unexpectedly (duh!) and causing Technical Difficulties. True, this would happen in SL too, which is why the Big Duran Duran Concert seems to still be conspicuous by it's absence, but in SL there are a multitude of different places to go, and many do indeed stream live music into them, on a very grass-roots, indie footing.
Turns out, not being a Citizen of the US of A, I'd have literally seen nothing at all if I'd gone along anyway. Some kind of archaic Music Licensing Laws, coupled with a sinister geo-tagging system would have filtered out the concert for me and my EU brethren, leaving us all looking around suspiciously at the blank screens and going 'What! What do you see!?' a lot. A lot of fuss really for what sounds to me like they just fired up the video advert-billboards and fed it a stream of a pop video instead.
I mean really...Live anything, Online, always seems a bit of a peculiar idea to me. I can go to Youtube for a comparable experience. The least you could expect would be actual avatars involved! Anyway, they're going to try again soon, but you should only bother going if you have a Zip Code, it seems.
Moving on, and an interesting piece here:
MMORPG.com: Planetside Fan Faire Update
In which we learn that Planetside isn't dead!
What must that be like? Thousands of people thundering about outside, dressed up as Fironia Vie and Antoina Bayle and whatnot, squealing as they meet hundreds of like-minded fans all on their servers, going ape about newly announced in-game collectable cardgames and so forth, and there you are, off the hall in a very small seminar room, with the 24 other fans of your game dedicated enough (or who happened to be in the area anyway), to come to find out more. Apparently, this figure is actually up on previous years, and I'm not sure I remember reading anything about it at all from those previous Fan Faire reports.
I mock mercilessly, of course, but only in fun, and I still really like the game personally. It is the sort of thing I can't play constantly, and I'm not sure I'm quite $12.95/month enthusiastic about it, but my future plans will no doubt include a Station Access Pass at some point, and with it, comes Planetside once more.
Interesting highlights from the panel there, including a surprising amount of new things on the way for the game, showing a clear message that low numbers or not, SOE are clearly not ready to consign it to the scrapheap, by any stretch of the imagination. Things to look out for include the pimped-up Galaxy Gunship, the cloaking Phantasm mini-dropship, some kind of lightsabre, and most curious of all, a kind of 'Monster Play' concept; 'Black Ops', where you get to have a limited fling as a member of a fourth, 'green' team, who basically gets enhanced stats and is allowed to go on a rampage against all three sides at once. Sounds like a balancing nightmare to me, but looking forward to seeing what it's all about in due course. Mind you...many of the 'new' concepts described have been on the cards long enough for even me to get bored of ranting about them!
Woo...big post considering it's mostly about nothing in particular. One more then:
Kotaku: Whorecraft Starlet Kicked From WoW
In which we learn the perils of having a distinctive nose. That's not a typo up there, by the way, and if you've never encountered this rather creative marketing concept, aimed at a very select type of online sociopath, I'll leave you with the giddy anticipation of A Google Too Far. Can't buy comedy like that...