City of Heroes Issue 11

City of Heroes Issue 11 is tempting me to play the game again, at least for a little while. Not because I care about old missed badges and only a little because I want to play missions that I missed... Mostly just because I'm a sucker for time-travel stuff, even this sort of cheesy B-Movie style madness...

Tid Bits: Pattern Recognition, Jungle Disk, Podcast

I've been on a Gibson catch-up kick lately and I've made my way through to Pattern Recognition now. I'm about a fourth of the way through and enjoying it immensely. Gibson's books are interesting because there's an obvious closing of the gap between how far out/fantastical his work and how contemporary his worlds seem. I think it's an obvious mix of maturity in his writing style and the fact that the future is just catching up with him too fast... Pattern Recognition is interesting because it's almost a novel of examples from some near future marketing textbook, and isn't boring in doing so. It involves a main character with an allergy to classic trademarks [1] and revolves around what Hugh has been calling "Social Objects"... The idea of the marketing object not being a one-way-street brand item like a logo or a trademark but something intentionally designed to spark conversations and spread in the ways that we speak to each other... Plus, my copy of Pattern Recognition in this case is itself a social object for me. I found a hardcover copy in Half-Price Books in amazing condition with what appears to be Gibson's signature in it. No idea how it ended up in a Half-Price Books but I find it interesting to speculate.

I've decided that S3 via Jungle Disk is the right "set it and forget it" backup solution for me. I've also been slowly moving some of the more static elements of this website to my S3 storage as well. I doubt anyone has much noticed that media.worldmaker.net (and thus all my CSS, JS, images on most pages) now is entirely S3 served. Some times it's even faster than previously...

I finally ...

Assassins' Creed

After a few days of playing it I think I can safely say that I like Assassin's Creed... I just don't love it, and I was trying to. There are a lot of things that I like about it. The control scheme is not too bad, and I appreciate the sentiment of being a bit more forgiving and striking a bit closer to 'do what I mean, not what I press'. I like the idea of adding more of the stealth/tactical killing game play in a sandbox. I like how it looks and I like the conceit of using computer glitches as a visual aesthetic. I certainly like how the menus try to keep from breaking the immersion of the over-story. But amongst all these things I like there seem to be more that I am "putting up with" than I would like.

Perhaps the biggest problem for me is one of "interest inversion", and I noticed this early on at PAX 2 years ago. What I heard from the trailer and the sussurus of opinion didn't really appeal to me... I wasn't really intrigued until I first heard rumor of the backstory, the over-story, the Sci-Fi elements. I still find the Sci-Fi parts of the story more interesting than the assassinations. It's a bit unfortunate that assassinations to me feel like "things to do between pieces of the 'real' story".

Beyond that I've been spoiled in the immersion front by Bioshock recently. Sure Assassin's Creed attempts to immersive, but it is no Bioshock. On the sandbox front I've been spoiled by Crackdown and even to a degree Saint's Row in comparison to Assassin's Creed. I'm not sure if it's the attempted appeal to realism, or what ...

Would you scab for the evil television networks?

I was discussing the other day about the current Writer's Guild strike and how I support it, mentioning that in support I'm not working on any television or film projects, either. Not that I had any in the works in the first place, though. So the question was asked, if I was given a rather large advance to work on a project like, for example, writing for the cheap-o Office spin-off that NBC is trying to hastily put together lest we forget how much we like the Office when it becomes one of the first big sitcoms to go on hiatus due to the strike, would I take it? Sure, but I realized that as soon as that advance hit my bank account I would be a professional television writer and it would be pretty stupid of me not to join the Writer's Guild and start picketing with my fellow writers...

So, television networks, feel free to pay me a nice advance to pretend to be interested in writing for your upcoming projects that need scab writers. Also, I have a reality show project or three I'm willing to sell.

Political Tid Bit: I Supported The Libraries, At Least

I've been pretty good about avoiding political commentary lately. I haven't given up yelling about it or writing letters to the editor about it, but I've tried to keep it from poisoning the tone of my blog as much as I did last election cycle. I just have one thing to say really right now and it's that I'm disappointed that the Library initiative didn't pass. I figured it wouldn't, but I tried to stay in a bubble where I at least had hope for it. It's almost a shame that we have one of the brightest growth curves in the nation for library readership and we can't get the city together to pay for the libraries we deserve.

The End of the POP era for me? Reevaluating email clients in the wake of the Gmail IMAP rollout...

Gmail has IMAP support now. It's an amazing tool. As much as I like Gmail's AJAX web interface I prefer a good email client more. There are just things that an email client can provide that even the best ECMAScript user interface just can't match. Email clients have decades of evolutionary refinement behind them. Also, Gmail IMAP means that I now have a way to more effectively back up my 1 GB of email that I've accumulated in the years that I've now used the service as my primary web interface. Up to this point I've relied on POP downloads to keep things in sync between a Thunderbird "hard copy" primary and the Gmail secondary web interface. Now with IMAP available I've decided to retire my POP archive (slightly "cleaner" than my Gmail All Mail, but also dating to slightly prior to my Gmail account) and switch to primarily IMAP access, with some sort of simpler backup process. In light of that I decided to reevaluate my choices in Email clients and see where things stand today. It's interesting too because I have a Gmail account with 1 GB of email and over 80,000 messages in All Mail, a good percentage of which has at least 1 label (and Gmail IMAP duplicates messages in folders for each label). It's a heck of a test case for an IMAP client. I was looking into bigger "PIM" packages because I figured I wanted a good desktop calendar as well.

Outlook

Outlook is Amazing in an Exchange environment. With IMAP, not so much it seems. I had issues with Outlook freaking out on me. It apparently tried to download every single header in the account from the get go, which is fine, but ...

Friday Night Concert: The Paradigm CD Release Concert

The Paradigm CD Release Concert was just amazing in terms of musical bang per buck. There was 3 and half hours of beautiful live music from Paradigm and opening act Liberation Prophecy and a copy of the CD being released by Paradigm, titled Melodies for Uncertain Robots, all for the low, low cost of $10 at the door. My only complaints were about the venue itself, which I'll save for later.

I had heard a lot about Liberation Prophecy and I don't think the band had spent as much time in my ears prior to the concert. I was impressed by what I heard and I plan to buy their CD when I get a chance. The band has something of a "psycho-lounge" feel that I rather enjoyed. With two saxophonists, an upright bass player and a female vocalist with that classic jazz timbre, there's almost a feeling of a band that might have been seen in a classic Jazz bar... but then the lyrics are a bit bent and the music a bit more hectic and varied.

During one of their songs the drummer just a bit too enthusiastically struck a tom only to watch it tumble off its stand. He had just the briefest look of "damn" on his face, but continued to drum without it, not skipping a beat. A couple of the band members worked their way over to help reattach the drum and screw it a bit tighter this time, all the while he continued to play and eventually the band returned to the earlier themes and finished the "song". It's just the sort of impressive improvisation that can happen in a live performance that you couldn't capture in a CD.

I was introduced to Paradigm about a year ago ...