Snippets: Mortality, Architect, Code, Writing

The last few weeks have been a bit crazy and there are probably a handful of posts that I've wanted to make. They probably still deserve individual posts, but I'm going to just do it as a bunch of snippets.

• My maternal grandfather passed away a few hours before my birthday. I will miss him, and I've been meaning to write some sort of memorial thing, but the words haven't come yet and I've been preoccupied. Now both of my grandfathers have passed away, within the span of almost exactly two years. So it goes.

• I used a bit of my birthday money towards a couple of games. Perhaps the principle poor choice was to spend another month for City of Heroes/City of Villains, and I say that in a loving fashion. Certainly I've already spent more hours than I planned to within the Rogue Isles. The game is certainly as slot-machine addictive as ever, if possibly more so with even more flashy things that go ding every so often and the near elimination of my biggest arch-nemesis of all, debt, which was arguably a silly idea in the first place.

  The particular reason for the visit to Paragon City and the Rogue Isles was to play with the new Architect system. First of all, I feel that I must point out that I feel a little queasy every time that I see a press release, and unfortunately there have been several, proclaiming that the Architect system is the first of its kind, ever for an MMO. It's possible if you narrowly define MMO to include just the Diku-derived graphical MMOs that have been a steady progression from the EverQuest template, that it might be considered the first. But as someone whom ...