September 2005 Archives

When I leave my comments on your blog, it's not like I'm abandoning them. I'm just letting your site borrow them. I'll pick them up after school. I promise this time. We'll really go to Disneyland.

I saw a DeLorean drive past me today... my kid brain instantly thought "Oh, cool!!" and then I realized "Wait, that car is just plain UGLY!"

Also, I think it's safe to assume that DeLorean owners are sick to death of hearing Back to the Future references, right? So when someone calls them Marty McFly, do they imagine killing that person by:

a) Hitting them with their car going 88 miles per hour?
b) Electrocuting them with 1.21 'jigga'watts of electricity?
c) Telling a van full of Libyan Nationalists that "that guy" stole their plutonium?
d) All of the above.

I've been meaning to write a long and flowing post about how amazing World of Warcraft is, but... I find that I'd rather spend that time playing the game! I feel like I really should post something about it though, since it is the most incredible game that I have ever experienced. This game is from the next generation, all other games before it pale in comparison, it is THE game. A game that I couldn't imagine was even possible and now while playing it, I scarcely believe is real. I'm not joking, this isn't just Game of the Year, this is Game of All Time.

Ok, let me see if I can calm down and describe this rationally. The amount of content in this game is literally incomprehensible. The world that they’ve created is just enormous. Here, look at this map. All of this land is actually represented in this game. Now see that smallish island in the very upper left? That is the only region that I saw for the first 15+ hours I played, and there was tons of stuff to see and do there. Since then I've since spent WAY more time with the game, and I've still only seen a miniscule fraction of what is available.

I mean, think about the length of an average game... you're lucky to get 10 hours out of a platformer; a solid RPG can take up to 40 hours to beat. I've spent 108 hours - 108! - with World of Warcraft in the last month, and I've barely scratched the surface. The first character I created is only level 24 out of 60, not even half way to maxing out (and my friend Carl has said “the game starts at 60”). In addition I've created two other characters, each with their own unique race, class, professions, starting areas, etc. And the start-up time (15 or so hours) of each one of these characters has felt like an entirely new game! And even after the start-up time, the play styles of the different races/classes are drastically different. And there are 4 more professions, 5 more races, and 6 more classes that I haven't even touched yet! Like I said, the amount of content is incomprehensible.

An unending game full of fantastic content... that’s it? Nope. This baby is online like no game you’ve ever experienced. (Ok, that’s not entirely fair, seeing that this isn’t the first MMORPG to hit the market. So if you’ve played a MMO, then I’m guessing you have an idea what the experience is like. But the fact is that before WoW, I only knew one person that ever played a MMO game. We’re all skeptical, right? I mean, I was there too. Thinking that it sounds like a freaky meeting ground for people into D&D. Or, thinking, why the hell would I pay $15/month to play a game once I already bought it? I’m telling you now, once you try it, you’ll understand. If you own a Tivo, you’ll know what I mean. You try to tell people how great Tivo is, and they just don’t understand. There’s this dam in their minds that words alone just can’t breach. But you give those people a Tivo, and then just try to take it away from them a year later... no way. So it is with WoW, you’ll have to trust me, but you will be SO glad that you did).

So, revolutionarily different and indescribable, but let me try anyway. When you play the game, you share the game world with hundreds and hundreds of other players (here’s a graph of the number of active players on my server alone) . These other players, for the most part, are working on their own quests, killing their own monsters, accomplishing their own goals. However, you see these people and are completely free to interact with them. Say you see a guy getting his butt kicked by 2 or 3 monsters, you can stand there and watch, you can help the poor guy out, you can laugh and taunt him as he heads to the grave, or you can just ignore him and continue on your merry way. And here’s why that’s awesome... you become part of the game experience for that person (and likewise others provide game experiences for you). Now that was just a superficial example, the game allows much deeper levels of interaction. One of my favorites is they way players take the place of NPCs of other games. For example, you’re supposed to get some item from some dungeon, but you don’t know where to go. In a game like Zelda, you head to town and start talking to every NPC you see until you find the right one that spits out the scripted text that you are looking for. In WoW, you simply ask people for directions. I don’t know how many times I’ve been running down a path, not really knowing if I’m heading the right direction and I’m relieved to see someone coming the other way. I stop and ask him “Is this the right way to town?” or “What’s up this way?” or “Do you know where this certain monster is?” Almost every time, people will respond. A real response, not scripted unchanging text, so who knows where it’ll lead. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he knows and has an additional helpful tidbit of advice. Maybe he’s looking for it too and we’ll decide to group up and look for it together. The possibilities of that one chance encounter are virtually endless; something that could NEVER be scripted into a game.

And that’s just interaction with strangers... since I started playing, my ranting and raving has persuaded Billy and David to buy the game as well. We often form a group and work on quests together, and it is without question the best cooperative game I’ve ever played. We each play different classes (Warrior, Rogue, Warlock) which means we all have drastically different strengths and weaknesses. So we fight together, doing our own things but also supporting each other. Dave can make health potions, so he shares them with us. Billy has serious armor, so he draws the attention of the enemies and takes the abuse. I sneak around to gather intel and launch surprise attacks. This interplay between the play styles of the different races & classes create an incredibly rich cooperative experience.

Well, I could just keep going on and on. I really haven’t even begun to describe all of the awesome things in this game. And new stuff keeps popping up all the time, last night (even after 100+ hours of playing) I had my first dungeon experience and it was completely different than what I expected. Amazing.

So, you need to get on this game. I’m telling you that there should be no doubt in your mind, this is the ultimate game experience. I’ve got my copy of the trial disc and between Billy, Dave & I, we have three 10-day guest passes. I think my guest pass is already spoken for (Scott?), and I don’t yet know if Dave has a plan for his, but I do know that Billy has offered his up. So, let me know if you want to try this thing out (for free, even!) And even if you can’t get a free trial from me, you really should just buy the game. If the thought of paying the $15/month fee is causing you to hesitate, think of it this way: The game costs the standard $50 which includes the first month of play without any additional charges. So, say you only play the game for 5 hours a week for one month and then never play it again... that’s $2.50/hour for what I’m telling you is the best form of electronic entertainment that I’ve ever seen. Even if you play for only one month, I can almost guarantee that you’ll get your money’s worth out of the game. And after that month, you can judge whether it’s worth paying $15 for the next month. I bet it’ll be one of the easiest decisions you’ll ever make.

Yesterday morning I received an email from my web hosting company telling me that I’ve already used up 90% of my monthly 5GB traffic limit! I was shocked; how in the world could my mostly text website generate 4.5GB of traffic in the last 18 days!?! So, I started poking around in my logs and discovered that a song I linked to in this post has been accessed 985 times since September 1st. I’m guessing that it must have been found by some file searching site, and I unwittingly became a wholesale distributor of Lonely Rolling Star. So, I pulled the song from my site, but I’m pretty sure I’ll still hit 5GB by the end of the month... Oh well, it’s only 99 cents per 1GB over, so it’s not like it’s going to cost me a bunch.

I’ve been dieting for the last month and a half and I’ve lost 11 pounds. I started off by signing up for eDiets again ($12/mo.), but quickly realized that I don’t need the site anymore. I pretty much learned what I needed to last time, so I cancelled the subscription and I’ve been doing my own version instead... Perhaps I should call my diet plan: “Jake off the weight.” Ok, maybe not...

Anyway, I’m simply eating balanced meals and sticking to about 1500 calories a day. The trick for me is to make sure it’s easy to do... So, I've picked out food that is within my calorie range and is VERY easy to “make.” So, here’s what I eat:

Breakfast:
Piece of fruit (I usually buy bananas, apples, oranges, and nectarines)
Whole wheat English muffin
Bowl of cottage cheese (only on rare mornings when I have the time)
Coffee

Lunch:
Piece of fruit
1-2 large carrots
Low cal Subway sandwich (anything less than 300 calories, but I usually get a 6” roast beef. Regardless of type, I get no cheese, mayo, mustard, or oil but do get any of the veggies I want, pepper and vinegar; the vinegar actually does a good job of flavoring the sandwich on its own.)
Diet Pepsi

Dinner:
Piece of fruit
1-2 large carrots
300 calorie frozen dinner (mostly Healthy Choice dinners, which are quite tasty and a sufficient amount of food when supplemented with fruit and vegetables)
Diet Pepsi

So, I pretty much eat the same thing every day... However I’ve been pretty lenient this time around, so I usually eat out over the weekends and occasionally for dinner during the week. Even with these extra calories, I’m still almost hitting the target of 2 lbs/week. I also haven’t been exercising, so I’m getting off pretty easy for the amount I’m getting off!

Dave and I watched Batman Begins last night at the Bagdad Theater. I’m going to pull out the classic Jake review and say "it was just alright." I mean, it was hands down the best Batman movie, but is that really saying much? Some notes:

I've known my RSS feed has been screwed up for quite some time... but no one has ever complained so I didn't feel compelled to fix it. Well, Cry Baby Chris B. (let's call him CB-CB for short, pronounced "seeb-seeb") broke my nearly 2 year lazy streak... he complained about it today. So, I fixed it.

There were two problems, the first was the encoding... I use Word to write these posts which encodes the text in Windows-1252, but my RSS feed was reporting the encoding as iso-8859-1. So, anytime Word did something fancy with my punctuation (like quotes or apostrophes) the aggregators wouldn't know what the heck kind of character it was, so they'd plop in a square instead. Now that the feed is reporting the correct encoding, there should be no more screwed up punctuation.

The other problem was the issue of formatting... for that, I lovingly ripped off the template from this site. I hacked out the trackback and comment code, but otherwise it's a direct copy (with the correct Windows-1252 encoding, of course).

I've added the XML button back to my site (I removed it when I first set up the site, back when I had no idea what RSS was, or why I wanted it). Here's the only catch for you subscribers out there... to get the nicely formatted feed, you need to use the RSS 2.0 feed which is at http://lessthanme.com/index.xml and NOT the RSS 1.0 feed which is at http://lessthanme.com/index.rdf. I'll leave the .rdf file up for a while, but eventually I'm going to remove it, so update your aggregators!

If you had no idea what this post was about... then... well... umm.... go here and read this. Peter introduced me to aggregators back in the day, so let him introduce them to you too! (Yay, the laziness is back!)

It's raining pretty hard today and I had to walk quite a distance downtown to apply for my passport. As I was crossing the last street to enter the building, I saw a puddle of water next to the curb and was reminded of an event during my visit to New York:

The weekend before I arrived in New York, there was a large snow storm. By the time I arrived, the snow had stopped falling for a few days but the temperature had not risen. So for the majority of my week-long visit, there were piles of dirty, crusty snow on every corner. The last day or two of my visit, the temperature finally raised past freezing and the snow piles melted into a slushy mess.

On one of these days, I approached a street corner and there were two ladies nearby acting kind of frantic. There were other people around, and the two ladies were saying "Get Back!", "Back up!" to everyone. I had no idea what there problem was, but I figured they must know something I didn't, so I backed up along with the rest of the crowd. A few seconds passed, then a car rushed by us and hit a huge slushy puddle that was right off the curb. The wall of icy water that splashed up was enormous, far larger than I would have imagined, had I been aware of the impending watery doom. And I would have been entirely drenched with dirty freezing water had I not been warned...

So, thank you ladies. Had I been in your shoes, I would have probably let me stand there and get soaked. It's a good thing for the world that we aren't all sadistic bastards like me.