Blackmoor Vituperative

Since we moved to Richmond, Susan and I don’t get down to the Chesapeake Library for Fantasmo Cult Cinema like we used to, but we did get to attend the all-night schlock-a-thon this past weekend. The high point of the evening was, I think, the peculiar musical The Apple. I considered myself something of an expert on bad movies, yet I had never heard of this film. You owe it to yourself to see this if you get the chance. It’s not every day that one sees General Zod singing disco in an airport.

By the way, the site I linked to above, The Unknown Movies, has reviews for quite a few lesser-known films, and not all of them are bad. It’s worth checking out.

Sheryl Crow and Laurie David were on Bill Maher’s show this evening, publicizing a tour they are doing to promote awareness of “global warming”. You know, I don’t mind that they believe that planetary temperature shifts are a real, human-caused phenomenon. What I do mind is that they call it a “fact”, based on the experts they choose to believe, and completely discount the experts who disagree [1] [2] and the people who choose to believe to those experts. It’s a theory, not a fact, and claiming it’s a “fact” is just an attempt to prevent informed discourse.

(This is a compilation of my impressions of Star Wars Galaxies. It repeats parts from some of my previous blog posts, hopefully in a more coherent form.)

I am willing to give a lot of leeway to a game if it allows me to play in the Star Wars universe, but Star Wars Galaxies has so many problems it’s nearly unplayable.

• The graphics are extremely dated, like something from the mid-1990s. Compared to beautifully rendered games like Guild Wars… it’s just no comparison.
• The radar (sometimes called the compass) featured by nearly all games (other than World Of Warcraft, which has a minimap but no radar), is unavailable until one reaches roughly 10th level. That is simply absurd.
• The controls for the game make the most basic tasks — targeting an opponent and then attacking them — an exercise in frustration. Essentially, it’s impossible to simply select a target and attack them, as you can in every other game I have ever played. Guild Wars, again, is the high water mark here.
• The Player-vs-Player mechanics are utterly borked. There is no separation between areas that are “safe” and areas that aren’t — there are no safe areas. If PVP is enabled, it is enabled everywhere. There is also no separation or discouragement for players of wildly different level attacking each other, meaning that anyone who enables PVP is instantly killed unless they are at least 70th-80th level.
• The game only permits you to have two characters per server. Two. 2. T-W-O. That’s ridiculous. Every other MMO game I have played permits at least six.
• The last straw for me was the idiotic name filter.

I had played a Jedi up to level 20, and was working on another character when I ran into a peculiar error message. When attempting to create a character named “Siobhan”, I got an error message that said names of famous Star Wars characters and planets were not permitted.

Um… what? Since when is the name “Siobhan” a Star Wars character or the name of a planet?

So I went on the Star Wars Galaxies forums and asked if this was a famous planet or character that I’d somehow never heard of. The answer was… ye gods, it’s just too ridiculous. The answer was, “Because the name filter won’t permit any name that has the letters H – A – N in it.”

Ethan. Chani. Hannibal. Vaughan. Nathaniel. Siobhan. “…han…” is a very common series of letters in names. And none of those names are permitted? You’re kidding me, right? They weren’t kidding.

You know, there are so many, many things wrong with this game (I have listed only a few), but I struggled through and persevered for a couple of weeks because, by gosh, it’s Star Wars. I will go a long way and forgive a host of faults just to play in the Star Wars universe.

But that was just the last straw. Any game with that level of obnoxious, overt stupidity built into it is simply not worth my time.

I really, really look forward Bioware’s MMOG.

Finally, a word about the “New Game Experience” and the “Combat Upgrade”. A great many forum posts and reviews are nothing but bitching and moaning about these game updates from 2005. News flash: this is 2007. Get over it. Complaining about something that happened in 2005 is just pathetic, particularly when there are more than enough things to complain about in the game as it is today.

This is just too cool.

I only have one question: how can someone have such a great secret base, and not use it for super-villainy? Using it for mere horticulture shows such a lack of ambition. But then, I guess that’s what they say about marijuana….

If God can do anything, can he make a mountain so heavy that God himself cannot lift it?

The computer requirements to run the Energy Department’s performance program for a national nuclear waste repository are so complex that they may thwart state review of the government’s work, a Nevada official said.

A simulation that aims to forecast whether Yucca Mountain can safely hold thousands of tons of nuclear waste needs a network of 30 master servers and 298 process servers – or a total of 752 processors operating in tandem, said Bob Loux, chief of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

“No participant can reasonably expect to duplicate” the computer cluster, Loux said in a letter sent Tuesday to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dale Klein.

“The model is so complicated and so large, and takes so many computers to run it,” Loux said, “that it is fundamentally not checkable by any third party, including the NRC staff.”

(from Nevada Appeal, Nevada Appeal)

YesButNoButYes has collected what they think are the top 15 unintentionally funny comic book panels ever. Funny, funny stuff.

You can see more where this came from at http://www.superdickery.com/.

In a truly incredible display of governmental disregard for personal privacy, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin has refused to take down — or provide any access restrictions — on tens of thousands of personal data records that identify borrowers’ SSNs, bank account numbers, home addresses and phone numbers, The Associated Press reports.

His resistance comes just weeks after he criticized Gov. Deval Patrick for failing to protect voter information on his campaign site.

“It’s totally unacceptable that they are contemplating leaving it up,” said Betty Ostergren, a Virginia-based privacy advocate. “Once they realize it’s a veritable treasure trove, identity thieves will flock to it. They need to shut the links down.”

Galvin refused to shut down the links, saying: “This is standard practice in the business world,” he said. “It’s necessary for commerce. There are people who are reliant upon this system.”

At issue are Uniform Commercial Code filings that borrowers make when they put up collateral to secure a loan. While intended for lenders’ research, the information is freely available to all. The site has no access restrictions.

A quick check on Wednesday by The Associated Press showed names, addresses and other personal information for various Massachusetts residents. In one case, a copy of a woman’s personal check — complete with her name, phone number, address, bank account number and all the account information for a loan with General Motors’ financing arm — was posted.

And Galvin sees nothing hypocritical about criticizing Patrick while displaying all this data on the open net.

“That’s very different from what we’re talking about here,” Galvin said, who was aware of his office’s policy when he criticized Patrick. “The governor’s site is a political committee. Our site is a governmental function. This is an essential part of commerce.”

Complete nonsense, of course. Commerce is not at restrained by having to enter a password or having the data encrypted so it can only be used by legitimate lenders.

(from ZDNet, MA exposes thousands of private data – and doesn’t plan to stop

While corporate IT departments spent countless hours and dollars updating IT systems for the March 11 move to daylight-saving time (DST) in the U.S., the largest cost of the time change to companies involves business meetings — some of which are still susceptible to DST-related scheduling errors.

[…]

“The biggest cost is the hidden cost of confusion over the time of meetings,” Ferris wrote in a subscribers-only Web bulletin yesterday. “Almost everyone involved with U.S./Canada meetings will miss some, or show up prematurely.” Those missed connections waste an average of half an hour to one hour per person, he said, and with about 100 million electronically connected workers in the U.S., that will cost about $3 billion in lost productivity.

“A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” he said.

(from Computer World, The corporate cost of DST? $3B, says analyst)

This doesn’t even begin to approach the real cost, factoring in the time wasted by normal people in their everyday lives, running around fiddling with clocks, missing appointments, and so on. Why, on my personal laptop (which still runs Windows — Windows XP Pro, to be exact), the time change required a patch from Microsoft which played hell with my calendar, turning around 1000 appointents and scheduled items into two-day events.

It would be very easy to blame Microsoft for that. Hell, it’s not like they haven’t done enough things worth blaming them for. But this wasn’t their fault. There should have been no need for that patch, because there was no need to fiddle with the time to begin with. So, on top of the hour or so that it took me to straighten out my calendar (and I’m not the only one, by the way — this was a pretty widespread problem), how much did Microsoft and other companies spend to patch and update software just to comply with this idiotic, useless, and completely arbitrary change in the display of our clocks? And that’s just one way this absurd Daylight “Saving” Time fiasco costs us all time and money.

A hack for Microsoft is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (aka “FUD“) concerning GPL3. This is no surprise, since that’s primarily what hacks for Microsoft do.

As I am looking at the auditions for the second season of Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, a few of things have become apparent:

1) Most aspiring supers desperately need help with their costumes.

2) Most aspiring supers are doughy guys with guts bigger than mine.

3) Of the few aspiring female supers, most are doughy gals with guts bigger than mine.

4) Something about being near a wrestling ring makes people think they need to shout to be heard, even though they are speaking into a microphone.

5) A lot of people are unclear on the distinction between “super hero” and “renaissance fair volunteer” (huzzah!).

Here are my picks of the best from the auditions currently online. It’s hard picking good ones, because, well, most of them are just really, really bad (and not in a good way). Even these are just sort of okay, and not really good.

American Angel
Elementas
Fire Ant
Jetstream
Mama Voodoo and Wyld Cat
Midnight Wolf
Omnicron
Optimyst

I thought about listing a few of the worst, but I started to feel sorry for them, so you’ll have to find the bad ones on your own. Maybe I am getting soft-hearted in my old age.