blakerson.com

Well, as of Saturday it is, as that's when I'll be arriving in Austin to start the pre-college insanity, but tomorrow I'll be tearing down the computer to pack that up. It's been a fantastic summer, both in Europe and here in the States. I've gotten good doses of life learning and character building, as well as sleep and relaxation, and I'm about as ready as I can be for another year down on campus.

I've learned to drink coffee, I learned to eat a few new things (and promptly got sick of them), I made some fantastic new friends, but above all I feel much more prepared for the rest of my life. Europe was just the challenge I needed to make sure I could cut it on my own in the world, and for surviving that I feel like I've been handsomely rewarded.

On the lighter side of things, there's been a ton of good music this summer, thanks to Jamiroquai, Telepopmusik, Common, and a couple other one-off goodies from Gorillaz and a few more. My official soundtrack of the summer has been as follows:

Jamiroquai - Dynamite [album]
Telepopmusik - Angel Milk [album]
Common - Be [album]
Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc.
Jimmy Eat World - If You Don't, Don't (a gem I wouldn't have discovered if not for my iPod's shuffle feature)
Frou Frou - Details [album]
Feist - Let It Die [album] - props go to Aroon on this one. Seriously guys, go grab this. If you don't like Feist, your taste in music is beyond terrible, but at least you can revel in your enjoyment of the junk ClearChannel serves you.
And finally, the Amelie soundtrack.

Quakecon, the trademark event that serves as the celebration of the end of summer, brought us to the season's end with a whimper. The event moved slowly because it's much more boring to go as a casual gamer. The more hardcore you are, the more access you have, the more people you know, and the more things you can enjoy. That doesn't mean it wasn't enjoyable - some fine times were shared among those of us who went - but it definitely didn't feel like the QCons of old. It felt more like a shameful attempt to rehash those old times, and it definitely didn't work. The photo album reflects it: a few cool things were found, but it really just shows us chillin' and playing around. The best day we had, the afternoon where we tested for Atari, has no photographs to show for it. I was the only one who attended Mr. Sinus. We pissed off people with the Airzooka, which amazingly held our attention for several hours. All in all, we potentially could have had a better time having a giant A-town LAN party and inviting everyone over. As for next year, the only guarantee I have is I won't be doing early check-in. Good way to waste 8 hours of our time, Qcon admins; well done.

The biggest disappointment of all, though, is that I'm moving. It's not that we're moving into a crappy house or anything; it's in fantastic condition and it's actually a pretty cool place. But having just moved into here a few years ago (OK, 4, but that's the most time I've spent in any one house since I was a kiddo) and knowing how much damned effort went into the house we have now, I feel like my mom just decided to throw all that out the window because it's not absolutely perfect. We have *neighbors*, omg, and she's moving into another neighborhood. I still think it's a subconscious addiction to the Home and Garden Channel. Look - I know how to appreciate what one has - there's a whole list of stuff I would change on my car in a heartbeat given the chance, but I'm very happy with what I have - and I think my mom has lost her understanding of that. This place is beautiful, it's what I've truly called home, it's the house I finished high school in and left for college from, and I'm not happy that it's going away.

At the very least, I finally finished all the bullshit negotiations with my apartment complex, and my mates and I have a very cool apartment. If you're in Austin, feel free to stop by Villas 108; there's a couch with your name on it.

2 really cool tech things that have been on my mind lately:

Google as an ISP seems to be coming closer to reality. They're busy acquiring bandwidth for their own uses, because their stuff uses crazy BW and will continue to as they launch video and mapping services - but what if they start service as a consumer-level ISP as well? They're acquiring fiber-optic lines all over the place so they could conceivably give insane levels of service. Even better could be Wi-Fi access with targeted local advertising. Go google go!

On demand content. Podcasting is storming the world (even if it is a dumb word), TiVo is a smash hit, and Comcast is pimping its on-demand cable services just like every other cable carrier that supports the service. Graham's idea is that within 5 years, every cable company will go entirely on-demand as a means of access control for cable companies. I think it's a fantastic idea. The internet has already been moving this direction for ages - I can name several people who would eagerly wait for Tuesday morning for the release of the newest episode of Red vs. Blue, for example. All of the TV marketing can remain the same, except commercials can say "Friends: releasing this Thursday at 8pm!" and everyone can go gather around the TV and stream it in from their content providers. Podcasts are working the same way, and the iTunes feature of auto-updating is brilliant. Content providers will like it so they can fight TV show piracy (which is easily the dumbest thing I've ever seen, TV shows air freely and nobody deserves to get sued over them), viewers can click a button to watch the show they want, and everyone goes home happy. Get on it, content providers.

You've come home from Quakecon, crashed the fuck out, set your computer back up the next day and checked your own website to see if it updated while you were gone.

So yeah, I'm kinda fried. Quakecon was good - not stellar, but good - and since I blew it with the camera I'm collecting other people's pictures to put together an album. That and the write-up will be up in the next day or two.

In the meantime, I'll be tinkering with the new Windows Vista beta and with the idea of getting a tattoo.

If BT is coming to play a set in Austin, post the fucking tour date before it's over. Thanks, fuckers, I missed a spiritual experience thanks to your webhead's laziness.

Death, hatred and a pox upon your household,
blakerson

(ps - for those who are curious, it was the 6th, this last Saturday night)

So with Quakecon looming dangerously close, my World of Warcraft playing time has come to an end, the game's been uninstalled, and my account should be expiring tomorrow. I haven't been sucked in, to some surprise for a few friends, but I have learned a lot, especially some MMO conventions and how they really play these things and how the players interact in and out of the game. For their help with all this, huge thanks go out to Tall Paul for hooking me up with a guest pass, and an even huger thanks go to Thomas for hooking me up with the game, giving me countless tips, and even taking me on a couple of quests and helping me kick ass. Without further adieu, I give you my take on it.

The game: In short, Blizzard has made a fantastic game. It's exactly what you would expect from Blizzard: a game that took forever to make, has spotless production value, is easy to learn without reading the manual, and endlessly deep. They've made an extremely accessible MMORPG, which is much harder than most players give anyone credit for. I, a newbie to the genre, always understood what was going on, what I was supposed to be doing, and how I could go about doing it. Like any RPG, online or off, I had certain objectives to accomplish, usually by going to other towns or killing things and reporting to someone about it, I had a backpack full of items, and I had equipment to go equip, unequip, and buy and sell. Most MMOs may be similar in these aspects, but they sure as hell don't make it anywhere near as straightforward as they should. There are a lot of things I didn't get to learn about in the game, such as having pets for transportation, professions to make your own items, or class-specific skills, but it was clear that those things were going to be just as clear as the other systems when the time came.

Hell, I would be ecstatic if Blizzard made an offline WoW. The quests were interesting, the combat was decent enough, the environments were gorgeous (in 7 levels in about as many days, I started in a desert and wound up in tropical paradises, islands, ruins, and a major Orcish urban center), every location had its own appropriate music playing in the background, and the attention to detail was fantastic - it had really surpassed my expectations even of a Blizzard game. I know that I saw a tiny, tiny part of the game and it was truly fun. With the huge amount of terrain to adventure through, the ridiculous number of available quests, and the large diversity of classes (there are 6 races which are further divided into roughly 30 actual classes, and each race and class have their own specific quests), this could be an unimaginably replayable, immense, brilliantly made RPG. But it's not. It's an MMO.

So then there's the online part of the game, which entirely warps the game. It takes this fantastic RPG and throws in zillions of people, whose online avatars at best only slow down my system and at worst slow down my system, insist upon selling me something they found in some quest, and endlessly solicit your help in a quest until you start longing for Viagra spam just to have something less annoying filling up your screen. All is not lost, though, for having other people running around has its occasional benefits. In my second night of playing, after getting acquainted and starting to pursue small quests to kill small desert creatures, I ended up chatting with another newbie like myself and we were able to help each other accomplish our respective quests. Even better is having an actual friend in the game. I had the good fortune to have Thomas very willing to help me along, and he constantly answered questions for me on various items, where places were (the most useful advice, because WoW kind of leaves you stranded on navigation) and definitely came to my rescue at least once when I found myself crossing through an enemy stronghold. The usual routine, however, was more boring. Very early players were willing to help each other out, but once I got to a large city guilds would gather in cliques and talk amongst themselves, too busy to answer to passers by.

And that was really what stuck with me. The whole point of this experiment was to find out what drew players to this game, or EQ, or any other game that has spawned a support group for family members of its players. I've found that it's not the game at all: it is a fantastic RPG with the added feature of optional co-op, and like any truly great game, it has its own group of hardcore players. But the fault for the existence of EQ widows and countless blown college careers lies with the players themselves. Halo players have lives. Quake, Unreal, and Counter-Strike players all have lives in varying degrees, but they certainly have them. Players of Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Soul Calibur II, and virtually any other franchise you can imagine all have lives. WoW players and the like are drawn to WoW and submit themselves to power-leveling, item farming and all the other consequences that come from putting an RPG online because of their personalities. They're often identified as addictive personalities and I'm inclined to agree: these guys put themselves through much worse amounts of misery than fanatics of any other game genre. When I was primarily a Quake player, I sacrificed my weekday social life to play. As a Halo player, I endure the stupidity of idiotic children online in order to get to my enjoyment, but it's still a social activity. WoW players are a different breed entirely: they give up their *entire* social lives, weekday and weekend, in order to spend hours on end pursuing one item or accomplishing one task for their guild. Most MMOs are geared towards these players, but thankfully WoW is at least usable by low-level, casual players. Yet still, they're not common at all. It's inexplicable; there's no reason why they shouldn't be there, yet that's just the way it works in this genre, just like the trends of powerleveling and extremely antisocial players.

And that leaves me feeling bittersweet as I leave my WoW days behind. It's not a far cry from a vacation to a beach not unlike the ones I walked in Sen'Jin Village. The game as an RPG, the thing you pay $50 for in a store, is a thing of beauty and it's a place I'd very willingly pay full retail price to spend my time in. But like any beach, you find the experience terrible because of all the damn people everywhere. The thing you pay $10 a month for is absolutely ridiculous. I've always said from a distance that hardcore MMORPG players are masochistic and timidly addictive characters, and now that I've had a good look at them I can say exactly that, but with more conviction. So if you're feeling like finding an exceptional RPG and you'd like the best Blizzard game to come out since Starcraft, give WoW a spin - after all, $40 for a copy of the game and another $10 will buy you two months' access - and then just put away the credit card. The thing you'll find when you strike it alone in Azeroth is like that one untouched beach on some remote coast - it's your own private paradise, and there's no one around to make your stay the slightest bit unenjoyable.