A Home Away from Hythia

Hello and Goodbye

2007-05-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

This is the last post that I will be making to this blog...

(pause for dramatic impact)

... because my actual website, hythia.com, is back up and working.

This site was only ever intended to serve as a temporary home for me and it has come to the end of its time and will be used no more. Not that I really used it much in the last year anyways...

All content of this site has been moved to the new blog over at hythia.com. Please direct all future, current, and past traffic to that site instead.

Thanks and I hope to see you there.

cough hack wheeze

2006-06-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

So finally getting over a bout of strep throat. Some of the bastards I work with knew they were sick, but came to a meeting and coughed all over the rest of us at it and infected us all with their lousy germs.

Bit behind on work because of it, slept for pretty much all of the last few days. Not that I wouldn't have been behind even if I had been healthy... Thinking I may have overbooked myself a little bit this quarter for work.

Birthday tomorrow. Approaching it with dread. 365 days after that until I turn thirty. I remember when I was a kid (well, more of a kid then I am now) that I had all these plans of things I wanted to do, places to see, etc. that I wanted to do before I turned thirty and had to start acting like an "adult".

Still, turning 29 means I am several years older than quite a few people expected me to ever be. I think among my circle of friends from the olden-days the general consensus had been that sometime before I turned 25 I'd get mouthy to someone who would take offense enough at it to end me or hire someone else to end me. I was a bit more of a jack-ass back then.

Getting morbid now, thinking about how many of those friends I've already out-lived. Will likely become maudlin and drunk later as I try to figure out just what the hell I actually accomplished in this last year.

Tomorrow really is my third least favorite day of the year.

Blegh. Looks like it is going to be sunny too. Think I'll spend the day in a nickel arcade I know, forty bucks should keep me pretty busy playing Gauntlet or something similar until the day is pretty well and over.

BOOM!

2006-05-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

They blew up the Trojan Nuclear Powerplant's cooling tower roughly 28 minutes ago (at 7am Pacific). Well, not blew up as much as dynamited. Saying 'blew up' makes it sound less like a planned and controlled demolition then it was.

Apparently the cost of dismantling Trojan will be roughly the same as the original cost of building it, on the scale of $340 million or so (though the construction was 30 thirty years ago, so the true cost is far less when you figure inflation). Just the cooling tower today, two more years until the storage dome gets taken down and they haven't contracted a bidder for that or decided how to do it yet.

Of course, this still leaves the Hanford nuclear waste site and the Tillamook military site (((which produces C & B material (which also had a hurricane earlier this week and everyone on site has been required to wear a hazmat suit since (but trust the goverment, nothing is wrong, it is just a minor unnecessary precaution...))) in the northwest that needs cleaning up still...

Hmm...

2006-05-20T00:08:00.000-07:00

Are 'Obsessives' just 'Compulsives' who don't know when to quit?

Or are 'Compulsives' just 'Obsessives' with short attention spans?

The things I ponder six minutes after midnite when I haven't had enough sleep, and have had way too much caffiene...

Unrelated Bits

2006-05-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

Unrelated entirely to my other post from earlier, but today is Oregon's May primary election day. Which isn't a big deal to anyone I know until tomorrow morning when we can see the final results, everyone I've talked to sent in their ballot by mail over a week ago. Vote by mail can be nice like that at times, especially on days like today when it is supposed to be unseasonably warm out again and going to a voting booth would be a decidedly unfun trip in the heat.

One of the local free papers (The Portland Tribune) had a nice article about it today and it is worth reading. If your state puts up a ballot measure to switch to vote-by-mail I'd suggest supporting it. Just so nice to have it done with, especially since once your by mail ballot has been registered as accepted you are off the mailing lists for all the candidates and can stop getting election crap in your mailbox everyday.

Oh, also found this article on the Tribune website talking about how Portland inspired various bits and pieces of Matt Groening's "The Simpsons", which is again unrelated to the earlier bit of this post but might amuse Simpsons fans.

The End of the World...

2006-05-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

This seems to be a theme lately.

So while waiting for a bus downtown I had the 'joy' of listening to a street preacher go on and on about how the world is going to end in 21 days. His reasoning: It will be the sixth day, of the sixth month, of the sixth year of this century. That whole 'six, six, six' or 666 thing. (Of course this was coming from someone who is, I imagine, in the same class of people who thought that 2000 was the first year of this century in which case this is actually the seventh year of this century, counting year 0...)

While normally I would have laughed this off, likely loudly and in the face of the person preaching it, it bugged me a little as coincidentally that day is my birthday.

So, God, if you are reading this... Could you do me a favor and delay ending the world until relatively late in the day? I'd like a chance to see what (if anything) I get for presents and an hour or two to read, watch or play with them if I do.

Oh, also, if by some odd chance I turn out to be the Anti-Christ (proving the opinion of me expressed on numerous occasions by teachers I had over the years) and come into the fullness of my demonic heritage this year I promise to play fair and make war and end the world by the Old Testament rules of engagement you had us kooky humans write down for you so long ago. Not as keen on the New Testament stuff, the whole Book of Revelations is actually kind of corny by todays standards. If I have to go in for the special effects and weird events as heavily as they are depicted there I might have to hire a creative team and see if I couldn't jazz it up a little.

I Need Central Air

2006-05-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

Annoyingly hot right now, high of 97 degrees today where I live; and while it isn't uncommon for Oregon to have a couple days of 90 degree weather each year those days are normally in July or August.

Weather forecaster on the weather channel was just saying that today is the earliest it has ever been this hot in the 'summer season' on record. Given that those records do go back quite a ways...

Nope. No climate change here. None at all. Everyone go about your business and please don't notice the changes in the weather patterns. ( Meanwhile, I think I am going to go invest in stock in a company that makes sunscreen... )

It's The End of the World As We Know It...

2006-05-11T00:34:00.000-07:00

I just spent way too much time reading this which should guarantee some really odd-ball dreams tonight.

Anyways, Exit Mundi is a wacky little site documenting the ways the world will end. Fun reading, good times, lots of laughs.

Plasticity

2006-05-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

I accidently tabbed around and posted this when it was nothing but a title. For a moment I almost left it like that just to see what people would post as comments to a simple title of 'plasticity'.

Anyways, back to the original subject I had in mind...

History and how plastic it is, especially American history it seems. I have a silly number of books, a fair number of which are non-fiction reference books I've picked up over the years. The largest number of those being random volumes of history textbooks or the occasional odd-ball encyclopedia volume that catches my eye.

It is pretty amazing how wildly they vary when depicting historical events, especially in regards to the American Civil War. Looking at history textbooks from before the 1970s and you find people like John Brown (of 'Harpers Ferry' fame) being depicted as insane or criminally dangerous (and that it possibly ran in his family) simply because he supported abolition (which before the civil rights movement may have been considered a sign of insanity...).

An old copy of "The American Pageant" from the early 80s talks about Columbus's crew being mutinous and unruly because they feared they were about to sail off the edge of the world, when by 1491 even the Catholic Church had admitted the world was round. The copy I have from when I was in school had corrected that fact at least, but it goes to show how long silly notions like that stayed in print.

Not sure where this train of thought is going. It started with me being grumpy because I couldn't remember much about 'The Great War' (aka. World War 1) and the sequence of events that began it. Something I had been working on which was originally contemporary suddenly fit much better in with the bits of history I could remember from that time, now the story is going oddly split-screen and multi-generational in my head.

I can also blame the cold medicine for that I think. Bit under the weather for the last two days. Being sick always really and truly fucks with my head and results in really disturbing dreams. Well, disturbing in different ways at least then the ones I have when I am not sick. More 'Giger meets Walt Disney' and less 'Twilight Zone' I suppose.

Cruel

2006-05-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

So I have to break my work schedule a little today. Have stuff to get done, contracted on probably more projects then I should be working on at once ( in my defense, I really seriously did not expect as many bids to be accepted as were ), but I need to take some time off this afternoon.

Reason is, I have to help move my grandmother from the room she is currently in at the nursing home my aunts and uncles dumped her in to a room in the Alzheimers ward in the same building. Apparently she has finally slipped into that final twilight of the mind and needs more supervision then before.

The part that gets me about it thought is that there is a specific time window this afternoon that it is being done in, during the time that she is out on a drive heading to a park or garden not far from the building. We are going in, moving her furniture from her current room to a different room and apparently she is not being told what is going on and will just casually be brought back to her new room with all of her stuff now in again as if nothing had changed.

Something about that just seems frighteningly disturbingly cruel. Plus, really freaky for her. Reminds me of that thing Stephen King wrote talking about the three levels of fear: gross out, horror and terror. Terror being when you come home and find out that everything you own, every personal possession you have, has been taken out of your home and replaced by an exact duplicate. Just have this feeling that if she wasn't already suffering from Alzheimer's that something like this could pretty well be the bit that pushed her over the edge.

I really hate the world some days.

Star Trek Science

2006-05-03T22:07:00.000-07:00

I love it how every so often new bits of applied science get publicized and immediately get described in relation to 'Star Trek' or 'Star Wars' instead of talking about their merits and values in and off themself.

That said, it is kind of cool that they've found a mathematical principal wherein a cloaking device (ala 'Star Trek' Romulans) could potentially work. Leave it to bored British scientists to figure it out.

Article in the BBC News is here.

Autos

2006-05-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

How is it that myself, who has never owned a car and has never held a driver's license ( I had a permit once, long ago, that expired ) knows more about changing a cars oil or changing a flat tire then my friends who have owned cars and had licenses since they turned sixteen.

Gyah...

Planetes

2006-04-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

Anyone seen the "Planetes" anime?

Saw a trailer for it and it looked interesting, a lot different from the manga, but still good.

The basic setting of Planetes is near-future Earth. After decades of space exploration and orbital development and the building of facilities on the moon the orbit around the Earth is filled with tons of space debris. Which is a very bad thing since even a screw that has fallen loose moving at orbital velocity can pretty well shatter what it hits. So some astronauts get stuck with the 'noble and valiant' job of debris clean-up.

The manga was very character-based, very poignant at times, very well done. The anime looks a little more action oriented and more focused on the job they are doing and less on the characters themselves so I hope it still is as good but not seen any of it except some trailer bits.

Bright Glaring Day-Star

2006-04-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

So here it is the second to last week end in April, and according to the weather people, this weekend is only the fourth weekend with sunny weather so far this year in Oregon.

Go rain gods go! Up with the clouds! Block that damned too-bright glaring day-star from the sky!

Safari

2006-04-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

So I was looking forward to the idea of just spending all day today indoors, collapsing and doing some reading on the couch instead of on a bus seat as I have been lately, maybe digging my sketch pad out and inking a couple pictures in it for practice, or just something laid back that allowed me to ignore the existence of the outside world.

While I was thinking this I glanced out of my dining room window and realized that I couldn't see the street outside. Not that I had gone blind, or there had been a sudden solar eclipse, or heavy fog or anything, but because the grass / weeds in the front yard had grown tall enough that pygmy tribesman may soon be moving up from South America and setting in to the jungle that is quickly becoming my front yard.

Hadn't really noticed. Most mornings I am leaving before the sun is fully up and way way way before my brain is actually engaged and awake. By the time I am getting home my brain is tired and has engaged it's "not seeing things we don't want to think about" mode.

But damn. There are a couple things out there that look like alien plantlife but which I think are just weeds grown to be far taller then they normally get a chance to get and are producing huge seed / spore pods to spread across the entire neighborhood.

Off now to take my lawnmower on safari. If you don't hear back from me soon, call an anthropologist and let them know of the pygmy infestation in my yard.

A use for Wikipedia

2006-04-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, silly meme thing I got pestered into playing with which for all I know already made the rounds and I just failed to notice it.

"Go to Wikipedia and look up your birthday (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year."

So...

3 Neat Facts
1912 - Eruption of Novarupta in Alaska begins. Second largest volcanic eruption in historic time.
1969 - The first Internet connection was created when network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another,
1974 - A new Instrument of Government is promulgated making Sweden a parliamentary monarchy.
(also '2002 - A near-Earth asteroid estimated at 10 metres diameter explodes over the Mediterranean Sea. The resulting explosion is estimated to have a force of 26 kilotons, slightly more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb.' which I wonder if we should consider as a sort of celestial 'warning shot'...)

2 Births
1799 - Alexander Pushkin (Russian poet)
1872 - Tsarina Alexandra of Russia
(also apparently '2001 - Shinji Ikari' from the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime/manga...)

1 Death
1961 - Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist
(also '1991 - Stan Getz, American musician and composer' who performed 'The Girl from Ipanema' which tortures elevator riders when converted to muzak to this day...)

I wonder what it is

2006-04-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

I wonder what it is like to be insane. Not bi-polar or something similar but full on bat-shit insane. Could you tell you were?

Happy "Jesus Unlocked God-Mode" Day

2006-04-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

I have never quite understood this holiday. The whole "Hey, look. You all went and got me killed, but thats alright, I forgive you despite coming back as a ghost to haunt you." bit kind of comes across as odd to me.

A bit after two in the afternoon. Just now getting up and moving. Think my sister is cooking something over at her place a bit later today and I am supposed to be there. Free meal, likely turkey (Mmm... Turkey...), but then I'll have to listen to her and my female parental unit complain about their jobs for hours. Think I'll bring a book to pass the time.

Random bits of my brain

2006-04-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

Haven't been doing a good job at keeping up at this lately. Starting and the ending of weeks is seeming to be when I find the time to write something here.

The little bits of writing I've had time for lately have been odd. Too many ideas in too small of a story or too big of a story for the characters aren't large enough to fill it out. There is a happy place in-between those two, just finding it is hard.

Anyone know how to find a copy of a 1920 issue of Scientific American, specifically the issue for the last week of October of that year? If it was a newspaper, it'd be easy as I know of a few places I could go to get that on microfilm, but a magazine? Hrm.

When you think about the Bible do you consider it an anthology or a collection? Yes, there is a difference between those two.

When did time and space become interchangeable concepts? If you are heading to a meeting and someone asks "Where are you?" why is the answer "I am five minutes away" which is about 'time' (or the passage of) when the question was about 'space' (your location within it) acceptable? Much less, why is it such a common answer? And then, when you ask someone "When will you get here?" you get a reply in terms of geography "I am just passing now."

Friday, means webcomic updates to read and orders to be given to my hattrick team for their Sunday match ( their training update is on Thursdays ). Just got home a little bit ago with a couple small plastic boxs of take-out sushi to fill the hollow in my tummy with. No idea as to my weekend plans yet, or even what I am going to do tonight after sushi and webcomics.

Take the moments as they come.

Going up the mountain

2006-04-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

Didn't have any reason to leave the house today, so taking today and being an introvert. Cel phone is somewhere in the house, not sure where. Ringer on my phone is off. Ignoring the front door. Not checking my mail. Just not accepting any input today and just relaxing and recharging.

One of the people I work with (Tal, whose name isn't really that as that is just the first syllable of a much longer first name I can neither remember, pronounce, nor spell) refers to it as my 'going up the mountain' days. He likens it to old hermits or prophets going up into the mountains to seek wisdom before coming back down and dispensing it to the masses. I can never be certain if that is meant as a compliment or a mockery when he says it, which is part of why I get along with him when working on projects. We can mock each other well and make it sound complimentary.

I swear that the Lifetime network is really 'cable to make you cringe'. Do they show anything that isn't either dying of an incurable illness (which amazingly gets cured), marriage is breaking up (but she goes back to the ass of a husband anyways), or crime (kidnapping, robbery, etc.) gets done but the police officer is handsome and comforts the bereaved woman and the case gets solved in the end and everything is better? I may be over-generalizing the channel, but that is all I ever see on it and isn't really a well-researched or well-informed opinion, but mostly me being tired and ranting and enjoying mouthing out about it more then I imagine I would enjoy researching it.

There are few things more damaging to a person then self-knowledge.

Home at last

2006-04-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

Last week was busier then expected. Three days of meetings with various design groups I work with and clients they wanted me to meet with them spun into ultimately five days of dreck. Potentially lots of work on the horizon, which will be nice as the actual 'work' part of my career takes up far far far less time then the 'meetings of mindless boredom' part does.

My still-living matrilinear genetic forebear remains cranky and cheats at cribbage. I've caught her pegging extra points, stacking the deck, and dealing from the bottom of it so far.

I've been asked about the possibility of teaching a couple of seminar classes. 'Accessible Internet Development' is one of them, the other is poorly named and even more poorly explained and has someething to do with XML or XHTML or X-something-ML-something. Easily qualified to teach both, just I have this deep dread of actually teaching again. Hate it. Literally hurts my brain to break the concepts down into small discrete chunks that are digestible via a lesson plan. Like trying to teach how exactly my lungs work and why I keep breathing even while sleeping to a shrubbery who has neither lungs to experiment with themselves or a conceptual basis in common ( I see the sun as a glowing ball of flame that is too bright and blinds me when I go outside, the shrubbery sees it as the source of all photosynthesis and nourishment... )

Need to get a laptop soon. Spent most of the week in meetings having to make presentation sections work or navigate example site-work on other peoples computers. Almost feels odd now to be at home, at my desk, and using my own computer and keyboard again. Plus with a laptop I could play videogames anywhere which might make meetings more palatable. Especially since I have no idea how long until the Nintendo Gameboy DS Lite is going to make it stateside. Very pretty piece of hardware, but huge production shortfalls in Japan make them expensive and hard to get even there, no idea how long until US sales will start.

Anyways, back now from errands I had to spend the morning running. Grabbing another shower and changing into sweats and a t-shirt and veg'ing out for the rest of the day. Maybe I'll post more later.

Viva Pinata

2006-04-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

I really thought this was an April Fools joke when I heard about it. I mean, the idea is just sooo freaking surreal. But apparently Viva Pinata is real.

Okay, quick summary of the concept. There is an island called Pinata Island where a breed of living pinata roams which you entice to come to a garden you maintain and befriend and raise and apparently train to fight hostile living pinata's.

Yes. Living. Pinata. As in the colorful papier-mache things that show up at childrens birthday parties.

Not just a video game for the Xbox 360, but also a kids series showing up on Fox 4Kids and apparently a toy line are going to be released before the next holiday season based on this concept.

This concept of animated papier-mache animals you befriend, lure into your garden, train to beat up other papier-mache animals, and then hang from a high branch with a short rope and watch while immature human spawnlings beat it to death with a wooden stick in order to crack its fragile body open and get at the sugary contents of its flesh.

Okay, not actually sure if that last bit will be in the game or the animated series, but c'mon... That is the end of the life cycle of the pinata. They don't grow old and retire to a Florida beach, they get beaten to death and devoured by children.

And there is now a childrens property making them all cute and lovable. Damn is that going to traumatize some kids as they look back on previous birthday parties....

Frick. Frick. Frick.

2006-04-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

Frick. Frick. Frick. Changed every clock in the house for daylight-whatever time yesterday except my alarm clock. Frick. Hate today.

Edit: And saved by mass incompetance. Back home now for a hour and a half (before I take off for another meeting). Got a call waiting for a bus transfer and found out that of the seven of us that were supposed to be at the meeting, five of us made the mistake I did, including all of the clients people. So meeting is re-scheduled for later this week and I hopped on the bus heading back the way I had just come so I could actually have some breakfast grab a heavier coat before going back out. Gloomy and rainy today.

MMORPGs

2006-04-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

My apologies in advance for any typos and all of my ranting, less then fully sober at the moment as I just got home from seeing a few gamer friends I hadn't caught up with for a while. Cheese sticks, nachos, chili fries and much vodka are mixed in my tummy. One of them had a birthday this last weekend so I got to drop off a very belated xmas gift and pretend that it was wrapped in birthday paper instead.

But to the meat of things... While hanging out, and scaring all the normal people, we got on the topic of MMORPG's. Okay, really, it was them trying to get me to pick up a copy of World of Warcraft and me stumping them with the question of, "Why? What does it have that another MMO doesn't do better?" So the conversation rambled for a bit as they failed to defend WoW, and we talked about a lot of the other MMO's on the market, and now you get to hear the points that I think are valid and hopefully make comments and replies of your own so I know just how one-sided my views are.

World of Warcraft is the current dominant one in the market. Which, really, I just don't understand. What honestly does it have that other MMO's don't have and haven't had for longer and done better?
About all I can think of is that Azeroth is a known world-setting from the previous Warcraft games, but if having a pre-existing known world setting is the key for MMO success then shouldn't Middle Earth Online ( or is it Lord of the Rings Online these days? ) with its much more detailed world setting and pre-existing fantasy fan-base be getting a hell of a lot more press then it is?
It can't be the races, damn near every fantasy MMO in existence has had the exact same damned races. The PvP combat is better balanced and, honestly, more interesting in DAoC, Lineage 2 or Guild Wars. If you want crafting then both EQ and DAoC had crafting systems. Hell, EQ also had more land to explore by the time the last expansions were added. In WoW you still need to sit on your ass and farm the higher level elite gear, hoping you have big guild friends who can help out with getting it. Balance is still whacked out in the game and remains the biggest complaint among the people I know who play it.
About the only allure I see WoW having is naked Alliance elf women in high resolution bump-mapped detail. Which explains why in the upcoming expansion the Horde side is getting their own race designed heavily for sex appeal. Which apparently is a pretty big allure given the number of new servers they've been adding lately. Ultimately, I think WoW is going to dominate the market for some time to come as Blizzard does know how to appeal to an audience and how to maintain that interest with small updates and dangling expansions in the distance.
I do have to admit that the game does look pretty, and it did do some things right, but the idea of grinding for gold and farming elite gear just to be competitive in PvP (or even high-level PvE) just turns me off enough that I don't see getting a copy anytime soon.

City of Heroes and City of Villains is still the only MMORPG I am paying to play. Don't see that changing anytime soon, though I have been finding that the 'new' has worn off and I don't rush to login whenever I have free moments like I used to. Which is shown by the fact that I've barely been on lately. For different reasons between the two games though.
In CoH, I've really ran out of things to do that keep my attention. I still have the Kheldian arcs to finish (mid-way through the 20-25 one) but other then that I only have one task force and I think 4 missions left to do and then I'll have seen it all. With Issue 7 having no listed CoH side content additions, I am kind of depressed about not having anything new and interesting to see in the near future for my hero peoples.
About the only bits of gameplay that have been keeping my attention lately is the PvP. Unfortunately Bloody Bay tends to be full of either whiners (Stop killing me! I don't want to PvP despite being in a PvP zone!) or griefers (How many invisible flying assassins can their be lurking above the helicopter at any one time?) and Warburg I find distasteful as the villains tend to be better mannered and more polite then the heroes (I've had villains offer to duel me and arrange meetings for a fight, and have had heroes lurking just outside of the no-PvP zone by the boat just waiting to jump people newly arriving.) so I end up playing in Siren's Call and that has me set in the 20s and gets dull after a bit, playing without a lot of my powers tends to get rather formulaic but at least the PvP in Siren's Call seems to have a point as you battle for control of the zone. I can only hope that the rumored "Recluse's Folly/Victory" high-level PvP zone shows up with Issue 7 to make PvP more interesting again.
In CoV I actually have a similar, but different problem. There is no where left to explore. I like seeing new parts of the map and the world, but the entire thing is available from the get-go and by the high-teens I had already been everywhere and gotten all the explore and history clicks and all the waypoints from all the zones. Nothing else to see until Grandville in Issue 7. The story-arcs are better written I think, but the balance is getting irritating as the CoV side of the game feels like it is balanced a lot more then CoH was towards trying to force you to team. Or maybe it is the archetypes that seem to do that. Not sure. Just something about solo-play in CoV, while still fun and I still like playing solo a lot, just hasn't clicked the way it did for me in CoH.

Anarchy Online remains a study in how not to launch a MMO. I was a beta-tester for it, and the game in beta- had potential. It was fun. But it was clearly not a finished game. And then they launched it anyways and a lot of people tried it out and quickly got disgusted by how buggy it was. It did have some things that were ground-breaking at the time, like randomly generated on-demand missions/quests. The character creator was one of the most versatile and allowed some of the greatest creativity out there until CoH trumped it. But the game was just incomplete and broken.
Yet it was still fun. I still played for a bit and I still go back and play every so often when they have 14-day free trials or something similar. Until I get into the mid-30s again ( takes me about 45 minutes a level with a Martial Artist or Nanotech ) and run into the same balance problems as before that make the game suddenly slow to a grind while playing solo and have to suddenly find a team to play with. Right now, three expansions later, the game really looks pretty solid and if it had been released with all the features it has now it would have been a much greater success and had a lot more of a market impact then it has had. Still, if you want a sci-fi MMO this would I think be the way to go. There is a free trial offer right now that if I actually had the free time I'd be tempted to download and take a peek at what it looks like again.

Speaking of sci-fi... Star Wars: Galaxies may not be around much longer. Or at least may not be improving anymore. From what I have heard, Sony may have lost the license to do any further Star Wars themed development. Honestly, I won't miss it much. I played from right around launch until a bit into the first Alderaan story-event thingy. Was fun, had a Master Smuggler with a bit of Pistoleer, but it got a bit repetitive and the story missions in the game were either buggy and didn't work right or just weren't interesting / fun.
The game also suffered a bit of 'early adopter' syndrome. To do crafting you needed resources, a lot of which were mined. One whole skill tree was about surveying to find where your resource extractor thingy should go. Well, very quickly, all of the good resource spots on all of the planets filled up REAL quick and new people had to go to crapper locations to get stuff. Now, to combat this, the resources were supposed to drift and move periodically so new people had a chance to potentially survey and find a good spot right after a drift and compete with earlier players. I played on, I think it was, Chilastra and when I went back after the 'Jump to Lightspeed' expansion came out adding space combat finally (space combat was fun, but not as fun as the old Tie-Fighter and X-Wing games were...) the resources after three years hadn't moved once. Blegh.
They did some re-design of some of the game elements, especially the 'Path of the Jedi' to become a Jedi because, really, that was what everyone wanted to do and why the played the game. I heard they also re-did combat to be more like CoH rather then typically EQ-style combat but haven't been back to find out. Ultimately the game has always suffered from the problem of the fact that if you stripped out all the 'Star Wars' thematic bits out, the underlying gameplay just wasn't that good. It was always a mediocre game made popular by the Star Wars licensed bits. Still, if you are a rabit Star Wars fan-boy you might enjoy it (and in fact already be playing it). Otherwise I'd wait and see if Bioware (who just started a MMO division) really is developing the new Star Wars MMO they are rumored to be working on and maybe that one will be better.

If I do pick up another MMO'ish game anytime soon it'll probably be Guild Wars. The first expansion is just around the cornor (the 24th of this month), it is fantasy-based (I've had this urge to play a fantasy game lately...), and it has no monthly fee (so I don't suffer in the pocketbook). Guild Wars was built by, it appears, the same people who did Diablo 2 (and some of the old Blizzard Battle.net development) and apparently after Blizzard North got axed started ArenaNet up. Basically it is a fantasy-MMO designed to avoid farming, grinding and a lot of the other normal MMO crap with a lean towards guilds and guild / PvP combat.
Here is the thing though, PvP is entirely seperate from the PvE part of the game but the PvE part of the game unlocks more options for you in the PvP. It is really hard to describe, but a lot of the thought in the design really appeals to me. Apparently they have been pretty surprised by the number of non-PvP'ers who got the game just to roleplay and do the PvE part too. They had apparently expected it to be a lot more PvP then it is. With the upcoming Factions expansion and the new asian themed continent, they will have new PvP styles and goals such as the shifting of the national borders on the new continent as the two-factions fight for control of the land.
All in all, pretty interesting to me at the moment. Solid PvE, interesting PvP, fantasy, no monthly cost, active development and expansions and lots to unlock and explore in the game.

The other one I have my eye on right now is Tactica Online which is still in development. Fantasy, squad-based, turn-based, online tactical combat. Set in a sort of fantasy Rennaisance era, it is three competing ideologies (Doctrine, Science, Magic) and a skill-based tactical game. The online-tactical-game bit is what gets my attention. I am a tactical game junky so looking forward to the Open Beta for this and trying it out.

Other then that, lots of other MMO's on the market that I haven't played:
Lineage 2 looks interesting, especially the actual guild-based castle control stuff.
Eve: Online turned out a lot different then I thought it would, a very cool concept and might be an interesting game someday to try but I lack the time to sink into it now.
Horizons: Empire of Istaria ended up being such a disappointing final product after all the promise and ideas they had for it very early on in development, just goes to show what going bankrupt and being desperate for funding will do to a game.
Ryzom is pretty unpopular in the US and not the prettiest game, but the 'Ryzom Ring' bit coming out soon which apparently going to make players into content-creators for the game and allow them to add storylines and areas to the game which is potentially very revolutionary.
Dark Age of Camelot I have played, but not in a long-time. Pretty fun, like the three-realm PvP balance. Imagine that most of the players bailed to go play World of Warcraft though.
Ultima Online I beta-tested for sooo many years ago. God that game was broken from the moment it was released. A lot of the terms you hear these days referring to peoples playing styles and behavior were coined way back in that game. No idea what the game is like these days. Been way too long since I even though about playing it, halfway surprised it is still around.
Everquest is another I beta-tested for. Was a lot of fun in the beta, too crowded after launch. Really the MMORPG most people think about when trying to define the genre. Haven't played it in years (Is the original even still around? Lost patience waiting for the website to load.) and only goofed with a friends beta of EQ2 and wasn't impressed by it.
Warhammer Online is apparently in development by the people who did DAoC. Either still in beta, or close to beta, haven't heard much about it. But solid world background of the Warhammer setting and hopefully solid game mechanics.
Ragnarok Online I think still wins the award for 'cutest MMORPG'. It was really popular for a while, at least among the crowd I used to hang-out with online, but I think lost a huge chunk of its players to WoW. Had the interesting bit where your gender was set in your account, so all of your characters had to be the same as the players gender. Interesting bit of forced honesty there. The 'Ragnarok' manga by Myung-Jin Lee is actually set in the game setting ( though the english release is re-written/translated oddly). Never played it, heard a lot about it, but apparently a very fun and very cute little game.

Ran out of MMO's that I have bookmarked or can remember off the top of my head. If I missed some, or you have differing opinions, please rant in the comments section. Interested to hear other peoples takes on them.

Sales pitch

2006-03-29T23:17:00.000-08:00

Talk about a pre-order sales pitch...

As someone who has purchased Audio CDs by Nine Inch Nails, you might like to know that Every Day Is Exactly The Same will be released on April 4, 2006. For the next few days, you can pre-order your copy at a savings of 0% by following the link below.

The actual pre-order savings is $0.03 which makes me want to rush out and pre-order that right now... Someone at Amazon fucked up this pre-order promotion email...