VξѓŐŊĭćã đüמЪДя -- ξρĺċ ĻÖvÈ

Goodbye Tabula Rasa

Sometimes, we're all a little prescient. We can see a bit into the future. The problem is, we can never predict when we're going to have one of those moments, and we never actually know we've had one until it's already come and gone.

Roy and I have been having one of those prescient moments about Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, the game we called The Best MMORPG You're Not Playing (January 27, 2008 blog entry). We went online on the game last night because we're consolidating our game accounts down to just a very few. We cancelled our Tabula Rasa accounts last night and just wanted a few screenshots for posterity, just to prove 'We Were There.'

Sure enough, this greeted us when we signed on:

"To the Tabula Rasa Community,

Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we've achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn't performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while.

Stay tuned for more information. We thank you for your loyal support of the game and encourage you to take us up on the benefits we're offering Tabula Rasa players.

--The Tabula Rasa Team"

 

Online in the game, as we gathered our final screenshots, we heard the usual misplaced griping that accompanies such sad moments, when a game that people like is about to come to an end. General chat was filled with angry comments. There was the usual claim that the game publisher and developer didn't advertise enough. And NC Soft's efforts to ease the pain a little bit were angrily rejected in more such misplaced anger.

 

The general feeling seemed to be that NC Soft was cancelling Tabula Rasa to get its players to sign up for other NC Soft games, and that truly loyal supporters of Tabula Rasa would reject such overtures and refuse to play any other NC Soft games.

 

Oh bollix. The same 'shoot yourselves in the foot' reaction we have seen over and over among the subscribers of failed games that have not generated enough active subscribers to stay alive.

 

What NC Soft is offering Tabula Rasa players is actually quite nice:

 

"On February 28, 2009, Tabula Rasa will be shutting down its servers, and as of January 10, 2009, the game will be free to play.

To thank our loyal Tabula Rasa fans we've prepared a little closing down gift. Any active paying player as of 10:00 AM Pacific Time on November 21st, 2008 will be eligible for all of the following:

• 3 free months of City of Heroes including digital client
• 3 free months of Lineage II including digital client
• Aion beta access (coming soon)
• Aion pre-order access (available in 2009)
• 1 free month of Aion including digital client (available in 2009)"

All NC Soft is trying to do here is offer SOMETHING to loyal TR subscribers. CoH-CoV and especially the very popular Lineage brands are strong and successful MMORPG titles in their own rights that do not need the paltry TR subscriber list to stay alive. Granted, none of those games offer anything remotely like the sci-fi based story line of alien invasion in TR. But there isn't a lot that NC Soft can do about that. They did TRY something very different, and very fun, but flawed.

Roy and I certainly did our bit. We blogged on TR several times, wrote role-playing story lines, and we wrote one of the first well read reviews of the game that remains our single biggest blog entry in terms of hits. And there wasn't much more that could have been done to bring attention to the game.

After all, Garriott turned his entire trip into outer space into an unprecedented advertisement for the game. Do more advertising? How exactly do you top that?

If the TR users aren't foolish, they will at least get a few free months to try out some other games. They might even find something they like. We note here that WE are loyal players of, in effect TWO NC Soft games already in City of Heroes and City of Villains, and no one is offering US free time on other games. Laughing out loud.

Anyway, we're sorry to see TR go, because it opened a lot of new ground. It just didn't do it well enough to stay alive. It's not good, for example, when the TR website lists fewer hits in Google than Veronica Dunbar -- Redhead Girl Geek Chic. A single blog with more hits than an MMORPG...wow.

For our part, we're not sticking around in TR just for the freebies. TR will be even more of a ghost town as things wind down. We've noticed that the players we didn't care for much are the ones on most of the time now, and griping. And we hate griping and whining. It's like our two least favorite human interactive experiences. So, we've deleted the game from our hard drives, kept a few screenies, and now it's on to other things.

 

 

 

Veronica Dunbar -- Last of the Freelance Test Pilots...

I'm just guessing about how it all went down, but maybe it was something like this, repeated with certain variations at more than a dozen high tech firms in the U.S. and Canada...My new business cards, for example, were a big hit, it seems. Everyone who is hiring me has mentioned them.

"Cutting edge new tech executive: This is her business card? Purple lettering on Black: νΞѓθήÌςã ďūח฿äř -- Ŀàśţ Ŏךּ ŤҢĕ ҒŗỂěĽǻŇċẻ †ẻş‡ ρĬĽÖŤŠ.

Exec #2: Well, yes. Er, sort of. It's one of them.

Exec #1: One of them?

Exec #3 No two of her business cards appear to be exactly alike.

Exec #1: She did...What?

Exec #2: Here's the one I received: VẹŕÖЙїĈã ĐùŊбäЯ -- ļáŝ† óҒ ŦĤẻ ךּŗỀỀĽÃńĉỀ ţẻŞŧ ρįļòŦš. I think the color is called Antique Mauve on this one.

Exec #1: *Whistles* Motions to Exec #3. Let's see yours.

Exec #3: Just make sure you give it back to me, please. VęŘθńїĊ@ ÐÛИЪÃŖ -- Ľāŝ‡ õ∫ ŦҢĚ ךּŖỄỂĿāИςé ‡Ęš† ÞїĺÔţ∫. The color on mine is called Cool Granite, it says.

Exec #1: Each of her business cards is unique, and written in hacker style?

Exec #3: Umm, no. Not exactly hacker style. Little more complicated than that.

Exec #2: Yeah, some of it is Volapuk or Translit.

Exec #1: What?

Exec #3: Transliteration. Can I have her card back now?

Exec #1: (probably getting a little exasperated) Sigh, what??

Exec #2: Sorry. It's when you use the letters from one kind of alphabet to display another language. Volapuk encoding.

Exec #3: Most commonly it's using Latin symbols to denote the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. It's very old school. You can give her card back to me now.

Exec #2: Ms. Dunbar said her uncle taught her Volapuk when she first started using computers. Check out her pitch letter. (Hands it to Exec #1)

Exec #1: She wrote out her entire pitch letter offering her services testing our new high end tech products...in Volapuk??

Exec #2: Yep.

Exec #3: Mmmhmm.

Exec #1: Wow...

Exec #2: Exactly.

Exec #3: Yeah.

Exec #1: She's in California. She's got electrical backup systems? They get way too damn many brownouts in California.

Exec #2: Better.

Exec #3: She's totally solar-powered. She's off the grid. Completely-self contained power system, with 48-hour battery reserves backup, even if her solar array is damaged and offline. Otherwise, she's got power no matter what happens to the grid.

Exec #1: (Silent for awhile) So, what are we sending her to test first?"

Exec #3: Uhh...

Exec #1: What is it now?

Exec #3: Her card. You haven't given it back yet..."

I sent out 50 sets of unique letters and business cards to various high end technology companies producing all kinds of next generation electronic gear. I got 27 responses. Twelve of them are already sending me products to test over the next few months. Only one of them quibbled with my fee; he thought it was too low. Three more of the companies are negotiating with me. One is offering a three year, open ended contract. Roy is helping me find the next batch of companies to write. Those letters will go out in the next couple of weeks.

I already have enough formally contracted work to extend me through February of 2009.

I was never happier professionally than I was when I was a freelance writer and geek products tester. It's a job I can do anywhere, so when I finally figure out where Julian should be growing up, I can just move my entire business.

Yes, it means I'll be quitting the game industry, at least until Julian is older and clearly on a good course. I can be home for him everyday this way. I can do this because of that little inheritance mom left me. For someone as frugal as I am, $100,000 is still a lot of money to have in addition to my nine-year-old IRA. I've already got health insurance lined up, too.

Giving myself up to six months to transition out of my office job, and my bosses are so cool. They're really being supportive of this move.

Lucky gal. ŌЋ ŷÊǻҢ. (That color is purple moon.)

Veronica Dunbar Will Be Offline Temporarily...

...while I attend to some hardware issues. I have one dead hard drive on my desktop gaming computer and another one that is working 33% of the time, denying me data 33% of the time, or dead 33% of the time. Unacceptable.

The main two drives are working fine, but this must be fixed. I'll replace the two bad drives with a single 1 terabyte storage drive, which will probably eliminate some of the heat build up inside the box from the two video cards, the quad core chip and the four hard drives.

My poor notebook computer, which weathered a massive hack attack earlier in the year, is also failing. It is failing to recognize keystrokes, at the rate of at least one every 10 letters to 15 letters. If that doesn't sound like much of a problem, try typing a memo in which you made typos at that rate. It would be maddening.

I'll be replacing it altogether, but I haven't decided what the new notebook will be. The gamut of possibilities includes one with barebones office work abilities or a desktop replacement that is gaming and media worthy.

The only other computer in my house these days is my aging AMD Dual Opteron 246 server,a throwback to my free lance writing days when I supplemented my income by hosting a private game server for players of Battlefield 2, Battlefield Vietnam, and the roughly one dozen or so privately written games that were based on the battlefield game engine. Ah, those were the days, back in my old SOMA (South of Market Street) loft in San Francisco with few cares in the world.

It, too, is scheduled for replacement...something game capable for Julian, but with enough storage and processing power for Roy.

I'm doing all of this at once just because I want to get it all done, and because I'm kind of liking the idea of being without computers or an Internet connection for a few days.

Sometimes, it's just nice to unplug.

Gotta go look after Julian. He fell on the school bleechers today, gave himself a nasty cut on his eyebrow that required 18 stitches at the plastic surgeon. So, he gets to watch anything he wants to tonight: first off, Kung Fu Panda.

See you in a few days.

Another Smoky Sunset...

...but a lot less smoke in the air when we got back home this evening after spending the night and most of the day in a hotel just north of San Diego. We passed a new wildfire in Orange County on the way back north, but that wouldn't affect where we live.

The worst, we hope, is over.

Conflagration - Wildfires in California

To the northwest, through my home office window, the heavy pall of smoke clings to the tops of the Santa Monica Mountains as it drifts slowly west out to sea.

It's thick enough to nearly hide the setting sun, transforming it into an angry, blood red orb.

To the south, how far we're not sure, the somewhat lighter colored smoke from a completely different wildfire covers the horizon.

Tonight, we are literally surrounded by heavy smoke, thanks to the inversion layer that gave the Los Angeles Basin the nickname, "Valley of Smokes" because the old Indian campfires never dispersed and just hung in the air.

So we have the windows and the doors closed and the air conditioning is on. There's an air filter in every room that is working on a high setting, to try to keep the smoke at bay.

Still, our throats are sore. Our eyes are dry and irritated, and we are generally just feeling kind of miserable and oppressed. If you have ever had the misfortune to be near the smell of a house on fire, that is the smell that is right outside our windows and doors tonight and getting worse by the hour, even though we are really no where near any of the fire fronts.

This wildire season happens so regularly at this time of year in Southern California that one has to wonder why the person who thought a city ought to be built here wasn't immediately committed to an insane asylum.

Consider this, for example. There is the North American tectonic plate, upon which the vast majority of the United States rests, then the San Andreas Fault just to the west, then the Pacific Plate to the west of the San Andreas, which is what Los Angeles sits on. Yeah, we're on the OTHER SIDE of the biggest goddam earthquake fault in North America.

Above and beyond this everpresent threat of massive earthquakes, the desert climate and highly flammable vegetation such as chaparral gives us not just simple fires here, but conflagrations, firestorms that often dot the landscape and sometimes combine to create even worse infernos.

Tonight is such a night. Fortunately, the fires never burn in the Venice - Santa Monica areas where we live. There is at least one benefit to paving paradise and putting in parkings lots. This part of Southern California has been buried under so much concrete that there isn't a whole lot left to catch fire.

That's some consolation. At least we're not among the thousands of homes that have already burned or are threatened.

Still, this is frightening. I've never seen it this bad. The news is now saying that these are the worst blazes since something called the Bel Air - Brentwood Fire in 1961. That fire was also in November. All of the really big ones seem to hit in the 11th month of the year.

The worst I can personally recall was when I was 11 years old, in November, 1993, when another series of fires hit Altadena and Laguna Beach, with the worst being the Old Topanga fire that burned through the Santa Monica Mountain canyons to Malibu. This seems a lot worse than that.

If the smoke gets much heavier, we're going to have to make a run for it out of here because this cannot be good at all for Julian's lungs.

The western sky just above the ocean is already dark, but not because of the sunset.

It's where most of the smoke is out over the water. Above that, the sky is still red and light, like an inverted or upside down sunset.

So far, Julian seems okay in spite of his asthma.

Hopefully, we won't have to drive him away from Southern California and all of this smoke tonight, but we will if we have to.

Crazy goddam place to build a city...

Satellite track, California Wildfires, ENPLAN wildfire viewer.***

A history of Southern California wildfires.

Southern California wildfires, 2007.

Southern California Georgraphic Area Coordination Center.

***About ENPLAN:

Geospatial technology at work
tracking California fires

"Our geospatial team has created a web tool useful for fire management agencies and local residents to track current California fires. The Wildfire Viewer is a web application that displays wildfire locations and perimeters over Google Maps imagery. The data displayed is obtained from multiple government agencies.

The current viewer coverage area inlcudes all of California. Data is updated to the site every hour.

“We are helping to provide better data access during these difficult times by applying the technology we know best,” said Randall Hauser, Principal of ENPLAN.

ENPLAN’s Wildfire Viewer currently displays data available from GeoMAC and MODIS. The GeoMAC site is a place for government agencies to upload information as it becomes available. Participating agencies uploading data include the USGS, US Forest Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA, National Parks Service, BLM, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Interagency Fire Center, National Wildfire Coordinating Group, among others.

Wildfire Viewer also tracks fire heat detections collected by NASA from two satellites orbiting the earth, Terra and Aqua, equipped with advanced Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments. The satellites collect fire and thermal anomalies data which can be used to estimate burn area sizes, fire intensity, and particulate emissions."

Parenting: My New Life

((This is what I am listening to right now. Open the link in a new window, adjust volume and minimize.))

It changes your life.

When parents speak to adults who do not have children but say they are ready to have some, the parents say surprisingly little. And they are never as enthusiastic about your desire for little ones as you think they should be. In fact, you could say that a lot of what they say is actually discouraging, as in 'make damn sure this is a path you want to take, be cause this path takes 22 years to travel.' Twenty-two years being the traditional span between birth and college graduation.

Almost always, the parents say this: 'It changes your life.' Sometimes they say it like every word should start with capital letters. Sometimes it even comes out of their lips in a kind of superior tone, as in 'you are not prepared.'

It changes your life. Seems trite and disinterested until you actually do HAVE a child, then that sentence reads like the red ink in the New Testament, where it's Jesus doing the talking.

It Changes Your Life.

One day, you wake up, very far removed from much of what you would have been doing in your old life, and it hits you. Wow, it really does change your life.

I signed on for at least 14 years when I adopted my little brother after mom died. Overnight, as it also must be when you give birth, your actions are dictated by one thing. Your child comes first in all matters. When they need you, you drop everything you are doing, period. This morning, I was on long distance overseas, talking to a company vice-president when Julian comes into my home office and wants to say good-bye. Demanding little guy he is. He knows full well I'm on the phone with work. He knows he is interrupting, because that is kind of the point. In effect, he is saying 'Show me I'm so important that you can interrupt anything just to give me a hug and say good-bye before I go to school.'

I was very close silently waving him off, but then I took a second to think about it. Asked the vice president if he could hold on for a few seconds while I said goodbye to my son, and if not, I could call him back. Silence on the line, probably he was wondering if anyone had ever asked for such an interruption before. Sounding genuinely touched that I could hold something I do everyday as higher than the immediate needs of our conversation, he said, of course he could wait.

Still had the bluetooth headset on. So the company guy heard every word, and my son positively beamed me the biggest smile he could muster because I interrupted my work to give him a big hug, to wish him a happy day, and to say goodbye. Took only seconds.

Funny thing happened next. The vice president asked me about my son, his age (eight), his name. He knows I'm 26, and he remarked that it must have been hard to have a child so young, thinking he was mine since birth. I told him the circumstances. Both our parents dead. Julian being the product of a short lived second marriage with my mom, and my deciding to adopt my little half-brother. The vice president told me that eight was the perfect age. He spoke it in that wonderful way that older French men can when they think they are saying something of great importance. They slow down. Their voices get a little deeper. 'Savor every moment,' he said, 'because at that age, you are still a magnificent goddess to them, and they are old enough to know how much they depend on you for everything.'

Then we got back to work. Funny, but it sounded as though he was paying much more attention to what i was saying than he had before, like his image of me had been raised. I wasn't just some 26-year-old American woman of too low a pay grade to be talking to him. I was a loving parent willing to break the conversation just to say bye to my kid.

Ten minutes later, he said he had to go. "I need to call my son. He's 35 and we haven't spoken in a month. I need to tell him how proud I am to have him for a son. He'll be shocked that I called him from work, and perhaps he will feel almost as good as your son does now," he said.

I can cry at a moment's notice. It's something that really annoys me, so of course, there I was, sitting in my office and my eyes getting very watery. I felt good. I felt strong.

Everyday, we make these very little, incremental choices that are largely unimportant in the larger scheme of things. Chances are, I'll only remember this one if I stumble across this post sometime in the future. Little things that can be very meaningful in their own moment in time, little things that can make my son feel good, or make a father call his own son in the middle of a work day.

It's always because I am not thinking of my best interests at that moment, but of my son's best interests.

My life has changed.

Lord Of The Rings Online - If You Loved The Books, You Have To Try The MMORPG

By one estimate, about 150 million copies of the The Lord of the Rings books have been sold since they were first published in 1954 and 1955. Toss in The Hobbit, published in 1937, and you're up to 250 million. What is perhaps even more interesting is that this quarter of a billion total does not begin to do justice to how many times those books might have been read.

I don't know anyone who got through The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King who did not pick up the same books and read them again one more time. Roy and I have been through the books a total of eight times. Three times for me and five for him. As he has been frequently off in some remote part of the world doing climate change research, he says that pretty much all you have for entertainment at night are books. 250 million copies, but maybe 400 million to 550 million readings.

Even considering the fact that a lot of those readings were pre-personal computer age, and the fact that relatively few of the recent customers are computer gamers, I would say that you could probably aspire to a subscriber base of at least 150,000 to 250,000, if the game manages to give you at least a taste of what it might have been like to survive the Sauron years on Middle Earth. Once you get past World of Warcrack, Everquest, and Runescape, 150,000 to 250,000 is about as good as it gets for mmorpgs.

Perhaps the final impetus for the mmorpg was the wild success of the movie versions of the trilogy. They were not only amazingly successful. They also accomplished the rare cinematic feat of adding more fans and having successively bigger and bigger audiences with each sequel. The Fellowship of the Ring movie brought it $313,837,577 in sales. The Two Towers increased that to $340,478,898, and the Return of the King did even better with $377,019,252 in sales.

Consider all of those things together and the question isn't so much why they made a mmorpg version of the Lord of the Rings, but rather what took them so long to get around to it.

(unfinished post...much more to come)

The Morning After

The bad thing about a good party is, it always has to end. You always have to clean up and get back to reality once it is over. And as much fun as I'm having walking down Main Street today, seeing the big smiles on so many faces of people who may have for the first time gotten a grasp of what it is like to be a part of history, I don't have a lot of time for it. This must have been a little like it felt in 1969, the day after an American walked on the moon. You knew that this sort of thing could not have happened in any other nation on earth. But I digress.

I still have to summon the nerve to look at my 401k (which I started at age 18...such a practical girl.) And when I look at what has happened to it, thanks to Dubya's firm hand on the steering wheel (grrr grrr grrr), I have to remember that I have many, many more years to go before retirement.

I still have to write my last check out to The Ohio State University for my final student loan payment. It took more than seven years, but I did it.

I still have to figure out what to do with the little inheritance mom left me. Little... I say 'little' only because it is, as far as any mentionable inheritances go. I did a little math and figured out that Exxon-Mobil, the world's biggest publicly owned oil company, raked in almost $112,000 a minute during its third quarter...every single minute. My mom left me less than that, but I still sat and stared at the check for five days and cried before I deposited it into a money market account. It was the largest number of zeros I have ever seen on a check in my life. Five zeroes, and that's not counting the two other zeroes on the other side of the decimal point. I'm figuring this is going to be great to have for Julian's education.

I have to fire my accountant, and find a new one. Mine charges too much for doing too little. He's toast.

I have to narrow down the choices for our next home. Vancouver and Montreal were the only places outside the U.S. I was considering. And Montreal was the iffiest of the two since it only has one gaming company I might be able to work for, Eidos-Montreal. There are still five possibilities here in the U.S.

I have to finish going through all of my mom's old paperwork, not to mention a box of a lot of my father's old things that I never knew existed until I donned a mask and braved all the dust in the attic. One of the items is something I'm just not sure about. My mom kept a diary and I never knew she ever did that sort of thing. Not just a single diary either, mind you. There are volumes of them, appearing to stretch back over several years. And in the box of my father's things is this big yellowing envelope with my name on it. I can only assume that it was something I was meant to see after a certain number of years after his death. It's been 11 years now. Long enough, I suppose.

But not today. Today, these are too many things that involve the living to do, and they are not getting done any faster with me typing this silly blog.

Bye for now.

Wowzers

Obama, projected electoral votes: 338

McCain, projected electoral votes: 155

Needed to win: 270

Damn. And there we were getting all excited about Vancouver, too...

Election Day - Bush Cheney - The End of an Error

Roy: How do you feel today?

Me: I'm wrestling down this good feeling that keeps trying to break free inside me. But it's more difficult than I imagined.

Roy: Yeah, I know the feeling. It's like, if it happens, it means this country is still has a chance of becoming what I always hoped it could be. And if it doesn't...

Me: (interrupts him) ...don't even go there, I can't even imagine it.

Roy: (thoughtful for a moment) Have you given any more thought about where we will be? About where you want us to raise Julian?

Me: Ya. It came to me as I walked from the polling place, down the hill from the church on my way to the coffee shop. It was like...an epiphany. And I knew. It just felt right.

Roy: (smiling) You know, it gets awfully cold up there in the winter time.

Me: Nothing like the cold front that is going to blow through here tomorrow if this election doesn't turn out right. Besides, I have you to keep me warm.

Roy: (nine years I have known this man, and I can still make him blush, which he does) Damn good schools though.

Me: Much cleaner air. High tech explosion, and the game industry is huge there: Electronic Arts, Nintendo, THQ, Vivendi/Activision, Disney and Microsoft.

Roy: Very green, environmentally speaking...(he pauses)...you would be ready to do this? Really? The dual citizenship thing and all that?

Me: Yes. (I make the Catholic sign of the cross, over my heart) Oh, yes.

Roy: Is it about this election? Is that what focused you on this?

Me: Yes...(thoughtful for a moment)...We're not tied down here. We're free. We can do what we want, go where we want. It's our decision to make, and I can't see myself living here if we send a guy who thinks the Iraq War was a good idea to the White House. And that's just Item One on a very long list.

He wraps his arms around me. I close my eyes, my head on his chest, and drink him in. Nor for the first time, I wonder how I could have been lucky enough to find a man like this.

Roy: I hear the sailing is amazing up there. Maybe, once we've moved everything, we could sail up, the three of us. Just the wind for power. Not burn a drop of fossil fuels. That would just feel so...so fricking clean.

Me: And we'll have to live near the water, close enough to walk there, for the sunsets.

Roy: Vancouver...

Me: Vancouver...