Out of the frying pan and into the punch in the face.

A friend of mine said this:

How great would it be if, instead of holding the line for customer support you typed in your phone number and they called you back?

Great idea. Though it reminded me of that lift problem, except in reverse.

If people no longer sit on a call waiting line and instead wait for someone to respond, will it feel like it takes longer? Or more accurately, will it feel like the people you are attempting to reach are putting less effort into calling you?

Just a thought…

(Yes, I moved to LA. I should talk about that at some point…)

Why do we have an image element?

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include>; element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

It’s a hugely important point that seems to be rather lost among peer coding and reviews and architecture diagrams and forward-thinking generic frameworks that could some day save us a world of hurt because we might maybe sort of kinda do this maybe thing that might maybe be a problem later… but certainly isn’t now.

So I am in the beta / preview / thing (it’s attached to my standard email addr).

Any of you guys want in? My Brother has a bunch of invites…

Despite what you may have heard, Batman is not dead!

He’s actually hiding out in the Auckland waterfront:

R.I.P. Geocities

[View Hi-Def version]

The store owner sort of had oddly dead eyes, but the rest of it was pretty amazing, visually.

After playing Fahrenheit I’m still not convinced that there is actually good gaming to be had from a game made entirely from QTEs, but I wouldn’t hasten to call this a game. Games like Monkey Island are really more just light puzzle games with a good interactive story attached (some, like The Longest Journey, seem to more or less ditch the puzzle element all together in favour of satirically apostrophized ‘puzzles’ which wouldn’t challenge a four year old let alone a drunk 24 yr old) and I think Heavy Rain is just a continuation of the theme.

Which is fine for people like me who enjoy the whole interactive story-telling thing (Bring! Back! Grim! Fandango! etc), but I don’t think the square-shouldered cigar-chomping shotgun-toting audience much cares.

Luckily for me, the games market is becoming large enough that the genre that died in the early 2000s seems to be coming back. Monkey Island is getting remade, Sam & Max was remade, The Path, Dracula Origins, plus various franchises are getting adventure-game-ised, such as Nancy Drew, Wallace & Grommit, Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. OK, some of them suck (zomg Nancy Drew, I am not your target audience) but it’s really good to see a resurgence like this.

…

So… how about some Grim Fandango 2 then?

PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE?!?!

It’s so true it’s both hilarious and sad.

Currently I have 3 times the range of any NPC pirates I fight. Combine that with an afterburner, and I’m essentially invulnerable. Having said that, these are NPCs, which is not where the action is. They’re starting to disrupt my target locks though, the tricky little devils. Maybe I’ve just over-level. It’s so damn hard to tell, since there are no levels.

Or maybe I should man up and do some PvP… but I get a feeling from reading the forums that I’m not even a noob, I’m a sub-noob. People talk about how it’s totally possible to do PvP* with under 10mill skill points, you just have to not be an idiot about.

At <800,000SP, I think I’ll wait awhile longer.

*Solo PvP that is. There is constantly talk of corps like EvE University, which take out groups of 20-30 noob pilots in crappy ships (Frigates) into low / null sec space and teach them about PvP, where together they are able to kill small other players in much nicer ships.

If We Had No Moon — Narrated By Cptn Picard

Be sure to listen out to the part where Jean-Luc utters the phrase “Ask a guard” in a deep, precise British accent. WoW players, I expect a frag video from this, get back to me.