Thanks to AFKGamer for pointing this out: World of Warcraft fans are organizing their own festival in Los Angeles third week of April, at which time the official release will be five months old.

Just make sure it isn’t at Fry’s. (NYTimes password-deprived summary: Blizzard held a late-night box-signing party at a Fry’s Electronics store near their HQ in Irvine. By the time the devs arrived, 5,000 people were clogging up the parking lot and the road leading to the store. Doh.)

Most of the new links are thanks to Lum. Didn’t get all of his links added (or re-added,) because I am an elitist bastard and not everyone has something to say, or at least not that’s been able to grab my attention and hold it.

It’s tough work being the center of the MMOG-blog universe.
Continue reading More menu tweakage…

So Dave Rickey is ranting again, and has a job providing creative direction to Virtual Horse Ranch. And he’s apparently learned some humility.

And he’s in Austin. Fuck. And he’s linked this site. Fuck.

Got this in my box, as I’m on Bob McGoldrick’s e-mail list:

This is just a friendly reminder that the next video games First Friday Seminars will be a week from Friday, on Mar. 4. This month’s seminar features Brian Urbanek from Ninjaneering. Brian will be speaking about “Matching Substance to Style – Tuning mechanics and interface to fit your theme”. The spring lineup is on my web site. I hope you can make it.

Brian Urbanek is aka Balseraph, from when he worked at Wolfpack Studios on Shadowbane. I am so going.

This is the gun I die by. I’ll miss the occasional Page 2 writeup on ESPN.com, but he and Oscar De Acosta are no doubt partying somewhere at the end of the tunnel, where the only light is at the end of a cigarette, and the only cigarette is screwed into a holder. Or something.

I’d read the spoilers and summoned all my logic about why an action film with a first-time director starring a baby-faced talentless actor released in February when people only go to movies because there’s nothing else to do, and went anyway, expecting this movie to be as terrible as I could imagine.

I could imagine worse. I’ve walked out on worse. I stayed until the end for this one.
Continue reading Constantine…

Reply to Lum, in his reply to Dundee, about how the top five MMOGs will always be “fantasy.”

Once again, however, Lum states the belief that other concepts are possible (it’s really more of a hope, without specific expectations, right?) without offering what he thinks is a viable alternative. Not that I blame him. If he had a really good idea, he’d probably keep it to yourself, lest someone rip him off. (It’s happened before, with other things.)

Maybe the problem is that MMOGs are still tied by the umbilicus to MUDs, and aren’t 70 percent of all the competitive MUDs in history just some generic fantasy world? And aren’t the rest of them ripping off some established oeuvre? How can MMOG makers expect or be expected to wrench their brains out of that way of thinking, when it’s all most of them know?

Truth be told, I don’t think it’s “fantasy” or “D&D” that’s distracting so many from the great vagaries of the Next Big Thing. It’s in the subtext of his previous post — a rip on the latest propaganda from game-macro whorehouse IGE — that MMOGs have become so mired in game mechanics meant to cater to players with the most amount of free time, it’s given rise to third party companies bent on dropping spores in the great, weeping, festering wound.

Companies like IGE don’t care about “fantasy,” because their customers don’t care. If the problems that spawned IGE follow into the Next Big Thing, it won’t matter whether it’s “fantasy” or something else. It’ll be just another world to use up and throw away like Kleenex. Just like what’s happening now.

Read n3rfed for more funny IGE ribbing. And never mind that he agrees with Dundee. Ubiq doesn’t, but he’s not about to give away any useful ideas any more than Lum is. Then again, his favorite two stock answers to problems, at least when he’s feeling optimistic, are “not insoluable” and “non-trivial.”

I’ve lost a lot of it lately. Somewhere between fretting about my job and my money and my responsibilities, I got to feeling I was losing control. Which wasn’t true. I’ve had the same amount of control over my own destiny I’ve had since I moved to Texas (all of four years ago — time flies on Internet time.)

Morgan Spurlock is having a much better life than I am. Yeah, reading your own book aloud for a book tape is rough. So is posing for the camera with Morgan Freeman. Bastard. You know he’s going to win the Oscar, too. And he deserves to. Red-haired coal miner’s stepchild bastard.

The trailer for Mirrormask (now showing at Sundance, hopefully coming to a theater near ordinary humans later this year) has the best take on the classic movie trailer verbiage I’ve ever read. And it looks pretty sweet, too.

Based on story and art by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, and produced by the Jim Henson Company, so how could it not be awesome?

It’s lagging at the box office behind simpler, less challenging films. It got rushed to the theaters to be in time for the Golden Globes and the Oscars. It’s got a twist ending that makes it difficult for anyone who saw it and loved it to talk about it in depth with anyone. Even saying it has a twist ending seems like giving something away. Roger Ebert even had to write a whole separate column about the spoilers other critics dropped (and for God’s sakes don’t click that link unless you’ve already seen the movie.)

I will say this: Million Dollar Baby isn’t a film about boxing, even though it was adapted from a book written by a 70-year-old boxing trainer named Jerry Boyd (under the pen name “F.X. Toole”.) It’s a film about regret, first and foremost — regret for what you fail to do, even with the best of intentions and a lot of hard work, even without having much of a chance.

Clint Eastwood is a damned fine director, and might well have a few more flicks in him after this one, if he doesn’t keep casting himself. Even when directing and producing and starring, he still finds the wherewithal to stretch himself as an actor — anguish is not an emotion he’s known for.

Hilary Swank has come a long way from The Next Karate Kid. She can damn well play a Midwestern girl, because that’s what she is (though she’s from Nebraska, not Missouri.) But it’s what else she plays, and how she plays it, that make her star shine in this movie.

Morgan Freeman, well, there’s a reason why you have him in a picture. He’s just as much a flickering candle as Eastwood, and we’ll all be sad when he’s gone.

Don’t believe what Ebert or any of the other critics say about the other actors in this movie — you barely notice them after a while, the characters are so paper-thin. Barely plot devices. This isn’t an ensemble cast; it’s a trinity. And that’s all you really need. No regrets.

Oh yeah, and sweaty chicks beating each other up is hot. If that’s what you’re into. Some people must have just got the wrong idea, which is easy to do.