Destination: Hell, Transport: Handbasket

I have a few Brightkite invites still available, let me know if you want one.

Think we’re living in a housing bubble and mortgage crisis? Sure we do. But what’s more, we’re living in a “you gotta be fucking shitting me” real estate environment. Take this property for example - it’s a fixer-upper, the seller says. It’s got one bedroom and a bathroom (showerhead over tub). It’s got a garage. And it’s in one of those not-so-ritzy neighborhoods of San Francisco.

“So,” you ask, “Jonas. Pray tell. What will this property sell for? Over here, in Anytown U.S.A. we’re getting gouged for close to $200k for something even as small as this.”

Not so, I tell you. You see, this is San Francisco. Home of the mother of all “you gotta be fucking shitting me” real estate environments. Over here, such a place will run you $429,000.

“Wow, that’s a lot of money,” you exclaim. And I’d agree with you. Only, well, that’s not all. If you thought that $500k for a 1BR/1BA is a case of holy-crap-ness, do I have news for you. Here’s what those $500 buy you. Read on after the fold for some images and a link. Really, sit down and think about this before you click. $500, one BR one BA. This thing better have golden statues squirting microbrewery beer and expensive wine from their nipples day in and night out.

You ready?

Clicky.

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Geocoding your photos is all the rage, these days. I admit to having been saved by it multiple times when trying to figure out which of the ten million coves and beaches I took one specific photo at. In the following paragraphs I’ll explore ways to associate photos with their location, some easy, some a little more involved. Not all of them generate geocoded photos per se, but I wanted to throw the oddball one in, as well.

This is a rewrite of an email I’ve sent to a few people, now, asking me for this kind of information, and a companion to the presentation on the same subject (which I’ll post later).

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A Black Orc - one of his moves is called "Right in the Jibblies", a quick kick in the groin area to generate threat and slow enemies.

Well, the day of reckoning is almost upon us. Another sign of the impending WAR-o-calypse is the lifting of the Beta NDA by Mythic, effective immediately. I am expecting truly massive onslaught of coverage in the following hours and days.

Which is - let’s face it - the way to go. By keeping the lid on WAR information, Mythic ensures a flurry of Warhammer related information to hit the wires just as it is most convenient, marketing-wise: a month before the product becomes publicly available. That’s wise. By the time beta euphoria has died down, head-start players will get their fix of WAR (head start players purchased the game as a collector’s edition and are eligible to play on release servers a week in advance of everyone else, thus getting a head start). Shortly following that, there’s release.

Warrior Priest - His chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear. His three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to Karl Franz.

Previously (until now), I was allowed to say the following:

• Yes, there is a closed beta
• Yes, I am in it

Now here’s some more:

• Yes, there is a closed beta
• Yes, I am in it
• It truly rocks my socks
• It’s insane
• No, I will not be “quitting” any of the other MMOs I am playing

This means, in a nutshell, that WAR will be more or less a very “casual” experience for me. I love the closely tied PvE and RpR (PvP) aspect of the game, I am really looking forward to having not three or four but dozens of battleground “scenarios” alongside world combat and world RvR objectives, and - comparing Blizzard’s Open WotLK Beta with WAR’s RvR system - prefer it over other games.

That said, however, I don’t think any comparison between WAR and WoW is fair - thoug indubitably it’ll be drawn quite a bit. These games aim at different play-styles, different goals, and clearly WAR doesn’t try to be a WoW killer but a great game in its own right.

WP vs. Shaman - crazy man with hammer and marked abandonment of all reason fights crazy man with skull in hand and a marked abandonment of all reason. Sounds almost like the U.S. Congress.

Which brings us to the inevitable question of how “WoW” the game is. My answer? It’s adopted just enough of the MMO landscape’s tried and true paradigms to make the game better. Unlike, say, CoA and others, Warhammer doesn’t try to be different just to be different for the “we’re not WoW” sticker.

The game’s graphics are polished and pleasing to the eye. For someone who started his MMO life with Ultima Online (and considered it graphical overkill, considering we did just as well in MUD environments for years), graphics don’t mean as much as to, say, the new guy or gal playing Crysis for the nice explosions, but I am not one not to appreciate the graphical prowess of games.

Where WotLK is aiming to extend the horizon, however, applying gaussian blurs to remote objects and making everything look a little dreamy and very vibrant, WAR shoots for busy foregrounds and immersion through gadgets and widgets left lying around almost everywhere. Entering a village which has recently been ransacked by Destruction doesn’t just get you some widget corpses lying around and a smoking cart in the corner. You get half-eaten meals, burning fireplaces, blood dripping from walls, a child’s toy destroyed in the road, and more. The immersion is insane.

From the very start of the game you’ll have to make some decisions. Ideally your character will advance in more than one aspect. While this is central to many MMO (crafting, pvp, pve, influence/reputation), in WAR it is much more pronounced. Your starter area quests lead inevitably into the first so-called Public Quest (PQ), which will raise your “influence” with your current zone. Influence can then be used to obtain weapons and gear with superior stats than those you’d get from merely questing outside PQs. The cool knack here is, that PQ influence can be obtained in more than one way. Soloists can get there just as well as groups and those who join ad-hoc happenings. The end-result is the same, but WAR gives choices.

Just a little bit later most players encounter the first signs of the ongoing war - and with it many quests that require the killing of members of the opposing faction (or, in many cases, PvE quests in contested areas which will flag the player for RvR). Those who dislike RvR/PvP combat may just as easily skip those areas and advance at the same pace as PvPers. More than that - both, PvE and PvP, contribute to the games’ overall goal - to strengthen either side’s home city. Yes, that’s right, collecting wolf pelts and killing goblins or humans both contribute.

All things considered, WAR has the makings of a great new MMO and I can not wait to see it go live. It won’t “kill” WoW (if you hate WoW so much that you want to see it killed, why do you keep giving them money?) and as well it shouldn’t try. But it will likely get some good business from WoW players who are disenchanted with the current Arena focus in World of Warcraft and want to see a real PvP/RvR system implemented and become central to a game.

Expect some screenshots and videos over the course of the next few days. For more indepth coverage, there’s a bunch of really good websites out there, no need for me to become another WAR pundit.

Eye-Fi YellowScreen cleaning image

I haven’t written much about the Eye-Fi card, mostly because all the basic things (geotagging, automatic uploads, etc.) have been covered ad nauseum. Today, though, I think I found the coolest use for the card, so far.

I inherited a great, albeit not well kept, DSLR a few days ago, and decided to give the ol’ blower a go and see if I could get the camera’s sensor clean. Well, previously this was quite the work…

1. Create a cleanroom in my bathroom by running hot water and allow the steam to settle and take dust particles down.
2. Prepare the workplace
3. Take camera into cleaning mode
4. Clean sensor
5. Take camera out of cleaning mode
6. Shoot some white
7. Pop out the CF card
8. Run to my computer
9. Check the pictures for more dust flecks
10. Memorize the location
11. Bring card back
12. Pop card in
13. Back to step Three

Thanks to the Eye-Fi, I am saving on some of those steps. I just take my laptop into the clean room with me, and browse the folder on my desktop all Eye-Fi images are uploaded onto. The result is much less CF card hassle and a way for me to check up on specks without having to remove and re-insert the card.

This saved me a good 40 minutes today, cleaning that new/old camera. Hooray for cool gadgets. I enabled Flickr upload for a bit, here’s one of the images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jluster/2777086269/

The road (trip) to WAR has officially become a short walk over the hill with Mythic (formerly Mythic, then EA Mythic, no they didn’t leave, they’re just trying to avoid some of the stigma of being associated with the most-hated name in gaming) announcing the game’s “Open Beta” for September 7th, eleven days ahead its official launch on September 18.

It’s too bad I’ll have to re-level my Warrior Priest, but it’ll feel good for him to finally go “legit”.

I love Amy Dickinson. She’s one of the few sane voices in a cesspool of bad advice columnism, and she’s a riot (well, together with Tom Bodett, she’s the riot) on Wait Wait. But sometimes she gets it wrong. As in this case of a 20-year marriage going down the drain on, as the writer aserts, account of her playing World of Warcraft.

Amy’s response (I only use the first name, since that’s how the column is set up. I’d never address someone I don’t know in real life that way, else) is sensible but, alas, flawed in my opinion.

To reiterate the letter, “Walking on Eggshells” is married to his wife of twenty years. Recently, she’s started hanging out with her guild more and more, and even had an affair with another member of the guild. So far so bad. She neglects her family, spends insane amounts of her time in front of the computer, and becomes quite grouchy when approached.

Taking WoW out of the equation, this sounds like a very good example of a defunct marriage. One partner becomes distant, seeks out new interest groups and interests, even has an affair with someone else. 1970s text books called that “flight”, long before WoW was unleashed onto its unsuspecting victims.

Amy suggests:

Ironically, there are many online sources of support for online gaming addiction. One you would find useful is Online Gamers Anonymous, which uses a 12-step recovery model and offers support for addicted games and those worried about them: olganon.org.

To be fair, she also pressures Walking to go see a counselor with his wife, but neglects to mention something I find much more important - the “why”?

For one partner to flee a relationship into another community, to leave the bonds and duties of her family life behind, something has to be about that relationship in the first place. I am not suggesting that WoW isn’t her outlet for this flight, and it’s a convenient one which can be taken from the comfort and privacy of one’s own home, but it’s an outlet.

What World of Warcraft did, quite strongly, is open this outlet to a group of people who would otherwise maybe not have taken flight. Not for lack of want, but for lack of ability or comfort. It’s easy to log in, easy to have a non-committant chat with people, and meet new folks. This doesn’t make MMORPGs the culprit, it makes them yet another indicator of something wrong in a relationship if they are used as a means of flight.

Some argue, that this is akin to saying “the problem isn’t with Cocaine, it’s with those who use it and get addicted”. And to some degree it is. But games, just like sports, clubs, circles, alcohol, and drugs, won’t likely go away. And just like drugs and alcohol, all too often the symptom (drug abuse, alcohol addiction, flight) are blamed for a bad family situation and sought to be eradicated - rather than seeing them as one of the many indicators for a much larger underlying issue which, if not addressed, will manifest itself in another bahvioral pattern should the MMO outlet be removed.

Michael Morhaime: Due to these circumstances, we’ve reevaluated our convention hall space and come up with some solutions that will allow us to offer 3,000 more tickets for sale. We know this will not be enough to satisfy the very high level of demand for tickets this year, but we want to ensure that BlizzCon remains a great experience for those of you who are able to attend. To avoid the issues many of you faced this week, we’ll be selling these 3,000 via a lottery. We’ll post further details once our plans are finalized. Please note that the lottery will only be open to those with an active Blizzard Account as of 9:00 PM PDT on August 12, the time that the “Sold Out” notice was posted.

The cold updraft you’re feeling, right now, is hell freezing over. Which is to say, I didn’t see that coming. A half-arsed apology, delivered through a PR-department arranged “interview” with one of Blizzard’s back-pocket game magazines, I’d have bet on. But an apology such as this - my hat’s off to Blizzard.

Now, of course, there’s two questions. First, what will happen to those of us who are a “two tix or no tix” kind of deal? And secondly, more importantly, what are Blizzard’s plans for rectifying the issues caused by its store, such as multiple charges but no tickets, large amounts of accounts flagged as “fraudulent” by the CC companies due to the store’s malfunctions, and the cases of no tickets due to a store malfunction which prevented Firefox and Safari users from completing the last step?

(oh, yes, I am the master of bad titles)

So Qik is now out for the iPhone 3G. On Cydia, of course, there’s no chance in hell Apple will approve video streaming applications for the AppStore (One of my contacts tells me, AT&T already threw a medium sized fit when Apple announced it intended to support push technology above 1M data per day - how dare the unwashed masses actually use the data network they pay for?).

Couple of quick thoughts on this. First, Apple is slowly but steadily shooting themselves into both feet. Not only does the Fucking NDA create uncontrollable backchannels (which isn’t a problem for any company that actually values its customers and developers, Apple on the other hand…), its application selection process, which is driven by AT&T requests to ensure that users don’t use what they pay for, basically compels anyone - including John Q. Average - to jailbreak the phone.

Jailbreaking isn’t hard. And waiting two days until after official iPhone firmware releases isn’t hard, either. So everyone does it. Yes, yes, even my luddite family. It’s part of the “buying an iPhone” process, now, together with “buy a case” and “download Cro-Mag”.

Second thought - Qik just lept ahead of any and all competition by doing the right things. Releasing early, releasing onto Cydia rather than giving up on the idea, and making the application so insanely easy to setup, not one button needed pressing beyond the “record” one. That’s great mobile app design.

So, Qik, now it’s time to work on bugs and your next version, no? Adding location awareness would be huge, and CLLocationManager does all the work for you, in-phone.