I’ve not yet left the United States to see foreign parts, but my music collection has gone far and wide. In a bit less than an hour you can visit the Congo, Amlapura, Kashmir, Beirut, London, Leipzig, Moscow, Bangkok, swing through California (domestic and yet alien), and end up in a couple of very cold places like the mountain K2 and the continent of Antarctica.
Have you packed your bags, or at least your headphones? Okay then, enjoy your trip!
David Morgan-Mar is an awfully clever fellow, the man responsible for the inaccurately named “Irregular Webcomic.” Today’s entry is amusing on its own merits, but what broke through my general posting malaise is the commentary he wrote to go along with the comic. To wit:
Nothing anyone does can invalidate the pleasure you got out of enjoying some work of fiction or art in the past. You enjoyed it – you can’t un-enjoy it.
This is why, even though the last few years’ worth of (for instance) Anne McCaffrey’s writing output disappointed me on various levels, I can still go back and read the books I love without the experience being “tainted” by what comes later. I don’t grok the notion of being “betrayed” by an author or musician or filmmaker.
Anyway, go read Mr. Morgan-Mar’s commentary on “betraying the fans,” a good piece of writing that I wholly agree with.
I’ve always had a few knacks, among them a knack for being proven wrong almost immediately after making a definitive statement. This time the knack which has bitten me in the backside is that which gives me the utmost in perfectly ironic timing. If I do something, there’s a good chance that if I’d simply waited a day or two I’d have known not to do that something.
On Sunday I purchased the license code for the City of Heroes/City of Villains “Good Versus Evil” edition for the kids’ account so they could get some extra character slots per server and go into supergroup bases and such like that. So, guess what yesterday’s press release from NCSoft had to say?
Today we announced the acquisition of City of Heroes from Cryptic Studiosâ„¢ and the formation of our new Northern California studio which we are informally calling NCsoft® NorCal […]. Nearly the entire City of Heroes team from Cryptic Studios has joined the NCsoft team and together we have formed the core of our new studio.
Okay, so far so good. What’s the catch?
All players with City of Heroes retail accounts will now have access to City of Villains, and all City of Villains retail accounts will now have access to City of Heroes. Players that didn’t previously have access to “the other side” will find that they do now.
Oh. Well… I suppose that’s a good thing… for people who didn’t plunk $30 down for said “access to City of Villains” a mere 48 hours beforehand! Dagnabbit.
(It bears mentioning, footnote-style, that the “GvE” edition provides a few in-game perks that probably won’t be given away with this “access to” bonus from NCSoft. Still, I could’ve bought the code for said perks alone and spent twenty dollars less. Such is my life, eh? And the kids get the benefit now instead of having to wait ’til NCSoft blesses everyone. So. There’s that, at least.)
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Excuses I have. I’ve been sick for a week and a half, missing two days of work during that time. My job has become more tiring and tedious. My personal life is in a state of flux. I’m broke, in spite of landing a substantial bonus from work last week. (That’s that last of those I’ll be seeing any time soon, too.) The mornings and evenings are darker, in the “sun rises later and sets earlier” sense if not the metaphorical sense, so I’m engaging in my annual battle against the onset of seasonal depression.
I considered joining one of the “national something-or-other month” activities such as NaBloPoMo. (During a particularly manic phase a few days ago I decided that I was going to do BloPoMo with a theme, such as “30 days of musical artists” or “30 days, 30 anime” or some-such.) I even considered WriMo, which I have insisted for years that I’d never do again. I realized, however, that I’d end up even more depressed if I started something like that and then failed to complete it. Given my track record with unfinished projects lately it seemed the better part of valor to forgo that particular form of punishment.
So, this month I’m just going to sit back and participate in my own little event: National Do Whatever Month. You may get a couple of the music mixes I came up with. You may get a rambling about animation from that planned theme. You may get two weeks with no posting whatsoever… yeah, that would be new around here, wouldn’t it? At any rate, I have several unfinished posts that need fleshing out and tidying up, so it’s not like I don’t have anything to say. (Of special note is the upcoming photographic journey through the building of the Very Expensive Media Center Computer.)
If nothing else, I can at least take some comfort in the fact that October is over. Hooray.
For what it’s worth, the comments portion of this journal now supports Gravatar images. Now that they’re owned by the WordPress folks, I figure performance shouldn’t be too much of an issue going forward.
What can I say? It’s an excuse to use “buddy icons” in my journal. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.
Well, this is amusing. And by “amusing” I mean “annoying and frustrating,” of course.
A while back I posted an entry containing a music selection. Several comments were made at the time, and then life moved on. This is all normal so far. This morning, however, I saw two new comment notifications in my mailbox for that entry… and one of them looked really familiar.
It should have, since it was Kyla’s comment exactly, repeated by someone claiming to be “GoDaddy” using GoDaddy’s support email address. The next comment from them was a few characters of gibberish… which got approved because the previous comment was approved, probably because it looked identical (from the spam filter’s perspective) to an existing comment.
So, yes, I deleted them both and marked the gibberish comment as spam. I just hope this isn’t the new trend. I have enjoyed a couple years’ worth of peace and quiet on the spam-fighting front and don’t want to go back to the bad old days of playing whack-a-mole.
Hell of a way to start my Friday, let me tell ya.
