狂い死に

In recent days my mind has dwelt on the idea of the proverb; those short phrases that embody some important truth in an elegant, easy to convey form. I have thought of how they embody truisms not only for a given culture, but in many cases for humanity as a whole.

Sometimes they represent some fact of life in a given subculture or endeavor. In the open source community they say “Release early, release often” because doing so is considered the best path to success. In the business and financial circles I’ve heard them say “Bulls win, pigs die” as a warning against excessive greed. “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, shows us the essence of the creative process.

Others, I think, provide a window into the profound mechanics of an entire society; simple constructs that nonetheless have wide ranging effects on a culture’s more visible manifestations. Consider these proverbs in light of the histories that spawned them: the Japanese say, “The nail that sticks up get hammered down”, while the westerners say “Fortune favours the bold”.

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It’s been a while since I have had time to write (the eternal lament of the lazy blogger), but now that the recent turmoil in my life is beginning to abate, I feel it is time to once again put finger to keyboard.

I was reading a story in this week’s Economist about another famine looming over the beleaguered people of Ethiopia. Ethiopia is like many other countries in the world; where the news is perennially bad and the disasters line up for a shot at the downtrodden. Myanmar/Burma, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe spring instantly to mind, but there are many others.

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It’s been a bit of a crazy month (illness, death in the family, changes at work, etc) so I’ve been a bit slow with the new posts. It seems everyone with a blog says that, but that’s the nature of things I suppose.

Example of the Rikaichan translator

I was at the game industry nomikai this week and a friend was looking for some good Japanese resources. Instead of hiding them away in an e-mail I thought I put them here so everyone could reference them.

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This has made something of an impact on the gaming community recently, and I felt compelled to share it with you. This is a translation of a story written by someone in Korea. It reminds me very much of my own mother. Mom, I love you.

Animal Crossing Story

Happy New Year everyone. I’ve been a little tardy on my posts lately, but it’s been a bit hectic despite the holiday. Some things are coming up that will be the subject of a future post.

I did get to play a few games over the holidays, although not as many as usual. I’ll be posting about those games separately.

Yesterday I got something of a pleasant surprise. One of my Christmas gifts from playasia.com came in late. It was Picross DS for (shockingly) the Nintendo DS. I’m glad it came as I was just on the verge of buying it; I love this kind of game.

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So today I activated my jump clone, purchased some second tier implants and made preparations to head out to my new home in nullsec. I decided to travel in a covert ops frigate that allows me to go into stealth mode, or “cloak”, whereby enemies cannot see me. This makes bypassing hostile ships a lot safer and easier. I can’t carry very much cargo with it, but as I’m just exploring right now, it’s not a major concern. That said, even with the ability to cloak, there is still risk.

Since I don’t really know the political situation out in the wilds of 0.0, I decided to base myself with Mordu’s Legion Command (MLC). Since MLC’s territory technically belongs to the game and not any player faction, it cannot be conquered. Thus it seems unlikely that I’d be stumbling into the middle of one of Eve’s many ongoing territorial wars. Basically, my hope is that Mordu’s region is a relatively peaceful area of space with enough people around to still have a functioning market.

This is not to say that it is safe. As I plotted my course from my offices near Jita, the galaxy’s predominant trading hub, to Mordu’s Legion’s Testing Facilities, I noticed something troubling on the map. The border system between Empire space and nullsec, Torrinos, had had 19 ships destroyed in the last hour and 12 pod kills (that is, the destruction of an escape pod). This was clearly a gate camp.

A gate camp is where a group of pirates sets up a no warp field around a gate and wait for an unsuspecting player to try and pass by. The no warp field prevents ships from easily getting away from the predators. It is, in essence, spiders and their web waiting for their flies. Once a “fly” stumbles into the net, the small ships will “tackle” their prey, slowing it’s escape further while the bigger, meaner ones blast it to the verge of destruction. At this point the pirates usually extort money from their victim by requiring a”toll”, or simply blow them away in order to steal cargo or because they are just jerks. With all the pod kills, I was betting on jerks.

As I approach the stargate in Torrinos, I prepare myself mentally for whatever lurks on the other side. Maybe nothing… Maybe a large group of pirates… I activate the gate and it asks me if I’m sure; the warning saying that 0.0 is lawless and the police can’t help me if I go forward. Pausing for just a moment, I hit the Accept button.

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Well, I’m super pleased tonight. As many of you know I’ve been playing an MMO for several years now called Eve Online. For the last several months I’ve been grinding to get faction (doing repetitive missions in order to curry favour with in-game governments/companies) with the Lai Dai Corporation to get access to their cloning facilities. Early this morning I finally made it and have a shiny new jump clone of my own.

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Valve has produced a number of cute videos to promote TF2 which show off it’s new visual style. I’ve got four videos for you from the “Meet the…” series after the jump.

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For those of you who don’t follow the gaming scene, one of the biggest games of the season is Team Fortress 2, which comes as part of The Orange Box by legendary developer Valve. The game is receiving a lot of well-deserved press over its art direction which brings a fresh, cartoony style to a genre which generally opts for a more drab, uninspired motif. The result delivers not only delicious eye candy, but enhances both gameplay and visual longevity as well.

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I’ve got to admit, this is a stupidly great idea. At FigurePrints’ website you can order a custom figurine of your very own World of Warcraft character.

After you’ve chosen a pose and a base, they’ll 3D print the figurine and ship it to you. The quality of the figure looks a bit dodgy, but it’s hard to tell without seeing one in real life. And really, does it matter?

With 9 million WoW fanatics players in the world today, even at $99/figure, these guys are going to make a ton of money. Heck, I hardly play WoW anymore and I want one of these.