As you may have noticed from my twittering (or lack there of), it’s been quite a slow day today. Nothing special as far as news that I’ve seen. Nothing too crazy in the WoW department either. Work was quite slow, too. Just one of those days I guess.

During my slow day at work, however, I did run across a couple cool video series if you’re into WoW Machinima. The first one is Azerothian Super Villains. ASV, as I’l call it, takes a rather humours approach to the current super villains of WoW and their attempt to take over the world! They have a nice mix of “Pinky and the Brain” type of humor as well as little touch of a little insanity. It centers around Illidan, Archimonde and Kael’thas. It’s a good watch.

The other one is Chronicle of Annoying Quest, which has a bit of an EverQuest ring to it. I actually hadn’t seen this yet. I saw the first 15-20 seconds of their 20th video and decided I had to watch them in order! Sadly, dumb ass WoW Movies makes it extremely hard to tell what the order is: the title of the video, which contains the episode number, gets cut off in their minimal space.

Here’s an interesting article my step-mother sent over today. It is quite a conversational piece. Quite frankly, it tries to paint men as “child-men” because they like gaming and getting married at a later age.

I have to say, from a “SYM” perspective, I think the article was written by a woman. Oh hey, what do you know, just looked at the credits and it was. Well, sit back and grab a bag of popcorn, this turned out to be a long post. ha, oops..

Okay, to start off, I think this article is confusing two things into one. Lets start off with the gaming thing. The “adolescent child-men” as she calls them. It’s quick obvious she doesn’t understand men. This isn’t surprising though. I don’t understand women. Women and men just don’t “get” each other — that’s why so many things are “compromised” when they get married (as a guy, the “rule of thumb” is guys compromises more). Guys enjoy gaming, women do not. So what happens when a guy that grew up on gaming consoles grows up? He chooses not to “compromise” and keep his games. He gets into a field building the thing he loves — games. He realizes he doesn’t like bright colored games, and decided to build something his new adult mind would appreciate: it’s still a game. Women either compromises and learns to love these men or they get complete turned off and see them as “adolescent child-men.” Unfortunately, from my understanding of women ( ^ read above, I don’t understand them ^ ), they are more often turned off by “adolescent child-men” before they can understand the guy. Kay is very obviously one of these women. The sheer fact she calls men that play games “child-men” nails it.

Secondly, the issue of men remaining single for longer periods of time, not wishing to get married, just having fun, etc….She starts off with the example of 1965 where men often date and regularly marry women they meet in high school and how this doesn’t happen anymore… Well, pardon my language, NO SHIT?! Why? It’s quite simple: society has gotten SO hostile towards sex (and anything related — kissing, holding hands, even LOOKING), that many guys just say screw it. They don’t want to deal with the hassle while they’re still under the eye of the officials (school, parents, etc) and leave it alone until college (where it’s more “expected” now).

Lets jump back farther in history than 1965. Lets go back to 1865 — kids were “adults” by the time they are 14, often right after the “average age” of puberty. Over the years, that age as increased. I’m guessing due to parents and society trying to “protect the children.” If that trend continues, you won’t be an “adult” until age 30 in the next hundred or so years!

Now, you have a 14 year old kid, who is now officially sexually mature — by scientific standards, an official adult — being plugged into a society that’s afraid of sex. Want to watch somebody getting shot in the face? No problem! Want to see a womans breast? OMG! Close the curtains! Cover their eyes! Slap a law suit for destroying our youth! Call the national guard! What is wrong with our society when our natural hormones are so wrong? It’s gotten so bad, kids are not allowed to kiss at school; some schools don’t even allow them to hold hands! And you wonder why kids don’t meet their wives in high school?

Lets then couple that with what’s happening — suppression. So now this kid has a choice, suppression his natural feelings, or go against authority. Authority here being school, parents and society. Many of them just suppresses it, consciously or subconsciously. Now, high school is over, and they goto college. This part is important, it’s the whole away from parents and away from “high school — no touching” mentality. Kids go crazy, providing they actually got away from the suppressing authority. And wouldn’t you look at this: Kay even says here, kids these days don’t meet their future wife until college. Gee, I wonder why?

I know this might come off as a bit of a rant, but it’s a direction I see the US heading towards and I hate it. The hostility towards gays is stupid. The hostility towards pre-marital sex is stupid. The hostility towards anything sexual is stupid. What we should be hostel towards is violence. Society says they are but they don’t show it. Have you taken a look at prime time TV Lately? Show a naked ass and you’re fined $50k. Show somebody shot in the head (as long as there’s no visible blood!) and it’s remains PG. Am I the only one that sees something a little backwards here?

Maybe it’s because I don’t kids? I don’t know. I sure hope it’s not that. Because when I DO have kids, I sure as hell don’t want them to be suppressed or afraid to say or talk about anything sex related with me. I want them to be completely open — and I know the only way for that to happen is I have to be open with them. And yes, that does mean allowing them to see porn without any recourse. It IS the human body after all. Kids should be taught to respect it not fear it.

Okay, I will admit straight up front, I have not played the game at this time. I’m not a big pirate fan (they are cool, but I’m not all huge into Pirates like some other people). But, I am curious as to why people were calling this the next big MMO. A friend of mine sent over this rather lengthy review of the game, which is very good. It’s very long and quite detailed. There is a lot of good information about the game itself and how it would play.

PotBS is definitely a new type of MMO out there. Your a player; the captain of your own ship. You “level up” by gaining skill, and more / bigger ships. Combat is limited to three styles, but with over a hundred different animations, with reactive animations based on your opponents attacks. The developers went to great lengths to make this game as authentic as possible. All in all, it looks like quite a solid game that would please the pirate fiend.

But why wouldn’t this be the next MMO? Read the rest of this entry »

I have to say, one of the most frustrating things in the world is trying to troubleshoot a problem with a hobbiest coder that doesn’t know the first thing when it comes to code. He knows “this does this” but he does not understand why “this does this.” The most annoying case is when you tell him it can only be one of three options, but he insists it has to be something. I mean … hello? I am a programmer by profession; I’ve been debugging and troubleshooting code for well over 10 years now. When I say it can only be one of n options, it is only one of n options. Never-the-less, he doesn’t take my advice, even though he is the one that came to me, and we spend tones of more time than necessary debugging the problem. I finally tell him to make a change, to test you know. He does and wouldn’t you know it: he now realizes “omg, it’s this one problem” (which happened to be one of the n items I told him previously).

Here’s a tip for your new programmers: code does exactly what you tell it to do. It doesn’t so any more or any less. If it’s not doing what you expect it to do, it is because you’re doing something to make it not process like you expect it. It’s not the HTTP protocol that’s broken. It’s not PHP that’s broken.

Anyway, I just had to get that off my chest. This guy is a nice guy, and he has a ton of connections … but my god, he doesn’t know the first thing about programming. He also refuses to learn as I’ve tried, many times, to get him to read a book on programming. It’s sad; he has the desire to learn, but he doesn’t desire to learn properly. I fear this mod of his is going to get ass raped by the vB community once he releases it. However, I don’t dare to tell him this or else he’ll want me to go through all his code, line by line, to find and fix all his coding problems. 0.o

I was planning on writing some kind of post today, but I’ve spent the last 5 hours absolutely frustrated with my internet connections. It got so bad once, I couldn’t even load up www.att.com. It is absolutely horrible. I’m totally shocked I can run this internet radio stream flawless (so far). There are packet losses everywhere. Traceroute shows things dropping left and right within TimeWarner’s network. I don’t know WHAT they did, but they sure f’ed up something bad.

Sadly their customer server is closed….it’s good tough. I definitely did NOT want to be on the phone for over an hour, waiting for a customer service rep.

Our broadband market is completely fucked up. TimeWarner RoadRunner cable or AT&T DSL. Those are my only two options and nobody guarantees bandwidt, even if I bought a higher package. Sad, isn’t it?