Anti-U.S.A. Shooter

by Onder Skall

Below is a clip from The Special Operation (Rescue Nuke Scientist), a video game released in Iran by a bunch of students. It’s a first-person shooter where you have to save a captured scientist from those evil Americans who have an obsession with global military dominance. I guess.

As you can imagine people are pretty upset about it. Patriotism is Religion 2.0 these days. If you can put that on hold for a moment, though, this game suddenly becomes inconsequential considering the number of games out there involving killing people in other countries (including Iran). Turnabout is fair play.

Yeah I know I’m supporting “evil” or something blah blah blah here come the religious fanatics… guys. It’s a game. Pixels. Students made it. Nobody dies when people play it. If it’s used for “training” the soldiers will all figure they have “damage meters” in real life and just need to touch “health packs” to heal. It’s ok, really. I mean, far be it from me to prevent you from getting your hate on but…

(via GamePolitics)

SiCKO

Second Life Townhall Meeting 05/03/2007 - Cliff Notes

by Onder Skall

For those of you reading this long after the fact, this is the Town Hall meeting where the Lindens respond to our demands to make the grid stop crashing. It was long and didn’t say much. See the official transcript provided by the Lindens.

This is a summary that I wrote, originally published in the Second Life Herald, to keep you from having to sort through the mess. Also see the complete uncensored transcript.

If you the short version of the town hall, see below. If you want in-depth descriptions or everything nice and polite, see the transcript.

- Firefox integration? - Who knows when that’ll happen.
- What kind of superhero would Cory be? - Every kind.
- Voice chat? - It’s super great!
- Backing up inventory, restoring inventory? - No, we’re just going to make it so it doesn’t crash anymore.
- Can you fix Search? - We’re reworking it to make it spam-resistant. (No mention about stability, uptime guarantees, etc…)

Feature: Dissecting Jack’s Lies

by Onder Skall via Kotaku

I feel for those who’ve been touched by the recent tragedy in Virginia, but I’m too busy being overwhelmingly disgusted at the twisted freaks who are trying to use this to advance their own agendas.

Not that I’m calling any lawyers twisted freaks in the above statement… and this picture of Jack Thompson is just here because of how handsome I think he is, not because I think he needs a major reality check and is making the rest of our lives hell in order to feed his own sense of self-satisfaction or anything…

Here’s a completely random quote from Kotaku that for legal reasons I’d like to remind you in no way is meant to imply that anybody is a twisted freak:

Just hours after the shooting on the Virginia Tech campus, Jack Thompson worked his way onto national television to attempt to tie the tragedy to video games - hours before authorities had released any information about the suspect or his motive.

Please read the Kotaku article entitled “Feature: Dissecting Jack’s Lies” to your mother, your grandmother, and especially to your teachers.

Now, the twisted opportunistic freaks of the world just don’t know when to quit. Not that I’m calling Dr. Phil a (possibly litigious) twisted freak for the things he’s said here, either. I’m just talkin’, ya know… theoretically…

BoingBoing BOOM

Holy crap.

So here’s what happened: I got a little obsessed with Areae Inc because Raph Koster really seems to “get it” and the advisory board he assembled is top-notch. They’re building something incredible, I know it. I so very much want in. (Raph - call me!)

Anyway… enough sycophantic nonsense from me… getting back to the narrative:

This follows various discussions about SL being down again, breaking yet another function again, making modifications nobody wants again, etc etc etc - but we all put up with it because, well, what else is there?

What else is there indeed!

I’m working on a few other things when this occurs to me, so I give the idea a quick once-over in the blog entry entitled “Alternatives to Second Life“. In order to make the idea work I come up with three criteria, and in full recognition of the fact that I’m making these criteria up based purely on my own experience, I call them “Onder’s Big Three”. The whole thing takes me maybe… I don’t know… an hour in total (in ten-minute spurts) and I pop the entry up on the blog without proof-reading or anything. This was just me wondering about stuff, and not at all my best work, but I wasn’t too worried about it. It held the info required, and besides, it’s just on the blog.

Along the way I mention it to Pixeleen, who likes it and pops it up on the Herald. The same day New World Notes pops up some reviews I wrote for them (with kind of an awful intro … hmm, I’ll have to try harder next week …). So, when I notice a bump in traffic, I assume it’s from NWN.

Of course, what I didn’t realize is that Alice from Wonderland had put a link to the article up in del.icio.us. Then Cory over at BoingBoing picked it up. Then all hell broke loose.

2,300 visitors yesterday. That’s visitors, not hits. Another thousand so far today. Whoa. *Onder waves*

Things get complicated from there.

SL’s business girl has a business life on British Air

[Originally posted to the Second Life Herald. BTW, check out Wonderland, it's one of my favorite blogs.]

Wonderland’s world-travelling gaming guru Alice reports that “business life”, an in-flight magazine for British Airways, carries a cover story featuring our own Anshe Chung. Unfortunately, as she puts it: “no mention of flying willies.” I guess you can’t have everything.

That cover art is really something, though. Anybody know how to get my avatar to look that smooth?

Speaking of Wonderland, Raph Koster (of Areae Inc.) ran an interesting comparison based off of Alice’s ponderings of NCSoft’s claims. A figure of 67 million was given as the number of NCSoft’s customers, although later comments clarified that this was a figure for total registrations. Sound like a familiar story?

Meanwhile, Raph says, Habbo Hotel claims 70 million. That’s a 7 with one-two-three-four-five-six-seven zeroes after it. After a wild claim like that, is it even humanly possible to feign shock at Linden Labs’ population claims?