I feel weak. I’m playing an MMOG that Wen got me into. I’m giving money to Sony. I’m in a game based on a franchise of movies that I maybe liked for about a week when I was a little kid and was impressed by special effects. I’m probably paying royalties to the man who forced the character of Jar jar Binks on us all. All this is true, and yet somehow, Star Wars Galaxies is a good game.

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After watching Kat’s band play tonight, I realized that there were some simple things that bands should be doing in order to improve their audio performance. They were actually a pretty good R&B band, but something about sonic flaws just irritates the engineer in me. The problem is, it’s very rare that the band is even aware of these little sonic problems, as they stand on the stage being blasted by a relatively clean monitor mix and the guitarist’s entirely too huge stack they’re forced to stand downrange of. Nobody ever tells them this either, since in general your audience is not made up of audiophiles, and they’re used to this sort of live mix. The sound guy is probably not going to tell you either, since live sound engineers, as opposed to good recording engineers, are generally people who pick up a night’s work for like $50 and a beer or six, are usually half deaf, and about half of them are such bitter people they don’t give a shit anyway. Therefore, with the incredibly unlikely goal of getting a better audio experience the next time Wen drags me away from my computer, here are some useful tidbits I’ve found helpful. Note that all of this could be for naught if the venue you’re playing has SHIT gear, a SHIT engineer, or NO engineer. A lot of little places have these problems. Suck it up, I guess.

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Truth be told, I wasn’t even interested in DAoC when it was being hyped and released. Wen badgered me into getting the game for her, and I tried it out for a couple of days and was slightly miffed to find that I sorta liked it. Then Wen snuck out and bought me a copy while I was asleep, and I continued playing it. My general impression was, "It’s Everquest without the sucky bits." Now if that statement makes DAoC sound derivative, it’s absolutely correct. However, when comparing something to EQ with the qualifier "without the sucky bits," you might as well be talking about an entirely different game. Most of EQ can be categorized as "sucky bits."

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Later on 11/7, two other versions of what happened during the dying days of SND appeared, on The Chosen and Mobhunter. The former is very similar to Down in Flames structure and information-wise but puts a positive spin on Myschyf (not surprising, considering that after SOMETHING BAD she approached them to take her on as a writer), and the latter is strange, concluding with a reference to EQ’lizer going down, a bizarre non sequitur but important to the EQ crowd I suppose. These accounts point out more rifts and personal conflicts that contributed to the site’s demise, miss some other details, add some details I missed, put different spins on details, etc. I have no problem with other versions of what happened, as long as they are as honest as possible and backed by research with multiple sources. What bugs me is when people say things like, "Thanks for getting an accurate version of this up there that does more than rumor-monger." It’s not so much that articles may similar to mine. The fact that the only other story up at the time was mine seems to imply that all I did was rumor-monger and didn’t have the facts straight. The whole concept of objectvism/truth is what bugs me, and I’m going to tell you now, in a situation like this, "truth" is a mutable commodity based on whom you talk to.

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This story was written as a tournament report for Max Longstreet’s Mage Knight clan’s private site. Since about 15 people will ever see it there, 10 of whom will think it’s a serious report, I am reprinting it here so that another 4 people can see it.

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(Note 3/25/09) An old rant I wrote while frothing at the insane imbalances and labor waste of an unregulated large scale economy, something people typically do when at the losing end of it.  Of course, slightly after this inflammatory lefty diatribe, I learned from Peter Strait via email that Buckminster Fuller had already solved this proof in a plausible fashion in Design-Science Revolution, so I could have just read that.  This rant goes up in keeping of my "live with the infamy" philosophy.

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I have no idea why gaming sites post things about real world events that do not directly affect gameplay. I furthermore have no idea why someone would choose to come to a gaming site for informed and useful commentary on disasterous events on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon. This is what CNN and the like are for, right? Therefore, it confuses me a lot when in addition to the usual emails I get on an almost-daily basis advising me to "UPDATE YOUR SITE DAMNIT," I also get inquiries about why I haven’t posted anything about the attacks. What the hell? Sure I have an opinion, as I suspect most of the world does at this time. What does that have to do with my site?

Then I realized that it’s not a gaming site anyway… it’s just a site I dribble little bits of useless stuff on from time to time as I feel like it. Considering the utter uselessness of information available at the mainstream gaming sites, and the utter stupidity of the crap going on at sites like AO-Basher, I am far from monopolizing the world of useless dribbling. So fine.

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