Bloginati gathers up the RSS feeds for all the MMO developer blogs, it looks like. Shorter than signing them up in a feedreader, I suppose.
Alas, it only grabs the gaming category from here. Which means you miss out on the awesome Sunday Poem I posted yesterday. Really. Go read it. 😉
OK, this is for the geeks among us. In fact, it is geeky on many different levels. It merits explanation in advance.
Last night, I was working on a game I’ve been messing with. It’s circular, so there’s a lot of Sin(a) and Cos(a) and incrementing arcs and stuff. I was up until 4am, in fact, and needless to say, when you do that you end up with dreams. Mix into this the fact that at the Cub Scouts this past week, the demo was of optics, and we saw white light broken into the spectrum, and the wavelengths of the colors identified (and blue is damn close to 440 nanometers, and the note A is of course at 440 as well), an article I read a year ago about how the vibration frequency of the universe is the note A, how the composer Schumann (who went insane because of syphilis and mercury poisoning) was driven mad by hearing the note A… well, soon you end up with a poem that mooshes it all together.
Then, to top it all off, I wrote it in blank verse: iambic pentameter, with seven-line stanzas, and one extra coda line (alas, not 440 syllables — 290). The stanzas arose organically, but each verse really hated being in lines — words broken across lines, etc, like strands that shouldn’t be interrupted. So then I re-broke the lines to be in a sine wave. Because I could. They seemed to want to fall that way. Eerie, huh? 🙂
So finally, you’re left with a poem about, well, making games. And one I am tempted to annotate with Wikipedia links…
The Virtual Citizenship Association appears to be a recently founded group to promulgate rights for virtual world users. There isn’t a rights document per se up there yet, but it does start out by bluntly declaring that “living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there,” which under strict definitions seems a bit overreaching.
Their social contract includes the following points:
I really shouldn’t lust after this given that I have no iPod. But I do anyway. It’s basically a digital mixer for iPods, with four inputs (two phantom powered XLR, looks like), EQ and pan controls, a preamp, records direct to iPod, and it also works as an offboard soundcard/mixer for your computer.
We now return to your regularly scheduled gaming stuff.
Earth Eternal is the new MMO from Iron Realms, which of course runs Achaea and other text-based games. The graphics look charming and given their experience, I expect the gameplay to be pretty solid — and like their other games, it’s going to be free to play, with upsells for in-game items. Looks like quite a competitor to Runescape, in that case. Worth checking out.
I love the fact that this is a FAQ:
So many MMOs run out of money before release. Will you?
No. We’re completely funded, to the point where we can release and then operate for months with absolutely no revenue if need be. Earth Eternal will be released, period.
