Kondomari Damacy

#mariekondo #katamari
A little thing I made, seemed like a natural fit.

More EQ2 Homage

I was looking around for some images of EQ2 to use, since when I played it I was just playing it (I rarely took screenshots), and found a great directory of old images posted by a gamer here: http://img.surbane.net/index.php?/category/13 -- here's one they took, cropped down to just the one window.

Hilarious! That is, if you know that A Flock of Seagulls was a new wave band in the 1980s and their big song was "I Ran (So Far Away)". EQ2 is so full of homage to culture, it's great fun in that way.

Game Homage! Not Really

So fun when you find your name in a game! Ok my name is also an adjective and as an adjective isn't particularly uncommon. Here's a "hack the terminal by guessing the password" screenshot from Fallout 4. (A room mate of mine from a long time ago is in game design and had her name as a sign in one of the BioShock games, which was cool to see. This is not that, but it's fun anyways.)

More Borderlands 2 Homage

Two more examples to go with the previous post, although ones I ran into, not from Twitter.

The first one is from the movie Top Gun, referencing the Kenny Loggins song "Danger Zone", which is hilarious, in this quest, and the name of the quest is also a line from the film.

The second is from the amazing kids' book that you should all read, The Phantom Tollbooth.

More In-Game Homage

I have written, not at all exhaustively but somewhat extensively about in-game homages before, including one example from Borderlands 2. But I was in Twitter and ran into some Borderlands tweets about their in-game homage, although they referred to them as "Easter eggs" which isn't exactly how I would contextualize it. I like the topic, and the two examples they had, so present them here.

Homage is a great thing, and we love to play with the things we love, so there is cultural play, and being in the know about things also makes us feel special, or clues people in to what they should know if they don't so they can be in-group. In-game homage about other games is fantastic, but interesting given intellectual property laws.

The first, and if you're a gamer you won't need these explained, is homage to Donkey Kong, an early Nintendo game I played in junior high in about 1983 in the back of Sage's Jr around the corner from my school, and where you played as now-famous Mario. "Donkey Mong" is holding a barrel above his head, about to throw it, just like Donkey Kong.

This one refers to a current favorite, Minecraft, both via the blockhead appearance and part of the text refers directly to Minecraft (this could be an approved homage for all I know, it's unusually direct in the text and most homages aren't, they change something small like Donkey Mong for Donkey Kong).

Halloween in EQII

Well sure, there's Nights of the Dead or whatever, but here's some fun homage I mean IP infringement almost I mean homage. Hopefully the text flow is ok, but we have "Norm Baites" and we can also wonder how many licks it takes to get to the center of a… well just a lollipop.

Online Dating Math

If 1 in 5 (20%) relationships start online, that suggests that 4 in 5 (80%) start offline. Get away from your screen and go out into the world! Or something. And "See Pics of Single Women", really? What is this, a porn ad? I don't see that the Match.com people could have thought about the math much, or they think their audience is not very good at math. And yes they are probably trying to highlight the word "Free" but it shouldn't be capitalized, and they should know this is the internet where there are people who can do both math and grammar and insist on them being done correctly.

I Can Has Game

There is so much homage and cultural play in EQII I will have to stop at some point. Here is the I Can Has Cheezburger quest. (And yes that's one of my alts, in his guild cloak, but not on his flying mount, everyone has a flying mount now.) Notice it's a cat-person who gives you the quest, appropriately.

He's Dead, Jim.

Star Trek is all over the net. Everywhere. Even before the World Wide Web (and I'm not having a debate about capitalization or hyphens with that). But, I hadn't seen it in EQII, despite all the homage there, until now.

"He's dead, Jim," is the classic line spoken by Dr. McCoy (a.k.a. Bones) what seemed like every time someone or something died, which was quite often.

Someone has even made a little montage of "dead" quotes from Star Trek, mostly by Bones but not all.

Candy Humor

EQII also has plenty of cultural references, like a quest based on icanhazcheezburger. Here, though, is some of the Nights of the Dead (Halloween) candy, spoofing green M&Ms. (Nice M&M color chart in Wikipedia showing the timeline of changes.)

Seasonal EQII Homage: Norm Baites

There is so much homage in EverQuest II, it is almost ridiculous to continue pointing out examples, although it is nice to have some visuals in the blog. Here is one I think is seasonal, given the name of the character, Norm Baites, obviously playing on Norman Bates from the famous film Psycho. I'm not sure the character is usually there. Norm is wearing an EQII Halloween mask (Halloween is renamed "Nights of the Dead") of a nautilus-like creature and ends up looking like something from a Lovecraft novel. Given it's The Nights of the Dead in EverQuest II currently, Norm makes sense as a seasonal homage. You can see his name floating on the top of his head.

eHarmony Pimps the Virgins Again

Acronyms and MMOs

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we had games like World of Warcraft: multiplayer, Dungeons and Dragons-based, online worlds. Except they were text. They were called MUDs or MOOs, MUD for Multi-User Dungeon and MOO for MUD Object Oriented (a comment about the programming behind it).

We also had Dungeons and Dragons and a whole slew of other role-playing games, called RPGs.

Notice these all adhere to the three-letter acronym standard, which also has a three-letter acronym, TLA.

Eventually graphics and bandwidth improved, and we had graphics-based versions of MUDs. People started calling the MMORPGs, which was just stupid. No one called them MUDRPGs or MOORPGs. MMO would have not only fit the TLA standard, it would have thematically matched MUD and MOO, besides being visually similar to MOO (MMO, MOO, although they are "m-m-o" and "moo" like a cow, respectively, and MUD is "mud" like dirt).

Currently there are some people who use MMO, thankfully, yet there are, rather oddly, others who refer to MMOs as MMOGs. This is strange for three reasons:

1. It does not conform to the previous acronym method for these objects (MUD, MOO).
2. It does not conform to the TLA standard.
3. There is no other "MMO" so it's not as if MMOG is a clarification, the G is extraneous.

You could argue that MMOs are indeed Massively Multiplayer Online Games, and so you have to have the G, but given that an acronym drops so many letters already, why not one more? We already lost the Role Playing part. MMO is still just as clear, and as an acronym is 25% shorter than MMOG. (Overall, MMOG drops 27 letters, and MMO drops 28, which is not a significant difference in the loss of original information.)

Jon Stewart and Chatroulette

Yes, chatroulette's fifteen minutes of fame are over, but I was revisiting Jon Stewart's excellent piece on the fad (NSFW) and realized I should post about it.

The piece is notable because of its portrayal of much of the news media and their reaction to Internet things (note: "their" not "its" for news media since it is people, not a thing, I know it's incorrect grammatically but I don't like doing that, it's people). It also nails how people behave on the Internet as well (specifically, that some people like to behave badly and nakedly).

But it's also pretty funny since Stewart comments how most of the people he runs into are other reporters, doing a piece on chatroulette. It reminded me of academics and Second Life. There was a joke that, with all of the academics running around in Second Life interviewing people, they were only interviewing other academics...

Penny Arcade and Psychology

I have long suspected it, from their expressed wisdom... Or perhaps in contrast to the idiocy one encounters online... But, I would not be surprised to find that Tycho has an advanced degree in communication studies or psychology. (Of course, he doesn't, and he's making a very basic observation, but, one that some people never seem to get.)

All Your Hovercraft Are Belong To Eels

Sometimes there are things you should know about the internet. Or, the business version. 

It Does Not Just Work

I am occasionally moved to use strong language in email to certain close friends, since there is occasionally maddeningly inane material out there (well there always is inane material online, just it's worse when it comes from a source that should know better). 

One of these friends, however, works at a place that has filters on its email server, so I get a 550 "denied by policy" error every time (so infrequent I always forget). Oops.

So much for the Internet and the free flow of information.

Books As Technology

Besides being a big fan of Penny Arcade, I am also a big fan of books. They just work. And they are durable. I could expound on Innis' theories of time and space, but let's just say that books can easily be sent across space (no, not outer space, geographical space) and can also survive across time (with acid-free paper). 

Progress, at Penny Arcade

Will They Learn? TW and Phone Support

So, my Time Warner Cable Internet phone connection is not working. As you can see, my Internet service, provided by same, is. I had no dial tone this morning. So I went online to the TW phone assist page. It said chat is a great way to connect, but there was no active link. (Later it would appear that their chat starts at 1pm.)

Instead I try the Road Runner (Internet service) chat help, thinking they could point me to the TW phone help chat. But no. First, the web page asks for my information such as email address and name. Then I get a chat window. The first thing the tech asks for is my email address and name. Incredible.

Eventually he gives me a phone number to call. I hope you see the problem here, because he didn't. He also gave me a 15 digit ticket number. Does he really expect me to read out 15 numbers over the phone? 15? Are they insane?

I then got another tech in chat, via the phone help space, but he too said he could not help (but not why), and he too gave me a phone number to call.

What in the world is Time Warner Cable doing? 

(Luckily their phone people -- I went outside to use my mobile -- actually know what they are doing and fixed my problem, but they still ask for your phone number after you have entered it. If I give their system my phone number, they shouldn't make it so obvious that they don't use it in all the ways it would make my life easier. It's a simple information hand-off between systems. They can't do it. If they can't do such a basic function, what other basic things can they not do?)

A Series of Tubes

I have found the Internet! (A.k.a., "teh internets" but I hope you are all in on the in-group nomenclature by now.) It is, you recall, a series of tubes, another bit of insider lingo brought to us by convicted felon and former Senator Ted Stevens.

And yes I actually took that photo, it is not from teh googles.