So there’s a recent kerfuffle involving accusations of corruption in EVE Online, the game not the ecofeminism. There were some accusations of the developer colluding with favored players that created a stir. Then, after a delay, the game company responds that they’ve been framed; via Slashdot:
“The objective of this scheme was to permanently paint CCP as a biased and corrupt company that favors a select group of players over the rest of our community. In this particular case, instead of receiving notification of a possible problem and sufficient time to examine and address it, we faced a coordinated and hostile attack executed on our forums, Digg, Wikipedia, Slashdot, and other outlets at the beginning of a three-day weekend.”
Back to the present, there’s a conspiracy involving a group of players that embroils the game developers of the game in which complex capers are enacted in a real life caper. Now, that’s ironic and deeply interesting.
I was pretty impressed by the 12 month quest that the players created for themselves back in 2005, but today I find myself reflecting that this is a game where the players have forced the developers to play a part in a game-related quest designed by the players. The players gamed the developers and nerfed the game and the developers in real life.
mmorpg, eve online, quests, conspiracy, irony, petard
I loved this episode. Don Rickles was fantastic as he caught all the regular cast flat-footed. Some day I will find this episode again, but it never seems to get played. Hmm …
“The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer has a history dating back to 1922, when seven past-presidents of the Engineering Institute of Canada attended a meeting in Montreal with other engineers.”
“The iron rings given out in Canada are made from the wreckage that was left after the disasterous failure of the Quebec City Bridge on August 29, 1907.”
“To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or a
“‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re his
“Social design is a subset of design that focuses on the social lives of users. It deals with the activities, behaviors, and motivations of people who work and play together through software interfaces.”
“Indi Young, a Founding Partner of Adaptive Path, specializes in task analysis and navigation repair. She is also the creator of the mental model diagram and gap analysis process.”
“The thread and the wiki prompted me to look at how Second Life is being used at the Harvard Extension School, where I am currently a graduate student.”
“It came to my attention several years ago that some virtual organizations can be more efficient than ones where people meet face-to-face on a daily basis.”
“Fueled by vision and passion for their life’s work, their drive often comes from within, leading to an endless cycle of self-examination and rediscovery. Without that cycle, they would rarely push themselves to greater heights …”
“Creative Interchange Institute, Inc. (CII) supports changing organizations by preparing them to effectively manage organizational change, navigate through transitions, and enhance their capacity for growth.”
“Lumin8 is a mind/body technique that enables us to perceive people, events and things. Clients gain deeper awareness of themselves and their relationships, uncovering and resolving issues with velocity.”
“ICD is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank and center for advanced leadership training dedicated to clarifying and supporting the kind of understanding and leadership a vital future will require.”
“I was spawned uncounted aeons ago, in the dark mists of Khhaa’yngnaiih (no, of course I don’t know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds), of nameless nightmare parents, under a gibbous moon.”
“Fore-edge painting, or foredge painting, is a hidden art in more ways than one – a little known technique that reached the height of its popularity in Victorian times and has since virtually disappeared.”
“The method was to fan the fore-edge of the text block (the outer edge) and clamp it. Then, a water color painting would be executed on the fanned leaves. When dry, the fore-edge would most commonly be gilt, less commonly marbled. With this concealment, t
“Then he spelled out the words the letters stood for: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. Gunn’s last words to the lawyers before he adjourned the morning session were ‘Remember this: vuca is where history happens.’”
“The Nag is Anti-Apathy’s boisterous new web campaign that makes it very easy for you to do one thing a month to live more sustainably, taking you step-by-step through one low-effort, high-impact action around a lifestyle theme such as energy, food or fas
“Anti-Apathy* (AA) promotes awareness and action for positive social change and offers refreshing ways to connect you to the politics and economics behind your every day life, from fashion to free trade and everything in between.”
“Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment.”
“Thus rises The RoguelikeTemple, as a media to keep you informed on the development of the genre, the new projects, the people involved, everything you need to know is here!”
“Thus rises The RoguelikeTemple, as a media to keep you informed on the development of the genre, the new projects, the people involved, everything you need to know is here!” These run in JavaVM, so are cross-platform.
“The electronic P-I will carry real-time news, same as the Internet, not yesterday’s news like traditional papers. Readers will turn the e-paper’s pages by touching the flexible screen. And when those readers head off to work, they will roll up the electronic P-I and stuff it in their pocket, purse, or briefcase.” [via]
“… Our dream of technology is that is will give us back nature …” [Lee, Iara. "Synthetic Pleasures." @ 17:00]
“Girl-Wonder.org is a collection of sites dedicated to females in mainstream comics. Our goals are to foster an attentive, empowered audience community and to encourage respect and high-quality character depiction within the industry.”
“You make sugar-ally water, I’m told, by crumbling the sticks into a jug with a glass of hot water. Then you put it under your bed and leave it overnight. In the morning you’ve got a sweet liquorice water drink.”
“Finally, all that remained were the shaking bottle ceremonies which are to be found connected with holy wells all over the country. Pieces of liquorice were put into a bottle and mixed with water from the well.”
“Water taken from wells on Ascension -tide morning was also bestowed with curative properties. It was often mixed with sugar or liquorice and given to children to drink.”
“Then the painting is tricked or ‘clobbered’ with liquorice-water, and other artful mixtures and varnishes, which give it a clouded appearance.” Liquorice water used to antique paintings …
“100% pure Liquorice Juice – strong stuff to suck or nibble or use to make tasty sauces or ice-cream. Popular in childhood to make SugarAllie Water by dropping a piece in a bottle of water and shaking or leaving for a few hours”
“Sometimes we would buy three penn’oth of acidic crystals known as Kaylie (I have no idea how to spell that!) and Spanish (hard, black liquorice sticks) which would make our tongues sore and our teeth brown, but we didn’t care. Occasionally we would break
About 28 groups from Bremerton to Mercer Island are developing along the lines of Sustainable Ballard, and the EcoVillage concept has spread to Port Townsend and Olympia.
That’s all the article says about Olympia and Port Townsend. They don’t even link to them in the online article. What’s up with that?
Anyhow, I linked to them, for what ever that might be worth.
I was intrigued by the mention of the Phinney pledge. It’s on the Phinney ecovillage site, downloadable in PDF format.
Seems to me that could be the basis for a large-scale community awareness campaign, to form a kind of virtual ecovillage within a city. What if some Olympia group used something like this flyer to get people in the community to pledge some slice of the ecovillage lifestyle and tracked that information, like many non-profits track their donations, and made that available as a community health indicator?
One of the items on this list is to install a low-flow shower head. However, I remember there was a buzz going around a few weeks ago for “navy showers” which save even more. A “navy shower” is simply to shut off the water while soaping up, instead of letting the water run the whole time. The Wikipedia entry on “navy shower” points out, along with step-by-step instructions for the perplexed, that the opposite, lavish kind of shower is called a “Hollywood shower” as a bit of interesting trivia.
So, what if there were first and second steps to each pledge item, like first low flow and second navy showers?
Also, if one were to use something like a pledge to help develop community interest in and tracking of ecovilliage-like values, there should be pledge items about being in community and that encourage social connection and sharing. Then again, maybe there should be a pledge for each indicator of community health, so that there would be a climate change pledge and also a pedge about being in community? One could go through the process of developing one’s own set of indicators, or start with those developed by the Cascadia Scorecard project at Sightline and create a pledge for each indicator.
“The aim of this inquiry is not to describe these violent men and their activities yet again, but rather to begin a process of questioning the standard claims made about them by modern historians”
“In short, I’m a lazy, ignorant jerk and that doesn’t open many doors unless you enter politics. But luckily, I think I may have found my new career path: Roman-era Circumcellion.”
Sorry for this tangent, but this is a game that might have been lost behind obsolete copy protection if that protection scheme had not been broken. Score one more for the anti-DRM team, and there’s now a poster child for the need to be able to circumvent DRM schemes to, actually, protect copyright holders and to, actually, encourage economic development. So, one of the real reasons for DRM is revealed: to kill old software behind obsolete barriers in order to create artificial scarcity and build in planned unilateral obsolescence.
Okay, now, back to the main topic:
Andy Looney included the news in this week’s weekly news, naturally:
As another aside, while browsing around grabbing URLs for this, I was gandering are a page about pyramid obsession and scrolled down to find Andy’s “across” navigation:
It’s a bit synchronicity that I was browsing through some Xanadu information last night, but I like the idea of putting asynchronous navigation where there’s major tangents to the primary organization. Deep down, I feel like there the “across” that points northeast should occur before the “next” that points east, but I like it.
Using various “across” navigational icons, I might use them to mean thinks like “more general,” “more specific,” “see also,” and “see instead.” But, while it’s a good scheme, the main issue is that the navigation icons should be clear and concise and a taxonomy like I’m thinking is too complex to be represented by single icons. For example, the navigation would get immediately cluttered and confused if there were, say, two “see also” links.
“This paper is about Information Geometry, a relatively new subject within mathematical statistics that attempts to study the problem of inference by using tools from modern differential geometry. This paper provides an overview of some of the achievement
“The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 5000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny),
“Our goal is to create a community owned and managed site, where users can share their free website designs and templates, discuss web design, and promote their services.”
I got a glimpse of “Dwarf Fortress” being played by one of my brothers. Since I generally don’t use Windows, this was something I hadn’t heard of. But, I have to tell you it was a bit of a shock to see my brother playing a game that appeared to be completely in ASCII.
That’s taking “old school” a little too far … or, is it? I have to admire that this is a modern implementation of a game using the style of an old terminal-based rogue-like game. It’s a fantastic effort in focused design. Much like poetry offers a way to distill words through structure into more than prose, the restriction of using ASCII seems to have created a grand experiment.
