The Secret, Witchcraft and Prayer

I'm not a fan of psychological hand-holding, which is to say the whole "pseudo self-help" sector, be it business, personal life, etc. In my mind, people who write these books, record these videos or audio tapes or show up on Oprah end up doing absolutely nothing other then telling people what they could figure out themselves if they bothered with a little bit of introspection and self-honesty. The only people who really benefit from this are the ones raking in the cash when their product becomes the "it" device of the year.

The current (although possibly wanning) "it" product is The Secret, now a full fledged industry, the same way that 7 Habits and Colored Parachutes were in the past. I'm not intimately familiar with said Secret, but have had the Cliff Notes version given to me. From what I gather, this Secret (how secret can it be, now that the author is publicly rolling in a shitload of cash?) relies on visualization as a means to motivation or, if you think it, you can do it. Believe in yourself. The power of positive thinking.

Yeah, we've heard all this bullshit before under different titles. What goes around, comes around.

Here's the kicker: The Secret is anything but. In fact, it's been around far longer then you or I. It's been around longer then the Roman Empire, really. Truth be told, it's practiced more often then even the parasitic opportunist who wrote The Secret probably realizes (or, if he or she is really a scheister, then he or she knows it, and has made millions telling a lot of people what they already know. God Bless America!)

Back in the early days of humanity (yes, that far), people had a love/hate relationship with their world. With limited resources, people couldn't explain their world in definite terms, so they fell back on the only explanation they could: superstition.

For these people, the weather, crops, floods, births, deaths, animals and everything else was controlled by unseen and intelligent forces who had their own agendas which may or may not jive with those of humanity. In an attempt to sway the will of these supernatural forces, humanity invented the ritual, a consistent and crafted event and way of thinking that supposedly would petition the supernatural forces to view humanity in a more favorable light, and grant them the things they were seeking.

Eventually, this kind of thing evolved as people gained a handle on making things happen for themselves (irrigation, animal husbandry, etc). The supernatural forces took on a less realistic role, and more of a totemic role, acting as a focus for the desires of humanity. These focus points, or fetishes, served as a touchstone that people could use to solidify their desires -- for love, children, health, wealth and other personal requests.

Unfortunately, this got a bad rap. From our standpoint in today's "enlightened" society, this was called paganism. One particular form of paganism that people are probably more familiar with is witchcraft. Although I do not recall whether it was presented as such, if it was something I figured out, I realized that the notion of witchcraft -- as practiced in the real world, and not some Dungeons & Dragons idea of "magic" -- was less about petitioning the "powers that be", and was all about convincing yourself that the spells one invoked were going to get you the results you wanted. The spell itself was the totem that focused your self-confidence: if you believed in the power of the spell, then you would believe that it would work. If you believed that it would work, you could live your life secure in the knowledge that your dream would come true because of the action you had taken to help yourself.

Supposedly, this is the essence of The Secret. You pick a goal, a certain desired outcome, and you focus on it. You visualize yourself achieving it. If you believe in the method -- this Secret -- then you believe that you will achieve it. Secure in this knowledge that The Secret is working for you, you walk taller, speak better, become a more self-confident "go-getter"...and consequently, people see you as someone who knows what they want, knows how to get it, and knows what to do with it once they achieve their goal. You appear to be a leader, someone people can have confidence in, someone that others want to follow, support and bend over backwards for. You have no fear, because you know The Secret and are making it work for you.

In the end, nothing new. Nothing revolutionary. In fact, in modern times, this system has another name: Prayer.

Prayer is a major cornerstone in almost all major human religions. It's not so divorced from witchcraft or pagan rites as self-important religious figures would like their followers to believe, such to the point that practically all modern religions owe a huge debt of gratitude to those who worshiped the moon, or made offerings to unseen forces for good crops, healthy children and favorable outcomes. Don't people today pray for the same things, only with different dogma?

Prayer boils down to the same thing: the words carry a specific belief in whom you are praying to. You are entreating the target of your prayer to look favorably upon you in the hopes that they'll agree with you, or take pity on your situation, and will grant you some supernatural dispensation that will make your wish come true. If you truly believe that your prayers will result in the desired outcome, then you convince yourself at that point and time that you will be granted what you have asked for. Your life has now changed, and you live each day believing that your prayer will be granted, which changes your mannerisms, your outlook and, as a result, how people perceive you. You have taken what is possibly a depressing situation -- serious illness, potential destitution, etc -- and have given yourself hope, courtesy of your own action through prayer.

What's the bottom line? Is The Secret a scam? No, not really. Is it really a secret? Only to those who believe that it's some kind of voodoo (which is another good example of results through belief). It's just another way to bring the method of positive thinking into people's homes, especially for those who aren't interested in witchcraft, or aren't religious enough for prayer. Living life as if you will most certainly attain your goals is a worth-while way to live, but no one dogma or self-help industry is bringing anything new to the table...only repackaging it and putting a new ad campaign behind it. The funny thing is that there's nothing secret about getting to know oneself, or in having confidence, but someone sure is getting rich off of making people believe that there is.

Closing Down MetaPunk

I've decided to shut down the development of MetaPunk, or at least telling everyone who shows up that "we're closed for the foreseeable future".

There are two reasons: First, I think I spent WAY too much time with it too soon. There was a time when it was all I was doing: writing documentation, creating a web site, working with the MetaPlace alpha, etc. At some point, I just stopped, and didn't go back. I tried, once or twice, but the more I tried to make something useful, the more I realized that I needed to create other systems to support the one I was working on. And those systems needed support. And those systems needed support. There was no defined starting location; it seemed that nothing would be testable until everything was present, and I couldn't get it all done without testing it.

Which brings me to the second reason: a lack of real support. There were a lot of people who liked the idea of a cyberpunk MMO. We got a lot of good ideas out of people for free, and I like to think that their enthusiastic participation flowed from their desire to get this game made. But when I went around with the hat, so to speak, no one would step up and make a commitment to really work in the project with me. I realize that MetaPlace is in alpha status, so not everyone can really participate, and that people DO have real world concerns that prevent them from working on projects like this as much as I, they or the project requires them to, but the scope of the project was not insignificant; it could never be done by one person and a loose confederation of occasional contract workers.

The people who are interested in MetaPlace are very much like me. They want to make games, not play them. Unfortunately, everyone who wants to make "a game" really wants to make HIS game, not work as a third wheel on someone else's blueprints. I remember way back when, there was a product which billed itself as an "MMO Construction Kit". One day, I noticed a post in the forums which basically asked, "if the only people who are interested in the product are builders, who's going to play the games we create?" I think that for a builder to find other builders who are willing to put their own work aside to come together to work on a single, large project is something that's going to be extremely rare in MetaPlace. If anything, I would like to think that MetaPunk was the type of project that could inspire people to do just that. We had visibility, good ideas, well written documentation, a plan of attack, a cheering section comprised of almost anyone who read our feature list...the only thing we were missing were the people who would make it all happen.  That's really kind of sad.

Meanwhile, though, I'm shifting gears on MetaPlace, Without this sword hanging over my head, I can focus on developing modules and style sheets for others, and assist others on their projects. I might turn some of my current work from MetaPunk over to the public domain in the forum of long-winded tutorials, which are, of course, my forte. Maybe if I collect enough parts, I'll have something that can be slapped together to form a framework for something that looks, smells, sounds and tastes a lot like MetaPunk. Maybe.  ; )

Conan Redux

I'd like to post an update to my previous post on Age of Conan.

First off, the whole game world isn't tropical. The island fortress of Tortage is decked out in broadleaf foliage, and there's a connected area called White Sands Isle which is also tropical. The city of Old Tarantia is a Roman-esque city, Stygia is fashioned after Egypt, and Cimmeria (pardon the spelling) is fairly Germanic (I believe).

The quest voice-overs aren't all throughout the game, unfortunately, although FunCom has stated that they'd like to included at least one major quest per level which features the wonderful voice-over work that is featured in Tortage.

As previously stated (by FunCom, et al), the Day/Night difference is only from levels 1 though 20. Once you reach 20, and complete your "Destiny Quest", you get to leave Tortage, and you're limited (!) to playing in the MMO mode.

Since my first post, I've gotten into a great guild, the Dreamers of Nithia, a moderate to heavy RP guild on the Wiccana server. By pulling together, we've purchased a plot of land in Pointain, and have erected a Keep, the center of a guild city! Since we're a PvE server, though, there's no unhindered city siege dangers, but if we had built on the borderlands, it would be open season.

Enforcer has dumped his WoW account and has taken up AoC with me, and we're both having a great time. The level advancement is super fast in the lower levels, and it's not unusual to level up at least twice per session (of 2-3 hours or more).

Filed under: ,

Something Completely Different?

So here's the expected Age of Conan post. Expected...why? Because if it's got the letters "M", "M" and "O" in it's title, and it's not one of those shit-scraping Asian exports, then I'll probably be playing it.

Barbarians at the Gate

I know nothing about the world of Conan, except that it is in book form, comic book form, and was a movie starting the Governator. And James Earl Jones. Aside from that the lore of Conan might as well be an entirely newly created IP for all I care.

The world of AoC takes place during the "Hyborean Age" of Earth, which is a fictional time between the sinking of Atlantis and the dispersal of landmass around the globe. It's a partially pre-historic world, made more intelligent probably by virtue of the fact that the folks from Atlantis spread their culture around before they so rudely went on a permanent SCUBA vacation.

Since the world segment represented in-game occupies what is eventually going to be Western Europe, but is currently knocking around the Egyptian/Libyan latitude, you get a lot of tropical forest settings and coastal areas. As if in homage to Gilligan's Island, it seems that monster bamboo is the preferred building material. Folks are very much into the loincloth style, but there are more advanced Atlantean fashions this season. Steel weapons are de rigeure, and magic abounds.

Get a Job!

So what's AoC all about? Violence, basically. AoC was designed to be a full-on "M" rated title, and it delivers enough blood and gore to warrant that decision. It's claim to fame is the "real time defensive combat system" which acts thusly: each target (you included) have 3 defensible areas which are left, right, and front/top, and are represented visually by either 1,2 or 3 brackets indicating the strength of defense in that area (there are only 3 brackets that are distributed amongst the zones). When you swing at an enemy, you want to swing either to the left, right or front/top based on your opponent's least defended area. Hitting an area covered by three brackets won't do much, but hitting an area with no brackets will do wonders for you, and cause a bad day for your target.

Needless to say, this is a more active and thoughtful experience. No longer can you just Press N Pray...you have to adjust where you swing as the target will re-allocate his defense. This works with both melee and ranged combat.

You also have combos, which sometime require you to activate the combo, then swing in a sequence to execute the combo. Naturally, the plan is to get the enemy to expose a side, trigger the combo that targets that side, and let em have it.

Another Sword and Sorcery MMO? Sheesh...

Yeah, but this one is different (insert eye roll here). Seriously.

First, it's adult oriented. There are prostitutes all around the city, topless women, hacked limbs and "fatalities", or violent finishing moves like beheadings. The talk is more graphic as well, with NPCs letting loose with foul language.

But it's not all action, which would make it a glorified Hellgate:London or a first-person Mythos. AoC has a lot of NWN style story to it. Sorry, Anti-RP League of America, you're not going to like this. When you talk with an NPC to get a quest, you're thrown into a cut-scene type screen with full voice-over. That's a hell of a lot of spoken dialog (the install size is massive, so I guess it all works out). In conversation, you get to sort-of steer by selecting responses, but in the end, the result is that you get the quest or hand over the item.

You have two modes in AoC: MMO Daytime, and single player Nighttime. During the day, you have access to all of the general quests, shops and other players. During the Night, however, it's just you and what is called the "Destiny Quest". This night work is a single player linear story driven game. Neat! You get to advance per normal RPG laws, and you can jump back and forth between the two at any time.

I Don't Care...Do I?

One of the stranger things that I've been thinking about is that even though I know jack about Conan's world, the full voice-overs and the Destiny Quest leave their mark. While I've always been down on WoW, I've freely given props to Blizzard for creating a robust environment that no other MMO has been able to do. AoC, however, does it, and does it BETTER by really immersing you into the world. NPCs aren't all just talking totem poles, and your game-time isn't merely spent "quest spamming", reading only the text necessary to lead you to your goal. I know MORE about what the hell I'm doing in AoC in the short time I've been playing then I ever knew about what I was supposed to be doing in WoW or even Vanguard.

When you talk about MMO launches, none are flawless. AoC comes the closest. When you talk about MMO polish, few can claim that they were released in a "polished" state. AoC is one of them. I'm extremely happy for FunCom, who's Anarchy Online was, for many years, the poster child for shitty MMO launches (until it was usurped by VG). They've worked hard on this one, taken their AO experiences, and have really done some good work with AoC.

Is it For Me?

Chances are, you're a WoW player. I don't know why a WoW player would be reading a site written by such and anti-WoW gamer, but thanks for stopping by anyway.

If you're an MMO fanatic of any stripe (WoW or you other three people), I think it might be time for you to consider taking up another MMO. I don't necessarily advocate dropping what you have going on right now, but AoC makes a good second (or even first and only) MMO. The leveling is quick, the world is bustling and the experience is different enough to give you that "new MMO Tingle", but familiar enough that you won't have an EVE Online style learning curve.

Filed under: ,

The Bell Tolls For Thee

Whenever a new MMO is announced, there's always that awkward moment where some wiseass interviewer or columnist poses the question: Is this the WoW Killer?

Of course, this assumes that WoW needs to be killed, which it doesn't. What the question really means to find out is if there is any other game out there that can occupy the space between WoW's 12 million subscribers, and the next most populated MMO*, whichever that is.

I think we're nearing the breaking point for WoW. I really do.

According to numbers, the Age of Conan pre-order tally is thought to have exceeded previous pre-order numbers for an MMO -- including WoW, which had massive word-of-mouth and beta testing excitement.

In other news, it was announced that Stargate Worlds has reached over 100,000 beta sign-ups, and supposedly Warhammer Online has exceeded over 1 million beta sign-ups.

While it remains to be seen if these games can get the subscribers -- and keep them -- the numbers being reported for interest in beta testing (which these days is a cross between early admission and free advertising, more so then bug squashing) seems to indicate that the MMO genre is gaining new blood, or that the largest pool of existing MMO players -- WoWies -- are looking to pull up stakes and leave Azeroth for greener pastures.

Unfortunately, at this point, it's just a wait and see situation, since we won't be able to tell where the people are coming from or going to until these games launch, and have had some time to run, attract and attempt to keep a player base. What is more unfortunate is the fact that we'll never know if players of other MMOs have come from WoW because there's no way in hell that Blizzard would willingly issue a press release stating that their subscriber numbers have dropped.

 

* And I mean Western MMO. The Asian MMO gristmill turns out MMOs like those little machines at supermarkets dispense junk toys in those plastic eggs.

A LINQ to the Past

Learning a new programming language can be difficult. Learning an UPDATED programming language can be even more difficult, although it should have benefits.

One thing I had been looking at in .NET 3.x was LINQ, which uses a sort of natural language syntax to query "things". Normally, when you say "query" in relation to programming, you're talking about getting data from a database. However, LINQ allows developers to query the formerly un-queryable, like collections of files, SQL data, and even a way to easily get info from XML files (sorry, XPath!)

But there are some quirks. Mostly, they revolve around having to "pre-build" your database in a format Visual Studio will recognize, complete with relationships, PKs and FKs, and so on. You can either use the O/R Designer, which gives you a nice visual representation of your data and it's relationships or -- if you need more flexibility -- you can create your own class objects which represent the entities in your data source (tables, fields, etc). Needless to say, converting one of my projects to use LINQ hasn't been easy, so I was interested in tackling it with a new project I am working on, called SendHome.

SendHome is a small application which sits in the task bar tray. When you are in one location, and want to forward a little bit of info to another computer you have access to -- like home, or work -- you simply enter it into the SendHome popup window, and the info will magically appear on the other computer. It's one part IM, one part private Twitter, one part email (which is what my friends and I have been using for this kind of thing until this point).

But how to handle cases when your computer is offline? I decided to create a web service to handle the traffic until you log in to receive your messages, and that's where the LINQ comes in. I started out with the creation of user accounts, and so I needed to be able to enter data into the database when the CreateUser() web method is called.

Here's how a normal ADO.NET INSERT block, using a stored procedure, would look for this operation:

   1: Dim dbConn As New SQLConnection(ConnectionString)
   2:  
   3: Dim dbCmd As New SQLCommand
   4: With dbCmd
   5:     .CommandText = "pr_StoredProcedure"
   6:     .CommandType = Data.CommandType.StoredProcedure
   7:     .Connection = dbConn
   8:     With .Parameters
   9:         .Add("@Username", Data.SqlDbType.VarChar, 30).Value = Username
  10:         .Add("@Password", Data.SqlDbType.VarChar, 30).Value = EncryptMe(Password)
  11:         .Add("@Email", Data.SqlDbType.VarChar, 30).Value = Email
  12:         .Add("@ID", Data.SqlDbType.Int).Direction = Data.ParameterDirection.Output
  13:     End With
  14: End With
  15:  
  16: Dim intID As Integer = 0
  17:  
  18: Try
  19:     dbConn.Open()
  20:  
  21:     dbCmd.ExecuteNonQuery()
  22:  
  23:     intID = dbCmd.Parameters("@ID").Value
  24:  
  25: Catch ex As Exception
  26:     'Error trapping goes here.
  27: Finally
  28:     dbConn.Close()
  29: End Try

That's a fair chunk of change, not to mention the upkeep of the stored procedure, which requires a god amount of T-SQL knowledge. I'm used to doing this, but I wanted to try LINQ with this project, and here's the way we're going about it now:

   1: Dim x As New DataClassesDataContext
   2:  
   3: Dim y As New user With {.user_name = Username, _
   4:     .user_password = Password, _
   5:     .user_email = Email}
   6:  
   7: x.users.InsertOnSubmit(y)
   8: x.SubmitChanges()
   9:  
  10: Dim z As Integer = y.user_id

How's that for efficient? It's literally more then half the size of the original method, and it allows us to pull out the Unique ID from the newly inserted record without requiring a return parameter or a secondary query.

Filed under: ,,

Yahtzee Strikes Back

If you aren't aware of "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation video review series, then you need to block off some time to go and view them ALL in an unforgettable British-tinged, foul-mouthed Review-O-Rama.

Recently, Yahtzee reviewed Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which has been universally worshiped by every review outlet...except Zero Punctuation. Yahtzee didn't make any friends with this one, and this week, he answers his mailbag on the subject....with hillarious results!

Filed under:

Wooping It Up

I heard from...somewhere...about a new service called Woopra. On the surface, it LOOKS like a web site log file analyzer. But if that's all it is, then I'm the Queen of England.

Right now, Woopra seems custom made for Wordpress blogs. They offer a plugin for that package, and a JavaScript "hack" for everyone else. Don't get me wrong: the "hack" works perfectly fine, but you need to be comfortable with JS to customize it to get some of the advanced automation out of it.

The first thing you need to do is to sign up with Woopra. In beta, the service is free. Once you confirm yourself (I hate that part of any registration...), you need to add a website. Here's where the sap starts to flow, because right now, Woopra is hand-authorizing any sites registered, meaning it can take a few days to a few weeks to get the auth for your site to embed the plugin or JS code.

Once you do, you can connect it to the Woopra system by installing the plugin or code into the footer of each page you want to track on your website.

And then the fun starts.

There's an online statistic dashboard, but it's rather lame. You really need to download the desktop software in order to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, because this app will pull the stats for each of your tagged sites and display the info in an amazingly beautiful UI. It can track page hits, referrers, geolocation, visitation duration, bounces and more.

There's two features, though, which will make stats-whores drool: the live visitor tracker, and live chat utility.

If you use the Wordpress plugin, you have specific user info linked in for you, but if you use the JS script, you need to hack in user specific info like username of the logged in user, their email address, etc. If you have a way to access this, then you're all set. Otherwise, you need to beg for help on the forums, or ask for a platform specific plugin from the devs, but it's not such an issue, really.

With the desktop app open, any visitors to your site will magically appear in the LIVE tab of the app. It displays user info like their IP, country, local time, browser, platform and screen resolution. You can also see what page they're currently on as they move about the site, and their own history, if they've been to the site before. If you use the Wordpress plugin, or hack the JS, you can have the site transmit known info to Woopra, like their logged in username (called a "Tag" in Woopraese) and other info.

When you detect someone on the site, you can actually chat with them! Clicking on the Start a Conversation link in the desktop app will pop up a window on your desktop, and a window in the user's browser. You can then chat back and forth in real time.

Quite frankly, this is far, far better then a silly old log analyzer. It provides the same information in real time, AND allows you to connect directly with your visitors when they're on the site.

It would be nice to see some early info on the Woopra API (which they claim to have, but not ready for public consumption yet), and also a way to indicate if the site owner is online with the desktop, so the visitor can initiate a chat request.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the service right now, and am curious about the final pricing of the service. I'm hoping that it's a reasonable price with reasonable features. Nothing annoys me more then offering a terribly crippled service at free level, and only throwing on a pittance of additional features for $20/month...or worse, charging hundreds of dollars for something that would find amazing traction in the community (bloggers) were the price more at street level.

MetaPunk on MetaForge

As with any development project of large scope being constructed by many hands, keeping things orderly and sane is no small feat. Not only does there need to be a place where the developers can commune, but there should also be a place for the users to commiserate with the developers for the purpose of feature requests and bug reporting.

Having built a fair share of customer relation managers and content management systems, I know that what seems to be simple and straightforward to the user is usually supported by a hellish amount of code, modules, classes, data tables and stored procedures. It's not something that I like to create, although when pressed, I'm up to the challenge.

It was to much relief that one of the MetaPlace community members, Raam, created and then subsequently unveiled his MetaNetwork project for the MetaPlace community. The network is essentially that: 3 websites which work together as a resource for MetaPlace developers.

The first site is the main MetaNetwork site, and it contains news and the community-mandated forum. The second site is the MetaFAQ, which will contain information by and for the developer community: tutorials, knowledgebase, etc.

The third site is the real draw, though, for any MetaPlace developers, and that's the MetaForge. Like SourceForge or CodePlex, the MetaForge is a project management site. It has all of the common trappings of the better known systems, like news, forums, wikis, documents, files and -- most importantly -- revision tracking support. It's quite the slick system, so kudos to Raam and the MetaNetwork team for making this resource available to the MetaPlace community.

We've got MetaPunk set up as a project in the Forge, but since the contents of our project relate back to MetaPlace, which is still in Alpha and has us under an NDA, the project is private and isn't available for public viewing. We still have the official MetaPunk.net forums, though, for anyone looking to find out about the project and participate in the discussion.

New MPCard Style

We've got a new MPCard style available for MetaPlace Alpha testers. This is called the "Big Bar", which leaves room for a later addition, the "Small Bar". Naturally.

Filed under: ,