Davemonkey's talking thing

Is your cat trying to kill you?

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:07:08 +1000

Well I'm not at all surprised. Between two of them it is highly likely.

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Animoto.com

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:40:03 +1000

Playing around with Animoto

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Piracy, World of Goo and Dave

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:32:47 +1000

Woody

So apparently the new and supposedly excellent World of Goo is being pirated at the rate of 90% of played copies are pirated.

That is a catastrophic turn of events for an indie 2 man shop and provides an excellent case study for the likes of EA to say - look we NEED copy protections (and the MPAA, RIAA, ARIA, IRA, FiddldyDiddlyA and JLA). I am not playing the game but I do second Woody Hearn over at GU Comics on this.

I pretty much don't pirate much any more.

There are three main reasons I don't download.

security - there is far too much crap out there with embedded spyware and malware to be 100% confident that your PC is not going to get crapped on
torrent pollution and bad metadata - torrents and peer to peer networks are full of crap either seeded by the hacks of the MPAA and such that are just rubbish - or just badly labelled stuff - that Italian language version of Galaxy Quest was funny for about 5 minutes.
piracy on that scale, without that much thought affects people

I used to be pretty lazzes faire about it all, and I had friends berate me for downloading music because it affected 'the artists'. No thought for the people that made those games you downloaded the other day is there bucko?

But Dave you say - surely a game like Spore deserves to get ripped off? Its backed by a big company (EA) who are making gazillions off of this title - what does a little piracy hurt.

I take the view that EA employs people, and they need to keep selling games to employ people. Even if that doesn't wash with you because too much of the money goes to the executives (boo hiss) or the people that invested their money in the company (i.e. the shareholders) I counter with my feeling that it is a slippery slope. There is not much of a step from pirating Spore or Civ IV to unconsciously and ignorant of the implications pirating World of Goo or Sins of a Solar Empire. These are two great games by indie developers that have shipped without copy protection and have seen large amounts of their market get chewed up by piracy.

So I don't pirate anything these days. I don't support them and I respond with a huge meh when the Pirate Bay or some such lose one of their occasional stoushes with the authorities. Now don;t get me wrong, I don't think they should have the power of any government come down on them and hand out penalties in excess of murder. I also don't think bittorrent or peer to peer software is bad (got me a sweet version of Ubuntu for my eeePC the other day) I just don't care about them in the same way I don't care about Chinese counterfeiting operations.

I am not pure here - I do rip CDs I borrow from the library for example, but working for a small business has given me a new perspective on these things because I know how much it costs for smart, talented and hardworking people to sit at a desk for an hour. I like to see them rewarded for their effort. Our Internet culture unfortunately has an at times callous disregard for these people and their talent.

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A cold . . . joy

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:02:06 +1000

OK. Short post. I have a cold and have been writing all day.

Yep short post. Night.

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Google Chrome

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:50:11 +1000

Google Chrome

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chr...

I've been trying out the new Google web browser, Google Chrome, all morning and it is pretty sweet. Right down to my Vox and Tumblr bookmarklets being imported from Firefox and working on Chrome. All I need is a Del.ici.ous plug in and I am absolutely sold.

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How to play an MMO, keep your mental health and have a life

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:52:57 +1000

ScreenShot00048

I have recently started playing MMOs again after a break of some years. I had the "game or me" talk from Mrs Davemonkey when T our oldest was about three months old and I walked away from my Warlock in WoW and a history that spanned both World of Warcraft and Everquest.

I didn't stop playing games, but I did leave MMOs alone, raised two infants into toddlers and children and dealt with a number of mental health issues. It seemed like MMOs were a bad idea for most of that time.

Well the kids are a little older, I'm a lot healthier mentally and I decided to give a game I was curious about, Lord of the Rings Online, a go. I was once again hooked, but I was careful to make some rules to live by so as to avoid some of the destructive habits that had caused the ultimatum in the first place.

1) Do other things you like - this is in some ways the most obvious and hardest to do when you MMO, if only because it is so easy to get caught up in the fun of it all. There is a big wide world out there and there are kids to play with, footy to watch, books to read and board games to play. To name a few things.

2) Set goals for a session and use them to set boundaries on your sessions - The hamster wheel nature of MMOs rewards that 'just one more trip to the bank' or 'I'll just do some crafting' or 'I'll just turn in these quests' type of behaviour. It is easy to watch deadlines slide, chores get overlooked and bedtimes slide past midnight on a weeknight. At the start of the session I try to think about what I'm going to achieve - even if its just visiting the Auction House, doing some crafting and turning in a couple of quests. This tends to help me stop when I want to rather than realising that because I've been playing since 8pm and I haven't washed up I have maybe 5 hours of sleep before I have to get up and do the washing up before I go to work.

Damn.

3) Real life comes first. Always. - A no brainer but I have put the game ahead of the real life stuff in the past. Hence the ultimatum. Is that guild raid more important than work? Or the kids? Or feeding my cats? Or Mrs Davemonkey? Nup.

4) Negotiate long play periods with people around you. - If you do want to play for a long time try and make sure the people around you are aware of it and more importantly are cool with it. If we are balancing all the aspects of our life well surely the important people in our lives won't begrudge a little Balrog slaying?

5) Remember the basics. Eat. Sleep. Bathroom. - If only so I don't have to hear another non-gamer tell me about those Korean or Chinese guys that die in internet cafes after marathon 72 hour Lineage sessions. Geez people these things are actually kinds fun. Tell me a recently emptied bladder isn't a wonderful thing.

No you cannot use a bottle you filthy human being. Use a hose.

6) Eat well - Try not to eat the 'sometimes' food all of the time OK. It's bad for ya. See rule 5.

7) Never break appointments for the game. - An extention to Rule 3. By appointments I mean everything from dinner with Mum to work. Taking a sickie to play a game can be fun. I've done it before in my dissolute past and loved it. But on reflection an MMO is just so damn compelling that the habit can grow. Besides you won't be able to afford the game or the computer without the dollars.

And your mum misses you.

8) In game connections are nice but real life connections are solid, tangible and should never be neglected. - nuff said.

9) A corallary to rule 8 - respect ingame connections as you would a real life connection. - there are real people on the end of those avatars. Play nice, follow the Golden Rule and leave the teabagging to the XBox Live crowd.

10) Learning in game lore does not substitue for real life learning. - I love the lore that infuses the worlds of Azeroth, Middle Earth and the world of Warhammer. The lore that surrounds the game is for me part of the reason I keep playing becasue it provides a richness and colour to the world that does not exist in Halo or Formula 1: Jonathan will slap me silly.It's up there with good pulp fiction which I love. But I am also a professional with a career to maintain, a family to raise and a life to live. Try not to stop learning about these other things as well.

I really should cancel some of my RSS feeds.

11) It's just a game. Don't take it too seriously. Becasue when it stops being fun its time to stop.

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Back from the grave

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:04:30 +1000

. . . well OK that was a trifle dramatic but it has been a while for this blog and I'm going to try and get things going again by giving myself a bit of a schedule. I planned the schedule about three months ago but, well . . . I kind of got distracted by MMOs again and they are wonderful time sinks. So between kids and family, World of Warcraft, the AFL and the piles of stuff in my life I never got started. That original schedule was planned to give me a little focus and structure to my blogging and it had me writing, something, six days a week.

It went something like (my original notes are in a notebook at work):

Monday: AFL - a counterpoint to daddy-fu's Friday preview, I had planned a look back at the weekend but to be honest it was probably the thing that stopped me the most. I love watching footy, talking about footy and even kicking a ball, but there are so many people writing about it well (and badly) that I just couldn't be bothered recapping the weekend's games. The Lion's sinking form over the last eight weeks has not helped that motivation.

The big news as a Lions fan is that Leigh Matthews has resigned as senior coach, Jonathan Brown has re-signed for four years and Michael Voss is cleared by West Coast to tip his hat into the coaching contention for the Lions in waht would be a romantic but I suspect poorly planned move by the Lions executive.

I don't have a lot to say other than surprise, relief and concern mixed with a glamarous story in that order.

I think I'll use Mondays for talking about design and usability.

Tuesday: Probably some sort of comment on gaming, games and interesting gaming news.
Wednesday: Family update and meta issues.
Thursday: Books, comics and audiobooks.
Friday: Catching up with all of that music I've been listening to.
Saturday: Linkfest

Let's see how this goes huh? I'm aiming for the discipline of a schedule and to try and regain the joy and pleasure of blogging. Daily entries may be short but as long as I publish something, of some interest and quality I'll be happy.

Tomorrow: My hard learned rules for playing MMOs and having a real life.

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Saint of Killers street art

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:25:29 +1000

GRAFFITI_ENMORE_0608_20
Originally uploaded by baddogwhiskas

From the always dedicated baddogwhiskas over on Flickr.

The streets in Enmore are now a touch scarier.

GRAFFITI_ENMORE_0608_20

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Have the ghosts returned to haunt Port? - realfooty.com.au

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:11:36 +1000

Choco's chokers. I am cleverly diverting attention from Brisbane's capitulation at the hands of a superb Bulldogs last night by pointing you towards a rather good article exploring just why Port Adelaide is like it is. Is it all Mark William's fault?

Have the ghosts returned to haunt Port? - realfooty.com.au

http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/news...

YOU have to hand it to Port Adelaide. Of the six non-Victorian clubs in the AFL, Port is the youngest and smallest, yet it would be fair to say it has already penetrated the psyche of fans in this state more effectively than any other.

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Kung Fu Panda - Get Your Daily Fortune

nobody@vox.com(Davemonkey) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:35:47 +1000

Taking Thomas to see this next weekend

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