2006 March archive at Puck’s Blog

Archive for March, 2006

Mar

World of Warcraft Capture The Flag

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: Play

I know most of my friends who read this blog don’t play World of Warcraft. However, many of them used to join me playing various First-Person shooters playing Capture The Flag (CTF) and I thought they’d get a kick out of knowing that WoW has CTF in an “instance” called Warsong Gulch. I’ve been concentrating on levelling up my main character rather than trying everything out, but after trying WSG out last night I realized what I was missing.

I jumped into a public game after only about an 8 minute wait while the server found enough people who wanted to play. I ended up doing really well. I came in second place with 50 Honorable Kills and only two deaths. I assisted on two flag captures by putting down my frost traps to slow people chasing the runner (and then shooting them down with my bow). It was a lot of fun, and I think I’ll try it again.

Mar

Mediums ‘R’ Us

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: Body For Life

Went for a haircut today and wandered through Metrotown afterwards. I saw a t-shirt that caught my eye and went in to try it on. I knew some of the new Large shirts I’d bought after my first Medifast run-through were starting to not feel as fitted as before, so I tried on a Medium. And it fit!

Mar

Road Hockey!

By Puck 2 Comments

Categories: Hockey

Hey guys (you still read this now that I’m in Burnaby, right?) is anyone up for starting up road hockey on Wednesdays again? Daylight Savings is April 2nd which will make sunset on April 5th at 7:47pm. If we start at 6pm as usual we can get in over an hour and a half of hockey!

Who’s with me!? I can drop Mel off at work at 3 and drive in to the ‘wack and be there with tons of time to spare.

Mar

Lawyers Are Stupid

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: Rant

Every morning I open up my “Blogs” group (Maxthon has tabbed browsing and you can create a “group” of sites that gets opened all at the same time each in its own tab) and read the online blogs that I’m interested in.

One of these is Neil Gaiman’s Journal. I saw today that he’d been served notice by a bunch of lawyers who represent Four Square Productions, the company that owns Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

So he did something that’s on legally shaky grounds, right? Wrong. Not just wrong, but wrong-squared. I can unequivocally say that the Lawyers at Branfman & Associates not only have the wrong guy, but are also dead wrong in both the legal aspects of the alleged infringment, and also they’re stupidly trying to attack someone giving their client free marketing, and more importantly, a higher Google PageRank.

What are they accusing Neil of doing? He’s guilty of the incredible crime of linking to the Official Killer Tomatoes web site via a site called Tomatoes Are Evil. Unfortunately, Neil doesn’t have anything to do with that site, but let’s ignore that slip-up except to point out that it’s so retardedly easy to find out who owns a domain that I can totally understand why Neil thought this might be a joke at first.

Oh, by the way, did you see what I did there? I also linked to the Official Killer Tomatoes web site. Oh no, I did it again! Obviously I’m breaking some kind of law! Obvious only to stupid lawyers who don’t understand the Internet at all, and also don’t understand what “infringing” means.

In the letter they sent to Neil, they claim he (though actually they meant http://www.tomatoesareevil.com/ which has nothing to do with Neil except that it has a picture of him with a devil-horned tomato) violates the Lanham Act, though they don’t mention which specific section that “linking to the official web site of their client” violates (here’s a hint as to why: because linking doesn’t violate that act!) and also the Copyright Act. Again, there’s no mention of which specific section they’re violating.

So, in essence, they’re telling him to stop linking to their client’s site. The link from Tomatoes Are Evil’s Links Page doesn’t “deep link” into the Official Killer Tomatoes web site, it links directly to their front “splash page”. It doesn’t attack or denegrate them at all, nor does it claim ownership of the trademark. The link is present along with other external links. In short, they’re doing nothing but helping promote Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and doing nothing wrong. They even have a links to purchase Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (and the rest) from Amazon on their “shop” page! THEY ARE SELLING THE PRODUCT LEGALLY.

And also, as mentioned earlier, they got the wrong guy.

Stupid! For all your copyright enforcement needs, be sure to bypass Branfman & Associates!

Update! I have a solution! Obviously Four Square doesn’t want people linking to their site. Well, they can easily make it so nobody can visit their site by using referral banning! Here’s the code to add to their .htaccess file in their web server’s root directory:

RewriteEngine on
#Options +FollowSymlinks

# ban all referers except main host

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^(http://www.killertomatoes.com/*)(0,1)$
RewriteRule \.(html)$ notice.html [L]

This will forward anyone following a link from a site other than http://www.killertomatoes.com/ (oh no I did it again — somebody stop me!) to the notice.html file where you can warn them that they’re in big big trouble if they don’t remove their traffic-encouraging link. (thanks to Ryan Anderson for helping me fix up the code above!)

Mar

Marvel & DC Comics: Stealing Our Language

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: News and Rant

I’ve known for quite a while that Marvel & DC consider that they own the trademark on the term “superhero“, but it’s in the news again recently, concentrating on their efforts to trademark the hyphenated “super-hero” word.

It’s a ridiculous co-opting of a standard English word so that two huge corporations can bully anyone else trying to move in on their genre, and only points out the problems with Trademark and Copyright laws these days. I haven’t seen any proof that Marvel/DC actually created the term “superhero” and I’m certain the term was used a long time before they released their “Legion of Superheroes” and “Marvel Superheroes” comics. Used by their FANS to describe their works, not by them.

In other superhero news, DC’s Superhero MMORPG is being designed by Sony Online Entertainment, which is good because it means it will be terrible so I can continue playing City of Heroes without worry.

Mar

So Say We All

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: Survey

You scored as Commander William Adama. You have risen to your position by being damn good at what you do. Not only that, you have the deepest respect for the people under your command. You may be a little grumpy and unapproachable, but every commander needs to distance himself. Shame that you apply that to your children too.

Commander William Adama

63%

CPO Galen Tyrol

56%

Dr Gaius Baltar

56%

Capt. Lee Adama (Apollo)

50%

Lt. Kara Thrace (Starbuck)

50%

Number 6

50%

Tom Zarek

44%

President Laura Roslin

38%

Col. Saul Tigh

31%

Lt. Sharon Valerii (Boomer)

31%

What New Battlestar Galactica character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Mar

Design Perfection

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: Cool and Rant

My favorite quote about design is from Antoine de St-Exupery who said “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I need every one of my clients to watch this video poking fun at Microsoft’s packaging compared to Apple’s so they really understand what this quote means, Apparently it was created by Microsoft to point out the flaws in their marketing division’s design process (story) and who knows, maybe they’ll listen.

As a web designer and webmaster I’m constantly asked if we can add “more stuff”, “more graphics to spruce it up” and “maybe some animation?” when what really works is efficient display of information. Apple’s designers have understood this for a long time, though to be honest they sometimes err on the too-simple (are multibutton mice standard yet on Macs?)

Mar

Virtual Goods Bragfest

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: Play

Aside from the recent interest in Tribes 2 I’ve been playing a bit of World of Warcraft lately. I played it several months ago and sort of enjoyed it (my main character being a rogue) but not enough to keep playing. I then switched back to City of Villains as that expansion for City of Heroes came out, but after a few months I lost interest. I decided to pay for a month of WoW and play around in it just as ”something to do”.

This time I concentrated on my second-highest level character, a Night Elf Hunter. And I had a lot more fun this time around. I’m not sure if it was the Hunter vs. Rogue differences, or if a patch removed the annoyances or if I was simply in a different mindset and could really enjoy it this time.

So a few months later, Aluinne has hit level 40 which means she can buy a mount, which allows her to get around the game world faster. Slow travel is one of the major annoyances for me in WoW, so this is a real turning point.

There she is with her Striped Nightsaber mount and her pet Moraha (a rare tameable black lion who spawns once every twelve hours in Horde-infested lands). So yeah, there I am, being a nerd. Aluinne is on the Kel’Thuzad server with the Goon Squad. I’ve got a few other characters across other servers to play with different people, but that’s my main.

Mar

Happy 5th Anniversary Tribes 2!

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: Play

Oh man, I played the hell out of the first two installments of the Tribes series. The first was such a breath of fresh air in the gaming community with massive customizability, huge open maps, a few vehicles and intriguing and varied gameplay base on the other team’s strategy. But eventually the gameplay became imbalanced as players figured out “tricks” in the system to get Heavy Armor (very powerful, but supposed to be slow) to “ski” all the way across the map and into the opposing base to wreck it with only a few mortar shells.

For a while I switched to Counterstrike, which despite the typical CS player being a shithead was a great game.

Then Tribes 2 arrived. It had been pushed out the door too soon and had a ton of bugs. But when it worked, it was glorious. Heavy armor had been slowed down, but huge transport vehicles had been added to get them from place to place. You could still assault the enemy base (now much further away on even bigger maps!) with heavies, it just took teamwork to do so. A large array of new deployables were added, including new sensor packs and different types of turrets. A robuts community system was built-in, allowing the creation of your own “Tribe” with members, private messaging, buddy lists, email and more.

I played the HELL out of Tribes 2. It’s all I did for about a year and a half. But eventually the developer stopped releasing patches for it, and players moved on — some of whom had never been able to get the game to work right. Honestly I don’t even remember what I started playing after Tribes 2. Nothing as glorious, that’s for sure. There was a sequel called “Tribes Vengeance” but the maps were tiny, the speed was too fast and the gameplay just wasn’t there. The game sucked, hard, and for it I absolutely blame the people on gaming forums bitching about Tribes 2 being “too slow” because they were used to pulling off unbalanced, un-fun moves in the original Tribes and couldn’t do it any more.

Anyway…

On a few message boards people have been pointing out that it’s now the 5th Anniversary of the release of Tribes 2, so I’ve been firing it up lately.

Looks like I’ve still got it.

Mar

Spore

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: Cool and Play

There’s no doubt that Will Wright is a great game designer. He’s the designer behind the incredibly popular “Sim” games like SimCity, SimAnt, SimEarth and “The Sims”.

His next project is called “Spore” and if you watch this video on Google Video from the Game Developer’s Conference your jaw will hit the floor — several times. He’s showing off a VERY early version of Spore and describing their ideas for the game. It’s a fascinating look and well worth the full 35 minute runtime. Just remember to remind yourself every few minutes through watching it that the entire game started in a tiny drop of water.