Tiny Pirate

Crash Prefect, one of the Collaborators on DarkLife recently got back from the Second Life fan convention thingumy. He said he had a lot of questions and interest in DarkLife, which is pretty exciting! I wasn’t aware of how widely the game is still followed and updates are waited on. Looks like I might have to dive back in and help push DarkLife up to version 2 and all the exciting goodness that will bring. Good on Crash for encouraging us to keep this thing going! And congratulations to him for securing full time paid employment working as a content creator in Second Life for Rivers Run Red, a marketing, promotion and design firm with a leg in Second Life.

• Correction – Make that around $100,000us! **

  An EVE Online player recently was outed as having scammed the community of 790 billion isk (isk stands for Inter-Stellar Kredits). This works out at nearly $12,000us (you can pay for a month of EVE Online, $15us, for 100m isk). The player set up a ‘bank’ where other players would invest cash to be used on highly expensive but highly profitable building and market speculation. Whether or not the player started with good intentions is currently debated, but the end result was that the player simply walked of with hundreds of peoples isk. This is entirely legal in EVE, which is one of the reasons I really like the game. You do have to consider your actions carefully, there’s no one in game to hold your hand! You can read more about this over at EVE Network News (on their forums, Rumor Mill section, login required) and their podcast has a 15 minute ‘confession’ from the player involved. Very fun and interesting listening!

Tonight the Corporation I am in in EVE (ANZAC Alliance) got together to hunt and kill an enemy carrier. It died in around a minute, a great achievement for our corp and we achieved total surprise on our enemy. Click to check out a couple of photos of the carrier fight and the fleet!

I found this image the other day when I was surfing through my EVE screenshots directory. Must of been me and some chums heading off to a complex in EVE Online (EVE’s version of a dungeon). I thought it was quite a nice shot really and so I trimmed it up a bit and put it online. Enjoy!

There’s something about EVE Online which lends itself to making pretty EVE pictures. Consequently I’ve redone my sig (as I am flying a battleship now, and I made some protest posters. The posters are about the very high taxes the residents of Omist region pay to the ruling Lokta Vectra alliance. Taxes they pay for very little benefit as far as I can tell!

Thanks to the awesome work of Johan the Second Life games wiki is back up at http://www.gameslavewiki.com/. Johan will be managing it from now on as he’s technical enough to do a good job, which I’m not. Redirects from the old URL will be available shortly. Meanwhile, book this beautiful new link! Note, the version Johan has recovered from my crash might be a bit out of date and some pages might be missing. Please help out and bring the wiki back up to speed.

Word on the street is that Sony is well behind on getting final dev kits and controllers out to their developers, despite what some Sony staff are saying. Even worse, their middleware developer, Naughty Dog, is still hiring people to work on the software developers are supposed to be using to build games. Poor Sony, since the PS3 price announcement I can’t think of a single piece of good news to come out about the PS3.

The other day I saw Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, a simply fantastic Korean film. It turned up in a local film festival and it was a real thrill compared to some of the poop that’s on everywhere else right now. At its heart, the movie is a stylish revenge story, and one that encourages the viewer to relish the revenge as much or even more than the protagonist does!

After mulling over the film a little, I am reminded of how much I love a good revenge story, yet it’s one that’s seldom touched on in Hollywood (or elsewhere?). Some examples come to mind, with Taxi Driver and Leon/The Professional as particular favourites, but perhaps the dubious morality of a good revenge story is a bit much for most people. Read the rest of this entry »