pjharvey

Death… IN SPACE

Coming out of dock from Perimeter station I hear sounds of a firefight. This isn’t as uncommon as I would have expected in high-sec space, but it is still a little concerning when powerful ships decide to battle it out in front of a heavily populated space station. I have not normally hung around to watch the scrap, but this time I was intrigued. There were three ships involved that I could tell, and many drones were buzzing around the Drake in the centre of it all. It’s not long before the drake blows up dramatically, but to my surprise the fighting continues! The aggressors pod the pilot, leaving his frozen corpse floating in orbit near the station.

I was a little taken aback by this, partly because it was such a merciless act, and partly because there didn’t seem to be any Concorde intervention afterwards. As I understand it, kill rights don’t extend to destroying escape pods. Even so, I don’t know what motivated the dogfight in the first place, or who first attacked whom, so I will not draw any assumptions. It was a nice display of fireworks, though.

Posted in gaming | No Comments »
Tags: drake, eve online, penny ibramovic, perimeter

What’s in a name?

Whilst helping to stab orcs in Hellfire Peninsula, Knifey bumped in to someone called Epicstupity.

I didn’t stop to ask if it was an intentionally ironic name, just in case it wasn’t.

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Tags: knifey, outlands, world of warcraft

The Verve reformed

The Verve are back. Again. This could be an exciting time, as I remember The Verve from all those years ago, before the jazz record label forced the band to change their name to avoid potential confusion, hence the definite article being added. I remember listening to the extended version of She’s a Superstar where the song continues long past the in-comparison disappointing radio edit, with soaring guitars creating beautiful music that is just as amazing to listen to today as it was then. The debut album, A Storm in Heaven, mixed together songs that were both fragile and strong, offering gentle breezes before conjuring up thunder, and was a critical success despite not including their first few single releases.

The second album, just as pretentiously titled as A Northern Soul, saw The Verve grow. The same mix of songs was present, but somehow they all had more weight behind them. It looked like The Verve were going to be The Next Big Thing, until the announcement that they were splitting up, shortly before they released their final single entitled, poetically enough, History. From what I remember, there were tensions between singer Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe.

That The Verve reformed was good news, that they stayed together for just one more album was disappointing. Urban Hymns adds to the pretentious album names, as well as to their impressive body of work. Overall, the third album seemed more superficial than their previous work, relying on heavy-handed lyrics more than metaphor, although there are some gems to be found outside of the singles. The Verve split again, this time it must surely have been for good, after having tried a reconciliation album.

Richard Ashcroft turned solo after Urban Hymns, and it led to much chart success. However, whilst the songs kept a certain lyrical quality they were lacking in musical direction, ending up being terribly middle-of-the-road. Without the rest of the The Verve behind him, Ashcroft was just another solo artist. Yet he was popular, and understandably so. He fronted The Verve for many years, he was the man everyone associated with the band, particularly with the memorable and copied video for Bitter Sweet Symphony, the band’s big comeback single after the first split.

People remember the vocalist more, the man at the front of the stage, the man with the focus for most of the song. They get most of the attention, from fans and media alike, and it takes a huge personality for a non-singing musician to get much recognition. For example, Graham Coxon may have enjoyed some critical and musical success after leaving Blur, but hasn’t got anything like the attention Damon Albarn recevies with each of his projects, and it seems to be less to do with talent and mostly because Albarn is more widely recognisable. Such as it is for Richard Ashcroft.

Even with Ashcroft enjoying success through mediocrity I was quite looking forward to The Verve reforming, because of Nick McCabe’s ability to create wonderful music with his guitars. I still listen to The Verve on occasion, all the way back to All in the Mind, and it is the music that keeps me coming back. I admit that I focus mostly on the guitars, but I certainly appreciate how all of the band create a fuller, richer sound together. I was optimistic about hearing new McCabe music.

I heard a song on the radio a couple of weeks back, and it had a catchy-sounding sample looping through it. I admit, I quite liked it to start with, but then the loop continued throughout the song, and not just here and there but for the whole song, without pause or change. By the end I was sick of that loop and, by association, the song, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to hear it again. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I heard it again, and again the loop sounded interesting to start with but quickly irritated because of its constant use. It was perhaps fortunate that I heard the song again because this second time I also heard it being attributed to The Verve, and that it was their new single Love is Noise. What a disaster.

The loop in the song isn’t bad in itself. Like I wrote above, it is quite catchy. The problem is that it is clearly overused. There are no breaks in the song where the loop isn’t heard, no changes to how the loop is used or the loop itself, it just repeats and repeats from the start of the song until the end. It becomes tedium itself. Even in musical genres like dance, electronica, and Krautrock, where repetition is key, it is understood that changes and breaks are what contribute to the repetition succeeding. In all kinds of artistic endeavour the blank form, including silence, is known to be able to enhance a work. And yet a band that has created some astonishingly subtle songs releases a horridly naive single, lacking any delicate or sophisticated touches.

It is possible that Love is Noise is the weak link of all the new songs penned by The Verve, but with it being released as the first single in ten years it seems unlikely that they would willingly choose anything but their strongest song with which to grab everyone’s attention. Perhaps it was too much to hope for The Verve to be great again. Richard Ashcroft has enjoyed a huge solo career, larger than anything The Verve achieved, and the attention is unsurprisingly more on him than on the band as a whole. When the band are credited by DJs as ‘Richard Ashcroft and The Verve’ it becomes clear that we are no longer in the presence of The Verve as they were, but Richard Ashcroft’s band.

As much as I was looking forward to hearing McCabe’s wonderful guitars I will not be rushing out to buy the new album, although I will listen for further singles to see if the quality of music improves. At the least, I can hope that Ashcroft’s MoR career gets a boost from having better musicians behind him, for the unfortunate times when I hear him on the radio. In the meantime I notice that both Stereolab and Dandy Warhols have new albums out now, two bands that have yet to disappoint, offering me a much better opportunity to experience new music from established bands than The Verve currently promises.

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Tags: the verve

Cloaked and daggered

Mission running for the Caldari Navy has my standing increasing steadily, and with it I am able to move up in quality of agents. From the negative quality level two agents I have proved myself capable or working for a level two agent of quality 16. This gives me the same kind of missions but considerably more money for my efforts, as the higher quality agents are able to pay more for trusted allies. Running through quite a few more missions successfully I poke around the agent database again.

It’s quite easy to find agents in EVE Online. All you need initially is access to any one agent, perhaps one you’re working for or any agent in a station, even if unavailable to you, and open the information window for the agent. By selecting the large faction icon for the agent in that window you are presented with information for the faction, within which is a tab for ‘agents’. From this tab it is possible to view all agents of that faction, divided in to their respective departments within the faction, and showing those who are available to offer you missions and those who aren’t. Once a likely candidate for interesting work is found the information tab for that agent will show their location, and off you go.

By looking through the agent list again I find an agent offering level three missions is now available to me. Even though he has a lowly -18 quality rating the jump from level two missions to level three would surely offer much greater rewards over even those given by my high quality level two agent. Of course, with more reward comes more danger, and the jump in level of missions suggests more than just a few more ships trying to kill me. Never the less, I am curious to see what sort of life-threatening, adrenaline-pumping situations I will be thrown in to, so I head over to the new agent to introduce myself.

The new agent sneers at me, but most of them seem to do that so maybe it’s a military thing. He sends me out to disperse some rats who are acceleration gate-camping in deadspace. With level two missions mostly pitting me against frigates with only the occasional cruiser I assume that level three missions will throw larger hulls against me more often. I strip a couple of the assault launchers out of my Caracal and instead fit heavy launchers, hoping that I will at least have a chance of surviving. With the 750,000 ISK mission reward on offer I am willing to risk having to replace my cruiser, and I have money in the vault to do that at least. I leave the station, warp to the stargate, jump to the next system across, and then warp to the deadspace region.

Naturally, it all goes horribly wrong. I was right in expecting more cruisers than frigates, but I didn’t expect a full reversal. My ship warps in to find a dozen cruisers locking-on to me and a single frigate hanging around to give a sense of scale, making the other ships look suitably bigger and more menacing. I release my drones and start loosing missiles at some targets, but as heavy missiles start flying towards me like a deadly blizzard I realise I don’t stand a chance. Trying not to lose any time I punch in a distant celestial object and warp out after only a few seconds. Even so, there are dozens of missiles on my tail, my shields are depleted, and the Caracal’s armour is more broken than a third edition D&D splat book rule. I’m going to need a bigger boat.

Even with all this damage I will not face a hefty repair bill. The last time I was shot up quite badly was after performing some reconnaissance and I got some good advice to get armour and structure repair modules and activate them outside of a station. I took this advice and got my hull and armour back to full strength after a short while. I lost my drones, of course, but those are easily replaced, having even looted a few in some earlier missions.

I don’t abandon the mission, instead fleeing the scene hoping that maybe I can earn enough money to buy a battleship before the mission expires, which isn’t likely but you have to admire my optimism. It may not be a completely outrageous suggestion, particularly as I was asked to recon another system, by a higher quality agent than before. I was offered over 600,000 ISK to perform the new reconnaissance, and thanks to my previous experience I didn’t have to spend any of that reward on repairing my ship. Although I now know how to repair my own ship the relevant experience was knowing I should hit the reheat and head to the the acceleration gate as fast as possible in the first deadspace zone, ignoring any and all rats that engage me, so only my rechargeable shields take any damage during the mission. If only I hadn’t spent most of my money on the advanced learning skills I might have been half-way to buying a Raven by now. Ah well, my salvaging operations are raking in good money still.

Warping back to my previous agent, I let my armour repairing module run. I had taken it with me as vital necessary equipment to the station of the level three agent, so fitted it before making the return jumps to my level two agent. I activate the module on leaving the station but see that it gets deactivated after jumping in to a system. I try to reactivate it after a jump but ship’s computer becomes a female HAL 9000 and tells me that it can’t active the module, Penny. And here comes the revelation of the day.

I had initially wondered why my ship seemed insubstantial after a gate jump and simply assumed it to be a graphical bug to do with redrawing the ship when changing systems. After all, as soon as I started warping away from the gate my ship became visible again, which I assumed was a forced redraw invoked my substantial movement of the ship. But when I was told I couldn’t activate the module the message was that my cloaking was interfering with the module’s operation. Cloaking? What cloaking? I don’t even have the many high-level skills to pilot a cloak-capable ship.

Cloaking! So that’s why my ship is shimmering: it’s not a glitch, it’s a PvP defence mechanism! Just as using a hearthstone in World of Warcraft makes you for a limited time a target worth no honour when killed, jumping in to a system in EVE Online cloaks you for a short period. This defence mechanism protects against potential lag problems and gives players time to gain their bearings in the new system. Without the buffer offered by the cloak jumping in to a system would be far more dangerous. Lag could cause your reaction time to suffer considerably compared to any gate-campers already in the system, and even without lag a space cadet still needs time to find and target her destination and kick the warp drive in to action.

The massive beating I took on my first, and only for a while, level three mission was not in vain. I found out new information that both explains an observation held since becoming a space cadet and offers a better assurance of safety when jumping in to a system. I would say it was worth it.

Posted in gaming | 4 Comments »
Tags: agents, caracal, cloaking, deadspace, eve online, penny ibramovic, pvp, raven, salvaging, world of warcraft

Cmd-tab occasionally not working in EVE Online Mac

It is possible to Cmd-tab out of EVE Online’s Mac client to the desktop, using the key combination’s normal function to change application focus. I have found that occasionally the Cmd key seems not to be recognised when doing this and instead the client only collapses all open informational game windows, which is what a press of the tab key by itself should do. However, I have discovered what is happening.

At some point during a session I will have accidentally hit the caps lock key, probably in a mad keyboard mashing attempt to activate the right modules, which for some reason then prevents the Cmd-tab combination from working. If this happens, a subsequent press of the caps lock key (or two) is all that is required to restore the application-switching functionality to normal, allowing the EVE Online Mac client to be pushed to the background again.

Posted in gaming, technical | No Comments »
Tags: eve online

Sapphire tries protection-based PvP

World of Warcraft has entered in to the Spirit of Competition, and commoners all over the world are talking about the battlegrounds of Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Alterac Valley. There may even be chatter about the Eye of the Storm and the gladiator arenas, but Sapphire, my warrior, is too inexperienced to venture to those places. With Spirit of Competition being intended for amateurs the current climate is meant to encourage everyone to participate, particularly those who are otherwise reluctant, with the offer of a special tabard for anyone who stays to the end of a battleground, and the possibility of other rewards for accomplishments.

Having previously spent many a session trying to push back the Horde in both Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin, as well as one hilariously aborted-through-disconnection attempt on Alterac Valley, back when I was a warlock with nothing better to do, I fancied the idea of revisiting the battlegrounds to see how much had changed. The competition gave me the push to visit the Arathi Basin battlemaster and enter a contest.

My memories of Arathi Basin are of the Alliance being vastly less organised than the Horde, even after cross-server matches tried to alleviate the advantages offered from population imbalances. The Alliance team would rush off in all directions with little plan, and be crushed by an advancing army with a clear, shared vision of victory. It’s strangely reassuring to have the same experience again, in both battleground matches I enter, even though there is more semblance of structure in the Alliance’s actions.

It is also good to see the little changes made since my previous battleground encounters. Everyone being automatically grouped in to a single raid was introduced when I was still playing PvP battlegrounds, and indeed I like to think that my very suggestion on the official forum helped that change come to light. It was terribly frustrating for an individual to have to invite everyone in to the raid group, particularly if people joined or left mid-way through a battle, and it was equally frustrating when you’re not invited and getting no honourable kills. One addition that is new to me is the reduction to zero resources required to all abilities before the battle started, allowing for all classes to apply maximum buffs without being drained of mana, giving no excuse not to buff everyone and anyone, even if they join ten seconds before the battle starts. Of course, these are all gone after the initial, inevitable death on the Alliance side, but it’s good to start with some advantage.

I wasn’t expecting much from the battleground experience, partly because of my previous Alliance experiences, in general and in Arathi Basin, partly because I am rather rusty at PvP, and mostly because I am a fully-specced protection warrior, equipped primarily to generate huge amounts of threat whilst mitigating damage from PvE mobs. I also find that in the battlgeround I miss my Piercing Howl ability, which is an AoE speed-reducing effect from the Fury talent tree and quite useful in PvP. I am quite surprised, therefore, to find that at the end of the battle I have the second-highest number of killing blows for the Alliance. Whilst it is comforting to know that I didn’t directly cause the loss for the Alliance, it is just as disappointing to realise a protection warrior, who is seven levels below the maximum allowed in the battleground, made a significant contribution.

It is quite good fun to indulge in a little PvP again, even if the Alliance is still a relatively disorganised rabble. At least it means my suboptimal spec doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and I can still contribute. And in my postbox I find a shiny new tabard waiting for me, to commemorate the the Spirit of Competition. If I try again, maybe I can even get a medal.

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Tags: arathi basin, battlegrounds, pvp, sapphire, world of warcraft

Leaving Jita

It would be easier to leave Jita if it were possible to enter the system in the first place. Having found some asteroids in a deadspace mission pocket I thought I’d take the opportunity to mine some ore with less chance of being rudely interrupted. Mining the asteroids meant heading back to get my mining cruiser, then swapping to my hauler, before finally jumping back in to my Caracal to return to my agent to complete the mission. I pointed my Caracal at the first stargate on the trip back to Jita and started making the few jumps needed to get there.

When I got to the Jita gate in Sobaseki I initiated the jump process and my ship… well, it didn’t quite make it to Jita, but it certainly wasn’t in Sobaseki any more. I’m not entirely sure where it was, as it seemed to be in limbo. I waited for a while, browsed the web for a bit, did some auctioneering in World of Warcraft, and waited some more, but Jita and my ship remained equally absent. I tried restarting EVE Online to see if that would kick-start the post-jump resubstantiation but with no luck.

After a bit more pointless waiting I had nothing else to do but fire off a character stuck SOS, noting that Penny Ibramovic had disappeared on her way to Jita. My plea was heard and was quickly and politely responded to, and the jump gate was rebooted to push me back in to Sobaseki. ‘I suggest you stay away from Jita for the time being’, I was told, but I had no intention of trying to get back there any time soon, and never really relished the idea of jumping in to the system-wide stasis webifier that is Jita.

I had to go back at some point as my main ships are stored there, as well as some many minerals and some probably unnecessary modules. I formulated a plan: I’d go back to Jita when it was quieter and get everything necessary in to a different system. And that’s what I did. I got my ships out of Jita as well as any items in storage that I might want to use, and moved everything to a nearby system that looked like it would serve me as a hub just as well.

I will probably still head in to Jita on occasion, because of the bustling market economy both offering good deals on buying equipment and a thriving environment in which to sell salvaged modules, but with all my ships elsewhere it will not be a necessary location to jump in to for day-to-day operations.

Posted in gaming | No Comments »
Tags: caracal, deadspace, eve online, jita, mining, penny ibramovic, sobaseki

Kung fu tigress

With Kung Fu Panda the best film of the year so far, and my being a bit of a furry with a penchant for cats, I was quite excited to see that there is a stuffed Tigress toy available for sale! I was less excited to find out that the payment and delivery options were limited to the USA, with me across the pond.

Luckily, I have awesome friends of awesomeness, with one particularly awesome US friend who was happy to order a Tigress for me and then ship it over the Atlantic. Expecting the package to take around a week to arrive I was quite surprised to find it on my doorstep after only three days!

Tigress and I are getting along quite well, and she’s showing me some nifty kung fu moves, although those are mostly to keep Kenickie the cat from pouncing on her.

Posted in personal | No Comments »
Tags: kung fu panda, tiger, tigress

An otter PvP story

Imagine you learnt to wrap otters in carpets solely by playing against a carpet-wrapping computer. The computer plays quite well, but you learn by playing him often, and get bored of playing such a predictable opponent. You decide to go to some place where other people wrap otters in carpets, so as to be able to play against more intelligent opponents and to have more fun.

Eager with your new plan you turn up at the place so early that there is no other human around. To pass the time you start wrapping an otter in a portable carpet. You’re half-way through wrapping the otter when the first other player arrives, unrolls your carpet, and reveals sixteen otters of his own. But you’ve only brought one otter, and with sixteen against one your opponent wraps more otters easily.

You come back for a second game against the same opponent, this time sixteen versus sixteen otters and thus more fair. Only your opponent is using a magnetic carpet and iron otters, which he holds in his hands and starts running and jumping around with it. As it is Blitz otter-wrapping-in-carpet, and you only have a certain time to smother the otter, sometimes you simply don’t manage to run and jump after him fast enough, so he makes it to the ice cream factory quicker than you do and wins again.

You see some other players arriving, and with your first opponent being so obnoxious you decide to play against them. Only they number three and can each wrap a different part of the otter at any one time. Three against one, you lose again. You retreat into a corner where you see a single lone player and offer to play him. Only it turns out the guy is grandmaster Melmoth, who not only beats you easily, but then proceeds to use his otter wrapped in a carpet as a kite.

You flee the scene, but on the way out get ambushed by a rogue otter wrapper in hiding, who do exist, really! He manages to wrap ten otters in a single carpet before you can even wrap your first, then stuns you and wraps another otter, running off to the ice cream factory before you even wrapped your first otter. You finally make it out the door and decide to never wrap otters in carpets against real humans again. Playing against a computer is obviously much better.

This is what PvP is like. It’s madness, MADNESS I SAY!

Posted in personal | 1 Comment »
Tags: parody, stupid analogy

Defeating the impossible

Over at kiasa, Zoso is pondering computer games that feature unbalanced boss or end-of-game fights. The only boss fight that immediately springs to mind when reading his post is the walrus from the N64’s Diddy Kong Racing, who would throw the most annoying slowing obstacles in your path to make an already-difficult race to an almost-impossible one. But it is Zoso’s comment about the ‘hardcore’ player who could breeze through a particular game’s levels, and is perhaps responsible for the increased difficulty of the boss encounter, that got me thinking.

There have been a number of games that have seemed far too difficult to me, where the next level is a mythical zone, only shown as a screenshot on the back of the case as vague proof that it does indeed exist and isn’t just a conceptual artistic work to convince you that the game continues for longer than The Level You Can’t Complete. I have spent hours struggling to overcome obstacles, timing jumps just right, ducking below well-placed amorphous bullets, yet still plummeting down bottomless pits or being reduced to a skeleton.

My struggle continues until one fateful day, when everything just ‘clicks’. On that day, I enter a zen-like gaming trance where the lines of code run down the screen and I find myself able to break all the rules, to glide through levels like the obstacles were specifically programmed to miss me. Somehow, I can see the game’s true form. I can immediately think back to two games that gave me serious troubles when first playing them yet revealed all their secrets to me in an unfathomable manner later on.

The first is Super Ghouls and Ghosts, played on the Super Nintendo. The first level caused me problems, running backwards and forwards to avoid the zombies ambling at different speeds, plants firing blobs of fire directly at me whatever position I was on the screen, jumps needing to be pixel-perfect, and hidden upgrade pots tempting me to risk more than my ability could handle. When I finally made it to the second level, the ghost ship, I died so quickly that I soon found myself having no lives and restarting amongst the frustrations of the first level. I got so little experience with the later levels that I simply didn’t last long when I got there.

By the time I had somehow got to the icy level my earlier trials had probably hardwired the controls and reactions of my knight in to a clump of neurons that had dedicated themselves to working on the problem of defeating Super Ghouls and Ghosts. No more did I see a screen of pixels but instead I was the knight in the armour. From that point on, the game was me. I knew all the patterns of the enemies, what caused game events, where all the hidden pots were and how to summon them, and the scenery was more familiar than my back garden. I no longer feared my surroundings, I danced around them, never again to feel any ignorance.

The second game with a similar experience is Turrican on the Amiga. Turrican was difficult, with two-way scrolling; large, sprawling levels; hidden blocks; and vast arrays of power-ups to gather. The power-ups seemed to be the key to progressing, allowing several weapons to be upgraded at once and encouraging amassing huge numbers of floating icons all the time. Yet despite the lure of the power-ups, getting them was not easy and progressing was a struggle.

Getting through the levels in Turrican was hindered by their two-dimensional structure, often requiring vertical jumps to be made involving mid-air changes of direction. Whilst falling great heights did no damage in themselves, they were a set-back in time and occasionally forced you to encounter more enemies. Sometimes the levels were the enemy themselves, with the apparently H. R. Geiger-inspired alien level being such a maze that I couldn’t find my way through for many sessions, and even once the exit had been found I couldn’t remember how I got there in order to repeat it the next time.

Even right to the final level I fought hard, with the last encounter being difficult without seeming unbalanced with respect to the rest of the game. It took me many attempts to beat the final encounter, and considering the effort it took every time to get there I am amazed I managed to prevail, yet is also a testament to the high quality of the game to bring me back each time. It was difficult, but I defeated the final boss and I completed Turrican.

And then the game held no more secrets from me. I knew it all, where all the hidden blocks were either concealing multiple power-ups, or single power-ups but providing a stepping stone to a previously-unaccesible area full of goodies or a short-cut. The problems I had with jumping up with mid-air changes of direction were gone, and now there were just fluid motions ending in pixel-perfect landings. No more did I get lost in the alien-esque level, instead waltzing my way through the level with no detours. Even the final boss fight became straightforward. It was as if completing the game had unlocked an easy-mode.

I can’t explain what finally enabled me to play the games with ease where before I had trouble getting past the first level. I could understand a gradual progression from learner to master, but it was as if someone flicked a switch and the games got easier all of a sudden. And it wasn’t that I was getting through the earlier levels more easily, I was struggling through the whole game each time until that one day where everything could be completed with equal ease. It is important to note that the games also didn’t become boring because of this new-found skill. Indeed, they became more fun precisely because I knew how difficult it had been, and it was a delight to race through the levels with consumate ease, knowing that I had mastered them.

If only the walrus had too bestowed its secrets to me once vanquished, my time as a racing tiger would have been much less stressful.

Posted in gaming | No Comments »
Tags: amiga, diddy kong racing, n64, snes, super ghouls and ghosts, tiger, turrican, zoso