Author: Don

A higher viewpoint


St. Mary Cathedral, Wichita, Kansas in USA

While the rest of the inmates at the office were enduring the annual Christmas luncheon, I visited the cathedral again with my camera. I set the tripod up in the choir loft this time, and used a tripod head designed specifically for panoramas. The “Panosaurus” made a difference in the image quality. There are far fewer glitches than in my previous attempt, and they’re not as obvious.

Quote of the day

The astounding thing about all the quackeries, fads, and movements of the past hundred years in America is that they were first accepted by superior people, by men and women of education, intelligence, breeding, wealth, and experience. Only after the upper classes had approved, the masses accepted each new thing.

—Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (1928)

Perhaps it’s not that astounding; I long ago observed that high intelligence is not necessarily associated with common sense.

Pre-Rush Day link dump

J.K. Rowling has been recognized in Thog’s Masterclass:

Dept of Trickle-Down. ‘There, in his poky office, Simon Price gazed covetously on a vacancy among the ranks of insiders to a place where cash was now trickling down onto an empty chair with no lap waiting to catch it.’ (J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy, 2012)

Daniel Barenboim also earns a mention in Ansible:

Pianist Daniel Barenboim is interviewed by Rosanna Greenstreet: Q. ‘What is your earliest memory?’ A. ‘In my mother’s belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.’ (Guardian, 2 November)

Christopher Tolkien doesn’t care for Peter Jackson’s movies:

Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher says regretfully. “And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.”
This divorce has been systematically driven by the logic of Hollywood. “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,” Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”

So is the world going to end tomorrow? Nah. I suppose you could marathon RahXephon if you’re feeling silly, but I suggest listening to Geddy, Alex and Neil instead.

These are the acceptable ways to end civilization:

… asteroid/comet, climate, massive volcanic eruption, zombie pandemic, Daleks, the Master, the Mayor turns into a giant snake monster, Gachnar (although that would be a very tiny apocalypse), gateway to Hell opens over Los Angeles, Anubis, Tripods, Triffids, Ragnarok and possibly a Farnsworth Doomsday Device.

Are you still using Windows 95?

You have two cows ….

No silver eagle of the steppe

US copyright law is stupid. Case in point: Girls und Panzer‘s eighth episode is missing about a minute in its Crunchyroll version. Unless you download a fansub, you are going to miss this 1938 song, the highlight of the episode.

Update: here’s the video, via Ivlin, who notes that “Copyright is demonstrably making art worse“.

Time to hang up your tights

… and Paragon City is no more.

I stayed up way too late last night to observe the end of City of Heroes. I spent most of that time getting in everyone’s way taking screenshots of all the players I had never met. It was the first time that the MMORPG actually was “massively multiplayer” in my few months of occasional visits.

There was a lot of sentimental gushing in the chat, with much affection expressed for the creators of CoH and contempt for their Korean overlords. I have a good deal of sympathy for the stranded players. Still, I came late to the game and never acquired any “friends” in it, so I have less emotional investment in CoH than most of the other players. For the sake of the people who spent up to eight years’ worth of free time in that online world, I hope that CoH is resurrected. However, I probably won’t be there if it is, even if there is another Mac version. I have other ways of connecting with people online, and I am just not that much of an RPGer. (On the other hand, it is fun to fly, and shoot exploding arrows, and wield a blazing sword.)

Screenshots are below the fold. They are all from the “Triumph” and “Infinity” servers.

Update: No surprise here.

Continue reading “Time to hang up your tights”

The end of a world

Some years back I spent a lunch hour or two with City of Heroes. I was not terribly impressed. It was difficult to design an avatar that pleased my eye, and the game itself seemed to be just a lot of running around, blasting enemies and exchanging canned dialog with automatons. I lost interest before finishing the tutorial.

Although I didn’t find the game interesting, some writers of note did, notably Neil Gaiman and John C. Wright. From the latter I learned that the Korean company that owns City of Heroes is going to shut it down at the end of this month. Curious to see what Gaiman and Wright found in the game that I had missed, I gave it another try.

The game-play, frankly, is boring. It is still mostly just a lot of running (or flying) around, blasting enemies and exchanging canned dialogue with automatons. As Wright observes, the best part is creating your hero. As a non-paying member, I can only have two characters registered at a time, so I’ve created and deleted a number of avatars: the heavily-armored Carolus Ludovicus, slayer of Jabberwocks; MacCruiskeen, a plain Irish policeman whose toys make your brain hurt (Paragon City needs bicycles); the Mathematrix, a manager at Hilbert’s Hotel who strives to transform the world into a well-ordered set, by force if necessary.

My primary character, and the only one I’ve bothered to level up much, is The Remarkable Miss Sakura. (She became “remarkable” at level 12. I would have preferred an adjective such as “modest,” “unassuming,” or “polite,” but title choices are limited.) Originally a mahou shoujo, she eventually outgrew her frilly dress and retired from the magical girl business. She missed the excitement, though, and decided to make a place for herself as an occidental superheroine.

New characters advance rapidly for a while, and it is mildly addictive to acquire new powers every time you log on. Eventually your progress slows down, and leveling up becomes a grind of blasting gang members, abominations, robots, occultists and Chinese, ((I wonder if the real reason NCsoft is shutting City of Heroes down is that someone was offended by the villainous “Tsoo.”)) interspersed with frequent visits to hospitals. There is currently an alien invasion underway to spice things up, but it’s not enough to sustain my interest. I might log on once more on the last day, but I’m otherwise done with City of Heroes.

I may have missed an important part of the experience, though. There are many opportunities to form teams and many kinds of chat, but apparently I managed to pick the least popular servers to create my heroes on. More often than not, it seemed that I was the only player logged on. When I did receive team invitations, they were usually badly-timed, and the few occasions I was able to accept an invitation, the experiences were frustrating, sometimes for technical reasons, sometimes for human. Asocial though I am, I might have enjoyed City of Heroes better on a more populous server.

Which is why I’ll stick to Second Life for my MMO needs, even if City of Heroes gets a reprieve. It’s much easier to meet people from across the country and around the world, and there’s no RPG to get in the way. You can just find — or build — a congenial café where you can listen to music or play your own (it’s fairly easy to stream music from your computer into Second Life) and chat with friends.

*****

Superheroics of a different sort: Here’s a rather odd-looking Sailor Senshi.

Her colleagues can be seen here. There’a a different set of Sailor Avengers here.