Blabbidy blah-blah
Another couple of uneventful days. Today I was sent off on Orientation and Mobility to find the Alamo Drafthouse, which is hilarious since I LOVE the Drafthouse. I got there just in time to not see Alice in Wonderland because my phone was running down and I make it a point never to be outside walking distance of home without said phone. (I may go back Thursday if I finish classes early enough).
I continue to be utterly overwhelmed and almost stultified (as in, yes, getting dumber) by my inability to formulate a Plan B. Paralegal was suggested to me--but while I really enjoy reading layman-level law texts, that's a lot of work for relatively little money.
I don't really know how I feel about STO, aside from the "no sense of scale" complaint. It feels a lot like Champions Online, in that there's not that much incentive to group and build permanent bonds with other players, and the whole feels like less than the sum of its part. I think that with CBS/Paramount's involvement, it's more likely than CO is to reach its actual potential, but even as a secondary MMO I'm not sure I'll give it that chance. It's becoming evident that Paragon Studios was all the best people at Cryptic...and that doesn't change the fact that CoH grows stale after a few years. That said, I've put less than eight hours into it--I'm trying to finish the first Mass Effect, and I don't have the MMO time I used to. I might like it more or less when I get further in. (And for the record, my first ship is the USS Harriman, named for the captain who managed to lose Captain Kirk to the Borg on the Enterprise-B's shakedown cruise. Because I am that kind of Star Trek fan.)
Speaking of the STO scale issue, I remembered something today. Probably the very first non-fiction piece I read by Harlan Ellison was about his experience on The Starlost, a disaster of monumental proportions which is nonetheless remembered fondly by people who saw it on TV. (I'd say "Never mention it to Ellison at a con." But personally, in spite of how much I've loved his short stories over the decades, I would probably cross an interstate to avoid interacting with him since the only outcome is me being hospitalized by a man one third my weight and triple my age, so "never mention anything to Ellison" seems like better advice.) The basic concept of the show involved a Space Ark with various cultures segregated for purposes of preservation. Over centuries, they cease to be aware they're on a ship--that domed habitat, with a diameter of twenty miles, is the World. (There's more to it than that, but it's really not important to the story).
One day, Ellison got a call. There was a problem, you see, in that they couldn't get an outdoor location twenty miles across. The best they could do is two miles. Ellison responded with predictable rage and venom. "Just shoot two miles and call it twenty", he shouted into the phone. (Some weeks later when he arrived on-set, he was understandably horrified to find that they had been shooting two miles and calling it two...and that they had changed the script so that the ark's control room, the MacGuffin for which the story's hero was searching the entire series, appeared in the first episode so he could look for the backup control room, which the line producer didn't seem to understand was silly unless there's a good reason the main controls don't work. The idea of a wrecked-up main control center appearing in episode one might actually work in a dramatic sense, but it wasn't what Ellison wrote, which was a problem since this was his first time to be 'in charge' of a whole series.)
And that's the whole problem with a 10km range for phasers and photon torps. Vice City of Grand Theft Auto was something like three square miles at "real" scale. It didn't matter; you never saw real distance numbers on screen, and if you needed to they could just fudge them to preserve the illusion of size. The volume of space that represents the Sol system in STO might be a square mile or a square foot or a square Astronomical Unit in terms of "real" distance. It doesn't matter; if you don't want to render ten parsecs, you shoot two miles and call it twenty. No effect whatsoever on gameplay, nerds like me are pacified, everybody wins.
I continue to be utterly overwhelmed and almost stultified (as in, yes, getting dumber) by my inability to formulate a Plan B. Paralegal was suggested to me--but while I really enjoy reading layman-level law texts, that's a lot of work for relatively little money.
I don't really know how I feel about STO, aside from the "no sense of scale" complaint. It feels a lot like Champions Online, in that there's not that much incentive to group and build permanent bonds with other players, and the whole feels like less than the sum of its part. I think that with CBS/Paramount's involvement, it's more likely than CO is to reach its actual potential, but even as a secondary MMO I'm not sure I'll give it that chance. It's becoming evident that Paragon Studios was all the best people at Cryptic...and that doesn't change the fact that CoH grows stale after a few years. That said, I've put less than eight hours into it--I'm trying to finish the first Mass Effect, and I don't have the MMO time I used to. I might like it more or less when I get further in. (And for the record, my first ship is the USS Harriman, named for the captain who managed to lose Captain Kirk to the Borg on the Enterprise-B's shakedown cruise. Because I am that kind of Star Trek fan.)
Speaking of the STO scale issue, I remembered something today. Probably the very first non-fiction piece I read by Harlan Ellison was about his experience on The Starlost, a disaster of monumental proportions which is nonetheless remembered fondly by people who saw it on TV. (I'd say "Never mention it to Ellison at a con." But personally, in spite of how much I've loved his short stories over the decades, I would probably cross an interstate to avoid interacting with him since the only outcome is me being hospitalized by a man one third my weight and triple my age, so "never mention anything to Ellison" seems like better advice.) The basic concept of the show involved a Space Ark with various cultures segregated for purposes of preservation. Over centuries, they cease to be aware they're on a ship--that domed habitat, with a diameter of twenty miles, is the World. (There's more to it than that, but it's really not important to the story).
One day, Ellison got a call. There was a problem, you see, in that they couldn't get an outdoor location twenty miles across. The best they could do is two miles. Ellison responded with predictable rage and venom. "Just shoot two miles and call it twenty", he shouted into the phone. (Some weeks later when he arrived on-set, he was understandably horrified to find that they had been shooting two miles and calling it two...and that they had changed the script so that the ark's control room, the MacGuffin for which the story's hero was searching the entire series, appeared in the first episode so he could look for the backup control room, which the line producer didn't seem to understand was silly unless there's a good reason the main controls don't work. The idea of a wrecked-up main control center appearing in episode one might actually work in a dramatic sense, but it wasn't what Ellison wrote, which was a problem since this was his first time to be 'in charge' of a whole series.)
And that's the whole problem with a 10km range for phasers and photon torps. Vice City of Grand Theft Auto was something like three square miles at "real" scale. It didn't matter; you never saw real distance numbers on screen, and if you needed to they could just fudge them to preserve the illusion of size. The volume of space that represents the Sol system in STO might be a square mile or a square foot or a square Astronomical Unit in terms of "real" distance. It doesn't matter; if you don't want to render ten parsecs, you shoot two miles and call it twenty. No effect whatsoever on gameplay, nerds like me are pacified, everybody wins.