Lately I've been playing the last legs of the Lineage II Open beta. with beta about to close in a few days, I've decided to violate yet another EULA ;) and talk a bit about the game. Lineage II is a VERY clean looking MMORPG put out by NCsoft, graphicly it's on par with FFXi, and not as cartoonish as Worlds of Warcraft is going to be. Aside from putting a bit to much emphasis on certain....atributes of female character models (just look at some of the screenshots on their page), my only issue with the game is that it's lacking some features I never realized I used so much, and some other little things.

AFK tags, not there, could be usefull. I hate walking away for a minute and not having a way to let people know that

for some reason my keyboard does not activate hot buttons, they must be clicked. I like to use my keyboard for movement too, and in L2, it's slow, inacurate, and laggy. point and click still moves best, but I'm biased to likeing the keyboard.

A ton of quests, an active quest dialog window, but the only way to see if you have a quest available is to talk to...well, everyone, at pretty much every level. the 'name appears in gold' thing from WoW might be a good idea.

the spell effects, and model animations are awesome, you hardly notice the level grind hehe. Leveling takes a bit more killing than EQ, but that's fine by me.

when DE's run it looks silly :(

there is a HUGE bot problem. not like in EQ where someone will be afk tradeskilling, there are roving bands of botted players. on Kain, there is a guy with characters named lovenn0 through loven5. 0 through 2 sit in the orc village and sell things, 3 through 5 are roaming the lvl 1-10 area's killing everything and raking in probably 4k adena an hour each. there is a Jjoohn111, 222, 333, - 999 running around as well doing much the same thing.

Overall, it's a nice game, good to look at, fun to play around with. the way PK is handled is nice, but at upper levels it could cause some issues (PK makes vendors and guards attack on sight, but at higher levels, who's visiting towns?) The town thing is sorta balanced by the Karma system, and items dropping from your body more if you die with bad karma, but we shall see.

as far as I can tell, there is no /con system really. I've run all over, and found some critters that are WAY bigger than me, but there is no way to tell without attacking them. once again, maybe it's my PC, because I've heard players talking about grouping down 'reds mobs'

Look for the game in stores here soon!

Well, what a fun few days I had. Let me tell you all about it!

For starters, I was getting new carpet for the abode, then I wasn't....Then I was, then I wasn't for a week, then the next day I was. Now I have it. Follow that? Didn't think you would. It all started when I was told that my humble domicile was getting a floorlift, and that my nifty vintage 1980's bright red carpet was going away (Hopefully to ugly carpet hell). This renovation was supposed to take place prior to Easter, but was postponed. Then it was supposed to happen the weekend after Easter, but it was postponed again. Then it was supposed to happen Monday morning (ugh, and I'll get to that later) so I spent Friday, Saturday and a good portion of Sunday morning ripping up the old carpet, moving all of my stuff (I have ALOT of stuff!) and detaching the DigiMortal from it's various life sustaining connections....Only to find out that the carpet WASN'T getting installed Monday....It probably wouldn't happen until the next weekend. Since I'm so horribly dependent on tech, I hooked half of my crap up again, and slept in my bare prison cell of a room (the Guest room bed is like some kind of soft medieval torture device designed to prevent sleep) Monday rolls around, and I finish hooking up my necessary stuff, only to find out that the installer WOULD be there the next morning at 8AM...........Heaven forbid something goes my way! So now I have new carpet, and I only spent like 5 hours getting most of my stuff back into my room.

In other news, Juan is home! Yea! So after a night of drinking and listening to some great stories about chasing Iraqi gasoline thieves down and administering some good old fashioned American Justice (tm) courtesy of Stanley tools, we hooked up with Johnny and Steve and had some good mosh-pitting at the Iced Earth/Children of Bodom/Evergrey show in Cleveland. Overall, the show was phenomenal. Children of Bodom was awesome, loud and angry, and Iced Earth just destroys everything with Tim Owens at the helm. IE played not only the Something Wicked Trilogy, they also closed the show by coming out in Civil War era uniforms, Flag decked guitars and played the new Gettysburg trilogy. AMAZING STUFF! The only dull area of the evening was Evergrey, who maybe had a bad night, but they were pretty poor performers and seemed to not be interested at all in playing.

Remember folks in the Youngstown area (and worldwide!) the first Saturday in May (May 1st) is International Homebrew Appreciation Day, so if you have a local contingent of brewers like we do, make sure to find out where the party is and go have fun! (For ours, hit up the B&O Station Restr. & Microbrewery) FREE BEER, LOTS OF FOOD! I'll be at the B&O from morning till night brewing some beer, drinking heavily, and signing autographs for all my fans!

Well, I got home from work tonight and some mail was sitting on the counter for me, conflicting aura's of good and evil clashing about them. Deciding to put off the inevitable anger and/or jaw dropping shock that usually comes with opening a letter from "The Place Which Shall Remain Nameless". I instead eat a nice dinner of Vanilla Pepsi and hot wings. mmmmmmm wings. Having finished my meal, and with Futurama stranding me in the void of a commercial break, I reached for the mail. Deciding that I'd rather get good news first, I reached for the plain white envelope, which I had already guessed contained my Iced Earth concert tickets :). After securing the ticket, I forced my hand to grab the other letter.

Now, Before I tell you what was IN that letter, let me say something about how I view the world. When you do something good, achieve a goal, finish something noteworthy, I feel that it's only right to let you know that I appreciate that action. For example, Your choice of hockey teams wins the championship, do you cheer on their good fortune, or dwell on the fact that the one game you actually went to see, they lost, and refuse to acknowledge their victory? If your a politician, and someone contributes a large sum of money to your campaign, it's only right that you thank that person for their commitment to you, right?

Where was I....Oh yea, the Letter. Over the course of 3 years, I have put a significant amount of time, effort, and a tractor trailer full of my hard earned cash towards my education. This education was conducted entirely at one particular university. I have suffered through bad weather, boring professors, professors that don't even bother to show up, BS projects, innumerable paperwork errors that have dragged out my efforts to graduate by multiple semesters, constant scheduling conflicts and an administrative service that makes post-conflict Iraqi government look like the model of efficiency...And the only thing they can send me in the mail is a notice that I have 10 days to sign paperwork showing that I intend to pay off my student loans.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY!

Is it so much to ask that I get a little card in the mail saying "Congratulations on Graduating! Thanks for attending Kent State!" before they hit me up for more god damn money? It's freaking RUDE! Not to mention that they owe me apologies for losing half my damn paperwork more than once, and me having copies is the only thing that bailed them out! Having seen first hand what state universities do, I really wish I'd have applied to some private schools like where my sister is going...They handle things much better at them >:[

After Apple's slightly screwy tech advice for getting iTunes to recognize and use my CDRW drive turned my well used LiteOn 12x10x32 into a paperweight, I was "forced" into replacing it :)....With a DVD Burner :D. I've spent the last week in a constant state of render/burn hehe! All the Anime I've pulled off the web in the last years, all the DivX movies, all finally able to be played on the bigscreen downstairs instead of my monitor. I'm probably going to wear out this poor drive inside of a year, because I'm pushing out at least 1 - 2 DVD's a day :). For those that want to know, I got the TDK 880N drive, one of the only drives best buy carries that is capable of doing both 8x +R and 8x -R DVD styles. It's even burning the cheap 4x discs I bought at 8x!

Aside from that, It's been a relatively uneventful week, barring a rampaging, scissor throwing (oh yes, scissor THROWING, as in almost stabbing as they flew towards us after being intentionally released at a high rate of speed from angry lady's hand) , belligerent, screaming customer the other day that threatened to come over the counter and pound us poor tech's. What did we do to deserve such a fate? Well, apparently (and I didn't know this) in Profanislovakia where this lady comes from, it's an insult to offer to fix something for free. If you ever traveling, and you enter Profanislovakia, or it's neighboring commonwealths Angertopia or Tweaksland, never EVER offer to do anything nice.

lastly, some temporary links for my new music addict! BG - And Then There Was Silence, Majesty (Live), Bright Eyes (Live), and the special mega uber bonus addition of Symphony X's "Odyssey" in case your a fan of classic Greek literature or modern made for TV movies :D

Kind of an old article, but I'm hearing from some Canadian folks that it's now law up north!

Read Me!

for those that are lazy, basicly Canadian Copyright laws have changed. For all intensive purposes, file sharing, P2P and copying music are legal, because blank recording media, MP3 players, and other things like that now fall under a special tax used to pay recording companies.

I think the American RIAA could learn alot here. rather than fight your customers, threaten them, and make yourself look like an ass, work with them to embrace the technology, while still getting your money....but for that to work down here, our RIAA would have to be held in check by laws maybe, instead of running rampant through loopholes in the system