I had about five or six things I was thinking of writing about today, but I’m drawing a near-blank. You’d think I hadn’t had my cup of coffee this morning yet. Okay, one at a time, let’s see how many I can remember:

Book reviews: Today’s review is of John Izzo’s The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. I know it sounds gimmicky, but it’s actually a very good book.

I have three cookbook reviews upcoming soon: a Betty Crocker whole grains cookbook from Wiley; an EatingWell Healthy in a Hurry cookbook; and a New England cookery cookbook. I’ve also gotten four new cookbooks for review; two are filled with decadent desserts; one involves coffee drinks & desserts; and one focuses on olives and olive oil. I’m nearly done reading Margaret Wittenberg’s New Good Food as well.

Sayonara, Rite Aid: Imagine for a moment that you’re getting a prescription filled. It’s a medication that you have to take three pills of every day. Your doctor deliberately gives you a scrip for the time-release version so you only have to take it once a day, all three pills at once, so, for example, you won’t forget to take it at lunch. It’s a psychoactive mood stabilizer prescribed for bipolar, so it’s something you can’t mess around with in terms of blood level. You get the prescription filled. Thankfully you’ve been taking the medication for a couple of years already, so when you open the bottle up a couple of days later you know damn well your pills shouldn’t be bright pink.

Turns out they gave you the non-time-release version—without changing your instructions to take it once a day.

Imagine what could have happened if you had never taken the drug before and didn’t know any better, if you’d actually taken all three pills at once. Spike in blood level, possible toxicity effects… at best, without a consistent blood level it certainly wouldn’t have kept your moods stable.

Yes, human error exists at pharmacies. They can miss the very large ‘XR’ that indicates extended release (a later check of the carbon copy proved it had been on there). But any halfway-awake pharmacist should have realized that the direction to take three pills in the morning, combined with that drug, could be bad.

I was willing to deal with the apathetic pharmacists and ridiculously long wait times at our local Rite Aid because it was so close to home. I’m not willing to deal with careless mistakes that could truly screw me up. I’m now a happy customer of a different pharmacy, which is an extra 15 minute drive away, but had noticeably awake pharmacists and techs, a much shorter wait, and much nicer facilities.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: I love the game’s economy system more than that in any other game I’ve ever played. However, in order to really go nuts with it, you pretty much need a society (guild-equivalent) to work together. Each player is allotted ten plots of land (essentially) per server that they can put into use. On each plot of land you can build some sort of structure, like a plantation (which allows you to combine stored hours of labor plus money to harvest, for example, beans, maize, wheat, or hemp), a grain mill, a textile mill, a weaponsmith, a tanner, a hunting lodge, etc. The devs deliberately made these things fine-grained enough that you need more than ten buildings to really make anything useful.

One of my complaints in games like Warcraft is that ultimately, crafting isn’t entirely useful. There’s an end-state characters reach where there just isn’t much more you can craft that’s useful. Pirates put that to shame—there’s so much to build that’s constantly useful. Ships, ship modifications, ammo, consumable repair kits, buffs, etc. (special gunpowder, hull patches, and so on). With a good society you could really go to town playing with the economy and the pvp mechanics.

Unfortunately, everyone I know has already invested years into their Warcraft characters. Putting all that stuff together in Pirates would take a lot of time that they just don’t have. Nearly all the gamers I play with are adults, with jobs, spouses, kids. They don’t have time to do that and Warcraft, and since we already have our WoW guild kitted out and having fun, with its level 70 characters, the odds of them pulling up roots and settling down in Pirates—no matter how good it is—are virtually nil.

So as much as I’d like to play Pirates and enjoy the game, for the moment I’m not buying it. Perhaps later, if we can convince even a couple of friends to go with us, we’ll do it. But for now, it looks like we’re sticking with Warcraft.

EVE Online: Eve, on the other hand, is easier to get a satisfying experience out of without that active a corp behind you—simply because there are no levels, and thus it’s incredibly open-ended. There’s no worry that you’ll hit the top level in two months and say, “now what?”

I got my first Myrmidon and lost it again almost immediately in my first level three mission. I know, that’s incredibly pathetic. I blame the fact that I hadn’t had my coffee yet, because it’s a convenient excuse. (Actually, had my reflexes been slightly better I wouldn’t have lost my Myrmidon—I hit warp just a fraction of a second too late.) I went back with my tail between my legs, refused to drop the mission, spent a few days replacing my Myrmidon, kitting it out better, and building up shield skills, and went back and succeeded at the mission. Phew.

Okay, I don’t know if that was all I meant to talk about today, but it’s certainly enough for now. I’ll leave you with a bumper sticker that beautifully reflects my political feelings:

I vote for people not parties

Mmmmmm. I reviewed Michael Turback’s Mocha this morning. Good stuff. For various reasons the review also links to two other reviews in the blog: one on Turback’s Hot Chocolate, which I also highly recommend picking up a copy of, and one of a particular variety of Swiss Miss cocoa. The latter might seem an odd thing to review, but I do recommend reading Jeffrey’s accounting of it, as it’s quite hysterical.

In totally unrelated thoughts, since I don’t have much brainpower these days I’ve been playing a bit more EVE Online. It took me a while to find a corp. I tried one based on chatting for a while with the guy who was running it, but quickly discovered that while he was a decent guy, some of the other folks in the corp seemed to think it was a guys’ locker room in there. Things that guys won’t say in front of women in person because they’re far too offensive just fly past online; it often seems like when online, most guys assume everyone they run into is just like them in terms of age and gender, and speak on that assumption.

So, I dropped that corp. Not that the NPC corp was much better, but at least there it was easier to ignore people. I figured if I held out long enough I’d find something decent, and I think I finally have. My husband and I just ended up in a corp started by some retired military folk. Funny how I always end up gaming with military and retired military people. By and large so far they tend to be relaxed-yet-focused, and fun without being juvenile and offensive. After all, I don’t mind swearing and trash talk; it’s misogyny, racism and the like that I won’t stand for.

Edited to add: Courtesy of my new corp I’ve been introduced to the delights of 1,001 things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG. It’s tough to pick excerpts with which to convince you to go take a look, because nearly every other item on the list is pretty damn funny. But these are my favorites of the last five minutes, so here you go:

412. I will not try to skip to the main boss dressed like a singing telegram.
521. I will not convince the entire party to play Amish for the cyberpunk campaign.
552. If my character’s drow wife finds I let my neice appear in a Gnomes Gone Wild Video, my death will not even warrant a saving throw.
579. “Pimp out my Death Star” is not a real show, and I’d better believe Grand Moff Tarkin knows this.
616. Even if they are the same cliched acid for blood aliens, can’t load my shotgun with baking powder.
727. Cannot singlehandedly make Starfleet Academy the #1 party school in the Alpha Quadrant.

This is my alt

I didn’t get very far in the first part of my EVE Online thoughts, largely due to being sick and thus tired this week. So, here’s part the second.

Eve is wide open in allowing you to do almost anything you can imagine. You can mine ore and sell it for money. You can research and build devices and sell them to other players. You can do missions for corporations. You can hunt pirates and collect their bounties. You can hunt other players. You can explore space. You can build a vast empire on the strength of your skills, putting together a corporation of mercenaries-for-hire, running a courier service, or building ships for pilots. It’s an incredibly open-ended game. I never know what to say when new players ask, “what’s the end game like?” on the rookie help channel, other than the by-now-traditional reply, “there is no end game.” Which is ideal for me; I’ve never liked any end-game that I’ve seen before, since I’m not a raider.

I’d always heard about the pvp aspect as though that was all there was to Eve and I’m just really not much for pvp, so I thought I wouldn’t like the game. Little did I know that there was so much other stuff for me to do.

The first character I created was a miner. However, I ended up switching her out for a soldier for two reasons. First, I discovered that my favorite thing to do right now is run missions, and that’s easier with soldier skills. Second, as it turns out, a lot of the good mining areas are in low-sec (low-security) areas where pvp happens much more often (and where well-established miners with lots of equipment often come along and mine asteroid belts dry within an hour or two of server restart every morning), so I decided to avoid that for now.

The skill system, however, is the greatest part of what makes Eve so amazing to me. There are dozens of skills you can potentially train up, and all it takes is time: you can even train them while you aren’t logged in. Because of the vast array of skills, different characters in the same profession end up quite different for much of their careers. You don’t have the situation where every warrior has the same range of abilities and maybe a slight variation in some sort of talent or virtue spread. You have (potential) access to every skill in game no matter what you play, as well, so if you’re a soldier and you decide you want to do some mining on the side, that works too. My only regret is that you can only have one character per account training up a skill at a time, so you can’t develop multiple characters in parallel.

Naturally I’m (mostly) doing the smart thing of training up my learning skills first, which increases my attributes, which means I’ll learn my other skills faster. However, I can’t resist the pull of a few side-trips along the way there. I had to stop and work my way up to salvaging, because dear lord you make money salvaging! I had to toss in a few low-level abilities that allowed me to use a few specific upgrades, and I’m about to get cybernetics so I can use implants to increase my attributes and thus, again, increase the rate at which I learn skills. Also, since it doesn’t tend to take long to learn the first level of most new skills, I’m tossing in the first level of a bunch of handy skills here and there to take the edge off of some tight restrictions like ship CPU power and capacitor charge. I know, I know; not as effective as getting those learning skills first. But I have no attention span to speak of.

On Books: Today’s book review is of the Pocket Idiot’s Guide to the iPhone, and now I’m reading an ARC of David Gibbins’s Crusader Gold. Starting tonight we have a friend coming to visit for about a week and a half, so I might be a bit slow in posting and reading this coming week!

I’d move faster, but my latency is high

I had intended to post this a few days ago, but both Jeffrey and I have had the flu, so mostly I’ve been using up whole boxes of tissues and groaning. I swear this happens every time he goes on a business trip—something about air travel and sitting in meetings all day with lots of people results in illness.

Oh, and before I get started, the latest book reviews are of Barbara Weltman’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business, Third Edition and John Stark Bellamy II’s Vintage Vermont Villainies.

Okay, I admit it, I’ve been saying for months that I had no interest whatsoever in playing Eve Online. In my defense, I really did have no interest in the parts of the game I had heard about in people’s blogs: wild & crazy pvp, corporate espionage, etc. Then, about a week ago or so, my husband started poking around and looking at the trailers and information on the game and convinced me I should try it with him. Within 24 hours we’d both gone from the trial account to buying a subscription. In fact, I’d go so far as to say this is the most fun I’ve ever had with an online game, and I honestly believe I could play it for years without ever getting tired of it.

You should really know before you start that Eve has an incredibly steep learning curve. There’s a LOT to assimilate and learn, and plenty of details that aren’t entirely obvious. However, there are some things that make this process decidedly easier:

• Assume the first character you create will be a throwaway character that you use to learn how to play the game. That way there’s no pressure to ‘get it right’ and you can be a bit relaxed about figuring out what you’re doing.
• USE THE DAMN TUTORIAL. Seriously. It starts up automatically when you begin, and you need it. No, really. You need it. People are constantly asking questions in the rookie help channel that are answered very clearly in the tutorial. Besides, the various tutorial missions and such will also give you a better ship and other bennies, so they’re worth it. I repeat: USE THE TUTORIAL. If you don’t, no one will want to answer your questions, believe me.
• That said, there are plenty of questions that aren’t answered easily in the tutorial. If you get confused by something, try these suggestions:
  • Muck around a bit. Experiment. Play with the UI and see what you can do. There are few tragedies you can’t recover from with a little time, and if you took that advice about considering your first character disposable then you really won’t lose anything at all. This game is not designed for folks who need their hands held through everything.
  • Right-click. Most things can be found or done by right-clicking on a relevant item.
  • Explore the UI. There’s a ton of tabs and panels that present an incredible amount of information. For example, if you want to know how much money your character has, it might make sense to check the tab labeled “wallet,” yes?
  • If those don’t work, ask on the Rookie Help Channel (RHC), to which you are automatically subscribed for your first 30 days of play.
• If you ask a question on the RHC, be patient. If no one answers you after a couple of minutes, try again. There are literally thousands of people subscribed to the channel at any one time, which means that text tends to fly by. It’s extremely easy for people to miss your question.
• Use the Eve resources available on the internet. I highly recommend Eve[geek] for information on everything from ore to agents, and the incredibly robust and featureful EVEMon, which helps you plan out your skill progression.

Anyway, that’s about all I have the energy for today. Tomorrow: why I love Eve Online.