I got a nifty press release yesterday and wanted to pass it on to you folks:

MMO Portal Launches the Sale of MMO Calendar 2008 to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Wichita, KS - November 15, 2007
- MMO Portal is proud to announce that the 2nd annual MMO Calendar is now on sale! MMO Calendar is an annual, non-profit fund-raiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. With the help of some wonderful MMO developers we have put together another one-of-a-kind calendar featuring original artwork from some of your favorite MMO’s. MMO Calendar 2008 includes:

Age of Conan
Dark Age of Camelot
Dungeons & Dragons Online
Eve Online
EverQuest
EverQuest II
Guild Wars
Lord of the Rings Online
Pirates of the Burning Sea
Star Wars Galaxies
Stargate Worlds
Warhammer Online
World of Warcraft
As a special thank you to everyone that purchases a calendar this year we’ve also been given a bag full of prizes to give away! Upon placing your order you will be entered to win 1 of 10 prizes for each game!

List of Prizes

Age of Conan — Beta Key
Dark Age of Camelot — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Dungeons & Dragons Online — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Eve Online — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
EverQuest — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
EverQuest II — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Guild Wars — Copy of Guild Wars: Platinum
Lord of the Rings Online — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Pirates of the Burning Sea — Beta Key
Star Wars Galaxies — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Stargate Worlds — Beta Key
Warhammer Online — Beta Key
World of Warcraft — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
* 10 of each prize will be given away randomly per game. Odds of winning are solely dependant on the number of buyers.

Keep in mind though… even if you don’t win a prize in one of the drawings you still win. As always, 100% of the proceeds of the sale of MMO Calendar go directly to the amazing people at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, helping them in the fight for children’s lives. Is there a more noble cause anywhere?

Express your love for MMO’s and children all at once! This year’s calendar is only on sale through November 25th, so order yours today!

So, visit MMO Portal, pick up a calendar, support St. Jude’s, and get a chance at prizes!

I found the new Massively MMO news rag via Plaguelands. It’s kind of like a news rag on too much coffee, but that’s okay. Drop by often, check out their news posts on your favorite games, and enter all the spiffy giveaways they’re launching with (okay, so if you haven’t been there yet you’ve already missed a bunch of them, but not all!). I still have my fingers crossed on the ones I’ve entered.

Today’s new book review is of Bill James’s Wolves of Memory, a fantastic Harpur & Iles mystery which I highly recommend. Also this week I’ll be reviewing a hot drinks cookbook (yum!), so stay tuned for that. This is the latest list of upcoming reviews, and I’ll post a new one soon so it won’t have so many crossed-off items on it. You might notice a sudden increase in the number of cookbooks we’re working with; this is, of course, due to Thanksgiving upcoming! Our usual guests can’t make it (a standard hazard when some work odd schedules and others are a number of states away), but that won’t stop us from cooking too much food!

We posted our first new “Adventurers’ Last Words” design in a while: “Awww, How Cute!” It seems particularly appropriate to baby clothing, don’t you think?! Somehow cute things always turn out to be so darn deadly in roleplaying games. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

*blinks sleepily and glances at the watch*

Yes, yes it is.

Here are some links to the latest book reviews:

• The Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook
• Liza Fosburgh, Soups & Stews for Fall and Winter Days
• Jack R. Nerad, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hybrid & Alternative Fuel Vehicles

I now have the ability to easily add new links to the main page of the site, so it’s being updated quickly now. I’m in the middle of reading Bill James’s Wolves of Memory and hope to have a review up for that Monday at latest.

An early-morning conversation:

Me: I’ve noticed a pattern. I’m most prone to insomnia after sugary, fatty desserts.
My husband: Another good reason to eat well and take care of ourselves.
Me: Oh, speaking of, I ran some EVE missions last night and sent you another 3 million ISK for implants.
My husband: I’ll pick up some cupcakes on the way home from work.

Actual conversation.

I deployed three new designs to the cafepress stores last night. One went to Caffeinated Chicanery, the writing-reading-cooking-humor-etc. store:

THAT
They told me I couldn’t
wear that on a T-shirt

Okay, so we might be over-fond of wordplay and irony-based humor, but I think lots of other people appreciate it too.

The other two went to Gamers’ Heaven, our gamers & geeks store:

Level 70 Dad

It’s the companion piece to our Level 70 Mom design; I noticed sales of the latter were going up noticeably as the Christmas season approaches, figured folks were buying them as gifts, and thought it would be nice to have a matching design for dads too. So I set our business partner to the task of brainstorming image designs, and then I put them together. Fun process.

The other is called ‘Boss Faction,’ and it’s for all you working Warcraft or other mmorpg players:

I’m not kissing ass
I’m just grinding boss faction

Don’t forget if you sign up for the monthly store newsletters (left-hand navigation column, at the bottom) you’ll get access to a subscribers’-only sale each month. Also you won’t have to worry about missing our special announcement later this season!

That’s it for now, I think, although I’m sleepy enough that I’m not sure.

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.

Recently I was visiting Broken Toys and came across a link for The Guild Name Generator. Every time you load or refresh the page it generates 100 random guild names for you. My favorite so far? ‘The Beer Knights’! (Although I think ‘Lords of the Eclectic Ebay’ comes in a close second.) The whole thing is hosted on Nick Yee’s site, and I think he has the coolest-looking homepage I’ve ever seen.

Meanwhile, I’m whipping through that review copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business, Third Edition—about 3/4 done. Should have a review up Monday or Tuesday.

And oh, yes, I’ll definitely have a few thoughts on Eve Online this coming week…

Mages are not vending machines

Those of you familiar with LotRO might be familiar with the pie-runner deed. It’s a low-level set of Hobbit quests in the Shire, in which you run spoiled pies back to the Hobbit who baked them (on a deadline naturally), avoiding Hungry Hobbits along the way. Once you’ve completed all of the quests, and thus the deed, you get a new title you can add after your name: “Pie-Runner”.

Today we were out and about and we happened to see a catering truck from a ribs restaurant. On the back bumper it had a notation painted: “Rib-Runner”.

The jokes started flying:

“Hey, he got his Rib-Runner title.”

“He must have completed his Rib-Running Deed.”

“I wonder how many deliveries that takes, and how hard it is to avoid Hungry Humans?”

I hope they get a delivery person who plays LotRO.

Yes, I finally saw the “Bourne Ultimatum.” And I loved it. There’s something about the Bourne movies that you just don’t get in other action films. I think it’s the fact that while the characters exist at the extremes of what human beings are capable of, they’re not supermen and superwomen. No wire work, no CGI amping up the fight scenes—just human brutality overlaid with either that signature heart-pounding piece of music or even no music at all. Don’t get me wrong; there’s a warm spot in my heart for Matrix-y bullet-time and the wire work of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” But sometimes, particularly for the spy genre, it’s really heart-stopping to see something that can feel so real. I remember my reaction when the first Bourne movie was announced. It can be summed up as, “Matt Damon, action hero?! No WAY.” And yet he works perfectly as the series’ protagonist. I never would have expected it, and yet now I can’t imagine anyone else in the role.

We also saw “The Invasion,” with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. It felt like they left a few scenes on the cutting room floor; the pace and story were a bit jumpy in a few places. Other than that, however, I definitely enjoyed it.

If you’re in a bookish mood, I highly recommend checking out the R.I.P. II challenge. I think I’m a little too buried in books right now to go after it myself, but it looks like a great one!

Edit: Just had to add my favorite patch note from the new LotRO patch:

People were really bummed in Rivendell, sometimes. Now they shouldn’t be so depressing, even the Bowyer who was always going on with ‘Oh, woe is me!’ and ‘It’s terrible, just terrible!’ — brought to you by the ‘Rivendell Is A Happy Place!(tm)’ tourism bureau.

And, my second-favorite:

No more deja vu! You should now only see Athal once. You should now only see Athal once. (ed. note. MadeOfLions, that was too easy! You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed. -Patience)

I love that Turbine adds some amusement to keep the patch notes from being impossibly dry and boring.

Since I’ve been chatting about Pirates of the Burning Sea on other folks’ blogs for a while now (hi, Bildo and Keen & Graev! *waves*), I figured it was time to muse on the subject myself. But first, as context, a couple of thoughts on where my current MMORPG gaming lies:

City of Heroes/City of Villains: Currently I’m playing these two the most, although that’s mostly because they’re my most recent purchase and I’m rather expecting to end my subscription when I next decide to subscribe to another game, so I want to get my play-time in now. Love the highly individualized characters; love the faithful genre-feel; miss the ability to juggle 20-40 quests at a time.

LotRO: My current favorite of the games I play. I love to relax with this game, and can enjoy just about anything with it, from questing to deeds to crafting (yes, I even have a grand master cook). Love the deed system in particular, and the crafting is more complex and useful, IMO, than Warcraft’s. Of course I gather soloing gets rather tough at high levels, and it has the usual end-game “what now?” woes.

World of Warcraft: Warcraft is rather like an old friend who grows in a different direction than you do. You think of it fondly, you still hang out with it once in a while, but mostly you realize that you have very little in common with it any more—and that’s okay. Things change and eventually you just have to move on. Because of the way it’s designed, it really isn’t viable for them to push casual (i.e., non-raider, non-PvP) content much beyond the run it’s already had and keep it interesting and worth the expansion pack price of admission, IMO. But again, that’s okay. I had my more-than-two-years of fun with it, and I’m happy with that. I’m still subscribed for now, and I’ll continue to play now and then as long as it continues to be a way to hang out with distant friends, but eventually I expect to move on entirely.

This did, however, leave me wondering what would take its place, and then along came Pirates of the Burning Sea. Bildo in particular has been talking up how wonderful it is, and eventually I just had to overcome my inertia and go check it out.

What I saw didn’t just intrigue me; it made me immediately fill out a beta app and start babbling about game design details to my husband. I swear I check my inbox once an hour in the hope of getting a beta invite.

Sure, there’s a ton of very different stuff in the game, and that’s what intrigues me about it—it’s high time someone made a game that broke the mold, and this one looks like it’s broken almost all of them! The thing I truly can’t wait to play with, though? The entirely player-run economy. *rubs hands together with glee* Plots of land! Manufacturing! Resources! Trading! I swear, that could be the entire focus of the game and I’d be in heaven.

Okay, so there are ways this game could play out that might cause me to say, “well, it’s got awesome ideas, but it just isn’t for me.” However, I’m sure as hell going to give it the chance to impress me, because those ideas really are awesome.

Now… anyone got an inside track on a spare beta invite? Or maybe a Limited Wish spell lying around?

I’m not lazy
I’m just out of MANA