Archive for February, 2010

Starcraft 2 Beta!

February 24th, 2010 at 12:06 am No Comments

Yesss.

Well, it’s been out for a week and I never play it.

Yea…

I played feverishly when alpha was released to the company, and pretty often when beta was released to the company…but now that it’s public I’m too intimidated by the huge pool of random people. I placed into gold when it was just Blizzard employees online and thought that was nice. Possibly appropriate for my level. Maybe.

After going through my 10 placement rounds in public beta I landed in a platinum division. That definitely seems wrong, but damn straight I’ll take it. Problem is now I don’t want to play auto-matchmaking. I won all of my placement rounds on some fluke (save the 1st one where I DCed 30 seconds into the match. Actually that might be why everything was so skewed), and after getting thrown into in a league I lose a bit more often than I win. VERY SAD. I know that’s part of the process to find the right spot on the ladder for me, but competition gives me ulcers. I’m just going to slowly drop out of my division and hope the next one I’m placed in is closer to my comfort level.

Categories: Gaming No Comments

Long Beach Comic Expo

February 22nd, 2010 at 9:58 pm No Comments

This past weekend I tagged along with Trent to check out the miniature Long Beach Comic Con. It was a one day gig and Trent was offered a table in artist alley. I’d never done the tabling thing before so heck yea I went!

First thing he does after setting up though is leave me to man the table asdfasdf. I didn’t expect that people would want to chat with anyone except the artist, but it was still REALLY nerve-wracking because I’d never worked a convention before and people walking by were eyeing his goods but I wasn’t sure if I should immediately try to start up conversation or if that’d scare them away (a number of attendees looked like they really might be scared away if I made eye contact) and I know jack about the industry aside from flittering about with mainstream graphic novels like Sandman or Hush or Fables. Lord. Eventually I fell into the groove once I got a chance to see how he handled people and just tried to mimic what I could or play off his conversations. As the day went on I had to make an effort to be even more vocal with people who stopped by to chat with him as his commissions started to pile up.

lb comic expo

Overall it was awesome. Quite a few visitors said they came to the expo specifically for Trent as he’d been out of the convention circuit for so long (5 years since his last con). One hardcore guy had a tattoo on his shoulder of a character from the Creed series. I got to listen in on old school followers giving him pro-tips on how the industry’s changed since; commiserate with other female-halves of convention go-ers about handling tables (not that it was a miserable experience in the least. I just mean the jovial kind of commiserating); do assistant type things like get food and drank; and still had time to wander the floor to check out some other very talented artists.

He already signed up for the full weekend Comic Con in October before coming to this mini version, and it falls on Halloween weekend! I want to dress up as something cool! (By “cool” I don’t mean “scandalous”!)

One of his con sketches:
lb con zatanna

Categories: General No Comments

Game romances can get ridiculous.

February 8th, 2010 at 11:06 pm 1 Comment

Last word on Mass Effect 2, but with spoilers again. (Really, 80% of what you can say about the game is going to be a spoiler.)

Once I decided to stay true to Kaidan and ignore man options in the sequel, the dialogue choices became slightly less taxing. I was able to choose options based on what I actually wanted to say, which was how I would liked to have played the first but didn’t due to the novelty of potential romantic outcomes. They make Shepard out to be one of the greatest leaders of the galaxy, and yet you get dialogue choices like the top line here:

shepard bad

SO INAPPROPRIATE.

!!

I’m not into roleplaying, but I do enjoy emersive experiences, and when I go from choosing serious-face commander options to a, “Well, that was a nice chat about your dead wife – let’s hook up” option, it puts an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Maybe it’s simply a renegade thing. Even when I was just trying to talk to Jacob and get to know him though, my character’s tone of voice for the “I just want to talk” line (paraphrased) was all seductive and flirty and very, very creepy.

Romancing novelty’s gone for this title. Eck.

Categories: Gaming 1 Comment

Dropbox

February 1st, 2010 at 2:38 pm No Comments

I’d heard about Dropbox a few years back, from I forget whom now, but never got around to actually downloading and using it. When Trent picked up his Macbook Pro last month, the sales representative advertised a service (iDisk) that would allow you to access storage on the internets from any computer with iDisk installed… for $100 (!). I was reminded then of Dropbox which does the same thing, works on Mac, PC, and Linux (for my Jolicloudified netbook), and gives you 2GB of space for free. iDisk starts you out at 20GB for $100/year, but Dropbox lets you upgrade to 50GB for the same rate.

Up till then I had always either emailed files to myself or uploaded them to my webspace. Finally tried it out at home last night and I love it. You just pick up whatever files you want to upload and throw them into the Dropbox directory on your computer. It’s quite a bit faster than emailing (which doesn’t allow me to share/view the files through a browser) or loading up my FTP client (which is more tedious).

I’d signed up through a referrer and was pleasantly surprised to find that accepting a referral gave me 250MB more space :) It’s a mutually beneficial setup, so here’s a referral link:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQyMDE3NTQ5

Categories: Web No Comments