Author: Jason

And that`s two.

Random Thoughts

This time its the vent glass on the rear door of the passenger side. And it turns out the vent glass isn’t as useless as I pictured. An enterprising thief used a stick or something after breaking the vent glass to push the power door lock button.

With the doors open, he was free to pry off the dashboard cover and steal my stereo.

Twice in two weeks. What are the odds? I was even parked in a “better” packing lot… better only so far as unmanned-pay-money-in-a-slotted-board lots can be.

I decided I want a car alarm… but not one that prevents break-ins. I want one that allows the break-in, and then kills the intruder. I was to find dead street thugs laying in pools of blood when I discover my car has again been vandalized or a target for theft. Kill ’em all.

Yesterday was a good day.

Random Thoughts

It started off like most days, I woke up at the butt-crack of dawn in order to drive to work. Oh, did I not mention? I have a new contract for ITCS, I’m working downtown for BellSouth now, full time. Anyway, so I get up, shower, dress, and head out the door. Its raining. I hate driving in the rain. People, as I have said many times, suck. Somewhere in many people’s heads they actually believe that the chance of getting in an accident is affected by the duration of being on the road… so driving twice as fast means half the time of the road equalling less accidents… *sigh* Anyway, as much as I hate driving in the rain, I achieve a certain “Road Zen”, the opposite of “Road Rage”… traffic sucks, I have accepted that I cannot change this and am at peace with the horrible traffic allowing me to listen to music and smile as opposed to making rude gestures and screaming at people.

By the time I get to work, the rain is over. I park in my usual pay lot, and start the walk to the office. Its Thursday, and as I head down 3rd Street toward Spring, I see a Creative Loafing bin. Jackpot! Open it up, snag myself a hot off the presses copy of the new Loaf. I enter the BellSouth building with a bounce in my step.

At work, I get stuff done. I learn some new programming tricks. All is well. Lunch tastes good. More work gets done. All-in-all a very satisfying day in the trenches for a contract developer like myself. 5:30 rolls around and I punch out for the day.

It hasn’t rained all day, and the reports say it should be sunny but cold all weekend. I round the corner to the parking lot and I see about 5 or 6 people standing around. One guy eyes me and says, “Is this your Cherokee?” I answer affirmatively, and he says, “The cops are already on the way.”

Now I’m worried, I double time it to the car and look it over. At first everything looks fine… no flat tires, no big dents. Then I see the vent glass on my rear driver side door, you know, the smaller window glass that doesn’t move… and its shattered. I look down the row of cars and see that all of them have the same window broken. “Anything stolen?” a woman asks me. I look in and… no. Not a single thing missing. I say so and they start saying that nothing is missing from them either. While we wait for the cops, I call my insurance company, they file the claim, connect me to their repair hotline, who connects me to a glass repair shop who schedules me for a repair the next day… $0 deductable, full coverage. So at this point the only cost to me is time. The cops show, make their report, I call the insurance company back and give them the case number for their files. Then I get on the road and head home.

The whole way home, I think about it… I’ve known people who’ve been burglarized and vandalized before. They always talk about feeling violated, unsafe. I don’t. I wasn’t there.. it likely wouldn’t have if I had been. Nothing is missing. No cost to me for the damage. Just a bit of wasted time. What I am is annoyed.. a touch angry. But why?

See.. I believe in violence, as long as it has a purpose. Frankly, violence when used with direction and guidence has solved more problems in the history of the world than anything else. I believe in war, when other options have failed. People will try to tell you that we need to try to keep everything peaceful, but the true is, world politics is like parenting… at some point you have to realize your child isn’t going to stop screaming, and you send him to his room without supper. The only difference is, its much harder to make a country controller by a dictator with an army behind him sit in his room, they fight back. There must exist that point where you are willing to accept that peace isn’t working and commit to war.

This is, and its bad that I feel I must say this, not a comment on the current situation in the Middle East… that’s a difference monster altogether, because unfortunately we ARE at war… the problem here is that we are at war with an idea, not a country. In all of History I do not believe a war has ever been successfully waged on an idea… countries, of course… cultures, sure… religions, yes… but all “ideas” of the past have been backed by a physical land mass and an identifiable group of people. What we fight in the Middle East is purely an idea… terrorism is fear, and how do you fight fear?

But I digress…

Back to my day… see, I’m annoyed because some schmuck out there walked down a row of cars, breaking a single window on each, stealing nothing. In fact, the window he broke is the most useless window to break… in almost all cars these days there is no locking mechanism on the rear door, its controlled by the front doors or automatically in some other way, and with child safety regulations, most rear doors won’t even open if they are locked and you pull on the handle. And the vent glass… its too far away to reach the lock on the front door. This guys stole nothing… he made no attempt to steal or get into any of the cars. He just broke glass. Violence without purpose. That’s what I hate.

In any event, the window is fixed now, and life goes on. People continue to suck.

Searching for me.

Random Thoughts

Every now and then, ever since I’ve run a webpage or owned a domain, I go to search engines (Google in this case) and throw in my domain name to see how long it takes to get a link either directly to my site or a link to someone’s page that directly mentions my site. Normally its the third or fourth page, however, because of my writings I’ve done for City of Heroes my subdomain the Front Page shows up on the first page.

Out of curiosity, I decided to keep looking through the search results and see when I came up the second time. On page 4, one of my email addresses shows up in link to a post on the City of Heroes message boards, a place I do frequent. On page 8, a link shows up for a guy’s blog site, where he refers to the Front Page as “At first glance, this appears to be slightly odd City of Heroes fanfic. Look closer. It’s very odd, and it’s not quite City of Heroes or fanfic…”. I’m not sure how to take that, but I guess if someone is reading its better than no one reading at all. Around pages 12 and 13, a few links to posts on some programming boards come up, again because of my email address. Then we get a weird one: http://www.webknowhow.net/dir/Hosting/Free/ where they say to check out Probablynot.com to see examples Free Banners and Hosting, as well as “tab, music, whats cool, hot links, files” … hmmm, its not really a link to my site, but when you click it, you do go to my site. Page 25 gives us a link to an old EQ forum where someone references my old City of Mist raid guide as being good… of course, that link doesn’t work to get to my raid guide, and neither does the forum its posted on, but its in the Google cache. Some more links to email addresses show up, and then… we run out of results. The root site of Probablynot.com doesn’t show up on Google directly… *sigh*

But then… I remember seeing something odd, so I go back to Page 2 and see http://www.probablynot.net. It seems that there is a big problem with kids and gambling, and probablynot.net is a website devoted to helping recognize signs of gambling addiction in kids and ways to put them on the road to recovery. I’m a little scared of the site though, and not just because of the goofy pictures and colors, but that there is a sentance: “The most popular games of chance for youth are betting on games of skill, such as pool, card games and instant scratch-off lottery tickets.” See, either they have something grammatically incorrect with that sentance or scratch-off lotteries are based on skill and not blind stupid luck… and here I thought I never won because I was unlucky, but it turns out it might just be because I don’t have a good enough poker face to pull off the bluff, or perhaps I’m not using my penny properly to scratch off the card. (Note: I do not play scratch off lottery, my stupidity only goes as far as buying a $1 ticket every time the MegaMillions goes over $100 Million, because, well, shit, who couldn’t use $100 Million?)

I decided to check out probablynot.org, because someone does own that, but its just a holder page… no content. I also wanted to check out my old domains to see if anyone was doing anything with them… loadfix.com isn’t owned anymore… squadleader.com is, but like probablynot.org its a dead site with a holder page. Once, a long time ago, I wrote for a TeamFortress gaming site called lockandload.com… another dead site. Then there was my last gaming clan, nobodysheroes.org.. dead. ClanDoS.com… it belongs to a Battlefield: Vietnam clan called the Deadly 2 Dozen who have disbanded.

More curiosity began to creep in… There are way too many Jason Pace‘s in the world for me to sort through, besides I think I did it once before and I wasn’t there. But of Jason G. Pace‘s, there are three links, one to my resume and two to pages that link to my resume.

Well, largely an exercise in futility, but it interested me for a while, so I thought I would share.

Christopher Reeve: Sept 25, 1952 – Oct 10, 2004

Random Thoughts

I just don’t know what to say. I had planned this morning to make some tirade about birthdays, seeing that yesterday was my 30th, but then I found out about this, and… I’m not entirely sure why, but sitting in my office at work, I broke down into tears.

Yesterday, as I went about my day, I kept seeing “Happy Birthday” all over the place. Store fronts, a pile of newspapers, and loads more… maybe that phrase is just really common and I normally don’t notice, but yesterday I did, and so did Jodi. She said that it made her think that it was a sign, that my mother was saying it, that she was with me. Also going through my head were thoughts of being 30, and all the things I haven’t yet done, and the general mess my life is, and I was thinking about needing to “grow up”, stop playing games and settle in to work. To put aside childish things, to put aside my childhood, and move on.

And now I find that Christopher Reeve, Superman, a symbol of fantasy, of heroism, of childhood dreams, died on my birthday at the same time I was considering putting aside those dreams. If I were a man who believed in signs… well, maybe I am a man who believes in signs, and that’s why I’m crying.

While I go try to collect myself, I leave you with the lyrics to two songs, neither of which really evoke what I’m feeling, but they come close, and neither of which will stop playing in my head for many days to come…

Superman (It’s not easy) by Five For Fighting:
I can’t stand to fly
I’m not that naive
I’m just out to find
The better part of me

I’m more than a bird…I’m more than a plane
More than some pretty face beside a train
It’s not easy to be me

Wish that I could cry
Fall upon my knees
Find a way to lie
About a home I’ll never see

It may sound absurd…but don’t be naive
Even Heroes have the right to bleed
I may be disturbed…but won’t you concede
Even Heroes have the right to dream
It’s not easy to be me

Up, up and away…away from me
It’s all right…You can all sleep sound tonight
I’m not crazy…or anything…

I can’t stand to fly
I’m not that naive
Men weren’t meant to ride
With clouds between their knees

I’m only a man in a silly red sheet
Digging for kryptonite on this one way street
Only a man in a funny red sheet
Looking for special things inside of me

It’s not easy to be me.

Superman’s Song by Crash Test Dummies:
Tarzan wasn’t a ladies’ man
He’d just come along and scoop ’em up under his arm
Like that, quick as a cat in the jungle
But Clark Kent, now there was a real gent
He would not be caught sittin’ around in no
Junglescape, dumb as an ape doing nothing

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job
Even though he could have smashed through any bank
In the United States, he had the strength, but he would not
Folks said his family were all dead
Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself
To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

Tarzan was king of the jungle and Lord over all the apes
But he could hardly string together four words: “I Tarzan, You Jane.”

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I’ll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back
On man, join Tarzan in the forest
But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phonebooths till his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

Books!

Reviews

Normally my Reviews articles are for movies or TV, but I decided today to hit a different frontier… Books.

I read alot of books, not as many as I would like, but alot none the less. And as you may notice from this site (and my subdomains), I also like to write. When I started playing City of Heroes, I got a jonesing for some spandex fiction. Sadly though, there only appears to be two kinds you can pick up at the local books store: Wild Cards by George R. R. Martin and books based on existing comic book characters.

Now, don’t get me wrong… the Martin edited shared world of Wild Cards is probably one of my favorite series of books, but I had read them before… twice… and was looking for something new. I wanted to avoid the books based on existing comic characters because a few of the ones I thumbed through relied too much on prior character knowledge, basically you needed to be a fan of the comic in order to enjoy the book. I asked around for books in a superhero setting that were neither Wild Cards nor existing comics… but all the recommendations I got we more Sci-Fi or Fantasy… lacking that element of the superhero, the comic book, that makes it unique. So finally, after coming to the conclusion that either none had been written or that none had been published, I caved in and bought some books from existing comic book heroes.

And I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

There is a series of books, four of them so far, for the Justice League of America. One book is about the JLA as a whole fighting the good fight, and the other three (of which I’ve only read one so far) take a single member off on his own, with the occasional backup of the JLA. The first book I read was the JLA book, The Exterminators. And when I got into it, I was very happy to see the author not rely on prior knowledge. He explained as he went the relative parts of each character’s background as it was touched on. His book read like a comic without pictures… well, in my head there were plenty of pictures. The book was very well done, all-in-all a two thumbs up review. The second I read was for the Flash, called Stop Motion. Like the other, this author too didn’t trust you to just know the character, but he also didn’t bog you down with 50 years of history in the lives of speedsters of the DC Universe. He told what he needed, that’s it. The story was tight, and exciting… but it did leave me wanting in the end. The finale was just a bit sub par… it was a mystery, and as sometimes happens, the resolution of the mystery, figuring out who done it and why, was much more satisfying than the final conflict between hero and villain. It was like pushing a boulder up hill, excited the whole way up to the top, not knowing what was on the other side, getting to the top, seeing the other side, heart pounding, pushing the rock over the edge… only to see it roll about ten feet and stop because the hill on that side levelled off. It was like a rollercoaster that took you up a huge climb only to have a pitiful drop off the other side. I enjoyed the book, but just was a little less than fulfilled with the resolution once the mystery was unfolded.

There are two more books in the series so far, Batman and Wonder Woman, with a fifth, the Green Lantern, coming soon. I look forward to them.

When I picked up the JLA books, I also decided to grab the two Hellboy books by Christopher Golden, the Lost Army and the Bones of Giants. The Lost Army was a good solid read, and felt like Mike Mignola (creator of Hellboy) had done much of the writing himself. The sense of humor, the oddity of the situations, Christopher captured the essense of the Hellboy comics perfectly in his prose. And like the JLA books, he didn’t rely on the reader knowing Hellboy, not that Hellboy readers really know everything anyway. He would just hint at the past, and give you tastes of the world Hellboy belonged in that existed outside the scope of the story. Right now I’m about halfway through The Bones of Giants… and wow. It’s better than the first book. Christopher’s writing style and familiarity with the mythos now shines with a much deeper and provacative tale. I can’t wait to see how it end.

Anyway, that’s it for now… I’m glad I was wrong about at least some of these comic book novels. I hope more are on the way.

EverQuest… What`s next?

Random Thoughts

I was going to originally post this in the EverQuest category, but that was really for my ideas for fixing EQ… seeing as I no longer play EQ, its a dead category but will remain as is… and this, this is just comedy.

Over on the message boards for Monkly-Business, someone asked, “Now that Omens of War is out, what do you think the next expansion will be?”

Seeing as the next expansion will come after World of Warcraft’s release, and there are a number of games on the horizon, as well as free content patches for City of Heroes, the following was my reply:

EverQuest: The Twenty Other Zones of Faydwer That You Just Never Happened to Notice During the Last Five Years of Playing.

Featuring zones like: Middle Faydark, Dagnor’s Other Cauldron, The Hidden Lair of Meldrath, The land of LXnmoptgWWjyr, The Brownie City, Randomly Generated Dungeon Zone with Poor Pathing and Randomly Placed Mobs 27, and at least three new Estates none of which will be restful!

With this expansion they will introduce new items contain the new NO LOOT tag – you can view the stats and take screenshots and have the items load to Lucy, but you can’t pick it up and equip it! These items are intended for all the people who like to make Magelo profiles for their non-existant characters by picking items that they’ve never seen for themselves and try to pass themselves off as uber!

Also in this expansion, we will be introducing female giants! Ever wonder where all the giants come from seeing as they are all male? Well, rather than fix class balance, we’ve decided to make a whole set of Lore including new zones, spells for mobs that you’ll never get, and new models (since we STILL aren’t going to do new player models no matter how much you beg) all about the story of the where the female giants have been for the past 6 years! All because we know you care!

And lets not forget that we will be introducing a new class! Following both the arcane and physical arts this player can nuke as well as a wizard, heal like a cleric, tank like a warrior, and dps like a rogue.. from ANY ANGLE! This new class, called the Tankmage is bound to turn grouping and raiding on its ear! Class balance? WE GIVE UP!!

How to Truly Listen

Gaming

If you know City of Heroes, and you frequent the message boards, you might be familiar with the battle cry, “Repeal the Purple Patch!” and you might even know what they are referring to…

First off, what is the Purple Patch?

When City of Heroes first opened, it was possible for a player to fight and defeat a foe that was 8 to 10 levels higher than he was. These battles were usually fierce and hard fought, but with the way experience was given turned out to be well worth the effort. See, exp in CoH is done on a scale.. a mob is worth X exp, and then a bonus or subtraction is made based on other factors. The major factor is your level. If you are the same level as the mob, you get X. If you are higher level, you get less than X, and the scale works quickly down so that once you are 4 or 5 levels over it (and the mob is easy to defeat) you get nothing. On the other end, there is no limit… if the mob is 10 levels higher than you and you do 100% of the damage to defeat it, you wind up getting something crazy like 4 or 5 times the exp, so a mob worth 50 exp becomes worth 200-250 exp to a lower level. The issue is, the game is largely balanced around you fighting mobs your level. So, at level 10, you might get 20 exp for defeating a level 10 mob, which is 2% of your exp for level. 50 level 10 mobs, and you level. If, however, you can fight a mob and get 200 exp, then you only need to defeat 5 of them. Problem is, they didn’t expect people to be able to defeat a mob 10 levels above them, and didn’t expect people to level quite so quickly.

As a result, the Purple Patch came into play. What they did was once a mob goes purple (4 levels above you), your chance to hit begins to decline very steeply… VERY steeply. So steep that once a mob is 8 levels above you, realistically you have 0 chance to win the fight because you will be simply unable to do more damage than he will be able to regenerate due to missing. (Originally, it was harsher than this even, the decline started sooner and a mob 5 levels above you was impossible, but they eased up, so the original patch is not important anymore, only the existing situation).

The effect this had on players, was that now that they were relegated to fighting mobs 4 levels above and lower, the exp rewards were not as ludacris as they had been. Leading to the inevitable “they nerfed all the fun out of the game” cries because people couldn’t earn mad exp while fighting impossible odds. To a degree, the players ARE correct. However, as often is the case, they are single minded.

This can be tied in with my MMORPG Project (link over on the right)… See, the players are focused on “repeal the purple patch”, but what they don’t realize is that the purple patch isn’t the issue… its that the mobs they “should” be fighting (according to the developers) are too easy and not rewarding enough. Would they still be asking for the repeal if the fights with orange (level +2) and red (level +3) mobs were more harrowing and yielded a better reward?

I don’t think they would. And this is where the developers should focus. They were right with the purple patch… players should be fighting things 8 and 10 levels above them… but players should regularly seek challenge, even level to red con, and they should find it fun and rewarding.

The devs are on the right track… now its just a wait and see to see if they follow through.

So many yesterdays gone by.

Random Thoughts

In some ways, it still doesn’t seem real. I’m sure that those directly affected by the tragedy of 9/11 would disagree, but to someone who wasn’t, it’s still just hard to believe that it happened.

I remember that day well… I had just woken up. Jodi was gone to work. I settled in to do my usual job hunting since I was unemployed at the time. Flipping on the TV, it was on CNN… I had been watching some silly report on jobs the night before when I finally drifted off to sleep. The anchor cut in on the news and said they were going live to where a plane appeared to have crashed into the side of the World Trade Center in New York.

Immediately they pointed out that this wasn’t the first such event… once upon a time, a plane had hit the Empire States Building. Of course, that was a small bi-plane I believe, and this was a passenger jet.

I watched, eyes wide open, in shock and a little horror as the events of the day played out… a second plane hit the other tower. Then the Pentagon got hit. Another plane went down in Pennsylvania. Then the towers fell…

Three years of yesterdays have passed since then, and still the event weighs so heavily on the United States. I think I finally understand how my parents, and their parents before them, felt about Pearl Harbor. Only, in a way, they got satisfaction. The US retaliated against Japan, we bombed them, and then with the first and last use of Atomic weapons in combat we took them out of the war. Today, there is no country to bomb, there are no people to bomb. The World Trade Center was a terrorist attack carried out by people who fight for an ideal, not for a flag. And how do you fight an ideal?

We’ve attacked them as best we could… removing a regime that supported them, the Taliban… but we haven’t stopped them, they still take and execute prisoners. Japan was stopped because we showed them that the losses to themselves would be too great to pursue their course… but Al Queda… they are all willing to die for their ideal, so even 99% losses isn’t enough to stop them. Fighting terrorism is like punching water, it shifts and moves but you never damage the water. And deep inside, down in the places where only my fear of death lives, its now joined by a fear of a war that will not end. A war against people without a country, without a flag, without borders or a homeland… a war against an ideal.

I extend my deepest sympathies to all of those who lost someone in the 9/11 tragedy, and to all of those who have lost someone in the following three years of trying to find and fight the ideals of terrorism.

And lastly, I extend my sympathies to the administration that has had to deal with a situation unlike any that has come before them. They’ve done about as good a job as can be expected, despite what those who oppose them would have you believe.

Dragon*Con

Random Thoughts

Yesterday I got back from 4 days at Dragon*Con.

If you don’t know what it is, go here. Short version, its a convension for Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Comics, Horror… Books, Film, Games, etc… Everything.

I had fun as usual. I managed to go through a few panels and seminar things on gaming, writing, publishing, short films, and more… Plus I got to see tons of people in various costumes, and meet people from all over who have some of the same interests that I do.

We snapped a few pictures and those are up in the Pictorials section. Not alot, but.. well, check it out and see the reason.

Next year I’ll be more prepared.