The USS Quad Damage

... is back in the news thanks the Myers. Apparently Australia along with the United States of America are the only two OECD countries without paid maternity leave.

Which is funny because last time I checked the government gave women 9 weeks of maternity leave at minimum wage levels. Plus they give you an extra 9 weeks for every additional child born.

Hell you can even get paid for having a still born child, one that dies shortly after birth and adopted children, even those from over seas, under two years or one given to you for care before 13 weeks of age that your likely to look after for atleast 13 weeks.

Plus when I was looking on wikipedia at how long countries pay out for maternity leave it’s around 9 weeks on average anyway.

So yeah no sympathy from me for people qqing about paid maternity leave.

Rands talks about something not boring for once. And he’s wrong about Lost. I think Rands never watched X-Files, because that was when all nerds collectively figured out there’s actually nothing out there. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, there’s no solution, because the only way to keep you watching is to keep you guessing.

In order to solve a puzzle, it must have a definite end. In order for a TV show to be complex and yet satisfying means the TV show must not have a series two. Otherwise, like the X-Files, you’ll just get dragged along until the show loses focus and popularity, and then they’ll give you aliens and everything you thought up at the very beginning but it’ll be too little, too late.

All good shows with complexity have had an ending. The Pirates movies were great because there isn’t going to be a fourth. If there was, it should involve different characters in hopefully a different setting, the way Read or Die did with the TV series, which is why it’s a pretty cool moment when they meet “the paper” in the series.

And if you’re looking for complexity, you can’t look further than FLCL. That shit should be canon. People should be taught it in high schools. It’s like those old puzzles everyone learns as a kid and you have fond memories of how you solved it when you were young, and you can give it to your kids as well.

The most important thing about complexity is that by itself it’s nothing. This is what makes Opeth a fucking brilliant band. It took me a while to understand the music. For someone coming from Dimmu or other ADD heavy metal, Opeth is positively repetitive, but repetition re-inforces structure, and complexity shatters it. Good TV follows a lot of rules, and really good TV knows how to break the rules, and how to add complexity. As Will Smith says “[We both do the same thing, but] I make this look good.”

Also, pride and prejudice? You have got to be fucking kidding me.

NIN have a new album out called Ghosts I-IV. It’s supposed to be remix-friendly, and comes in a reasonably priced download with a variety of options. It even comes with liner notes (well, pictures, really), cover, etc. all free. It’s even got promo material like wallpapers, icons, etc., again all free of charge. Best of all, you can get a decent chunk of the album for free (9/36 tracks).

In fact, if you read my previous article on the matter, it’s pretty much the sort of value I was looking for. I downloaded the free version, figuring I’d pay for the rest if it was good. Listening to it, it’s not just the distribution model that’s strange about the album. The music itself is pretty wierd as well.

The first 9 tracks, at least, range from 2-4 minutes, most of them at the low end of that range. They sort of build a sound and create a mood instead of being complete songs in their own right. It sounds like game music or scene music. There are no vocals, and no “classic” songs. The website says:

Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I – IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I – IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Trent Reznor explains, “I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective – dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts.”

It sort of makes me believe that NIN will still use more traditional methods for more traditional albums, but everytime they want to experiment they’ll use the internet. As for whether I want to buy the album, I’m now conflicted. Despite the fact that they give out flac, and there’s 36 tracks, it doesn’t seem like I’ll enjoy the album the same way as I do ordinarily. It might form a good basis for re-mixing, but other than that, I don’t know.

Hmm.. Still worth it though…

So, maybe you’d like to go to the following site, maybe watch a video or two, and tell me what you think about this “Cali Lewis”. OK, now go here.

There’s a reasoned portion of my mind which says: “OK. What?” There’s a less reasoned portion which says “HOT!!!!”. I want those two girls dressed as Link to make out. I… don’t even know what that would mean in context.

As for Cali Lewis, I find her inordinately hot. I don’t mean that she’s incredibly hot, but I find her hotter than she is. Does that even make sense? Something about the way she laughs is infectious and flips some bits in my registers.

I, for some reason, felt the need to share that. I hope you don’t need therapy.

Ok so every now and then people would spam on the World of Warcraft General forums that a game and later event/movie/book/person/joke/etc would kill WoW. All wrong unfortunately.

Wrath of the Lich King as per the title will kill World of Warcraft.

Why?

Because the game will have moved too far from the ability of newer players to be able to pick it up in any meaningful sense. It will have become overly complicated at a time when it needs to be less complicated because the people attracted to the game now are not first movers. They are the late adapters whom expect what ever technology they are using to be simplified and easy to use and understand.

Now developing newer and harder challenges isn’t the problem. You could do that and still attract late adapters. Simply because all the early challengers have been done so many times and the optimal solutions for each challenge has been found.

The problem is that Blizzard is throwing all those challenges away and replacing them with harder and newer challenges. Which for your new player means that there is a massive gap in their learning curve at level 60 where they’ve skipped running 20/40 man raids and even all the old 5/10 man instances people learned the basics of team work on.

Now with Wrath of the Lich King there will be two gaps. One at 60 and another at 70.

Another problem is the failing of institutions to help people learn the game. With the intense focus on the latest content and very few new USA servers released it means that newer players will be jumping onto established servers. Sound great right? All those experienced players to help you out? Wrong!

Leveling in WoW on an established server isn’t so much as a learning experience as it is a hazing experience. See all those other people around your level. Either they are as noob as you or they are players leveling alts whom “know” how to play. So you’ll either learn very little from them or be called a noob and learn very little from them.

See if your leveling an alt it’s because you want another maximum level character as quickly as possible. Simply because you want that character to catch upto your main characters progression as soon as possible so they can take over. Probably because you don’t much like your old main character. Which means that you’ve probably got a short fuse with people whom don’t know how to play because they are wasting your time.

So there you have it. Massive gaps in the learning curve and non-fuctional institutions that haze new members = the end of wow.

I suspect that a bunch of more specialised, simplier and easier MMORPGs tailoring to the specific things that people want from MMORPGs will start to emerge and already have in some cases.