I have gone green…

….and no, that’s not an eco-resolution, nor is it a cause for concern.
In Nanowrimo parlance it means I’ve crossed the 50k line. If you click on the Nanowrimo 2009 tab just above, you should see evidence of my word-count on the little calendar tracker. I cam home from work yesterday determined to finish, and logged a count-check of 49,383 around 11pm last night, then kept going til 1.25 am where I checked again and discovered I had 53k. It’s nice when that happens. Despite the fact that it’s too early to “validate and win” (that starts tomorrow) I’ve been copying and pasting into the validator anyway – so I get no nasty surprises from it having a different word-count to google docs or open office.

I then spent a few minutes on nanomail before sloping off to bed and sleeping for a full twelve hours. That much sleep is almost unheard of for me. I think writing at that rate must take a heck of a toll on your system.

What I did realise last night was that not being able to write when I expect to makes me very grumpy indeed. I had been due to start in work at 2pm (after having lunch with my lovely aunt Annette), and so had intended to have a bit of a lie-in, get a few hours writing done and cut into the final 45k+ stretch. Instead, I was called into work early (and insufficiently caffeinated) and was out of sorts all day. It came as a bit of a shock when I realised where the grumpishness was coming from.

Well, actually, more than a bit of a shock.

I would hate to think I was in danger of developing any sort of “speshul snowflake” traits, so here and in the public setting of the interwebz, I do hereby apologise to my workmates (and former workmates who called in to say hi) yesterday, for being a grump. I may have explained why I was grumptastic above, but it’s still no justification. I’m sorry folks.

Thankfully, I was together enough to be perktastic, rather than grumpilicious with customers, as is required. BUt the contrast must have been pretty big for workpals to keep asking me if I was okay. I cringe in retrospect.

(And please, if I ever utter the phrase “bevelling my sentences” with a straight face, someone push me off the balcony, or brain me with that big Phaidon Architecture book in the glowy-green carry-case, I assure you, I will (eventually) be grateful for it.)

Today I plan to spend a while back-filling in plot threads and then I’ll set to writing the ending. Because I may have broken 50k but the darn thing still isn’t finished. Pressure is off now though, I have words enough for my winners badge, and this (and a mammoth amount of snoozage) gives me a happy.

So, fellow work-bods, I hereby give you license to poke fun at me for having been grumpy all day tomorrow. I earned it.

Off to replenish my caffeinated beverage now and get some more words down.

Nano…

is seriously interfering with my blogging time.

So before I start this evening’s tranche of wordsmithery, here’s a post. So you know I’m “still alive, thanks God” (and thank you to the wonderful Mohammed for the phrase that will never die, at least among Irish archaelogy-types).
I’m typing this with a kitten wedged between my back and the chair (don’t ask me why, he likes to lie there), and another moggy eyeing my mouse like it’s the real flesh and blood type, and not a piece of computer hardware (geeky aside, when did microsoft start calling them “human interface devices”? It sounds like something out of a Cronenberg flick).
Ah, kitten has just climbed over my shoulder and is now attempting to eat my fingers while I type. This does not bode well for an evening’s nanoing.

To business. Those following my confusion in an earlier post re: the new Alex Barclay book, here’s some of the answer – the book will be out in March 2010 and the title is not as yet finalised. Okey dokey? When the title is finalised I’ll post it, if I remember.

Appearances to the contrary, I have been reading.

I just finished (and I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to it) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and I absolutely loved it. It’s hip, smart, laugh out loud funny and genuinely affecting. It also makes geekery seem kinda cool. The prose is a mix of geeky slang, sci-fi/fantasy/RPG references and Dominican Spanish slang. Somehow it all comes together in a voice (or, well, voices) that is utterly compelling and wholly originial. It’s not often I use the phrase “original” so you should know I mean it. Because I am a nerd, I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything in the Spanish slang that I couldn’t figure out, so I found the following link invaluable (also helps with Dominican history, “nerdy” references (*blush* I needed no help with those) and some other things that may cause “huh?” moments while reading. If you plan to read the book, bookmark this and it’ll see you right. It’s not for nothing that people win the Pulitzer for fiction, and this book is a prime example of a deserving win.

The story is about three generations of a family that become part of the Dominican diaspora to the U.S. as a result of the reign of Trujillo (“the dictatingest dictator”) and never manages to feel like a family saga, despite being one. In terms of magical realism (there’s an argument to be used for this book kind of fitting that category) it knocks Allende’s early stuff (which I loved at the time: Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna especially), into a cocked hat. The titular Oscar (the Wao is a corruption of “Wilde” his college roomates inflict on him) and his sister Lola represent one generation, their mother Belicia another, and her parents (a doctor and a nurse) the earliest. The narration of the book is shared between Yunior (a friend of sorts to Oscar, and Lola) and Lola herself. Their voices manage to be completely different while sharing a common inflection – thanks to Oscar. The whole book is a feat of story-telling verve and narrative nun-chuckery. I defy anyone not to enjoy it. If you don’t, you lose 8 charisma points in my book. And if you don’t understand what that means, read the book to find out.

I’m currently reading Betrayals, the second in Lili St. Crow’s (otherwise known as Lilith Saintcrow) Strange Angels series. I’m enjoying this as much as I did the first one, and will write more on it when I’ve finished it. I will note that it doesn’t hurt to read the book while listening to the Kristin Hersh album Strange Angels, not sure if that’s where the series title came from, but it’s an association I like.

Okay, that’s your lot as far as book-nerdage for today goes, I will away now and write some new words.

Phew!

Sleeping on it worked, I’m on course to break 30k today.
POV has flipped back to third person (slightly snarkily) omniscient. Words flowing again.
I has a happy.

In other, unrelated news, I seem to have misplaced my Bejeweled Blitz mojo, which is a VERY GOOD THING since it means I won’t be tempted to install it on my iPhone no matter how many big blaring ads they throw at me on facebook.
I SHALL RESIST oh you wonderful PopCap games app designers.

And yes, thank you all for noticing, I do need to get out more.

Just after November and Nano are finished.

Besides, it’s raining out there!

: )

Halfway there…

And boy are things messy. I didn’t like the experimental pov I’d set up – telling the story of Faith through notebooks read and research done by her daughter Joy, so I flipped into the first-person and am not liking that any better.

One thing that can be said for Nanowrimo is that it allows you to experiment, flip things around and keep on going, knowing that you can fix it some other time if you care enough about what you end up with to do so. Another thing is that you begin to recognise pitfalls in your own style. In this story there’s been way too much preamble to a bank heist that is only the start of my main character’s solo crime career. I know I can go back and cut it all, but I’ve wasted time on it, and while it has generated plenty of words, it’s irksome.

Right now I’m so ticked off with myself that I’ve decided to close google docs for the time being and see if sleeping on it will help any. Grrr.

I will start afresh tomorrow with the warning to myself that THOU SHALT NOT HAVE TOO MUCH EXPOSITION. IT GIVETH THEE WORDS APLENTY BUT IT DETRACTETH FROM THE PACING MOST ABOMINABLY (Or: shut up and have someone shoot someone or something).The biblical all-caps warning is the one that I shall post-it to my monitor. If I can find a post-it. It’s been that kind of day.

To cheer myself up with the promise of something good to read in the future I checked Nielsen for a release date for the next Alex Barclay novel, only to find that it’s listed as August 2010. Ah boo says I, but elsewhere on the interwebz it say 26th of November 2009 and that is soon. Imminent, even. I am confuzzled. Also, weirdly, the book title has always been listed as Black Run but the cover art on Amazon has a big bold Tainted on the cover. Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, whenever and whatever it’s called I want it. And all the better if I’ve finished my nanoing by then as it would be a pretty good reward-read. We shall see.

Damn I’m such a nerd. Oh, and by the way, killing off a bipolar character’s shrink (the plot I’ve seen mentioned) is not only ultra evil (mwhahahahaha etc.), but an excellent premise. Should be fun.

Day one….

…went better than I expected. Having conked out last night, long before midnight. I got up at 7 am and cranked out an impressive 2,100 words before leaving for work.

Since coming home this evening I’ve racked that up to 5,126 – and because I’ve done over the 5k, I am hereby rewarding myself with the rest of the evening off, in the company of Season 2 of House. (Yeah, I know, I got into it late…and even then only because my friend Mark made me watch it at his place. I thank him for it.).

I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest last night. Capsule review: any misgivings I had about anything in the book were laid to rest by the sheer brilliance of the court scenes. For those alone it’s worth reading the entire trilogy, with it’s odd compulsion to list everything a character eats, wears or thinks (Did these by any chance start out as nano novels? I keep picturing Steig Larsson, on a cold Swedish November night eking out an extra 200 words by listing cupboard contents, then breathing a sigh of relief, uploading his wordcount to the Nanowrimo site and closing his iBook for the night). I had quibbles about a few things, but I’ll detail them some other time. For now, it deserves to be outselling everything else (especially Dan Brown) by four to one.

The Nanowrimo2009 tab above should be working, complete with a bit of what I wrote today. The wordcount widget server has gone into its ritual November meltdown, so there’s no widget there yet. I’ll fix that when it starts working again.

As a side note, and this made me smile, my boss came over to me yesterday and told me that she knew she should be rooting for me, but is it bad if she hopes I fail to meet the terms of my onerosity coupon?

Nope, it’s not bad, but I swear, if I hit 30k words by the 21st, I’m not re-alphabetising the kids picture books until at least December. And the same goes for the God-books if I have 20k written by the 14th, a coupon I gave another colleague. I’m not sure how much good declaring myself exempt from those two tasks will do me, but a girl’s gotta try!

Todat at work was made head-wrecking by the fact that people have already started their Christmas shopping, for which we were not wholly prepared (or staffed). Most common thing to happen today was a customer wandering over with one of our Christmas catalogues and demanding we fetch them “this, this, this and that”. Inevitably, at least one of the books has not been published yet. They then glare at us suspiciously and say “But it’s in the catalogue!”.

Yeah, I know, it’s in the catalogue, but that’s because all the big books with pub dates from September to  early December are in the catalogue. Yesterday was Saturday, the last day of October. Many, many books in the catalogue won’t be out til mid-November. I think there’s even a disclaimer to that effect in the catalogue. Then they say “But there’s a picture of the book, you must have one somewhere.” to which one can only reply, “A jacket cover photo doesn’t mean anything other than that the cover has been designed. The book is not out yet, I’m sorry. I can look up the publication date for you, and keep a copy aside for you when it comes in if you like?”. They never, ever believe me. And it’s not just me, they don’t believe any of us. One woman went through the same rigmarole today with me and another member of staff. She probably still thinks we were both lying to her….

We weren’t though.

 

 

 

 

So, it’s nearly November….

…and so it’s nearly Nanowrimo time again.

This means two things:

One: apart from going to work and suchlike obligations, I turn into a bit of a hermit for the month. A word-count obsessed, plot finagling, 200 more words before bed-time, feverishly scribbling word-nerd of titanic proportions (I see I’ve already gotten a head-start on hyperbole. Yay me!). I surface occasionally (as work permits) at the Nano meet-ups in Dublin, and then might wander round to say hi to friends in the vicinity, but apart from that, I score a big fat zero on the sociability scale. In fact for the whole month I’m generally absent even while present. For this I apologise, in advance.

Two: The last few days of October see me furiously trying to come up with an idea, ANY idea for a story, while rooting around in dusty piles of books to find my Nanowrimo stuff (viz. Chris Baty’s No plot, no Problem! and the novel-writing kit I bought last year to go with it. There is also the ceremonial dusting off of my trusty won-every-year-since-I-started-using-it notebook, and the adding on of the current year to the cover in Sharpie. Then there is the sourcing of a plot notebook, and the assemblage of a stockpile of functioning pens for when I’m not at a computer….all of which serve as ample procrastinatory tools to distract me from the fact that I’m still without a plot and the clock starts ticking very very soon.

I was planning to write another story about my post-apocalyptic posse, but given that I’ve spent the last week playing a MMO set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where people ride around on ATVs and struggle to survive (the game is Fallen Earth, by the way, (website here) and it is rather good. I started playing because I’d read about it on the web and there was so much about it that was like my nano-novels I couldn’t resist trying it out. I like it so much I’m quitting Aion for it. I made a character called Camille and pretty soon she’ll have her own ATV just like Cam in my stories does. Lawdy but I’m a nerd!)) I’m starting to have qualms about the world I created, the kind of “Damn, there’s not a lot I’ve got that’s really new in my stories” qualms that make you second-guess everything. I was also toying with the idea of trying a crime book, for the heck of it. Then I realised that I could do that by filling in the back-story of the fun-to-write criminal mastermind Joy from the previous two – and use her story as a way to explain how the world came to be the world it is in a way that I never could do in the other stories without being all expositionally clunky and telling rather than showing (a big no-no that!).

So far so good, except now I have to actually figure out the nuts’n'bolts of how the world became a wasteland, and that thought alone is giving me a worse headache than accidentally head-butting a table while foraging under it for a notebook (yes, I did do that…I know, I’m a clod). Still, it is something that had to be figured out eventually, so better now than never.

So, I still have no plot. But I have some nuggets that could grow into one. Which is better than nothing.

Tonight I’ll be doing my best to finish The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, so the only thing I have hanging over me to read will be a refresher skim of Rebecca for a book group on Thursday. The only thing I’ll say about Millennium III for now is that the translation is rather clunky, I wonder whether it wasn’t a bit of a rush job? I’ll fit in a post on it somewhere when I’ve finished it.

On November 1st, I’ll be creating a Nanowrimo 2009 page here (there’ll be a tab under the header on the front page, beside the other nano ones) where there will be bits from the novel-in-progress available for reading, giggling and/or eye-rolling at, and also the all-important word-count widgets so that anyone who is so inclined can keep track of how I’m doing.

(Kindly note Ms. E. and Ms. K that word-count targets on my onerosity coupons must be reasonable, as I’m not handing you both a free pass to cackling wildly over the sight of me handling Veritas books for hours on end without Hazmat gear….)

There will also be semi-frequent posts from me on the main page, these are usually hyper-caffeinated rants about my own idiocy in attempting this madness yet again, but there may be some lucidity there too.

Possibly.

I can’t promise anything.

For now I’m off to find out what happens to Lisbeth Salander, and then to get some sleep.

(p.s. If anyone knows of an iPhone app that I could use to write with that’d save me having to transcribe hand-written stuff, please let me know. I’ve considered emailing stuff to myself and/or using the iPhone WordPress app to create a hidden page for writing, but they both seem a bit unnecessarily clunky as ideas. A word-processing type thingy would be perfect. Is there such a thing?)

“I can’t shop under these conditions”

…Has to be my favourite quote from last week at work.
Poor customer, wanting to buy two US-published guitar magazines. They tallied up to around the €12 mark and he was most unhappy. I explained to him that the retail price of the magazines is set by the magazine wholesaler, and not by us, and then explained that the mags are first imported into the UK and then imported here – hence getting double the hammering on taxes that UK mags get – hence the higher prices. He wouldn’t accept that and kept on at me. I told him that it is not within my power, or my manager’s power, to change the pricing, basically, it is what it is. He kept going away and coming back like I’d change my mind every time he came up to the counter. Eventually I suggested that he look around and see if other local stores carried the magazine, and compare what they were charging to what we were charging. He responded with “But if you’re telling me the truth they’ll be the same price everywhere.”

Yup, that’s true. Took him a while, but he got the point. That was when he told me “I can’t shop under these conditions” and demanded to see my manager. The manager was out on lunch, so he complained to two other staff members, at length, then went away and came back only to find the manager was in a meeting. I still don’t get what he thought he’d accomplish by speaking to a manager, but I guess we’ll find out someday soon.

A workmate also told me about a customer she had who wanted to buy a book, the only information they had being that it was “translated from something into something else”. Um? Okaaay. We can assume it was translated into English, but they had no idea what language it was translated from, or even what the book was about. The bookseller tried all the hot titles (Steig Larsson, Vikas Swarup etc.) to no avail, and eventually had to gently let the customer know that their request was simply too vague, and that a bit more information would prove useful. On hearing that story, I’m beginning to reconsider the whole “cream and written by a woman” school of looking for books. At least a cover colour and an author gender gives us something….

Then yesterday I was accosted by a customer who wanted to know if there was a Mind Body & Spirit festival going on locally. I told him I didn’t know. He told me he was sure there was. I told him I was really sorry, but I could only help him find Mind Body & Spirit books, but had no knowledge of any such festival. He was adamant that it was going on. He was also adamant that I had this information and was being obtuse in refusing to share it with him. (Oh yeah, I like to hoard all the Mind Body & Spirit goodies all for myself, obviously. My persistent woo-allergy does not preclude me from doing this, oh no!).

I told him that the only thing I knew about that was happening locally was the weekly organic market and told him how to get there, also suggesting that he try checking on the web to see if what he was talking about was actually happening. That was a mistake. He then wanted to use our computers to google it. I said that wasn’t possible and directed him to an internet café. He told me I wasn’t very helpful. I bit my tongue to keep from telling him that a bookstore does not equal a tourist office, and instead said that if I had known anything about any such festival, I would have told him. Because I didn’t, I couldn’t. As a last ditch effort, I directed him to the shopping centre and advised him to ask in the health food store there, or to pick up one of the local free-sheets which would surely contain any information he was looking for. Apparently I should also have had one of those free-sheets on my person because telling him where to get them was just not good enough (sing it with me now…). Eventually he went away.

People who cannot recognize the illogic of their actions hurt my brain.

Ooops, it’s been a long time…

And it’s not like I had nothing to post about. There’ll be a lot of posts over the next few days about books and the people that want to buy one but aren’t quite sure which one…

For now here’s a what’s going on post:

Sadly (and possibly due to my evisceration of The Girl Who Played with Fire) I did not get a proof copy of the new Steig Larsson. This made me sad because it means I won’t have a lovely set of three blue-covered books to sit snuggled together on the shelf. In all likelihood what happened was that the people at our head office cottoned on to the popularity of the books and snarfed all proofs of the third installment for themselves. Bit late now people. I do have a copy of it, and started reading it on the bus last week, but I was having trouble getting started (mainly because a world specialist brain surgeon just happened to be in the vicinity when Lisbeth was admitted to hospital with that pesky bullet in her brain which made me sigh, and grumble). So I decided the best way to gird myself for more would be to remind myself of how good the first book was. And how best to do that?

Well, there’s a movie! And it was made in Sweden so it’s actually pretty faithful to the book. It goes by the original title (well, obviously) Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, and it’s actually really good. Salander and Blomkvist (played by Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist respectively) are both perfectly represented. It occurred to me while watching that there’s no way the book can successfully be made into a movie by the Hollywood types, since there is way too much nudity and violence required. The rape scene is horrific and followed by an equally nasty Ms 45-style retribution. All shown on-screen, unflinchingly. Pretty hard to watch, but essential to the story, and not just of this one, but of the sequel (which is apparently already out in Sweden, and they’ve finished shooting the final part). The casting and acting is pretty much impeccable and the movie really does justice to the source material – it’s not often you can say that. They even have scenes with Plague in his den of computers, and he’s just right too (yeah, I’m fond of Plague). Attention to detail is stunning, down to the name of the program Salander uses to access Blomkvist’s hard drive, it’s the same name as was used in the book – and you won’t see that unless you’re looking for it. Everything that matters from the book is covered, I couldn’t think of anything that got left out, and they handle the nuts and bolts of hacking very well, and in a very low-key style – which puts it head and shoulders above most Hollywood representations of same (see, variously Hackers, The Net etc.). Yeah, I’m a nerd and these things matter to me, but here it just goes to show how much they wanted to make the definitive movie of the book. And how well they did.

Plea for the day (and a pointless one, I know), let this one stand as the movie of the book. No Hollywood remake, no sanitising, no casting of Tom Hanks and Megan Fox (gawd, the horror). I for one will be more than happy to read the subtitles and enjoy the original Swedish movies.

And all of that said, I’m going to knuckle down and finally read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and I’ll post in a few days with my verdict, which won’t matter a whit as the book is currently outselling Dan Brown by 5 to 1. For that reason alone, I already love it.

MMOs, nerdrage and trolling.

Yeah, this is one of my relatively infrequent gaming-related posts. Feel free to skip it!

One of my favourite aspects about MMO gaming is the sociological aspect of it all. You really get thrown into a microcosm; you meet all kinds of people, from friendly to aggressive, sociable to achievement-focused, casuals to epeen strokers. As a word-nerd I also love MMOs because both in-game and on boards there’s a constant stream of new lexical input and memes.

One of my least favourite things about MMO gaming is that…well, that it’s a microcosm. The most obnoxious people shout the loudest and even those with no logical or rational point will insist on arguing for aeons on end about whatever they think they have a right to be mad about. There’s plenty of this to be found on the forums for any well-established MMO, but where it all comes to a head is usually right at the launch period.

For the past couple of years I’ve been keeping an eye on the progress of a game called Aion which has been up and running in Korean and China for about 18 months and is launching in Europe, North America and Australia in the next couple of days. I was watching it because it looked very very purty (indeed, I shall be referring to it as “the game of pretty” or TGOP so be mentally ready to translate in your own noggin), and because your character earns wings and can fly around in certain zones. Yum, I thought. The game is also a bit different in that it is player versus player versus environment (PvPvE) which is a mite more dynamic than a lot of other games around. Essentially, a lot of games are Player vs Environment (ie – you fight pixellated thingies controlled by a computer AI) with consensual player versus player in certain areas (player versus player means just that – you can be attacked and killed by players of the opposite faction). By consensual I mean, either you flag yourself for PvP combat (the MMO version of saying “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”) or you go to zones (areas) that are designed purely for PvP. Aion has perhaps the healthiest mix of PvP/PvE content I’ve come across so far. Also, and this is really really important: it’s fun as all get-out to play.

So yeah, fun new game! Woo!

Except for all the nerdrage.

Nerdrage example 1: Why should I have to pay for the game?
He starts out calm enough, but gets increasingly ragey/whiny as people try to explain the concept of capitalism. I actually, and in real life, facepalmed (this is a first). People who don’t play MMOs often ask why you have to pay a monthly fee to do so, but I have never yet seen someone complain about the initial investment (the only sure-fire money game companies make on MMOs is box/digital key sales, subscription fees are not guaranteed, and are needed to pay support and technical staff and keep servers running, the box sales are what pays for the 6 years + of development costs….)

Nerdrage example 2: Take this game and shove it!!!
Eeeep! Poor chap got an error message while playing in open beta (this is a slightly-restricted pre-launch TESTING period of the game, where developers allow a certain number of people to access servers early (and for free) in order to weed out bugs etc.) and /ragequit. There are a lot like him about.

If you pre-ordered Aion, you can (at this very moment and up until tomorrow morning Seattle time) reserve up to two characters on the server(s) of your choice. There are two player-controllable races in the game, the Asmodians and the Elyos. As of right now, the forums I linked to have (in one section alone) 23 pages of posts (that’s just post headers btw) with people bitching that they cannot roll the race they want on the server they want, or that they didn’t get the name they wanted, or that things happened half an hour later than advertised…you name it. I lost count of the numbers of people threatening to cancel their pre-orders because of any/all of the above. This in spite of the fact that some of the NC West Aion team have twitter accounts that were updated every couple of minutes to let people know what was going on and they all tweeted (using Liv’s tweet here ’cause I loved the “gogogo!” part) the second the servers were available.

This also in spite of the fact that the developers made it clear they would be balancing the servers from the start, so that there wouldn’t be too many Elyos or too many Asmodians on any one server. I can’t overstate how critical that point is. Anyone who played WAR will tell you that it’s no fun playing a game with player versus player content if there’s twice (or three times) as many players of one faction compared to the other. If you’re the bigger faction, you just steam-roll everything (it’s known as “zerging” in MMOs) which is hella boring, if you’re the smaller faction, you’re constantly being steam-rolled, time in-game is hell and the game is no fun, so you’ll either switch sides, or just quit playing. So to achieve a decent (and fair) balance, you have to do so from the second people are able to create their characters, otherwise, when retail launches and people who haven’t pre-ordered pick up the game and start playing, they’ll find that they’re stuck having to be part of whichever faction was least popular with those who pre-ordered, and that just wouldn’t be fair.

Fairness doesn’t seem to occur to the loudmouths though. There’s a long and banal string of posts created purely so people can vent/bitch/whine about how they’re being “isolated” from their guild-mates and being “forced” to roll a race they don’t want to play. What they’re willfully ignoring is the fact that race balance is dynamic, if they can’t roll Asmodean on a particular server, all they need to do is wait til some other people create Elyos characters, and then try again. Dynamic system is dynamic. But then again, whiners are also whiners.

What’s most interesting about all the rage and the whining, is that every single MMO launch I can remember was full of the same stuff. Go through a launch or two and you learn the following facts:

1. Things will never happen when they are supposed to happen. If a game launches at 8am, you probably won’t be able to access it til 10am, so there’s no point sitting at your keyboard getting angrier with every minute that passes. If the servers aren’t open, NOBODY is getting to play. If this is making you angry, you probably need to get out more.

2. Any patch deployed to fix something will break something else. MMOs are huge in terms of lines of code. Fixing something small often has unforeseen repercussions elsewhere. Seasoned MMO players are aware of this, and often don’t even try to play on patch days, wait a day and whatever got broken will probably have been fixed. Again, no point in getting angry.

3. No matter how many pre-sales there are for a game, it’s nigh on impossible to predict actual server loads when a game goes live (I might have Elyos characters on one server, and Asmodians on another, how are NC Soft supposed to know which side I’ll actually play most, or which I’ll play at launch?). You don’t want a bunch of servers that are crammed to the rafters and all laggy as a result, and you don’t want *any* that feel like a desert (no-one plays an MMO to run around a big empty world with no other players in sight, do they?). People will whine about server queues and lag, but too many servers is actually a bigger problem (cf WAR). I don’t mind queues at launches in fact I take ‘em for granted, but some people *really* do, guess what, it makes them angry…

4. WoW is the ten ton elephant in the corner at every new MMO launch. I’m so tired of reading about Aion compared to WoW, or how WoW has this and Aion doesn’t (and vice-versa), but it’s only to be expected. If 11 million people currently play WoW and for a lot of them it’s their only MMO experience, then it’s an easy point of reference. There’s no point in getting angry because Aion is not WoW (believe me, there are plenty of people doing this) since it is not claiming to be. It’s a different game. Different does not mean worse or better, it just means different. That last bit is important. There’s no point in bashing WoW (or WoW players) or attacking anyone who is critical of your new favourite game (this applies across the board), fanboi-ism is rampant, and unpretty. No matter how obvious all of this is, people will get furious defending one game over another….and really? They’re just games. Some people get over-invested.

5. A bunch of geniuses will power-level through all the low level content (not stopping to enjoy themselves along the way, or to eat or sleep for that matter), hit max level and then complain they have no-one to enjoy end-game with, that the game is therefore useless and they will also quit. These people are not very bright. See here for a most excellent parody of this mindset.

So yeah, you can pretty much take all the above as read for any MMO launch, and rather than get irritated by it, the best thing old fogeys like me can do is break out the popcorn, pull up a chair and watch the drama unfold while muttering about “kids these days”. Ah well, at least it gives me something to do until head-start begins on Sunday evening.

Booker books…

So, the shortlist for the Man Booker prize was announced last week, and it looks like it’s pretty much a two-horse race (betting-wise at least) between Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. Having just finished Wolf Hall and having read The Little Stranger a good while back in proof form, here’s what I think:

Regardless of people being nit-picky about how all the books on the list are set in the past (really, should that even be an issue?), I think there’s a lot to be said for any book that makes us consider the past in relation to the present (plus ça change etc.), and there’s even more to be said for a book that manages to make us think of the present while re-assessing accepted versions of the past. I developed an allergy to all things Tudor over the past couple of years as the period seemed to be the new literary and pop-culture version of the Knights Templar (bloomin’ Templars, they’re everywhere!), but I was always interested in Wolf Hall because of who wrote it. I love Hilary Mantel’s dark humour and the slant she puts on her worlds. To be honest, I’m rather surprised that she’s missed out on the Booker for so long, as she’s written plenty of books that are stronger than previous winners (at least in my opinion). Wolf Hall is not just brilliantly executed, with a moral sensibility that will be familiar to anyone who has read any Mantel, but it is also witty, engrossing and provokes plenty of food for thought. She wears her historical research very lightly, but brings the period to life completely, she makes Thomas More a bad guy (about time someone did, More’s Utopia always sounded rather like a place I would never want to be, so dreary and pious and joyless) and makes Thomas Cromwell endlessly fascinating – which is good as he is both the centre and the heart of the book. There are no ciphers to be found, no character is rendered in 2D, everyone is fully rounded and everyone matters. The fact that the book doesn’t end with Tom Cromwell’s head on a spike is well known at this point, there are murmurs that Mantel intends a sequel, with the title of this book acting as a sort of foreshadowing of things to come in his future. I have no problems with that, and am hoping the sequel rumours are true, since I’d like to spend more time in her version of Tudor times, and in the company of Master Cromwell.

By contrast (cutting and pasting from elsewhere on the site) I didn’t really like The Little Stranger all that much. What sticks in my head months after reading it is how much I disliked the central character with his class obsessions and be-chipped shoulders. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“Hmmm, it’s good, but it’s rather longer than it needs to be, and while it has effective chills in parts it is no The Haunting of Hill House (the book I measure all house-with-a-mind-of-its-own stories against). Also, I really did not like the central protagonist, who has a rather pronounced chip on his shoulder. Parts of the book reminded me of the original Grey Gardens (haven’t seen the recent HBO remake yet, seems weird to remake a documentary…), a house falling down around the ears of an odd family who seem to carry on oblivious, so in summation, good, but not Shirley Jackson good.”

So I thought it’d do, as a pass-the-time-of-day sort of book. Obviously the idea of it being a serious Booker contender never entered my head. Silly me.

There are, of course, four other books on the shortlist, but to be frank, I think Mantel should have it sewn up, since Wolf Hall has everything you could want from a book, and then some. There is always a danger that the Booker panel might be swayed away from a book that is seen everywhere as the favourite, but if they do, they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. It deserves the win, doubly so if they take Mantel’s backlist into account.

If you disagree, feel free to let me have it in the comments!