9 hours ago
Angry Robot BooksRepost: New iPhone
Nice toy and all, the little apps they are selling for it are all geeky nifty too.
Repost: Big Box Kick in the Nuts
Apparently I have a short memory. Yesterday (July 8th) I decided to go to Best Buy and pick up a copy of Civilization: Revolution for the xBox 360. No luck, not on the shelves and I did not bother to ask a sales tard. I just walked across teh street to Circuit City. CC is one of my last resort stops, they have actually gotten better but I still really hate going in there for some reason. No luck.
This time I asked the chick at the regester what was up, she checked the website from her terminal and it confirmed today was the release date, however the site also said “Not available for instore pickup” WTF, shrugged and walked out. Figured surely I could handle walking through one store for access to the GameStop in the mall. Walked in the overly cheerful and annoying rep there asked if she could help. “You bet” I said, do you have a copy of Civilization: Revolution ?”
“Nope, we will get that in tomorrow, we do not get releases on release day it usually takes an extra day or so because we are on the East Coast. Would you like to reserve a copy?”
I replied “Nope, thanks.” and walked out. Fairly pissed a confused by the whole experience.
Problems I see here are as follows in order of occurance.
You would think Brick and Mortar establishments would want to have things, new things in store for people to purchase. I could understand if they under ordered something like Civ, as it ain’t Halo or Rock Band 2, but this was just a case of BB and CC not even apparently intending on getting it in. I will not make this mistake again. Another bad experience I had was when Joani and I decided to get LotRO and start playing. They both had 50 bajillion copies of WoW but not ONE copy of LotRO.
As far as the experience of Game Stop goes. I think they just have a problem with deffinitions. Release day is not a few days around the time the product is supposed to be in stores, it is the day announced as release day. Having worked in both record and retail stores, we used to get shipments from our warehouses the day BEFORE the announced release or by 10 am on the release day. Big dog titles we searched the box for and had the ready to go, the 2nd string stuff we would shelve soon after. teh 2nd concept GameStop seems to have off a bit is that Huntsville, AL is on the East Coast, let alone that location should impact whether they get something on release day or not. My time in retail was both in Toledo, OH and Huntsville, AL and unless the Major distributors has a huge cock up, we got things on time.
I did not want to reserve a copy at their stupid store I would have to spend another hour round trip getting to and from after they had already pissed me off. I figured I would check Rhino at lunch today, if they had a copy fine. If not Amazon would get my money and I would have it by the weekend. Well GameStop got in a little jab because apparently they are now the proud owner of the former Rhino location, and they had a copy left of what has apparently been a suprisingly brisk selling title (Might be because the CC and BB don’t have it).
Oh and while I am at it, let me pick on the dorks at Barnes and Noble. They had a store sandwiched inbetween BB and CC. We have a new people àquarium theme park shopping extraviganza called Bridge Street that is around 5 away from their former location. They opened a newer bigger fancier, higher priced cherry position location there. At the old location, there are signs plastered all over with big red letters. The read °Thanks for shopping with us we are now Closed° and then in finer black magic marker it is scribbled in that they hav emoved to bridge street. The casual passer by might just think they have closed and move on. Their signage people should be shot. It is not like B and N does not move frequently. This same store has done it once before. A big WE HAVE MOVED is much more friendly than WE HAVE CLOSED.
I will go with my first instinct next time and just pre order the game from Amazon and get it without wasting gas, time and peace of mind.
Repost: Ravenor Trilogy Finished
Quite often fiction based on game or movie settings just are not that good. They seem to be churned out with a desire to pump them to the fans and not really hold much value, often not getting much more respect than romance novels. Once in a while you stumble on a book or series that suprises you. The “Ravenor” series written by Dan Abnett was one of those suprises for me. I had been wanting to give a book in the Warhammer 40,000 universe a try and Dan Abnett has written quite a few, so I figured it would be safe to give the first in the trillogy a chance.
Initially I was a little worried. The title character is a telepath, and the author pulls the cliche run down of minds as Ravenor scans the city looking for someone. Reading that just turns me off everytime I see it or anything similar used. Fortunatly it only happens, if I remember correctly once in this book and once in the last book of the trilogy. Other than that the books are just good dark SciFi/Fantasy fun. Good plots, decent villains, supporting characters you feel are worth knowing without spending too much unnecesary tiem learnign backstory for them.
Being a trilogy my 2nd fear was the 2nd book. No problems there and the 3rd book cleaned things up nicely. So I see no reason not to rate the whole group with a single rating.
Repost: DnD 4th ed. and Market Value
Apparently, according to the “rules” in 4th edition D&D, the player characters are idiots when it comes to commerce. Ok this is going to be a nit pick for the beginning of my look at the new books. I have no intention of doing a full review, that would take really getting down and playing and time is limited. This nit is however symbolic of things strewn about my skimming of the books.
From a sidebar on the section on rituals.
You can sell ritual books or ritual scrolls for half the market
price of the rituals they contain, assuming that the DM
agrees that demand for a particular ritual exists. Although
you can try to sell copies of a ritual you know, doing so
offers no financial gain, and there is limited demand for
ritual books or scrolls. You pay the full cost to create a
scroll and can typically sell it for only half value. In addition,
the number of people in the world who can afford to
perform an expensive ritual and who can succeed on the
necessary skill checks is small, and many of the NPCs who
are skilled enough and wealthy enough to be potential
customers already have collections of ritual books available
to them.
So now from the Wikipedia article on Market Value
Market Value is the estimated amount for which a property should exchange on the date of valuation between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arms-length transaction after proper marketing wherein the parties had each acted knowledgably, prudently, and without compulsion.
First why write a “rule” like this. They say several places in the PHB how much things will sell for. I know previous editions have set pricing structures for things. But the Saying the Market Value for something is say 50 but since you are a PC you can only sell it for 25 just seems silly.
Honestly any DM worth his salt will ignore this and do whatever they want. The writers should know this and take it into account , writing to the level of the players. I feel like this is what is coloring some of the dislike experienced RPG are expressing.
Sorry, just something that bugged me and I had to dump it somewhere.
Repost: Amazing what you can do with Statistic Spin
Twitter is what some call a micro blogger. Essentially you get an account, post in a maximum of 140 character “posts” and other twitter subscribers follow your posts. You of course follow your friends, interests, famous people etc. I’ve got an account, couple of friends and web acquaintances are on their and the latest Mars Lander.
If you already knew about Twitter then you must know they have been having lots of problems. Service outages, have been rampant of late. They have basically from what I can tell outgrown the basic infrastructure they went with. They had found a nitch, were quirky enough to sneak up on folks then BLAME, exploded. Another problem they have I think is their general openness of their API. There are “spammers” out there following 17,000 people. No way is that a human on the other end of that twitter account.
Well today was WWDC which is where Apple rolls out the next frenzy of non products that the Apple Geeks freak out over. As expected (even by twitter) it went down.
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%
Initially, we turned off some features to shed load as we announced yesterday but we were able to turn them back on during the keynote as Twitter handled the dramatic amount of traffic. About 4% of requests during this time did return the page that asks folks to wait a few minutes and try again. However, we learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line.
I’m sorry but those numbers are just the downtime for today. Not to mention, saying 4% of the requests telling people to wait for a few minutes was acceptable…. They are fooling themselves. Eventually one of their competitors will step up and be able to handle the load. Folks will jump ship like crazy. Also live software used by hundereds of thousands of people, some of who are watching a very important event ( to them anyway ) is not what I would call a stress TEST.