...by the way!

I just went through the entire list of Realms availible to World of Warcraft, checking for characters that I've forgotten about. Ahrotahntee members seem to keep dropping subtle hints about how many characters they have, as if that's somehow a status symbol. Well, if it is, then I think I take the cake. They think 10 is alot? Weeeeeell, I have 31 characters spread across 8 realms.

Do I play them all? Nope! Do they play all theirs? I doubt it.
But there you go. Just thought I'd mention it.

Maybe I'll release a list later. But right now, I'm off to prepare to leave to watch King Kong! We're going to try to hit the 4pm showing, so we're leaving at 2pm to get there early enough to get good seats! Yep... 2 hours.

A hearty thanks to Mister Witkowski for offering to host a small site for me again. Soooo... yup! Here I am. Back at good ol' www2.rivenwolf.net:808 (though you can still use www.rivenwolf.net if ya want).

So uhm... look at this: D&D Online Stress Beta Begins! I signed up and am currently waiting in the queue to download the gigantic client program. (Okay, so 1GB isn't too bad for an entire program.) They've decided to punish people or something and have banned all but paying subscribers of Fileplanet access to the standard hi-res client. So those of us who don't want to fund creepy, disgusting excuse for a file storage portal are left with a low-res client, whatever that means. The test only lasts a week, though. Oh well. Maybe I can win (haha) that "event" and get admission into the full Beta Test. ...and for those of you who may be worrying, no, I'm not buying it. World of Warcraft is more than enough MMOs to pay for.

The Gaming category of Slashdot must get more of the coolheaded commenters of that place. Lots of people whine and carry on about "no Linux version, waaaaah!!" and there's always at least one (shockingly high-modded) reply that puts them in their place. Saying, more or less, that Windows is the dominant gaming platform whether you like it or not. Linux is nowhere near popular enough for people to consider making a retail game for... and the users are wanting everything opensource and free, to boot. Not something developers want to do, understandably. I wouldn't work for 3 years on a game to just hand it up to everyone. If enough people made it clear that they'd purchase games made for Linux, then eventually developers might come around to actually doing it. But, right now, this isn't the time for it. Linux is too convoluted and non-standard. As in, so many possible configurations and drivers and such that it'd be an insane task to get your game working on all Linux distributions perfectly. With Windows, you pretty much just say "must have Windows XP!" and have done with it.

Anyway, that's my take on things. Linux != Gaming...yet. Heck, Linux doesn't even equal user friendly, yet. Work on that, first, and get a good healthy influx of people who will use Linux just because it's easy and then work on getting games over. Anyone who tells me that Mac and/or Linux is easier to use than Windows is a bit crazy. Sure, it might be for them... but try to see it from someone who just wants things to install and work without actually doing anything.

So yeah! I just turned this into a big ramble. Don't get me wrong, though. I like Linux. But it's not at all easy to learn, and it's not at all popular enough for games. It's slowly getting there, though, and that's cool.