Baud Attitude

The Power of the Cute Compells You…

Posted on November 8, 2007 by baudattitude

First things first: My wife hates all things Haruhi with the passion of a thousand blazing suns.

OK, to give her credit, she did watch the first three episodes with me. She made a good-faith effort, but her tastes lean more towards Wolf’s Rain, Pretear, Inuyasha, Gundam Wing, that sort of thing. Shows with some angst… drama… pretty boys… you know, girly stuff. We find common ground on Card Captor Sakura. Who doesn’t love Card Captor Sakura?

Anyway, tonight she was looking at one of the shelves o’ toys and said something unexpected. Usually it’s more of an “oh, please” reaction, and I will admit that there are some figures that I buy solely to get the “oh, please” reaction.

Tonight it was “that’s cute.”

I looked where she was pointing.

I moved the super-deformed Gamera to the left. I moved the small, purple Pokemon whose name I do not know to the right.

I said, “Point again.”

She pointed, quite clearly, to the Mikuru.

She’s starting to crack. Soon I’ll have her doing the Hare Hare Yukai dance.

…on other topics…

I have been enjoying the second season of Genshiken and eagerly awaiting both volume 9 of the manga and a licensed version of the OVAs and the second TV series.

I bought volume 9 of the manga from Kinokuniya books some months ago, but of course it’s untranslated and my Japanese skills… not up to it. I should try again now that I’ve got another 150 or so kanji more-or-less memorized. The domestic version comes out the 27th of this month.

Anyway, it occurred to me that an awful lot of folks probably know and like Genshiken, or Comic Party, but may not have ever experienced Otaku no Video, so I thought I would plug that a bit. Mind you, I’m not getting any kickback on this.

Otaku no Video tells the heartwarming story of a young lad about to go down the dreary path of Normal Japanese Life. He’s in college, he has a girlfriend… He plays Tennis, for fun, and hangs out in bars with his car-obsessed buddies. He’s a couple of years of school away from marrying the girl, having a couple of kids, and reporting to an office job for the next 40 years until retirement, punctuated only by the obligatory August-and-New-Years Vacations.

Then he meets a guy from High School who he hasn’t thought about in years… and Things Change. It’s an epic story of shattered dreams, lost loves, climbs to success, betrayals, cosplay and extremely bouncy bunny girls.

The references are probably a bit dated for modern fans, but I strongly recommend it, especially if you are a Gainax or Kenichi Sonoda fan.

Here is a link to AnimEigo’s site which has a trailer for you to watch. Of course, because AnimEigo has absolutely no marketing acuity, it’s a trailer for the second of the two OAVs on the disc and makes no sense at all. I know they had a better trailer… you know, one that was funny and gave you some sense of the beginning of the story… back in the VHS/LD days, but that trailer does not appear here.

Otaku no Video (AnimEigo.com)

Posted in anime, haruhi | 2 Comments

I hated “Last Action Hero”

Posted on November 6, 2007 by baudattitude

And then I hated “The Purple Rose of Cairo” which I saw after I was told “Oh, Last Action Hero was just a rip off! You should see the original!”

And now I have found a new level of hate in Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author”, which I have now had the unluck of reading for my English Lit (drama!) class this term. To make matters worse, I now have to put up with the class discussing the play, so I can’t just say “Damn, that was horrible! Glad I only had to endure that once!”… it will be dragged on for the next week or two. It puts me in a mood to start throttling.

Fortunately, it’s an online course, so (1) my fellow students are safe from throttling and (2) I can submit my online discussion posts without them being affected by tone of voice, body language, uncontrollable sneering, that sort of thing.

It is possible that my hatred for this piece of drama might not be so pronounced if I was actually seeing it produced. I am still befuddled by the idea that you can teach a “drama” class where the students just, well, READ plays, but I am not so counter to this idea that I will not take the four credits and happily get on with my college career.

It is also possible that I might not hate it so much if it hadn’t come after “Othello.”

“Othello” was an enjoyable three weeks of the class, mostly because Iago is one evil son of a bitch. Seriously. Anyone who thinks to themselves “I’d like to be an evil bastard. Where should I start?” should take lessons from this guy.

Going from Othello to “oh look see some of the characters are actors pretending they’re characters and some of the actors are acting like they’re actors who are playing characters and oh look how META I AM” was about as much of a paradigm shift as going from… mmm… a very good thing to a very bad thing. I’m not much on the metaphor tonight.

I will put it like this: Were I given the choice to 1) re-read this play or 2) go looking for Harry Potter slashfic… I would be browsing harrylovesdraco.com before you could say “you don’t need to answer right now.”

Disclaimer: If there is really a web site named “harrylovesdraco.com”, do not tell me, because I am already hanging on by a thread.

Thank you, and good night.

Posted in school | 1 Comment

“Remember when?”… Pioneer nostalgia.

Posted on November 4, 2007 by baudattitude

So, I found out last month that Geneon – formerly Pioneer – is getting out of the US anime market. I’m guessing that other companies will probably be licensing Geneon titles, and that their demise probably won’t affect my being able to see anything… but it was a little sad.

If you were an anime fan in the early 90s, you had these few options for getting your anime fix, from worst to best:

1) You could go to a comics convention and pay one of the many bootleg video sellers $20 for a VHS copy of something.

If you were lucky, these were only one or two generations removed from the laserdisc source, but if you were unlucky you’d get a barely watchable mess. It’d be in raw japanese, of course, so good luck with the comprehension thing… and, of course, you were paying someone to make you an illegal copy of something.

2) You could, if you knew a guy who knew a guy, get a fan-subtitled copy of something.

This was a process involving getting to know people, packing up video tapes in to a padded mailer – with another padded mailer and return postage included – and sending this whole bundle off. The guy you sent them to would generally copy what you asked for on to the video tapes and send them back… in a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, or sometimes not at all, but generally you’d get your tapes back. It did make for a very social fandom – you’d get to know someone and they would introduce you to a friend of theirs and your social network would get that much bigger, and most of this was done though honest-to-god paper mail because very few people had access to the internet.

Eventually the social aspect faded and fansubbers started putting lists of anime on rec.arts.anime and saying “Just send me some money and I’ll put the stuff you want onto tapes that I buy and mail them to you” and then there were all kinds of flamefests about how much you should be charging per tape before you became a bootlegging profiteer yourself… it was ugly.

3) You could buy one of the very few domestic anime releases.

Problem is, you were generally spending $34.95 on a VHS tape, so the picture was, well, VHS quality. Still better than the bootlegs or the fansubs, but a lot of money to drop on a videotape. Oh, and about half of them were released dub-only, so if you didn’t care for the voice acting talent of the day… and here’s where I carefully do not get in to anything judgmental.

4) You could import the laserdisc from Japan.

Upside: A really good picture, great sound, and generally some bonus inserts in the laserdisc jacket.

Downside: Of course there was no English translation of any kind and you were paying a bit of a premium for the quality. Like, mmm, $60 for a 30 minute episode. A single 30 minute episode. If you bought TV series, you could usually get 3 or 4 episodes for right around $100, or an entire series for six or seven hundred bucks.

5) Absolute best scenario: You could buy a domestically produced anime laserdisc.

There were very very few of these, but they were usually cheaper than the Japanese LDs… without the cool bonus goodies that tended to come with Japanese LDs, and sometimes with some really ugly re-done artwork, but you got a pretty decent picture and sound and they were translated. You still had to deal with the “some are dub-only, some are sub-only” problem.

Being an anime fan was kind of expensive and frustrating.

Along comes Pioneer, who gave us this:

This is the first release Pioneer did in the United States, the first Tenchi Muyo OVA.

Let’s run down the features:

You got the episode on laserdisc, with both English and Japanese audio tracks. They didn’t even release VHS tapes of their series at first.

They provided subtitles via closed-captioning. Granted, the first couple of releases had kind of wonky subtitles, but they got it straightened out by the third episode or so.

You got the original Japanese LD sleeve – they provided a stick-on English back cover, but you could remove it and the original Japanese cover was underneath.

They included the original Japanese inserts, and a second copy with translated text.

They included a set of postcards.

You got a free T-shirt with the first LD. They did this with their second release, Moldiver, as well.

The whole thing was yours for the at-the-time insanely cheap price of $35. Most laserdisc stores tended to discount by 20%, so you could pick it up for $28.

Now, spending $168 on the six laserdiscs that represented the first Tenchi OVA series is crazy by today’s standards – and, OK, it was crazy fifteen years ago, too – but at the time it was mindblowing. Here was an actual professional anime producer giving the fans pretty much everything they’d ever asked for, and releasing it for about half the price of the Japanese release.

It woke up the other anime companies, too – the quality bar had been set so much higher than anything else on the market that they all had to improve their releases just so they wouldn’t look bad by comparison.

It’s been a few years since I’ve really paid attention to what anime companies were doing what in the market. It hasn’t been an issue – everything comes out on DVD these days, with dual audio tracks and subtitles as a given, and anime DVDs are really cheap, especially if you have the mental stamina to hold out for the eventual multipack releases, so knowing what company puts out what release hasn’t really been on my radar.

Still, having Geneon close up shop did make me a little nostalgic, and when I went around reading threads on the topic, most of them were focused on “what will happen to the series that they didn’t finish before they went under?” – there weren’t many “remember when?” discussions.

So here’s to the passing of a company that went above and beyond for American fans back when there weren’t that many of us out there.

Thanks for everything.

Posted in anime | Leave a comment

Photography: Not my strong point.

Posted on November 4, 2007 by baudattitude

Trying to figure out how to take decent pictures of toys high quality anime figurines so I can be a right proper camwhore has been bugging me.

Here’s a couple of examples, in this case using a “Shadow Lady” statue. I really don’t remember much about the Shadow Lady manga… there was something about a shy girl with a magical compact, who could use it to transform into a not-so-shy thief who also liked to wear a lot of skin-tight outfits and had a little devil sidekick. Also, I think she may have been in a love triangle or two, depending on which form she was in.

We’re not talking high concept literature here, but I remember it being a pretty fun read, and of course it had that glorious Masakasu Katsura (I”s, Video Girl Ai, Wingman, so on and so forth) artwork.

I got a bit off track there. Anyway, it was a nice looking figure and had lots of detail to it so it seemed like it would be a good test subject.

Here’s the Shadow Lady figure using the camera’s built-in flash:

This turned out kind of washed-out. I feel like I lost details, and it casts a really harsh shadow. It LOOKS plastic. Of course, it IS plastic, but that’s not the point.

And here’s the figure without using the flash, but with putting a light behind the camera aimed at the figure.

Much less washed-out and I’ve lost the harsh shadows, but at the same time, there’s a lot of grain and the figure is trying to blend in to the background.

So I’m a bit stuck. I think that losing the flash was definitely the way to go, it might just be that I need more ambient light to make that work.

Posted in anime, figures | 3 Comments

How a random guy in Oregon would fix Gamestop.

Posted on November 2, 2007 by baudattitude

OK. So Gamestop obviously isn’t “broken” – it’s the de facto leading US video game chain, the 900 lb. gorilla in the market, it makes money hand over fist and I suspect its stockholders are quite pleased with it. I’m a pretty frequent customer, so (again, obviously), I’ve got to be generally satisfied with the place. On the other hand, I do have some random annoyances associated with the chain, and I have a blog, so like any other random internet guy with a blog, I’m going to rant about what I think they could do better.

1) Cut your employees some slack and let them think for themselves. I’ll make up a number that sounds high here and say that 92% of all Gamestop employees are pretty passionate about gaming, and that’s the difference between them and the bored guy in the blue shirt in the R-Zone at Toys B We.

When I go into a Gamestop, and I’m buying something, and the guy selling it to me is painfully ticking down a script and I’m patiently saying “I already have your discount card. I already get your magazine. No, I don’t want to trade anything in. No, I don’t want to reserve anything.” – It’s frustrating to both sides of the counter, AND it pushes me into a script of my own – I might actually want to reserve something, but I’ve just gotten so used to saying “No” that I don’t think about it.

Let the guy at the register take a look at what I have and base his upselling on that – if I’m buying a couple of cheap X-box games, it’s because I’m feeling broke. Now is not the time to try to pitch me a $60 pre-order. It might be a good time to say “Hey, if you like the look of those, there are a couple of other games in the budget bin you might like”, or push the discount card.

Likewise: If I’m buying a couple of $60 new releases, it might be a good time to push that pre-order. But, let your employees push something that actually makes sense. Mandatory “you must mention this game to every customer” is bad. I’ve bought lots of stuff based on recommendations that take in to account the games I’m actually buying that day, but if I’m waiting in line and I hear every customer asked “would you like to reserve “Great Giana Sisters II?” , by the time it’s my turn, I’m not going to feel like reserving me a copy of Great Giana Sisters II – I know the guy behind the counter is just asking everyone, and he hasn’t really thought about whether it would appeal to each of the customers.

Summary: I like being upsold to, but only if the guy doing it seems to have thought about it.

2) Set some standards for used games. Every used game should have an A, B, or C rating, and these ratings should be obvious to anyone browsing the used games. There should also be a category below “C”, which is games in poor enough shape that you simply won’t deal in them. Make it obvious both to people buying used games that they will be paying more for higher quality games and will receive more when they trade in a game in good shape – or, conversely, that if they don’t care the condition it’s in, that they can get it for pennies, but they won’t get much if they bring it back. If you pound this message home hard enough to your customer base, it will give them an incentive to take better care of games, your stores will have better quality product to sell and everyone’s life gets better. Also, the really lousy games wind up getting sold to your competition, such as it is – independent game stores and pawn shops – which means that customers will start to associate those places with “I bought a game from that shop once, and it didn’t work! At Gamestop, I know the games I buy will work.”

3) Make publishers send you display boxes. 900 pound gorillas can say things like “If you want “Great Giana Sisters The Dating-Sim-RPG” in 5000 stores, you will be sending us a display box to put in every one of those stores” to publishers, and publishers will weigh the costs of display boxes versus the profit they want to make by seeing their game in your store… and you will get your display boxes. Make them send you a few boxes, because we both know that people looking to steal games are dumb and will steal empty cardboard boxes.

Then stop gutting one copy of every new game. I have heard all the arguments about how gutted games are the same as new games, but I also know that one of the few perks your employees get is the ability to take games home to try out. A gutted game that’s been employee-borrowed is not a new game. I have no way of knowing which games have been checked out by an employee and which haven’t, so I’m going to assume that anything that comes out of a little envelope is a used game.

4) On used games, put the “Edge price” and the “Used price” – point out to people that, yes, you’re charging $54 for the used copy of Great Giana Sisters Kart Racing since the game came out less than a week ago – but if they have your discount card, it’s $48. That starts looking more like a deal and less like a “I’m only getting six bucks off for buying used?”

5) I love swag! Limited edition swag for pre-ordering is the Best Idea Ever! …just make sure every store gets enough to cover all the pre-orders, OK? I’ve never had a problem getting my swag, but I’ve heard people complain about it, so I mention it as a public service to them.

6) I know strategy guides have a nice margin, but I almost never buy strategy guides. On the other hand, I will pay a stupid premium for a strategy guide that comes with a soundtrack or artbook. Push publishers to make more of them. Again, a 900 pound gorilla is you. Don’t do this for every game, though. People buying Great Giana Sisters Kart Racer… probably not a good market for a $30 limited edition strategy guide. People buying Great Giana Sisters the Tactical Dating Sim, on the other hand…

7) You know back when you carried some game soundtracks? That was cool, and they make great up-sell items and have a higher margin than new games, or so I’m led to believe. Likewise, I dropped 15 bucks on a Dead Or Alive Xtreme 2 calendar because I’m a shameless male. Male, with no shame. It says it right here. Very formal, very official.

8 ) If non-specialty video game retailers can have copies of a new game for sale on its release date and you can’t – something is wrong. 900 pound gorillas don’t have to say “you didn’t preorder Great Giana Sisters : The First Person Shooter, so we didn’t get enough. Please don’t cross the street to Best Buy, where they have lots and we look silly”

If you’re limiting your pre-orders because you don’t want to take a chance on a game not selling and you getting stuck with a bunch, use that 900 pound gorilla mojo to talk to the publishers and say “We’ll take a chance on your game… but we want some really good return terms if it winds up flopping.”

9) Game Informer is great. I think of my Edge card thingy as a magazine subscription first and a discount card second. I’ve used this same strategy to sell some friends on getting your card, and nobody’s complained yet. Don’t change anything about the magazine.

I’ll stop here because “top 10” lists are a blight unto mankind, and I feel better having ranted this much. 🙂

Posted in videogames | 3 Comments

OK, I get the cake thing now

Posted on October 31, 2007 by baudattitude

After about a zillion sightings of “the cake is a lie hah hah hah I’m so funny and referential”, I broke down and rented Portal yesterday. Well, I rented “The Orange Box”, strictly speaking, but really… Portal. And it was a good thing to rent. I’m not about to drop 60 bucks on the 360 version right now, and the PC version, while cheaper, comes with the spectre of “Hey, we can turn your software off, remotely, if we feel like it. See? ” that is Steam.

I know it puts me squarely in the tinfoil-hat-crowd to avoid Valve products because they require Steam to work, but I’m OK with that. Saves me money.

Anyway. Portal. Damn fun game. I get the cake jokes now, AND the obsession people have with Weighted Companion Cube, and the ending credits / song are all kinds of awesome.

Video game rentals are mighty pricey these days – playing Portal set me back 8 bucks for about 4 hours of portal-hopping puzzle fun. I suspect that will go up to six or so before I take it back, as I suspect I’m going to have to replay through the second half, the half that my wife couldn’t stay awake long enough to see, at least one more time. 🙂

“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: Episode 40/52. Episode 39 featured “Yan goes out, gets drunk, and gets in a fight.” I do love this program. I kind of wish they’d kept Mary Althaus as the host for the second season, but I’ve slowly gotten used to the new instructor.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360, 日本語 | Leave a comment

Firmware hell

Posted on October 25, 2007 by baudattitude

Last year my wife got me a really keen swissbit MP3-player/Swiss Army Knife gadget for my birthday.

It made a pretty darn good MP3 player for walking, since I didn’t have to worry about destroying a hard disk, and it made a pretty decent, uh, well, knife, nail file, and scissors. It doesn’t really have a lot of knifey bits, but it’s a swiss army knife that plays MP3s and that’s really good enough for me.

Swissbit, knowing that they produced a product that didn’t have to try very much harder to be cool, really didn’t try very hard after they came up with the “It’s a knife that plays music” concept, so I did have a couple of gripes – nothing serious, just the sorts of things that fall short of perfection.

It doesn’t have any kanji support, and I couldn’t use it as a drive under Windows (it was my first introduction to the concept of “MTP” devices, which was pretty educational) and if you plugged it in to a PC and launched Windows Media Player before it had a chance to charge for a bit, Windows Media Player would crash very very hard. It was the crashing Media Player thing that really vexed me.

Still, these are pretty minor gripes and I learned to work around them. Mostly just a matter of making sure to plug the player in at least 30 minutes before I wanted to sync anything to it.

Yesterday I decided to see if they’d done anything about these, and I found that there was a new firmware version that let you use it as a removable disk AND seems to have fixed the crashing media player thing. It also added OGG support and a bunch of general usability stuff.

It installed with no problems, and the player is greatly improved by it.

Still no kanji support, but I can deal with that.

Flush with the heady glow of success, I decided to see what else I could find new firmware for…

Continue reading →

Posted in gadgets | Leave a comment

Yuno, I’m troubled.

Posted on October 24, 2007 by baudattitude

I ought to be heading to bed soon, but I’ll probably be up for an hour or so.

In the meantime I am faced with a conundrum.

On the one hand, I should take this opportunity to study for the JLPT.

On the other hand, after finishing Exit, I decided to give Brave Story a spin in the PSP.

Inside the first half hour of Brave Story, you meet your first companion.

mmm nekomimi

So I’d like to play Brave Story for a half hour or so.

On the other hand, if I study Japanese, then I will be better able to understand future nekomimi-inside games, even if they don’t get translated.

So really I’m faced with the concept of catgirls-in-actus vs catgirls-in-potentia.

I DID have to look up what the opposite of “in potentia” was. I’m freely admitting that I’m not that big of a geek without reference materials.

I have to give the character designer credit for realizing – leather armor: not cute. Leather armor WITH A BOWTIE and a pink skirt: cute.

Maybe I’ll crack the JLPT book open and do ONE chapter.

Also, since I haven’t been tracking this every day: “Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 36/52.

Edit: One hour later: TWO chapters read and a self-test administered. Brave Story played: Zero. The things I do for education.

Posted in jlpt, nekomimi, psp, videogames, 日本語 | Leave a comment

The PSP Appreciation Project continues…

Posted on October 23, 2007 by baudattitude

I have been, at times, an utterly clueless twit.

Wait, stay with me, I’ll only be emo for a little bit and it has a purpose.

Way way way back when I had just discovered anime and was going through the everything-Japanese-is-inherently-more-awesome phase, I was talking to someone when the topic turned to the then-currently-airing Batman: The Animated Series.

In one of those “I’m going to build myself up by putting something else down”, I made an offhand remark that it wasn’t bad, for “limited animation”

I then got a well-deserved smackdown on what “limited animation” really meant, and how the fluid, minimalist style of Batman was anything BUT.

This was one of those moments that sunk in, and it tends to pop up every time I find myself really enjoying something that has similar design philosophies.

And now we come to Exit, which makes the third PSP game I’ve managed to complete… and, like the other two (LocoRoco, Me and My Katamari), it brought that one “Boy, I’m stupid” moment right back to the top for another viewing.

Exit oozes style. It doesn’t come across well in a static screenshot.

Trust me, though, seeing all the little bits of Exit in motion is a beautiful thing.

Also, your character looks really cool. If I had a job where I hauled people out of burning buildings and from flooded subway tunnels, I would die to look as good doing it as the hero (“Mr. ESC”) does in the course of his efforts.

It’s recently come out for Xbox Live Arcade, as well, for all of 800 Microsoft points (10 bucks, damn their deceptive exchange rate) which should open it up to the folks who don’t have a PSP or who haven’t picked it up for their PSP.

It’s almost a shame seeing it as a full console application, though, because Exit is one of the most portable-friendly games out there (each level stands alone and is quick to complete – in fact, the most time you’re allowed to finish a level is 14 minutes, and most are under 10) and has finally made me understand how to make decent use of the PSP as a mobile gaming system – something I have struggled with in comparison to the DS, and something that had relegated the PSP to second-class status pretty much since the week I bought both.

The secret: Never turn the thing off.

This is not intuitive. Well, not to me, anyway. I get done playing a game, I turn off the system and take the disc out, right? Then, the next time I want to play the same game, I put the disc back in the system, turn it on, wait for it to boot, wait for the UMD to load, wait for the developer and publisher logos, wait for the intro animation to load, hope I can skip the intro animation, load the last game… and by now it’s been 5 minutes. This is not optimal for “hey, I have a few minutes to kill”, which is the real killer app for any portable system.

When playing Exit, I finally learned to embrace the PSP’s sleep mode, something that has always felt just a little bit WRONG on the system and ever so RIGHT on the DS. There’s something about just closing the DS’s lid that makes the act of going into sleep mode not feel like shutting down, whereas the little quick flick of the power switch needed to put the PSP into sleep mode always used to make me cringe with the thought of losing whatever progress I’d made in whatever game I’d been playing.

After going into and out of sleep mode 70 or 80 times over the course of playing through Exit – I’m over that, now. I am now completely one with the concept that it’s all right to do a quick pause, sleep the PSP, and leave the UMD in for the next time I get a few minutes.

Also, I can do a bit more gaming when I’m out, and not feel guilty about it like I would if I booted up the 360 or PS2 for a couple hours of playing something off the backlog while I have classes and tests to study for.

All around Big Win.

Note for pure honesty: I say I “finished” Exit. By that I mean I finished the 100 built-in levels. You can download 110 more. Two problems there.

1) Exit doesn’t really have a “story”, but it does ramp up in difficulty and the environments get more and more interesting as you progress through the game. 110 more levels leaves me with the question: Where do they go from there? They are going to have hard shoes to fill if they want to keep ramping up the environments, but if they drop back to more mundane environments, it’s the Perfect Dark Zero problem.

2) I really don’t have the staying power to blow through 110 more levels and I have a bunch more PSP games to appreciate. 🙂

Posted in psp, videogames | Leave a comment

Dying gameworlds…

Posted on October 22, 2007 by baudattitude

I spent the better part of 8 years playing Everquest. It’s not something I normally discuss in, you know, polite company, because it’s kind of like “I spent a few years doing, you know, crystal meth.”

I think people have a higher opinion of furry fans than they do EQ players. And, well, I can’t fault them there.

Anyway.

So I was a EQ junkie from roughly, July of 1999 until this spring, when I realized that I just couldn’t do EQ and work and school and I had a bloody ton of excellent single player games I should try playing instead.

So I stopped logging in, and eventually canceled my account.

Periodically, Sony sends me “come back to EQ!” e-mails where they say they’ve activated my account for a weekend, or a week – or even sent me a free 2 month subscription to Everquest 2, although that one was more related to my having tried and canceled Vanguard.

So I logged in a character I’d left camped out in the Bazaar.

This is the zone where, if you have things to sell to other characters, you can leave one of your characters here and they can sell your stuff for you while you’re asleep.

It has a limit of 550 characters, and it used to be that it was constantly at-limit and if you wanted to set up a bazaar trader you had to sit there waiting for someone to log out and hope that you got their spot before anyone else did.

Since those days they’ve had to merge servers, combining the populations of two different servers into one.

Last night, on a merged server, it had a whopping 219 characters.

But that didn’t have quite the impact of the next thing I saw.

I had a level 16 (pretty low-level for Everquest, which has levels up to 75) monk sitting around in Qeynos.

This is one of the very first game cities. It’s next to an outdoors zone, “Qeynos Hills”.

Qeynos Hills was one of the first places you went just after the training wheels came off your character – stuff can get aggressive, run for help when wounded, and there are a couple of high level NPCs who are normally NOT aggressive but will lay a smack down on you if they catch you messing with one of their friends.It has a bunch of low-level gnolls in it, and some snakes and giant bats and rats and a ruined standing stones circle with an undead infestation. Standard RPG cannon fodder.

It’s also got a little fishing pond, and there’s a fisherman named “Hadden” who hangs out there.

Hadden has a little problem.

When you kill him, sometimes you’ll find a piece of loot that gives your character the ability to breath under water.

Furthermore, after he’s killed, he will come back to life exactly six hours later.

Hadden’s life expectancy used to be measured in seconds.

You’d run by this little fishing pond and there would be at least a couple of characters hanging out and waiting for him… and since loot rights in Everquest are dictated by who does the most damage, not who got the first shot in, when he would pop his head out into the world it usually resulted in two or three people trying to get the kill, and therefore the loot. He also sparked massive arguments between people who’d been sitting there waiting for him for hours and people who knew how long it had been since he last died and were just coming back because it had been almost six hours since then.

I ran out to Qeynos Hills last night, and he was just standing there.

We talked, I left him alone, and then I logged out of the game and got back to real life.

I think he looked a little sad about the whole thing.

There had to come a point where he went from “god damn it, every time I try to get some fishing in, two or three jokers fight over who gets to kill me” to “wow, I lived a few minutes longer that time” to “uh, doesn’t anyone care enough to come kill me any more?” to “is anyone out there?”

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