The Old Republic

As you may already know, I got a chance to participate in the beta of Star Wars: the Old Republic, the blockbuster new MMO by Bioware. This is probably the most anticipated MMO since World of Warcraft. It's made by a superstar company riding high on the success on the Mass Effect franchise. They clearly know their way around the Old Republic era, having previously made Knights of the Old Republic, which is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Bioware aren't just a sci-fi powerhouse: they are also well known for Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and the more recent Dragon Age. The one kind of RPG that Bioware has never attempted before is an MMO*. So did they succeed?

Paprika, the Smuggler, was the first character we created

Yeah, so this domain is registered with GoDaddy

EDIT 2: As you probably noticed, the site was down for a while yesterday. (cricket, cricket...) Ahem. Yes, well, the downtime had to do with the change in registrars, and we should now be up and back for good. Whew!

EDIT: Change of plans. My friend Kage told me that it's actually really easy to transfer domains to NameCheap, so I went with that. Looks like I'll get to keep supervillaino.us after all. Hm, maybe that means I should post more...

Original post below:

So as you no doubt no already, GoDaddy is incredibly unpopular right now for their support of SOPA. If you don't know what SOPA is or why it's bad, then you haven't been on the internet lately.

Alas, this very site is registered with GoDaddy. Luckily, the domain expires in a few months. I don't have my heart set on keeping this domain, so I'm just going to let it run out without renewing.

Don't worry - the blog will still be here at supervillainous.blogspot.com. I may even re-register the domain with a different service, if that's even a thing that people do. Right now, I just don't want to give GoDaddy any more of my money.

Han is always wrong

What do I do on my lunch break? Make up new memes for my own amusement. Think of this as a viral ad for my post(s?) about Star Wars: The Old Republic, coming soon/eventually.

"The Secret World" video game trailers are great urban fantasy shorts

I recently came across the CG trailers to the "Secret World" video game. It's going to be an MMO set in the modern world, with an urban fantasy twist. The MMO itself looks like any other MMO, though they have an interesting gimmick where the gameplay intersects with real-world social networking and  websites you can visit.

The gameplay videos consist of groups of people standing around big monsters, shooting the monsters with guns and/or colorful blasts of magic. Meh, I have no interest in the game itself.

What does interest me are the CG trailers. If you ignore the fact that they're trailers for a video game, they make really cool short videos about some characters in an urban fantasy world.

You can watch the first three in any order, but you should watch all three before you watch the fourth.

The First Video - A woman comes home and makes a milkshake.

The Second Video - Another woman walks through a playground at night and finds a feather.

The Third Video - A man finishes his drink at a bar and goes to the restroom.

The Fourth Video - I won't say anything for fear of spoilers.

These videos make me want to read (and write) some hardboiled urban fantasy. Maybe after my National Novel Writing Month novel is done I'll have a chance to return to this idea!

The Graveyard Book

When I first left college, I went on a reading spree through Neil Gaiman's major novels, including American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Neverwhere (which I loved so much that I read it in a day), along with some collections of short stories and most of his Sandman graphic novels. Then, with my hunger for Gaiman sated, I stopped for a long time. In that time, The Graveyard Book came out and won just about every award a YA book can win. I had always meant to read it, and as Halloween approached, I decided it was time I finally cracked it open and looked inside.

From the Dust Returned

I have had a hard time getting into Bradbury. His work is very poetic and his stories show astounding imagination, but I have trouble investing in the stories in the same way I get invested in something by Gaiman or Pratchett. From the Dust Returned is the story of a singular house, inhabited by a unique family. Once a year, the distant relatives arrive, flown in on the wind or running on wolf's legs or flapping on bats' wings. The story begins with one such family reunion and deals with the changing times and their effect on this family.

A Night in the Lonesome October

In my mind, there is a sliding scale of Halloween. At one end there children dressed as Spider-Man and princess fairies. On the other end, there are gory heads on spikes with blood oozing down. If you ask me, Halloween is at its best when it's in between. Halloween is the time for Draculas and Frankensteins, when bats go eek-eek and ghosts go woo-oo-oo! And no book captures that spirit quite so well as Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October.