06.16.2009 - Terrence Marks:
Firstly, the amazing folks over at Studio Tavicat have a webcomic, @Tavicat. You may know them as the extremely talented folks behind the Reality Check and Ranklechick comic books, or the Shutterbox manga. This comic is up to their usual high standards. We both like it, so you probably will too.
Secondly, UnlikeMinerva.comcommentary is back up. I wound up missing a few weeks, due to various things, so I got more written and set the clock back.

Thirdly, Isabel and I both have Twitter accounts. We talk about a lot of stuff, but if we've got some small news about the comics (like them running a bit late), it'll probably be there first.

05.30.2009 - Terrence Marks:
Isabel is back to work. As you know, we're a few days behind. She's working hard to get caught up.

05.27.2009 - Terrence Marks:
It's Isabel's birthday! The good news is we found out what she's allergic to. The bad news is that it's dogs, which we just spent the last few hours around. Hopefully this time it won't be as bad. Previous News | Old News (2006 and before)
 

05.30.2009 - Terrence Marks:
Isabel and I are back playing Maple Story after taking a year or so off. One of the things they've added is the Maple Trading Service (MTS), where you can buy and sell in-game items for cash money. I'm still trying to decide if this is a good thing or not.
That's bad. I'm the target audience for that kind of thing. I have a job, which means I can spare five dollars more easily than I can spare five hours. The game's demographics skew young, and I don't imagine people like me are in the majority.

Why do I like it? The MTS is searchable. The in-game markets are not*. Since they take a 10% cut of anything sold in MTS, that's not surprising. Since the in-game markets aren't searchable, they tend towards higher-value items - it's not worth your time to try to find anything else. There's a lot of stuff in the MTS that wouldn't be worth buying or selling otherwise. It used to be that if I really needed an item, I'd have to spend half an hour combing the markets for it, and the moderately common items wouldn't be worth anybody's trouble to sell. Now, if I'm catching up on old quests I can just go in and buy them for a quarter or so.

The problem is that there is now an exchange rate between cash and game currency ($1 gets you between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000). That really rare item I found and sold for 2 million? Used to be totally awesome. Now it's about 50 cents worth, which isn't nearly as exciting.

This also means there are two prices for everything. It's a moderately inefficient market, and it's very tempting to spend a few hours coming up with price lists to try and make money via arbitrage (buying items cash-cheap items, selling them for game money, which I use to buy cash-expensive items, to sell for cash). The problem is that, again, I'd probably be making well under minimum wage. I don't really need another job, especially at that price.

So, will I use it? Yeah. I admit I bought some very nice equipment for our characters; most of it is going to be a part of our end-game gear, and worth a few dollars. It's too useful to ignore. But I don't like it.

*: Or, rather, it you can buy the search-the-market items for about 70 cents per search. The cheap stuff goes for 21 cents in MTS, so you can see how that goes.

03.20.2009 - Terrence Marks:
Since I last updated, I managed to find an old-school cassette deck, with line-out even. Looks like it used to be part of a really fancy home entertainment system twenty years ago. That's cool. It randomly makes this horrible shrieking noise. That's trash. It records just fine and doesn't damage the tapes, but it sounds like I set it on fire.
This put me in a mood. Not angry. Not upset. Just unpleasable. I wanted to do something, but I knew whatever I did, I wouldn't like it because of the mood I was in. I've got all these old movies I picked up cheap, and I've been thinking of finally reading Kimagure Orange Road - I mean, I've heard good things about it. I might like it. But I wouldn't like it today. I'd just get five minutes in, put it down, and never pick it up again.
So I did taxes instead. I have absolutely nothing entertaining to say about the process, especially Form 1065 (which is intended to cover any kind of partnership, from husband-and-wife team to an international conglomerate - estimated time to fill it out is about 72 hours, if you're lucky). Anyhow, taxes are done.

03.09.2009 - Terrence Marks:

It's been kind of a busy week for me.