Like..real-life ones. So, if you’re not into real-life issues, read my bit below about the blonde keyboard or something. Okay, so I’ve been friends with a friend of mine (let’s call her Paulina) for about three years. She’s always been a smart person who helped me out with my maths coursework in college..overall very bright. Her fatal flaw is that she’s a complete dimwit. Do you know the type? The type that is amazingly gifted in academics, but doesn’t know a damned thing about taking care of themselves?

So Paulina got married when she was 18 (she’s a few months younger than I am) and her parents were furious– rightfully so. Her father nearly disowns her over the whole matter and she moves away with this man. She moves very very far away and is dependent on her husband’s income. Her husband is away a lot on business, but is overall a good person who loves her a lot. He has a very demanding job where he’s actually risking bodily injury everyday. While he was away (he’s gone sometimes for 6+ months), she gloats about how she wants to have a baby with him and I tell her that she’s crazy. I mean, she’s crazy, is she not? Having a child one year after getting married and having the husband gone? A few weeks later…

The story gets more interesting. Paulina’s husband is away and all is well. She’s a little lonely, but has made friends in the neighbourhood. Paulina’s friends, unfortunately, are dumber than bread and they wag their tongues constantly as if they’d accidentally swallow them if they stopped. Paulina cheats on her husband. She kisses another guy who is the friend of one of these girls. A few weeks go by and Paulina realises that she’s very unhappy with her marriage, so she sleeps with said guy.

She rings up her husband and tells him that she wants a divorce without telling him what happened. He arranges to come home, and will be there within the month (has to finish up duties required of him). She phones me up telling me how “inconvenient” it is of him to come home and how he has “added to the drama” in her life. Now when you have a friend of  three years, it’s hard to tell them the truth. I did it though and I lost that friend to-day. What did I tell her that was so wrong? I told her that what she did was shameful, that the guy that she broke her marriage vows with doesn’t love her, and that her self-pity is frankly infuriating. I also told her that because I care about her, I decided to tell her what I thought. Since she did ask, after all.

So Paulina doesn’t want to be my friend after this and I’m writing this to you all for no reason other than the fact that since she’s told me that, I haven’t been able to be of much use for anything else.

So! The assist system came out today. I really like the idea of it and it completely came out of nowhere. It’s clear that Jagex sees that there is a disparity between lower-level and higher-level players and they’re finally doing something about it. Rewarding players for helping each other isn’t new to gaming, many MMO games have some sort of system or quest designed for players to rely on each other and it’s about time Runescape added something like this. The only way I can see this being misused is by people who are über-newbies who think that “assist” means they can ask normal players for FREE GP PLZ.

I hope they add info about the assist system to Tutorial Island as well, if they haven’t already. It’s something that can be great as long as people can work together.

Blond Keyboards

Yes, in Russia, a keyboard specifically made for blondes have emerged on store shelves.

Each function key has a little description on it about what to do and the ESC key simply says “No!” on it. It can be yours for only 16 EUR (about 25 USD). Is this thing pointless, or what? Read more about it here.

While doing a few quests in Canifis, I noticed a very peculiar set-up of the town. What I found there was HORRID and OFFENSIVE that I had to write this blog entry to tell you all how I’m on a mission to boycott Canifis forever. You shall see my reasons in a moment. As I walked through the town, I noticed that there was an NPC named “Svetlana”. I thought Oh, that’s awesome! A Russian NPC! How quickly my excitement faded. As it turns out, there are several NPCs with Russian names in Canifis, but when you examine them you get a rather unpleasant surprise:

“Seems a bit of a drama queen”.

A bit of a drama queen, eh? So all of us Russian women are just drama queens who secretly turn into werewolves when you attack us? We just sort of, I don’t know, have nothing better to do than to create drama and aimlessly walk around a swampy village according to Jagex. Here’s another:

“He keeps calling me comrade”.

Oh, right. Because all Russians are obviously commies who sit around drinking vodka all day saying, “AHH KOMRADE, ZIS IZ VEDDY GOOD VODKA. IZ BETTER ZAN ZAT CAPITALIST GARBAGE YOU AMERIKANS DRINK, DA?” That’s right, we’re all just a bunch of communist werewolf weirdos, don’t mind us!

“A travelling man. Are those fleas?”

Fleas? So now we don’t wash? We’re just a bunch of dirty gypsy communist werewolf drama queens? Well you know what, you’d stink too if you had to live in Canifis! Might I also add that ALL of these NPCs are hostile whenever you try to make conversation with them. You might say that “Oh, but MQ! It’s because they’re werewolves and they hate humans!” Wrong! It’s because Jagex thinks we’re all a bunch of anti-social overly-aggressive jerks. Let me introduce you to Irina, another participating citizen of the anti-Russian campaign that Jagex has founded.

“I bet she works out”.

Oh does she? We’re just a bunch of steroid-ridden women who are drama queens as a result of the influx of male hormones into our bodies? That probably explains why Jagex has made us all morph into WEREWOLVES when attacked. Oh, oh, oh, let me guess: we got the werewolf ability when Chernobyl happened.

In essence, Jagex has a rather peculiar view of Russians as being communists, masculine (the women), drama queens, poor, dirty, aggressive, and simple-minded. LET ME ASK YOU THIS, ANDREW GOWER: WHO WAS THE FIRST COUNTRY TO SEND SOMEONE OUT INTO SPACE? That’s what I thought.

More Russian NPC descriptions:
Vera: “She seems sure of herself”.
Yuri: “He’s staring at the moon”.
Georgy (which is actually more of a Bulgarian name): “A simple villager”.
Nikita: “The woman”. (Sorry, Nikita is actually a boy’s name.)
Zoja: “A healthy villager”. (You mean she escaped Chernobyl??)
Lev: “A tough looking villager”. (Yeah, you better watch out Andrew.)
Yadviga: “A well off villager”. (Her names means “wealthy”, that’s the only reason they say that!)
Sofiya: “A wise villager”. (They’re just saying that because it’s the meaning of her name.)

What the heck possesses people to submit news articles like this (I KNOW people don’t read the DailyMail, but still). A good portion of the world doesn’t believe in evolution and now we have some lone scientist saying that there will be de-evolution of the human species?

100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed.

100,000 years into the future? I somehow doubt that we’ll be on the earth in 100,000 years. I also am baffled why this “scientist” believes that there will be an “attractive intelligent ruling elite” that will govern the “underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures”. I can’t remember who said this, but it’s true: the more you know, the worse you look. I wasn’t aware that smart people are pretty and dumb people look like goblins.

The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000.

The London School of Economics? Wow, I hear that they have some ground-breaking evolutionary research going on there.

Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men’s satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.

Rofl, sorry. I cannot believe that this guy is serious. I think he’s trying to pass off his daydream fantasies as science. Also, IN A REPORT COMMISSIONED BY A TV STATION? Bells should go off in the minds of the “attractive intelligent upper-class” that this “report” is grade-A rubbish.

Medicine will weaken our immune system and we will begin to appear more child-like.

Childlike = attractive = intelligent? Mr. Curry is obviously a paedophile who needs to put the HG Wells books down and step into the real world. This is the stupidest thing I have ever read.

I don’t have much to write about, so I’ll leave you all with this:

I am so glad that Jagex are game designers, not architects.

It’s been a while, I know. Shane, Jeff, and I haven’t forgotten about RuneWire though. Jeff gave me the green light to begin further designs on the client. Looks like we’ll be able to utilise AIR for it and that makes me über excited. I’ve updated the design and fixed a lot of accessibility issues that existed previously. Though, I NEED your input on it. It always helps to have a second (third, fourth, FIFTH?) pair of eyes looking at this and telling me where the design might cause problems for users. If you can do that fully and courteously, I’d be glad to look into your feedback.

In other RW news, Shane (when he finishes midterms next week) will be implementing a PM system. I’m really happy about that. I’ve been heavily pushing a group system on RuneWire, but that will come much later, so don’t hold your breath. Right now, a few things need to be worked on. Mainly, I want to see a better notification system so that you can see when friends add you, PM you, reply to your posts, etc. Also, Anubis suggested a to-do list and that should be added too. I hope you guys find these things helpful (if you’re a RW member, that is).

Here are the design drafts of the client.

Login:

Main Client:

Image Uploader:

Settings menu: *Known issue: Opacity level should be changed to “Window Opacity Level”.

Notification box: *Will notify user of PMs, Friend adds, and Mini-blog replies.

This took me quite a long time to put together! It’s so hard designing a small client that won’t get in the way of your RS playing! If you have any feedback at all, feel free to comment on here.

PS: This blog is now running on WordPress 2.3 and I have tags now (instead of categories). I love the new version and many thanks to Jeff for sorting everything out for me!

I got the news via The Unofficial Andrew Gower Archives that Constant Tedder is no longer the CEO of Jagex. The new CEO, Geoff Iddison (who has apparently been at the position since August) used to be the CEO of PayPal Europe. Here’s what TameBay (an eBay consultants’ blog) had to say about him:

Geoff was an unusual MD, in that he wasn’t afraid to mix with his customers. He was a frequent speaker at eBay University leading the PayPal session which was popular for all the wrong reasons - it was a chance to ask about that unfair charge-back! Geoff however was never afraid to enter the fray and field the questions.

If this Geoff Iddison is indeed the way they describe him as, could he be a positive asset to Jagex? Let’s assume that the gripes of Jagex being indifferent to fan-site communities stemmed from Tedder’s ideology. If Iddison were more into getting involved in the community, could we see this as being a new age of how Jagex interacts with its customers?

I certainly hope so and I’m also curious about the circumstances involving Constant Tedder’s departure. He was a long-standing friend of Gower’s and he doesn’t seem near retirement age. Either way, I hope that Iddison’s arrival to Jagex will help the company succeed in areas that it’s currently behind in.

Geoff Iddison on the left.

A new Christian-oriented religious site has come along to appeal to those who aren’t interested in the “lesser” forms of entertainment (”LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE”, Miss Teen South Carolina, Scantily-clad women dancing in some R&B music video) that are featured on YouTube. When I first saw this site, I thought it was a pretty good site for Christian people to view sermons, little kids saying psalms on camera, and other things that are carefully moderated so that the entire site is free of any inappropriate material.

On YouTube, there’s always the funny videos that we all enjoy, but there’s the sort of “dark side” to the site itself. There is hate-speech and racism that is tolerated on YouTube along with the scathing comments that are sometimes left on people’s videos. But what about sites like GodTube? Is there a dark side to them?

My answer is: sort of. There is a bit of a dark side. Granted, it’s nothing compared to Neo-Nazis rambling about Jews controlling everyone’s brains. It’s more of a recruitment campaign instead. Here you have a video that predicts the Rapture that shall come to claim the holy and destroy the evil. The film is very graphic, with clips of 9/11 melded into it to conjure up memories of that dark time. This film is basically telling you that you will experience that hell-on-earth situation if you do not give your heart to Jesus Christ. This is a very scary message to put out there. It’s the type of message that’s intended to intensify religious feelings in those already religious as well as to incite these feelings of fear into people who would otherwise not even think about it.

The campaign of religious recruitment isn’t something that is unique to only one religion: all religions do it. But it really makes you ask yourself “Do you want to persuade people to adopt your beliefs because of an advertising mechanism or do you want people to adopt them because it’s in their natural will to do so?” Religion is such a touchy subject (the reason I talk about it so often on here is that I find it mostly impolite to discuss it fully with my friends.), but how far do you think is too far when it comes to promoting a religion?

I was about to end this entry here, but I also wanted point out that there are campaigns for recruitment by anti-religious people as well. I think we all know about the “Blasphemy Challenge” (No offence, Atheists, but most of the video responses to that clip were made by 13 year olds or people who look like they still played Dungeons and Dragons in their mother’s basement). I want to know what BOTH sides of the issue think. Do you think it’s okay for sophisticated recruiting to take place? If so, why?

I was playing Oblivion last night and I realised that it was the voice acting that made me really pay attention to a story and get involved in it. In Runescape, I just click past most of the dialogue without even being bothered about the story. What if Jagex actually got decent voice actors to read out the quest dialogues? Would you find it more easy to become interested in the quests? Before anyone brings up the whole thing about loading times, let me just ask that you throw that out the window for now.

Now, we know Jagex are NOT good at making sound effects. I mean, heh, they have that ultra-lame sound your character makes when getting attacked (you know, the “eerrk!” sound. Or the “oorrkk” sound if you’re a male). Now that I think of this though, Jagex release so many quests every few months that it’d be a bit of a hassle to hire someone to read off the dialogue for each new one. Anyway, just a thought.

-Gripe that is not related to the above post-

Ok, for those of you who work in retail jobs/food jobs, isn’t it annoying when customers use your first name constantly? Yeah, I have a name tag, I get it. I don’t need you saying “Hey, Kristina, I like this purse. Isn’t this a great purse, Kristina? Oh, Kristina, this one is even better..Kristina”. Wtf, I seriously had a lady do that to me today. Maybe she just liked my name..or maybe she’s a l– Oh god, I didn’t even think of that. AND SHE TOUCHED MY SHOULDER. I need a new name tag.. I don’t want some crazy lady stalking me. My new pseudonym should be ______. (pick one for me)

You see, RSBANDB has RuneWire and I knew that after making it..we’d have competition. I didn’t know it’d be like this.

Click here

YOU GUYS WILL NEVER WIN. NEVER.

PS: That’s not a fake.