Kami Harbinger

After days, even weeks of laborious research, the mad scientists here at Kami Harbinger Labs have managed to shrink avatars down to teeny-tiny little figurines that obey your commands! Naturally, the first use my demented mind could conceive for such subservient and tiny creatures was RPG miniatures.

KamiMinis are a revolution in gaming in SL! By dropping them into the world (usually on a Kami Gaming Table), they will snap into position on the grid, every quarter-meter. Touch the mini, and you will get a menu allowing you to turn and move the mini by precise steps, change its color, number (for identification), or select one of the 64 images in each KamiMini!

You can copy your original mini (you won't be able to copy rezzed minis) as many times as you like, and changes you make to the color, image, or number will remain even when you take it back to inventory!

Many more sets, including very different genres and art styles, will be coming in the weeks to come, and custom requests are considered.

All products are available at Kami Harbinger's Curiosity Shoppe (Magritte, 148,202,29).

The Kami Gaming Table, FREE with any KamiMini! A graph-paper table for RPG miniatures! (click to zoom)

KamiMini: Hero1, only L$250 ! Scripted RPG miniatures! (click to zoom)

KamiMini: NPC1, only L$250 ! Scripted RPG miniatures! (click to zoom)

I just finished reading the AvaStar (<http://www.the-avastar.com/>, no link because I don't want them to have any googlejuice)... Their obnoxious press release claims it's "the first professional publication", which is a total lie; depending on what you mean by "professional", it was either Second Life Herald née Alphaville Herald, or Reuters, and more recently In The Grid, Metaverse Messenger, and SL Pixel Pulse. There's many more, but that's what's on my regular reading list. It's simply retarded to claim any priority over these existing publications. AvaStar is merely one of many rags published at SL residents.

So, that aside, what's the paper like? Is it worth L$150?

It's crap.

Newbies will learn more from just reading the SL Knowledge Base and the aforementioned free periodicals. Experienced residents will find it pointless and condescending. Their "business tips" might be suitable for a child making a lemonade stand, but are obvious and a waste of time to say to adults trying to do real business. The commentary on 2 million Residents is empty noise, and doesn't Catherine Linden have some real work to do, anyway, not stand around talking to these bozos?

The ads and the back-page girl are all fully-clothed. This would be expected in a non-SL publication, but it's actually shocking to see this kind of modesty in SL. The first SL tabloid, Second Life Herald's Post 6 Grrrl pinups (here's another if you're not into catgirls) are far more... Well, more.

And then there's the price for this pile of electrons, all 31 pages of it, including the cover and non-pornographic girlie pic. You can grab it from their website for free as a PDF, and have something almost readable, or, this is the great bit, you could spend L$150 of your hard-earned camping-chair money on it in SL!

If they were aiming at professionals in SL, they've failed miserably at the content. If they were aiming at newbies, they've failed miserably at the pricing. The advertising rates are astronomical, so expect either a gigantic drop in rates before the next issue, or a totally ad-free issue. I don't know who'd ever buy this. Certainly not me.

For even less generous commentary about the publishers and their corporate tool Aimee Weber, see The First Second Life Tabloid, Second Life Herald and the links in their comments.

I slept. I dreamed I had a robot brain, not a horrible decaying meat brain like you disgusting fleshy things. I was very happy. I woke up and realized how boned I am... I'm one of you mammals. This sucks.

Raph Koster (of whom I have previously written) has announced what he's working on: Areae... "Areas", except you probably can't trademark that, so instead he uses an unpronouncable and unspellable Latin word.

And that's fine, except he's got nothing. No screenshots. No product description. Zilch. It's less than vapor, it's less than smoke and mirrors, it's an empty space filled only with the lonesome echo of public relations bafflegab. Here's the front page blurb, in case it gets edited out later:

Areae means "many places" in Latin. Depending on who you ask, you pronounce it "Airy-eh" or "Airy-eye" or "Area-ee"... well. It doesn't matter. What matters is what it means: many places, many worlds.

Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new. Something anyone can jump into. Something where anyone can find something fun to do or a game to play. Something where anyone can build their own place on the virtual frontier.

Feel free to wander around the site and learn about us. We're hiring!

You know, it's a bad idea to tell people your company name doesn't matter. Claiming to be everything to everyone, and so easy that Helen Keller could hit max level in 2 hours, despite her trivial handicaps of being deaf, blind, and dead, isn't particularly encouraging, either.

(click to zoom)

Then there's that company logo (see right), where apparently a child's conception of a medieval castle, a giant kaiju dog chasing a car with no doors, a medevac chopper, a UFO and a Flash Gordon rocketship landing next to the Space Needle, and some high-fiving stick figures are all part of the same world. Someone should tell Raph that "user-created content" doesn't mean "random nonsense".

Looking over the jobs, it's obvious why there's nothing there. They haven't even started. They're looking for the most basic technical talent. Maybe they can get the one artist they're looking for to make them a logo that doesn't look like a child doodled it on a Denny's placemat with the free crayons.

Elsewhere, Raph writes, "We're working on some new tech that will literally change how virtual worlds are made. We've got a cool world or two incubating on the back burner."... What he's talking about here is Magic Pixie Dust^TM. Magic Pixie Dust^TM is any unspecified and nonexistent "technology" that allows you to create vaporware and fuel fanboy discussion without actually committing to anything. He has no technical people on-board in the company, only marketroids, ergo, he has no tech. This is a bald-faced lie, of which any man of honor would be ashamed.

Mark Wallace, usually a sane enough mind, calls Vaporeae "exciting". What, exactly, is so exciting? There's no game. There's no world. It's an empty Web 2.0 marketing website. If it was late March, I'd figure this was an elaborate April Fool's joke.

People, think about this. It's Raph Koster. He's left after trashing [ed: changed from a previous, inaccurate phrase] two giant online worlds already: Ultima Online had to have most of his virtual-world ecology and economics modelling removed because it was completely inadequately designed, it didn't work, it was completely unable to withstand contact with actual players, and anyone who had ever run a MUD for real would have known that and could have told him right up front. Then he repeated the same catastrophe with Star Wars Galaxies, first making the most deathly boring, often just plain unplayable, MMORPG in the history of the world, before saner heads prevailed and fixed it by removing his influences, finally dumping the entire game and starting over from scratch. The man made a freaking STAR WARS game where you couldn't play a Jedi!!! Hey, while you're at it, Raph, why not make a WWII game where you throw flowers at Hitler's troops, or an adaptation of Citizen Kane without a sled? Hardly an inspiring record. If anyone is going to take the "tired old MMO" and make it "fresh and new", it ain't gonna be Raph Koster. The man does not learn from his mistakes, and has such hubris, such hilariously total lack of self-awareness, that he published a "theory of fun", after making two of the most unfun game experiences in the history of gaming. Unspeakably slow level grinds, grubbing in the dirt endlessly for resources so you can build your way up from the stone age every single day and then getting paid nothing for your work, and hunting rabbits to extinction are Raph's idea of "fun".

The rest of his team and advisors are old MUD people (of the lot of them, Richard Bartle is the only one who seems sane and capable of learning from experience, but he hasn't done anything new lately, either...). Great, glad that they're all still around and theorizing about how they'd fix things if they were in charge, instead of these young whippersnappers with their modern technology... But none of them have implemented anything new in 15-25 years. Raph rails endlessly about others not learning the lessons of the past Ancient Wizards of MUDdom, but seems unable himself to learn the lessons of the present, for instance that people like games that don't suck.

What's depressing is, they're probably going to get a few tens of millions in venture capital, based only on their vapor site. In 2 or 3 years, in the unlikely event that they make it that long, in the totally improbable--bordering on supernaturally impossible--event that they finally start to have the vaguest hint of a shippable product, that's the time for them to be announcing stuff. Raph is doing the same routine as Tim Roberts of Infinium's Phantom console: lots of PR for a vaporware Magic Pixie Dust^TM-fueled product that doesn't exist and never will, take the money, and run.

Quit rewarding vapor with praise, people. You just encourage them.

Apparently, it's not "tactful" for me to say that running an application server on Windows XP Pro is retarded. I'm even informed that they're trying their best. Hey, I just tell the truth. I'm sure people participating in the Special Olympics are doing their best, too, but they're still retarded, and shouldn't be running application servers.

Oh, geez. I just checked specialolympics.org:

   Linkname: Special Olympics Public Website                                    
        URL:                                                                    
          http://www.specialolympics.org/Special+Olympics+Public+Website/       
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    Charset: iso-8859-1                                                         
     Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0