Recently in Opinionated Category

You’re bored and have some time on your hands and keep seeing ads about this game Evony. Hot girls just waiting for you to come and ‘rescue’ them and sweep them off their feet to pump them full of alcohol, get them naked and have kinky sex with them, right? Well, I hate to kill the secret behind the ads but if you haven’t figured it out by now, there are no hot girls and a lot of the ‘women’ you’ll find there are guys who are bored and wanted something different.

I do play Evony but I have major issues with the game. It takes too much time to do any ‘one’ thing in the game. If you want to get bigger than your neighbor faster you have to spend hours upon hours on the game or spend ridiculous amounts of money for worthless items. Regarding building, you can only upgrade one building at a time, which when you get to higher levels, takes hours and sometimes days. You have to build up both city and resource farms. Each has it’s own place and you’d think you would be able to upgrade a resource and a building at the same time. Even in Evony Age II, this is impossible. The longer they keep you sitting at your keyboard, the more impatient you’ll get and spend money on speedups to make things go faster.

Now, with all of this going on, imagine being in an alliance with up to 99 other people who all have goals in mind (usually to be number one alliance on the server). There’s a host and several other positions of ‘office’ you can appoint people to. Hosts generally keep everyone in the alliance on the same goals and make sure they act properly for the most part.

Another thing Hosts do is something called ‘diplomacy’. This is where things get complicated because most people who have been playing the game for awhile on several different servers know the basic rules when it comes to your neighbors. There are no rules. It’s a WAR game. If you get attacked and wiped out, having to start over and rebuild your army and walls, that is what should happen. Instead you get players contacting hosts and whining about their member wiping them out and taking all of their resources. Which causes the alliances to go to war. Well, it is a war game. Yet there is no extra benefit when attacking and winning against an enemy other than the fact that you won and you can go back until you have all their resources.

Diplomacy with other alliances tends to be time-consuming. People all over the world play so there are issues when it comes to timing conversations between Hosts who are in different parts of the world. The game has a mail system, but you can only have 500 characters (including spaces) which doesn’t allow for much at all. While conversations take time between mail and whispers wars end up being put on hold or get out of control.

Then you have those who can’t get enough of Evony, especially on the same server, so they create alternate accounts, which according to the ToS is against the rules and you can be banned for it. These secondary accounts (or more) get created anyway, and get into other alliances that aren’t in the Coalition you’re in, which causes people to make mistakes because they end up attacking members of alliances their main account is friendly with, which may end up causing more war (yay) and then people will spend more money to get their cities back up to par if they’ve been wiped out.

Personally, there is no reason this game should cost anything at all. It makes me think of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Mabinogi. With D&D you could play free on the server but you could not play certain dungeons unless you ponied up some cash. With Mabinogi you had to pay up in order to change what your character looked like. Once I found that out, I uninstalled it. The difference between D&D and Evony is that you actually get a character who can be modified, get weapons, magic or something else and be moved around all kinds of different places battling monsters. I am not supporting D&D or Mabinogi over Evony, or vice versa.

Evony charges outrageous amounts of money to get packages, some of these packages get sent to your alliance members and anyone else you add to a list. Those that get sent out to others require a key, which costs 30 bucks to get access to. So these packages build up in your items area (some do so whether you claim them or not) and take up space. You’d think they would expire or go away after a month of never being used, but they don’t. There are still packages from Christmas and New Years sitting in there just waiting to be used.

Main issues with Evony is the simple fact that it is a time-sucking wormhole of a game. When you log off, the game continues without you, your city gathers resources, your buildings continue being built, etc. You go to bed for the night and can’t sleep because ‘OMG I might get attacked.” or “Did I have enough food to feed my troops if I can’t sign on to farm in the morning?” because people get so addicted to the game that they become obsessed. There are people who aren’t on just one server, they are on several servers, and possibly even have multiple accounts on several servers.

There comes a time when it has to stop, though. Evony will crash and burn when people get fed up that when they look around their friends and family are no longer there or interested in them because they have finally moved on to something other than waiting for their loved one(s) to stop staring at the screen long enough to notice them. Even I have been through this, one both ends. So put aside the mouse, close the Evony window and go spend some time watching the grass grow and the leaves return to the trees. Laters.

Due to technical issues I was having when uploading images - it wouldn’t bring up the menu to tell it to make a thumbnail, what size to make it, where I wanted it aligned or if I wanted a popup as well anymore. When installing MT5, you have to do a completely new install (this is a warning to all of you out there) and that means you cannot use the database you used with MT4. I did and that messed things up. So I uninstalled everything, started a new database and deleted the old one, then reinstalled MT4 because it’s the preferred method of posting for this girlie.

MT5 is more for those who are starting out fresh and new and don’t want to have to go through the weeks it would take to establish a website and blog integrated into one. Although, I have a bit of a bone to pick about this. The way MT5 seems to be setup is on a new install you have to start a website before you can start a blog. And then it messes up the urls from there, especially when you work with subdomains.

I think MT4 is amazing for creating an entire website with though. You can create Pages that have the same exact layout as the rest of the website. Those pages get linked in a widget, or if you want them elsewhere you can put them anywhere on the site. So I didn’t see a need for the way MT5 was set up or why it even replaced MT4. Or maybe I’m just not savvy enough to see the use for it yet.

I like MT4, it works for my needs. And soon I’ll have everything here back in order, including the other three sites that are also currently down and out. I am reuploading photos one by one so that they are listed in the database and with work taking up a lot of time and the Little Lady taking up a lot of time (she had food poisoning saturday and is still feeling effects from it) this has been on the low priority list. Let me tell you though, it is driving me batty. So as always, be patient and things will come together very soon. Laters.

I’m always excited when there is some kind of upgrade to MovableType, especially if it’s a quick and easy one. Before you do upgrade to 5.1 make sure you back up everything, literally. I thought I had and thought I had made a huge mistake (which luckily was easily fixed). I thought I had downloaded a complete site backup. What it turned out to actually be though was a System backup. I’m not entirely sure what that means but I do know it was not what I thought. When you think you’ve made a huge mistake and didn’t download the proper backup, you may go through what I did. So, first and foremost, make sure you download the correct backup from your host, then backup (and hey maybe even export entries) from each blog hosted with your MT setup. After you’ve done that, read the instructions.

Unlike previous upgrades of MovableType you do not want to overwrite the files of the previous version. You want to put them in their own file folder in the cgi-bin and make a new mt-static folder to go with version 5 as well. After doing that, changing the file permissions (etc) you’re ready to do the check and login for upgrading. Remember to change the config file to recognize the new paths to the new folders! This is one thing that I forgot to do.

After everything upgrades, login. Everything is completely different. The setup is more like WordPres with the menu down the side instead of being along the top. One thing that isn’t working for me inside the system are avatar photos. I’m not sure why yet but once I figure it out I will let you know. I tried finding out where the photos are supposed to go but I can’t find that in the file folders on the server - the one they are talking about doesn’t seem to exist. I uploaded new photos to try and use as an avatar in the system but they were no listed as a possible photo to use. I need to look through the manual and see if this is addressed.

I haven’t tried everything in the new system yet. I have removed spam trackbacks, looked through the settings regarding the blog info and registration setup to make sure everything was still the same and so forth. Things seem to be larger in the new system. The window in which you type your post out is larger and does not need to be resized (nor can it be). The menu being at the left is much more nicer than the one in 4.3 because I won’t accidentally run my mouse over it to do something else and end up having the menu floating over the post box. With the new menu you actually have to click in order to open and close the menu.

The theme is the same with the gray, blue and green throughout. It may take some time to get used to the new format and layout but it shouldn’t take long at all. Everything is there, everything works and hopefully there will be some new themes to go with the new version before long. Enjoy the new system, mt users.

No, this isn’t insight into my personal life. Well, not really anyway. Being as I rarely listen to the radio, since I have my own personal radio station online and I never sit in front of an actual tv anymore (unless I’m playing a game that requires a console) I’ve noticed something. In books, too.

Everything lately seems to be filled with Sex. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything at all against sex. I enjoy sex; having, watching, reading, etc. It’s when it gets to be in every song you hear, every book you read, every tv show you decide to check out, that it gets to be overdone, old, worn out. I’m sure I could use a lot of other words to describe just how much society seems to require sex involved in the storyline in order to be marketable. Explosions, too, for movies, but hey, I like seeing things blown up, so go for it.

Honey I recently watched the Torchwood season 3 episodes. Don’t ask and I won’t spoil it too much. If you watch Torchwood you’ll know that the only good looking guys seem to be those involved directly with the group. There are a lot of pretty women involved but there aren’t all that many good looking guys. To be really honest I did not need to see an overweight guy naked in bed. I’m sure when it airs here that it’ll be clipped or covered or something, but it was just bad. Give me a good looking guy naked on the bed anyday and I’ll be happy to look, but it was just way too much and way to jiggly for me to get with it.

Books with sex tend to be over rated as well. You all know I love Laurell K. Hamilton’s writing and that I do let you know that a lot of the books contain a lot of sex. Yes, it’s a lot of sex, in fact it’s too much sex even for me who enjoys writing erotica when I feel the urge to do so. I know it wasn’t a marketing scheme for her to do that. I know it had to do with the storyline of explaining Anita’s metaphysical ties and needs and whatnot. So I skimmed. Unless the sex was interesting to me I skimmed past it to get back to the main storyline.

Music. I have my own station over at Slacker, which I’ve mentioned and even linked to. Because of that I rarely have to listen to the radio, so it’s extremely shocking to me when I hear four or five songs in a row that have to do with some dirty girl doing the nasty with some guy. Then you get the female singers basically flaunting all the salacious things they are going to do to guys. It’s another reason I don’t listen to the radio. It’s overdone, overrated and sometimes it’s even sickening. I tend to tune it out until I hear the chorus, which usually ends up being some girl riding a guy or giving him oral sex. Yay for them. I doubt these guys truly get laid all that often and if they do I doubt they find it all that thrilling. Or maybe they are writing their music based on real experiences? Those poor girls should be getting royalties if that’s the case.

The anime I watch doesn’t have any sex in it. I know, shocking, right? But it’s meant for a slightly younger crowd, although there seem to be a lot of people my age and even older who watch it. I watch Bleach, Naruto and now 07-Ghost regularly. None of them contain sex but they do fulfill on my needs of fighting and violence. Hey, a girl’s gotta be diverse nowadays, right?

So I’m always on the lookout of new things to read or watch that don’t contain a ton of sex. We all know movies have to have some form of sex scene or two in order to sell, but that’s not entirely true. I’ve watched plenty of good movies without sex involved. And plenty of bad ones with sex involved.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Kim Harrison and Richelle Mead. Their books are amazing, they aren’t centered around sex, but there is some involved. The characters in their books come to life and slap you in the face with their adventures and mishaps. They make you cry when someone dies and they make you laugh when something hilarious happens. I know, I tend to reread books and it doesn’t matter how many times. I still laugh out loud at the funny parts and I cry when someone I love dies. I’d stop reading them to avoid the crying, but then I’d never find out what happens at the end. These are the kinds of books I’d love to be writing and who knows, maybe someday I’ll figure it out.

So try something new. Something that isn’t full of sex-filled nymphos running around trying to bang everyone they can get their hands on. Laters.

So I finally uninstalled TweetDeck this morning. I felt that since I have anywhere from 3 to 10 internet tabs or windows open at a time, I have no use for it. Plus, since I have those windows open using TweetDeck simply uses enough system resources that it slows everything down even more so than usual.

So goodbye, TweetDeck. It was nice before I realized what a resource hog you are. It’s easier to have all the windows I need open instead. I usually have one internet window with tabs for Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Then I open another window for Disillusioned and my MovableType (you know, in case I see something to write about). Then sometimes I’ll have another window open to surf the internet, blogs I read, etc.

That much altogether uses enough resources that sometimes things tend to slow down. So no more TweetDeck, I’ll just Tweet from the Twitter page. And this way I can see all the crazy quizzes and other apps that friends are using on Facebook. I also tend to get my messages on there a lot quicker, plus it has a handy little chat thingie. Later.

There are many reasons why I hate celebs on a regular basis. Unfortunately it rarely leads me to boycotting their shows, movies, etc. Nowadays I rarely know who is who and I prefer it that way because of the simple fact that they don’t dictate how I live, eat, sleep or what I wear, say or do. Which is what their main job is.

Check this out: The Completely True Brad Paisley Story and Other Things I’ve Meant To Post - A story about how celebs treat regular every day people like you and me.

For whatever reason regular every day people seem to except the fact that celebs can act like high and mighty assholes on a regular and every day basis and still be accepted as great and wonderful beings of humanity. Give me a break.