blueZhift Blog

The thing that grabbed me about this story was what appeared to be a lot of condescending remarks about Japanese consumers. The Japanese digital media company, Transcosmos Inc., is hoping that their upcoming virtual world, meet-me, will be a G rated alternative to Second Life for Japanese consumers who are so “well behaved and conformist”, passive, and not interested in individual creativity. Well, I suppose a Japanese company would know better than I what the Japanese are like. But it still comes off sounding a bit condescending. Perhaps something was lost in the translation but it appears that some folks at Kotaku feel the same way.

There wasn’t any technical information in the CNN article about what platform(s) meet-me is supposed to run on. The picture in the article showed someone holding a Game Cube controller, so who knows? It makes sense to guess that it will run on PCs initially. But what I would really wonder about is how it hopes to compete against Sony’s virtual world, Home on the Playstation 3 due out in 2008. Consoles enjoy much more popularity in Japan than PCs do, so that alone would seem to doom meet-me to a small niche in Japan. In order to avoid total obscurity, I think meet-me is going to have to get out the gate before Home does and steal away many of the Japanese residents of Second Life.

Update: I found an old (June 2007) article in the Japanese ITmedia News that says meet-me will run on PCs and is slated for a winter release. They’ll still have an uphill fight against Second Life and Home, but I, for one, look forward to their efforts. Here’s a link to the Google translated story and my own rendering of the article title.

Tokyo Reproduced In Second Life-like meet-me

As much as Bush and Cheney like to demonize Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, they should actually be quite flattered. Imitation is, after all the sincerest form of flattery and Ahmadinejad’s comment that there are no gays in Iran is just a variant on GOP strategy concerning gays in the US. It is no secret that Ahmadinejad is not particularly popular at home in Iran right now. He simply hasn’t delivered on his promises to the people there on the economy, and they’re pissed. So he needed a distraction. Gay bashing is a strategy that has served the GOP very well in the US and probably plays very well in Iran too, along with poking the Great Satan US in the eye. It’s really quite a delicious treat he served up because Bush and company can’t really condemn his remarks without somehow coming off as pro-gay which they are about as likely to do as anything that would make them look pro-black in any meaningful sense.

So a tip of the hat goes to President Ahmadinejad, we have been soooo played! And as a nice, cover your tracks, twist his comments have been scrubbed from Iranian media. Can’t have those nonexistent people getting ideas you know!

After a nap, followed by some hemming and hawing, I jumped into the car and went to Chicago’s Microcenter to get Halo 3 at midnight. I was hoping for more of a carnival atmosphere, especially since they were giving away a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition to the best Master Chief cosplayer. There were only 30 or 40 people lined up, and not one, not even one, Master Chief! Oh the lameness! Heck, if I’d suspected it was going to be like that, I could have whipped up a passable Master Chief myself!

Game in hand, regular edition, I raced back home only to first get lost on the far south side due to all of the ramp closures on the Dan Ryan Expressway. It’s a little crazy, but there was something almost electric about being out in the night last night. Or maybe it was just all of the blue lights from the very active police presence around the city! I have no idea why so many police were out, or why so many people seemed to be crashing their cars. Maybe it’s like that every night. Sigh, shows how much I get out!

By the time I got home, I only had time to play about half an hour. I got totally pwned in multiplayer. No surprise there because I just jumped in without any preparation to see how badly I would suck if I did that. Next time will be much better because it cannot be any worse!

With Halo 3 coming out tomorrow, I’m once again wondering if I should do something with the old Xbox which currently gathers dust in the living room. An article at Lifehacker has me thinking Xbox Media Center once again.

Soup Up Your Xbox Media Center

I hear that I can install XBMC without a mod chip, so this time I may give it a shot. Still, Dead or Alive Extreme Volleyball doesn’t work on my Xbox 360, but hey, there is a new version! :3

Sometimes I really feel that I’m beginning to hate my wife. It seems that all she does lately is bitch about everything, yelling at me and the kids for no good reason. But I generally prefer not the bitch about things like that myself here. As uncomfortable as things are right now, it’s just a temporary thing and not anything to get too excited about. Still, it really hurts because I still want to share so many cool things with her, but there just isn’t an opening right now… I think this is also a good reason to hold on to one’s hobbies and the things you’re independently passionate about, and of course, your own friends. Without those things, I’d be adrift on a sea of someone else’s anger. And I really don’t want that. Oh thank the maker that Halo 3 comes out tonight!

And so it begins again! I had originally only planned to tune up my current cosplays for Youmacon, but had a Halloween inspiration and decided to make a new costume. The inspiration came via the anime Princess Princess when I realized that Yuujiro’s goth loli nurse outfit would be perfect for Halloween and Youmacon. Most anime cosplays don’t really line up with the traditional assortment of Halloween costumes, but this one is almost perfect!

I bought the shoes and stockings last week and started cutting fabric yesterday. This time I’m going to pay some extra attention to internal details and depending on the outcome, I may enter this one into competition. It’s been months since I last touched the sewing machine, so I’m really excited to be starting a new project!

I’ve been working a bit with RSOAP and one of the required packages is SOAPpy which unfortunately does not appear to be actively supported anymore. Attempts to compile SOAPpy on Windows or in Cygwin always resulted in the following error.

SyntaxError: from __future__ imports must occur at the beginning of the file

I’m no Python expert, but I managed to fix this by placing the following line,

from __future__ import nested_scopes

before any executed statements in the file, including the ident= statement. This had to be done in 3 files in the SOAPpy subdirectory.

Client.py
Types.py
Server.py

Doing that allowed me to build and install SOAPpy 0.12.0 on Windows XP. I haven’t checked this on Linux yet, but my guess is that this fix should work there since I think it is due to changes in Python going from version 2.3 to 2.5.

I’m passing this on here in case anyone else runs into this problem since googling it didn’t turn up any solutions for me in my own searches.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is widely demonized on the net. So I was a little amused when I got the ad below in the mail. Yeah, I know, software rights management is not the DRM associated with protecting music files, that you usually hear about. But if it has legs like those, who cares!

Halo 3 is coming out next week and it now appears that a number of retailers will be open at midnight to sell it. Quite honestly, I don’t think I’ve played more than 3 or 4 hours of Halo, ever! But I love a party, so I may be out there to get my copy at midnight too. Heck, might even take a day off to play it. Why do I get the feeling that a lot of IT workers will be calling in sick September 25th? Worse, still, heavy play is going to make the streets run red with the blood of overheated Xbox 360s. Oh the humanity!

We’re all familiar with the jokes about your online sweetheart turning out the be some old guy or teenage nerd, etc. etc.. And we laugh at the “horror” of discovering that your image is false. But surely there must be some stories where these odd couples in real life become friends/lovers despite that, and not just the ones involving people getting arrested for statutory rape. For reference, I’m thinking more along the lines of the relationship between Tsukasa and Subaru in the anime series .hack//Sign. That series is somewhat vague about what happens after they meet in real life, but clearly they did not recoil in horror at the discovery that they were both women, one confined to a wheelchair no less.

If indeed online relationships are real, then it is highly likely that eventually they are going to profoundly change the nature of real life relationships and what are and are not acceptable pairings. Indeed, the pair could conceivably cease to be the base unit.

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This is a bit of copy pasta of my comments on the Slashdot discussion of Regina Lynn’s Sex Drive commentary on Wired.