Tattered Page

I’m still here, grinding away… wondering when I’ll get around to some more edits for the site.  Work has hit a “crunch time” and it’s not leaving me with much room for many other activities.

I first heard the motto “hurry up and wait” in the Army.  From the moment the first alert is sounded, we’d have everything packed, every vehicle rigged for heavy-drop, and every soldier fully ‘chuted up in well under 6 hours… then we’d wait for sometimes 18 more hours on the side of the runway for our ride.   Sometimes, after all that, they’d just send us home. Hurry up n wait.  Bust your hump now, then have nothing to do until the next fire drill starts.

Nothing much changes in the civilian side of things, it seems.

Some people can be critical about the expense of government contractors compared to more commercial endeavours.  Heck, I’ve bitched about that enough.  Truth is, every government agency I’ve encountered is a bear to work with… late in releasing funds, giving approval, or making decisions… even later in identifying specs or “critical requirements”… and they’re very persuasive in getting their way when you try to argue that the information’s well past a critical deadline. You can be 3/4 the way through the project, after countless client reviews, and someone will suddenly say something that nullifies all of your work.  The end result- for what we have to work with, the taxpayer’s probably getting a bargain.

That’s where I’m at right now- a grossly-late project suddenly gets the go-ahead with a “mission-critical” emergency call to get it started.  It enters the line with three other similarly-urgent similarly-late taskings… none of which were originally scheduled for this time.

It doesn’t leave much time for much else. Until the next big “wait,” which history has shown can come as suddenly and as unexpectedly as the “hurry up.”

Thomas Malby over at TerraNova has got a got a good writeup on ganking, or more specifically, why “ganking” isn’t just “emergent play that some folk don’t like.”  Raph managed to post a very nice and rather lengthy response quickly… (I’m beginning to think the man has access to a review copy or has a whole library in the queue for just such an occasion.)

(For those unaware of MMO terminology, ganking is essentially a very very powerful character going around and killing much weaker characters that offer no challenge and no reward.)

Two elements in Raph’s writeup that I’d like to build on:

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As I mentioned, I temporarily lost sanity and returned to that Galaxy Far, Far Away.  I took the Star Wars Galaxies trial.  It was a different game than when I left- but I’ll leave my critique of THAT for another time and focus on one observation. 

I made three new characters on three servers.  I tried this at odd hours that really weren’t “peak.”  All three times, I found Mos Eisley comfortably alive with a great deal of the characters displaying the “roleplay” flag.  There were many, many more roleplayers than I used to encounter just passing through.  It was a welcome feeling.

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I’m still here.  Work cranked up a bit and some of my “big idea” posts are in heavy re-editing.  It’s amazing how the art of just writing a “really cool” idea down can reveal exactly how full of holes the whole thing is.

Aside from that, last week I did something I swore I’d never do.  As I prepared to try EQ2’s Echoes of Faydwer trial, I noticed that my SOE account had listed a “free trial” for SWG.  I left shortly after the NGE, but the temptation was too much.  I had to climb the mountains in Correllia one more time and take my rusting Y-wing through one more mission.

I’d figured that the visit would make a few easy blog entries.  As it is, they remain half-written as I still try to figure out where I stand about that galaxy far… far… away.   I’ll give em time to brew…