Yzabel / September 18, 2005

Virtual Disease in a Virtual World

Even though I haven’t found many sources yet to confirm this, it looks like World of Warcraft now has to deal with a disease spreading to other players’ characters, and bearing the charming name of “Corrupted Blood”. Here’s what pigz at Shacknews has to say about it:

Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarentine and infect other players. 

As a person who’ve dabbled in MMORPGs for a few years, although I’ve never played WoW, I find this quite fascinating. Is this an intended feature that’s working too well, or a serious coding bug, if there’s ever any difference between the two, in this case? We’ve all heard of viruses that spread from computer to computer through the internet, and of course of biological viruses, but this is a premiere to me; I don’t think that any online game has seen such collateral damage occur, and while it can sure be fascinating from a purely roleplaying point of view, it also has the potential to be a serious bother to players.

I now wonder how Blizzard will handle the matter, yet above all, I wonder how this could happen. What piece of code was needed for the Corrupted Blood to become so virulent? How come that such an event could occur in what’s supposed to be a completely human-controlled environment? Somehow, I can’t prevent but thinking that this is a perfect example of chaos in motion. It’s so similar to real life that it’s almost frightening.

(Link found through Clickable Culture)

Yzabel / September 17, 2005

Dialogue vs Description

Triggered by the tidying of a still unexplored room in our house and finding some old “classic” French books, I remembered a belief I had when I was younger. Although I can’t exactly recall why I had it, I suspect it had to do a lot with studying a certain amount of said classic books at school.It could be summarized as follows: “description is better than dialogue”.That’s it, I thought that the longer and the more detailed descriptions were, the better the book would be, too. Dialogue? Some puny thing, used only to provide some relief to the eyes among heavy blocks of text. In fact, I’m more and more certain that our teachers had told us at some point that dialogue was “easy”, and that it denoted a lack of talent in writing.Tell you what, twelve years later, I’m not convinced of this anymore, at least not when it comes to fiction works, and frankly, where else would dialogue wield so much importance anyway?Read More

Yzabel / September 16, 2005

Low Blow Against Childless Women In Politics

Yesterday, I caught this article about Angela Merkel’s childless status in the online edition of The Independant. The elections are drawing to a close, since it’s for this week-end, and it looks like once everything is said, people will once again resort to sex slur to strike at their opponents. Even though I don’t agree with many of Merkel’s points, I don’t think she deserves such a low blow—and coming from another woman, nonetheless. (As a sidenote, I’m aware that it’s just another of the usual pre-elections blows, specially coming from the opposition; I just find it extremely low, and of very bad taste.)Then it hit me—seriously, can women in politics ever stand a chance? Will there be a day when such attacks stop? Why is it that women get this kind of arguments shoved at them, while they wield so much less importance in the case of male politicians? Why does this matter of sex always come back, as if it was more important than criticizing their programs instead (which are the things that should be discussed first and foremost, in my opinion)? Sure, every celebrity gets her deal of flak; once your name is known, even the most insignificant of yours action can become matter to discussion and mud-throwing. But this?Read More

Yzabel / September 14, 2005

Second Person (Points of View, Again)

Today, this particular question came to mind again (I had already wondered about it when I was reading “No Plot? No Problem!”, a few weeks ago): does anyone use the second-person point of view? I mean, for real? Or is this just a joke? Come to think of it, if I hadn’t remembered these well-known “choose your own adventure” books, I would indeed have be tempted to think no writer in his right mind would ever use that.However, this very morning, as I was broswing through old archives (not mine, fortunately), I realized that some people use, or has used it. In technical documents nonetheless. Oh, the horror.It’s not about addressing the reader, no: it’s clearly a second-person point of view, and the result is very awkward sentences sounding much like “you see a window in which you click…”. I’m not kidding, and it’s a good thing that I’m decent at writing English, else our current manuals would be really icky.Someone please tell me that it’s not the way technical writers are supposed to work in English…documents, writing

Yzabel / September 13, 2005

How Many Points of View?

I know, I know, I should stop thinking so much… I simply happen to very often ponder writing matters, these days. This time, I found myself wondering about points of views in stories. There are many questions attached to these, after all, and it’s not always easy to know how to write, and at what moment.I’m not sure whether first person or third person is better to tell a story; it probably heavily depends on the story itself, and on the author’s ability to use them to their full efficiency. For instance, I know that instinctively, I tend to use the third person one from my character’s perspective, rather than its omniscient version (it’ll happen, of course—just not that often).Read More

Yzabel / September 12, 2005

Writing From A Plan

I don’t think there’s an absolute answer to this question, as there very likely are as many solutions as there are writers out there. Therefore, I’m going to consider this from a subjective point of view only: drafting a precise plan and outlines for a story before writing it, is it an effective method for you, or not?Weirldy enough, I’ve always worked with a plan for non-fiction writing, such as school essays or technical documents later on. For fiction stories, on the other hand, I work much more loosely, not even writing chapters in order. These days, I’m trying to use both methods, so that I can compare them and see which one is more efficient for me. It’s not that evident to define.Read More

Yzabel / September 11, 2005

The Web Nostalgia

Currently perusing and comparing webhosting services, I went off a tangent in my head about how my perception of the internet has evolved since I started using it…I’m not one of the early children of the web, but I’m not too new to it either. My first contact with it was in 1997, when our teacher in Applied English class decided that we had to be open to the world, and dragged us at the school library for a few sessions on the computers. From 1997 to 1999, I went on accessing websites sporadically from college computers, when I had some time to surf; my main researches at the time were on the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Enoch, and websites related to Mage: The Ascension, so my use of the internet was a very basic one. Later on in 1999, the friend who was to become my boyfriend convinced me to take an e-mail address at the university, which I did: I had discovered the joys of e-mailing! From there, my horizons expanded, and by year 2000, I would access the web everyday, or almost.I suppose that all of us who went to gradually use this tool had our little lightbulb moments, as well as stupid beliefs on which we stood corrected later on. Here are some of the things I remember, mainly from these 1997-1999 years. In a way, it’s very funny:Read More

Yzabel / September 10, 2005

What About Signatures in Blog Comments?

Here’s an interesting post—wielding quite an amount of questions— that I picked on Darren’s blog: signatures in blog comments.Because I was too tired to develop in my own comment there yesterday, here’s my own opinion on the matter:

  • I’m technically okay with signatures in comments on this blog, provided they’re not cumbersome: a name and a link is enough. However, so that you know, posts containing any link are screened and must be approved by yours truly before being published. This is an anti-spam measure.
  • “Signature” does not equal “free pass for spamming”. Spammy comments will be immediately deleted, or never let in in first place (WordPress’ filter is a powerful one). Of course, what is considered spam or not is left to my own appreciation, but if the previous point is followed, you’ll be okay.
  • Obnoxious signatures are a no-no, especially when they contain banners and other images, whatever their size. I’ve been editing images-signatures for a good five years on a variety of forums I’ve administrated, and trust me, they’re a serious bother.
  • For me, it’s a matter of etiquette. I’ll courteously allow signatures in comments for people who’re courteous enough to keep it under sensible control.

Now, one may ask, what’s the point of adding a sig to a comment, given that most blog systems will let you enter a link to your website along with your name? Personnally, I know enough about blogs to know where to click if I want to visit someone’s webpage. One the other hand, not everyone knows that, and a commenter may want to leave a link to a different site of his, if it’s more related to the blog he’s commented on.This said, don’t hesitate to go have a read at the comments on Darren’s posts. Many valuable opinions are represented there.blogging, etiquette, signature

Yzabel / September 10, 2005

European Fair and Scientific Brain-Teasers

European Fair in StrasbourgThe reason why I haven’t blogged about anything insightful since Thursday is the image on the left, and I must simply admit that s much as I wanted to finish my next planned entry yesterday evening, I’ve been too dead tired to go on with it. In any case, I’m glad I went to the European Fair no matter what.Bozo Bozo (link in French)Here’s one of the interesting things we found here: a little series of brain-teasers called “Bozo-Bozo” (nevermind the weird-sounding name, really). Its principle of course caught our interest, based as it is on actual scientific matters: a wooden stick with indents in it and a propeller on its end. Rubbing another, smaller stick on the indents will make the propeller move. No problem here, except that when you say “bozo”, the propeller rotates backwards, which in theory isn’t possible by itself.Of course, there’s a trick, and I’m not going to give the solution here (a shame we figured it out quickly). Who knows, perhaps I can one day use the theory in a story, too. Everything is worth being investigated when it comes to imagination.fair, games, science

Yzabel / September 8, 2005

Sketching the Thoughts

A little musing on my mind today: in the case of fiction (since I assume that it’s not really appliable to non-fiction works), do some of you also happen to sketch their characters, or even landscapes, actions, and so on, instead of directly describing them in your books? This is regardless of style and skill, and only as a personal way of fixing your ideas, not as artwork in itself.My own style isn’t what you could call “realistic” (my influences mainly come from comics and manga, as well as a certain type of vector works), but I’ve found that more often, sketching helps me to write better descriptions, as what I want to show is clearly pictured in my mind already. Moreover, in the case of action scenes, it’s also a good exercise for me to see if said action can be performed by a human body, or is just looking nice in my own perception. If the latter can seem laughable, sometimes it really isn’t, and has already allowed me to avoid… many mistakes.characters, drawing, sketching, writing