C G L

CGL. College Gaming League. World of Warcraft 3v3 tournament. There is a tournament on the horizon, everyone is warming up for it as i type. This tournament uses its own server, complete with unique vendors that sell season two gear and tier five gear as well, as well as all the enchants and gems that you can fit into your bags. To gain access to this tournament, you must verify that you are in fact a college student. After that, the tournament directors give you a choice of either alliance or horde. I myself chose alliance, because alliance pwn in arena. At the character selection screen, you have a level 70 character of every class in full season two. I decided to stick with what i know, so i selected the human rogue. As soon as i logged in, i realized that none of my gear was gemmed or enchanted. I also wasn't specced at all either. I went to go buy gems and enchants, which cost about 2 gold per gem/enchant. It doesnt matter how much things cost, cause you have 5k gold to begin with and you can replenish your gold supply at any time. After gemming and enchanting and speccing, i was ready to fight. A few of my friends hopped on and we played some practice matches. I have no chance of even placing in this tournament, but it would be nice to get the top prize, an alienware area-51 m15x laptop, one for each team member. For those who don't know, thats about a 4k laptop. Its pretty fancy. As i said before, i have no hope in getting a prize, but it is just good fun playing around with different classes and specs.

If I had 1k Lindens...

If i had one thousand lindens...what would i do? I have found, in my second life experience, that you dont really need lindens. There are tons of cool items floating around for free. You just need to know where to look. With my lindens i wouldnt buy any land, as it is pointless. It is pointless to buy land because even if you make some sweet awesome place, nobody will ever visit it. And to buy a parcel of land and seal it off from the rest of the world is the most pointless thing i have ever heard of. What would you do? Just sit there and chill by yourself? SL is a social network game. As for what i would do with my lindens, i would most likely hand them out to someone that is thoroughly convinced that the lindens will make the game that much better for them.

(Literal) Vent Rage

I know that all the big MMO players know about ventrilo, but for those who don't, its just a free program which allows speaking between teams/clans/guilds for better coordination than trying to get their typing WPM up to the 100s. From that sentence, it may sound like I'm going to talk about Ventrilo, Teamspeak and all the others, but I'm not. This post is about pointing out how people act when talking to other people over the Internet literally.
So many people are normal and talk and act normal over it like it was originally made for. But some people want to abuse this very useful program to have some "fun" by applying and spamming soundboards, the most common is Duke Nukem and then so boldly put it on Youtube so everyone can see what they did to piss off a group of people.
But if you keep the IP and port secure it's hard for something like that to happen, or your admins are always on and ban happy. I would personally know this because I am an admin on my old guild's vent and I'm on whenever I'm online, sometimes talking to the old friends or just in my channel which only other admins or myself can enter. If someone does something like that, I have the ban command linked to one of my keys so all I have to do is click the name and then hit the key, and then the person is not heard from again until I unban them( which is normally never.)
So if your admins are smart and on duty, you don't have to worry about vent harassment, but what if they are in your guild and an official spaz or the most hardcore person in the world, my best example is Troxed, the guild leader and main tank of the once great War Ensamble. The man was a psycho and a hell of a show(you can go see for yourself), but the man was a main part of the guild so the people had to get use to the psycho yelling at them and then it turned into a great soundboard and he became sort of a legend.
My whole point of this weekly rant is that, with the power to speak to other people around the world, what are we capable of? The real answer is to annoy the living hell out of other people, we are so screwed...

Lindens Lindens, Everywhere

If I had a million lindens, first I would buy my own land and block it off so I would have an area to call mine. I also noted that it costs Lindens to upload stuff such as sounds and textures. I would upload all new fabrics for clothes so I didn't have to pick from the ugly textures we are given. Creating new gestures would also be fun with some sounds and outside influence. So I think in total I would only spend some for private land to do whatever I wish and then add textures and sounds so that I could make my avatar as unique as I can. Other than that I have no other objectives or ideas to do with the lindens. This week's blog seems hollow and quickly decided versus a lot of the other assignments and blogs. The big reason why I don't go out and then buy like thousands of toys and other garbage is because if I look I can find something just as good for free. Which may raise the question of why would I rather look than just pay since I have so much money? I find joy in trying to locate hard to find items and the item itself is just a reward. Twiddles, I demand a more thought out assignment next time so that we can talk about it easier.

IF I HAD A THOUSAND LINDENS

 Well if I had a thousand lindens I would buy a lot of things. You know like a godzilla skin or a house or something like that. I suppose that I would have to think about some of the things  that i would buy though because I would get some clothes and mabey buy a piece of land. I dont really know though. Thinking about it I would more then likely save it for something important. Because I am kind of a tight wad when it comes to cash. :) any way thats what I would do if I had a thousand lindens. I know its not much but its all I could come up with. I dont know mabey if your lucky I will tell you more before sunday.  :P

LAUNDRY DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well its true..even giant lizards need to do laundry now and again. This time is no different for me. :) lol. Yeah I am just sitting in the laundry room washing my clothes and thinking about volleyball. I think that our team is good we just need more pratice and a better formation would be nice too. Currently we are 0 for 2 so we need to pick up the pace and get our engines up and running at 100 percent. The next team we face go by the name squirrels and they are 2 and 0 so we need to put a stop to them now. I beleive that we can because we have an original member of team gorilla coming back and playing with us. We call him lumberjack on the court and hes an ok player so we will see what is going to happen. We have decided to go with a 4 man front and it will go like this: if we win the serve then we will have server go in ( by the way I will be using their nicknames to concel their true identies) with "the souix" intimadtor and gorilla. if not then we go with the turnaround, the twins and spikers.  start us off. Because these two formations I beleive are focused on offense and defense. Of course there is some rotation involved but other then that I beleive that this new stratgey will win us the game. Hopefully any way its time to switch loads so I got to go now. Bye.

Aquarium - JoeM Mills

Our class attended an aquarium in Korea town and analyzed what we saw. After doing so, we found a spot in the aquarium and used the "snapshot" option to take pictures of our avatars. Basically, we where literally inside the aquarium with the fish and other underwater creatures and plants. There was a sizable octapus hanging out by the left side of the aquarium. The aquarium is sour

I took my picture with Godzilla2000, who is a girl with wings and wears tight clothing. Behind us is the left part of the aquarium.

rage vent

Begin rant. I don't know if this is considerd a virtual world, but I want to discuss my extreme hatred for the online study program called Aleks. Aleks is an online program used in my Chemistry class, why the teached uses that over standard teaching I have no idea. The program has the used log on and complete questions in selected areas. This is where my hatred for this disgrace for a study tool comes into play. The questions are so horrible worded and pick that half the time spent is makeing sure you have the answer in the correct format. If get something wrong, the program offers a crappy description of what to do. I also think the program wasent even made for english speaking students. I have noticed many sentences that dont make any sence and look like they have been poorly translated. End rant.

Music

So I was thinking that music might be able to be considered a "virtual world," possibly used to communicate. It would be very easy for someone to create anything from a complex song to a simple beat, that would be able to have a message encoded into it using the beat or word patterns. This would be a very good tool for people to communicate messages that may have a sensitive or secret meaning, and communicate it to a large base of people. It would be very interesting to devise a code using some type of musical element and communicate using it, or even see if any previously recorded songs adhered to the code and had any messages within the music. I dont know. Just a thought.

Subliminal Messaging

So this is a kinda random topic but I wanna talk about subliminal messaging for a bit. I was watching TV the other day and during the show i was watching a quick message popped up and said "Rockband 2 in stores tomorrow!" and i was really surprised. I don't think that was the mistake of the broadcast station.  I looked into it and found that subliminal messaging originated in 1898 by a psychologist named Knight Dunlap and he found that it could be used in advertising. Fifty years later a market researcher tested subliminal messaging in his theatre to advertise popcorn and pop. He used a tachistoscope which is a machine that flashes pictures at very fast speeds to show his messages which included "drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat popcorn". After the test he found that popcorn sales went up 57%. 

Yeah so I was just walking around in Second Life and I found this really cool but random place. It looks like stone hedge but there are crazy techno/rave lights going off all over the place. I think it would be an awesome place for a rave. If you look in the back of the picture you can three random teepee's just sitting there with smoke billowing out of them.The Second Life world has the most random things I have ever seen. 

Second life Snapshot

So I was in second life, and I teleported to some place that sounded cool. I ended up falling a very long ways, landing on a 2x2 platform, falling off, and then falling a while more, and landing on a stripclub. odd. I, not for the obvious reasons, but rather to see why there would be a stripclub in second life, ventured into the stripclub. Luckily there were no strippers in the club at the time. I noticed that it was also a place to buy clothes. However, there were some "naughty" pictures on the walls. They werent very attractive.
The picture is of me sitting on a swingset outside of the stripclub...(why the hell is there a swingset outside of a stripclub!?)

Sl photo : I am Bamph

This is a photo of my ingame avatar. I tried to make my ingame avatar look as strong and meanincing as possible. The reason that I added a gun to my avatar was to show that i like to play shooter type games. This dosent mean that I am a violent person, but rather that I like to act strong in the virtual world. I guess that this photo can also relate to my view on video game violence. I strongly believe that violence in games dosent make us more violent people. The violence in games is fake and unreal. It dosent even come close to the real hell that true world violence and war is. Rather then find some exotic location in second life, I took the photo in our online "classroom". I wanted this to show how I am currently a student at SCSU.

Cabin!!

Alright, so in this post I decided to talk about my cabin i just came back from this weekend. So the first picture is a picture of my aunt and uncle, Jean and Ken's cabin which we call The Lodge. Of all four of the family cabins, this one os the biggest, it has three floors, including the basement, while the other three have only once floor. The next one is my aunt and uncle, Katie and Rick's cabin. We just call it Rick and Katie's, i know, clever name, right? Next is the cabin I stay in, we call it the Red Cabin. (Gee, i wonder why we call it that :D). The next one is my three aunts' cabin, basically we just call it the grey cabin. (Again...can you guess why?)My dad is one of eight, one of his brother's doesnt come up to the cabin so the four cabins house the other seven siblings' families. I loooooove going to my cabin the summer because I get to see my cousins, aunts and uncles who live out of state. I was up there this last weekend, which is when I took these pictures. The only thing is, is that it rained all weekend. It was still nice to up there again though. :)

Virtual Worlds - Picture

This picture was taken in Urban Worlds and basically I'm sitting in this position cause...well..its the way my character just sat. It said 'Recline' so I'm just like, sweet, I can recline. I though it was actually gunna be me like sitting leaning back with my feet out in front of me, but this is what actually happened. The moral of the story? Don't believe everything you read....... :D

Meet Solisaaki

My characters name is Solisaaki. I chose to have that name because well I couldn't think of anything and so I just chose one of my characters names on WoW. I chose to dress him the way I did because I can’t ever get him to look the way I want him to so I decided to just conceal his appearance. I took this picture in a place called Crescent Beach, they sell medieval items and much much more, but none of its free : ( . They also have a couple chairs that you can sit at and earn two lindens an hour which is what I am doing in this picture at the moment. So far I haven't seen more than four or five people at this place at any given time so it’s a nice place to be if you just want to be alone for a while. I have been to a few other places trying to find a place where I can fight other people for fun since I like to place the first person shooter games, but since you can't kill anyone in this game it loses some of its appeal. But i suppose I'm still a little lost because of all the options of places to go kind of like "Where do I want to go today", but there is also fun in that.

Second Life exploration

Exploring in second life is easy but difficult at the same time. IT is easy because all you need to do is click where you want to go and teleport. But it's difficult because since there are so many place you can go in second life that you kind of need to know where you want to go otherwise it could take you several minutes to find what you need, but I think that that can be the fun of it. You can click to a place and have it not be the place you want to go but when you do get there it is actually a better place to be then where you had wanted to go originally, but also I suppose that that can be very frustrating. You might have to go to a a specific place and then not be able find it cause it’s lost in all the other places in the same area. But then again there is the search application that will let you search a word have everything that has that word in it come up to narrow down your search significantly. But I myself like the fact there there are so many places that you can go. It gives you so many possibility's to find an place that will give you nearly anything you want and then some.

Second Life

I think that second life is a good game in the fact that you can create items in the game and then sell them to people to make money in the game which is like WoW but with more variety because you can create basically anything. Since the last class i have been exploring a little bit of the world and have found a couple of interesting things. One of the being a medieval clothing and weaponry "store". Also several places that will just give you free cloths or weapons or attachments. But what i find most frustration about second life is the money factor. It is not that easy to get money in second life. You either have to buy it or find a place that will give you some for sitting on a place for an hour at a time. Now the sitting isn't really that bad but you cant just afk it all day and get free money. You have to do something at least every 29 minutes or you'll go into an inactivity faces and not get anything. Or you can go to some places and they will give you lindens just by putting them int your profile. But I figure that once I've been playing the game for a while it will start to get easier to make money because I'll know how tpo do many more things.