There Frisky - a fansite for There, the online virtual world

Pwn Joo

Pwn Joo
That is a pick off the boss villan "PwNxxorz". We kicked his butt. LOL CoH is going to have their new patch very soon and it is filled with lots of fun new goodies.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/522/522416p1.html

GOM Gets Crooked
Sadly, GOM got taken for three large ($3,000) recently. Some asshole bought $3,000 in SWG coin and then reversed the charge on paypal. The policy on payplam favors the complainer for intangible goods. GOM has halted trading of all currency except SL. I am not sure what they can do to stop this in the future. I wonder how the other sites do it. The FBI and RCMP are now involved...I sure hope they catch the guy since this is a serious crime. This is a tricky area with all internet sites that sell intangible goods...anyone can say "I did not join; I did not buy it; I did not receive it" and then it is almost impossible for the seller to prove otherwise. I can't think of a simple solution off hand. You could limit the value of sales to prevent large fraud...you could make it so a person has to buy several times and be in good standing...like ebay does it. Even so, these never completely stop fraud, they just minimize it and sometimes that is the best you can do. I hope GOM finds the perp.

Engine Masters
I have a new summer hobby...I was selected to be one of the 50 contestants in the 2004 Engine Masters Challenge. This contest is an engine building contest. I get to get good and greasy. :) I might blog post maybe once a week to my site Pirates Of Horsepower.

The Slide
There auction revenues continue to be on a slow slide...but really this has a lot to do with summer. Most games and internet sites consider summer the slowest months. When kids go back to school, things pick up. Here is the chart from Tarah's.
http://www.soulsong.org.uk/ThereDAQ/report8.html

Tribes3 Beta
Need a new beta to signup for? Craig the Programmer hooked me up with the secret page for Tribes Vengence.
http://support.vugames.com/betasubmission/

Tribes is a team first person shooter. Betas are fun and free so give it a try. I am not sure when they are opening the doors.

There Bucks Up

T$ Up, Real Estate Down
The Therebuck has come roaring back and is very stable. Check out the numbers at GOM. My theory for this is as follows: There are few new players in the game and more older players. These older players know that you can buy Tbux from four or five sources. Players have also learnt to trust the top sellers like tbux.com and gom and so it's now easy and safe to make transactions. these two conditions are helping make for a very stable T$. Yay! :) There are less houses for auction now after the crash; the nine pages has fallen to four pages and I have seen more and more shacks under the $100,000 barrier. Now is a great time to be buying a shack in There if you've been waiting for lower prices. Here are the auction pages for deeds.

Arrests made in 'Half-Life' code theft
Wow! They caught the hackers. Very cool. I want Half-life2!!!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5189819/

NCsoft All Over The News
NCsoft is the king of massively multiplayer online rolw playing games.

RPG legend Van Caneghem signs on with NCsoft
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/06/08/news_6100146.html

Tabula Rasa (PC)
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/tabula-rasa/512085p1.html?fromint=1

The lad that founded NCsoft is Jin Kim
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/05/12/news_6097266.html

Nightwolf in CoH
If you fight the 5th Column in CoH, on rare occasion, one will morph into a nightwolf. If you go to Brickstown, you will see level 35 warewolves. Oh my.

The New SpamArrest
I get a lot of spam; 100,000 spam emails a year. :) And the spam filter I use is spamarrest. I am all excited because spamarrest is redoing their site and now has the "white page". Yahoooo! So now I can type in "there.com" and all there-mail gets to me. Weeeeee :) This was such a pain in the ass before. If you hate spam and get too much of it, try out spamarrest today.
http://new.spamarrest.com/newfeatures.jsp

Sexy Second Life Beast

Sexy Beast
Makeup tattoo by Starley, cheetah mini-skirt by Cytra, hot legs by Twid. :) One of the interesting features of second life is that men and women can share the same clothing. Meoooow. :) I haven't played much SL, maybe an hour here or there. It's certainly a world that builders, designers, and scripters love. SL has good old fashioned lag as shown by these signs I found.

T$ On The Rise!
Therebucks recovered and then some. The crash was the best thing that could of happened to GOM! They have never had higher volume and the T$ has recovered more than I ever would of imagined. Revenue seems to have stabilized at a level.

Knight Online
Here is a game like Lineage that is in beta. Sometimes the download is hard to get. I played the game for like 5 minutes and it was not that bad.
http://www.knight-online.com.my

State Of There Radio Address
Did you listen to the radio address yesterday? I did. I wonder if someone typed a transcript...I haven't found one yet. Gawd. I shake my head. Half the time I was screaming at the radio and half the time I was howling. :D Some of the questions had me rolling. Here comes my overall opinion on these things so please take it with a bag of salt. There Inc stated several times "we are NOT closing". I don't know if they are trying to convince us or them that. Hee hee. Where the hell do I start.

If I hear the word "community" one more time, I'm gonna hurl! ROFL If the word "community" was said once, it was said 135 times in that radio address. I know I am a cold hard numbers lad, and so I will say it again

THERE IS A BUSINESS

It's all nice and fine that There is a community and we are all passionate about it, but that does not mean a rat's ass if they are going to be around six months from now.

A business is made to "make money".
There is a business with the subscription model.
You make money with the subscription model getting more signups.

Here are the two things that catch my eye on that old Michael Wilson post:

Michael Wilson wrote:
"As we go forward we will continue to evaluate the consumer service and our ability to meet our financial goals on an ongoing basis."

What does that mean?
It means that the consumer game version of There failed. This is why There was created. The company is still alive and feels responsible for the gamer community and will do its best to float the game side as long as possible. This is why they are trying so hard to cut the costs. They need to get costs to rock bottom and then they can keep it open for us to play.

Michael Wilson writes"
"Q: Is There going to close?
A: No. The company has just received new funding and will continue to operate; only we will now be focusing most of our resources on building out our platform."

What does this mean?
To me this is horrible in terms of business! This says to me that they burnt $40,000,000, but some how they got a new cash fish on the line for a few mill more and are going to toss that money down the well too. He did not say "we made a profit and so we can continue to operate...no, he said "we found some more funding". Eeeeeek! Eeeek! This sounds a lot like the dot coms.

Michael Wilson wrote:
"There is changing its strategic direction to focus on our technology platform."

What does this mean?
It means "we are changing our direction because we did not make any money".

I don't think There is closing anytime soon. As I said before, The Sims Online was a huge money loss and it's still around. The advice at the end of the radio show was "stick together as a community and keep playing". This is bad advice and will not save the game and here is why...

You make a subscription model succeed by getting a continual new flow of players or customers. The best advice would be "get 5 of your friends to join, and get them to each get 5 of their friends to join". And that advice is very hard to do. The There player base is going to suffer from lack of new blood, and so it will dwindle. It's got a half-life. I would say that every 90 days, about half the players will disappeared and moved onto the next game. It's not that There sucks...There is awesome, but we still get bored with things in time and move onto new hobbies and games. Did you used to play Sims? Did you love it in the beginning? I did and yes, I pee'd my pants over it. TSOL had me on six hours a day every day. The community was awesome...because...it was you and me. I could not play TSOL for three minute today...it's now boring to me. It's still an amazing game. I used to play There six hours a day, but now I can only play 30 to 60 mins. I can play City of Heros three to six hours now, but in a few months, I'll have the itch to move on. This is human nature. Players will continue to exit There as they reach their personal boredom limits. Therefore the only way to keep an active community that is not shrinking, is to get a constant or growing amounts of new players. I don't know if There has this or not and There Inc seems to ignore or not understand this side of the business.

There Inc itself, I personally think is still struggling to find their niche to see if they can succeed. Once that military project runs out...what then? They need cash revenue. They are now betting on the platform. Man...this is a long shot. Who needs a metaverse game engine and how much would they pay for it? You are now competing with all the other game engines out there and there are some damn good ones. To date, no social metaverse has succeeded in a big way. Maybe they could go all industrial or business to business and use the product like NetMeeting :)) and have corporations use it to host office meetings or something.

A Few Fun Items
Sidney built a swimming pool in SL last night! Starley got her Single's studmuffin to grab some boobies. Get your new Flip Ramp today in There Auctions!

Sneaky Dinky Submission

The Sneaky Dinky Submission
Here is a story that I almost forgot about...There Submissions allowed the original "dinky" shirt into the game. There Submissions rejected the infamous "8 equals equals Dee" shirt on more than one occasion. This would not deter the dinky ninjas. You see, my friend, Starley the frog, had a plan. She wanted to do a reproduction of an old bananna painting. I helped her with the rough vector art and she did all the finishing photoshop touches. Here I am cleaning my mantle beside the finished print. The painting came out great. It's even signed by the artist, the infamous 8==D

Is Second Life Making Money?
You know I love the numbers so let's get out the napkin and push the pencil around! Here are the bits of info we need...Subscriber numbers. In the story that hit the web huge a couple days ago about SL selling land for $500 and up, the info is given that there is 10,000 active subscribers. My source "Sassy Sid" tells me that she read or heard the staff of SL is very tight...something like 30 peeps and I am pretty sure I heard this before as well.

Revenue From Subscriptions
10,000 x $10 a month = $100,000 a month and $1.2 million a year

Salaries
30 peeps at $30k-$35k a year is about $1M

so that's a wash. They are break even on subscriptions to salary. You might then say "what about all the land and taxes!" There is only a handful of people buying islands etc. Even so, I'll be very generous and say...let's double the subscription amount and say they are grossing $2M, land and taxes and subscrions. You now have to add in...lease, server farms, taxes, workmans comp etc...$500k in various expenses and that leaves maybe 500k profit.

I'll go on record saying that I it's my opinion that second life is breaking even to inching out a small modest profit. I do not think they are taking the wheelbarrows of gold to the bank.

Is Second Life VC Backed?
I believe it is. VC again is short for venture capital. Who backs SL? They said who in the Forbes story...

Forbes writes
The company, which is backed by Lotus Development Corp. founder and high-tech investor Mitchell Kapor, has about 10,000 active players.

Now I misread this and I thought it said "backed by Lotus", but Jamie showed me that it says "backed by Lotus Founder". So I am sorry for writing that I thought IBM backed SL. One of the VCs for SL is Catamount Ventures also lists Linden Labs as one of the firms they invested in. The big backer is Mitchell Kapor and he even has a moveable type blog!

More Bla Bla On Second Life, There, And Sims
Before, I used to rate all three games different. Originally I gave sims an 8, there a 7 and SL a 6. Then I reversed and ranked There highest. After playing all three, I would now rate them all an 8. They are all very different and they all meet the niche for certain gamers. Not everyone will like each platform, but all three are technical accomplishments and all three are fun to play.

Second Life has some interesting things going on that I think might bite them in the ass down the line. You can submit a shirt to second life in seconds. There is no submission approval system...anything goes. Therefore it is the land of the junk shop. LOL This freedom is awesome but can be abused. I would say that 20% or more of the objects in SL are in violation of copyright laws. You cannot copy other people's work, virtual or real, and then sell it as your own. This is against copyright laws. There will come a point when lawyers will say...."hey! VCs are backing...time to sue! We got some deep-ass pockets and a whole pile of infringement."

If you haven't tried SL, you really should, just like if you have not tried Sims Online, you should as well. If I had to say 3 pros and 3 cons for SL, they would be:

Cons
The avies are butt ugly
The game is the least intuitive
The male to female ratio is heaviest male

Pro
The is the most open platform
The in game objects and scripting are simply amazing
The customization allowed is endless

The Other Virtual Worlds
We always hear about Sims, There and SL, but there is a whole line of of virtual worlds. These might be thought of as the B league. :D Check out some of the other worlds available at Virtual Worlds Review.

Woah! Twid Forum Posts
It's a rare day when I forum post, but I saw the talk was headed to game engines and I had to spew in my two cents. :)

There is a Big There Metting
And the Heavys are going to talk about the future of There...but I can't find the official link? Can anyone toss that in comments if you have it? They may mention it on announcements.

Singles and Thief3 Release Demos

Singles One Hour Demo
Singles is like really frisky Sims. :) The demo is now out and the servers are edios seem overloaded. Both Thief3 and Singles are edios. Here is the download link
http://ftp.eidos.com/pub/demos/singles/SinglesUSDTry.exe

Now I don't know if Singles license from Sims or not...if they didn't, man what copycats. They must have good lawyers. Hee hee. The game feels just like Sims. If you played Sims, you will be a natural at Singles. The big difference is the camera is totally user controllable. You can zoom in, out pan around. Here is the lovely couple I started off with. I was able to get my skirt into her frilly white panties. I only played ten minutes so far but it seems to feel "just like sims". I expect there will be some heavy petting and partial nudity along the way. ;) Check out Singles the Game again today. Both these downloads are a large 450mb.

Theif3 Demo Now Available
Thief series plays like a suspense filled horror movie! Turn the lights out and the sound up. You are a theif of olden days and you have missions. Usually they require you to get into a house undetected, knock a guard or two over the head with your blackjack, and steal some rich evil lord's gold. I started playing the game again last night and it felt great. The tutorial is well made and teachs you how to use many of your Thief tricks. You have all sorts of neat arrows like a water arrow, used to put out candles and torches. You alwo get some real arrows so you can kill a guard if you can fire off three into him before he swords you to pieces. The guards are the most fun in the game since they don't know you are there are they are always muttering and complaining about something. Here is the link to the Theif3 demo
http://ftp.eidos.com/pub/demos/thief3/T3_Demo.exe

Here is also the Thief3 website. The demo is also 450mb and both games are single player.

IQ Test
If you dig online IQ tests, here is a cool one. It's two pages and around 50 questions. It takes maybe 15-30 minutes.
http://web.tickle.com/tests/uiq/

New Yahoo Messanger Is Out Of Beta
And ready for download!

Fun In There

There Is Hella Fun
It's the start of summer! Happy Memorial Day weekend. :) After today I'll be slowing down and posting the major There Inc events and big game release news. I've got a few stories for today and also maybe some general comments on gaming, the internet and fun. I've played There for over a year and I'll have to say that it's been hella fun and a wonderful gaming experience. I played Sims Online for six months before that and also enjoyed it very much. Before that I played Half-Life off-and-on for three or so years. These games are now all part of me. Gaming online is great and it's only getting better. The latest figures show that the average online gamer is 29 years old! How cool is that. Women and men both enjoy the social fun of internet gaming and this trend will continue to grow. People are watching less TV and logging in more frequently.

Drama
I think a lot of players think that "drama" is a There-only experience, when really it's a mix of human nature and uninhibited internet. There is a good amount of drama in There, but I have seen the exact same amount in my previous online hobbies such as half-life, poker, porn, foosball, and cars. Text based communication removes inhibitions and creates extra miscommunication and this is a formula for added fun drama action. LOL You just have to take it all with a bag of salt. :) The drama is not so bad when you take a step back.

Forums
I personally avoid forums since they offer a super-size portion of daily drama. ROFL :) Forums are often the focal point of any online hobby. This is where people all meet and discuss their passion. They are kind of a social microcosm of the "tribe". Most forums follow a pattern: they are born, they start small and grow, there is a love-fest, they reach a middle stability, then the mutiny comes and all hell breaks loose, then alternative forums break-off from the main one. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this happen. :D Forums often live on, long after the game dies. TSOzone was popular with players, long after they stopped simming.

Business
Games are made to entertain us, but we often forget that they are produced to make a profit. Both Sims and There have met with this cold reality. Games are now big business with movie-sized budgets. I think it the future we are going to see some amazing games. The down side of this is that the "garage programmer" will have a hard time breaking into commercial gaming with these huge barriers to entry. I can't forget about "counter strike" though, which started as a simple programmed mod to half-life, and eventually grew to insane proportions. Number one tracked gamespy game is Half-life and the number one half-life mod is counter strike, so the highschool garage programmer still has a chance. :)

GameSpy Reviews City Of Heros
Speaking of GameSpy, Nerina sent me in their review of CoH!

GameSpy for The Old-Schoolers
Do you know how gamespy got it's start? You old-schooler do. ;) Back when I was a young lad, with my first windows PC with a gamer video card, The Micron Millennia XRU with Monster 3D Voodoo1, quake1 and quake2 were all the rage. There were quake servers here and there, but how did you find them? Gamespy started out as a client server piece of free software. You could DL it free and fire it up and use it to find all the quake servers. I think it used to track four servers...I can remember quake and hexen and I can't remember the rest. That little game spidering free client went onto become the gamespy empire. :D Now almost every game comes with client searching built in. Some license gamespy technology...like Halo has gamespy server searching built into it.

Website Popularity
Ever wonder how popular a website or fansite is? It's very difficult to guage site traffic on any site because no two counters are equal. There are a hundred ways to count hits to a website, and this makes comparisson difficult unless all sites use the same counter. My favorite counter is MasterStats. It's free and super cool. I especially dig it because my old porn bud "KidSlick" invented it. ;) If you ever want to toss a counter on your website, give it a try. There are a couple other ways to get a rough gauge of websites popularity; the two I know of are Alexa and Link Popularity checker. The most popular There site that I can find seems to be Life In There. It's been around for a long time and is always popular.

Frisky Second Life
Oh My...SL Erotica is dedicated to the sexy side of second life. :)

What's Next For Twiddler
In terms of blogging, I am probably going to make about 60 posts on the site for my stock market book. This is to help promote it in the search engines. In terms of gaming, right now I am enjoying City of Heros. I have pre-orders in for Sims2, Doom3, and Half-life2. I'll most likely buy GuildWars or World of Warcraft, depending which hits the market first. I know I like guildwars so I think I would lean that way if I had to choose. I miss half-life and there is an 80% chance that I will run a full bore half-life server on 66.146.50.100. My old one was called "Cucamonga Chunk O Phlegm" and I'll call the HL2 one that as well. LOL I used to live in cucamonga so I like that name and my buddy Gene-La-Machine and I just used to say "chunk of phlegm" a lot for no good reason. LOL Here are some of my old marketing spams to Usenet, back in the day. Ohhh! I don't know if I've ever showed you some of my smaller gamer sites from the past. here is High Ping Bastards. Here is the classic Twid 36 Half-Life Jumps. The skirts cannot resist an old-dude in pink.

There was one gamer project I gave up on that I might try one last time; I had worked for two years with two programmers to try and make the greatest first person shooter stats site. The site was to be called Taunt.com (don't go there now or you will get the same boob in your eye as lips.com). Craig the Programmer had his php nimble spiders querying the 30,000 half-life servers, once every 7 minutes. The spiders hammered the database with snapshot after snapshot. My concept was to present stats like a search engine, since we are all very used to the search engine format. We hit snag after snag and the code was never better than 70%. I tossed in the towel. If HL2 is huge, I might give taunt.com one more run for the money and try and make a large gamer stats portal.

When I Was a Day One Noob

Day One Noob Twid
I was wandering around sims secrets and I found some pics that I believe were from my very first day. Nice brows you got going on. There is the spongebob buggy that was banned shortly after. Some of these names kind of look familiar. A fine helper lad game be a few tips and I think lent me a board. I was a little too shy and confused to enter the chat group. I was building up my courage. :D

Summon Me!
I was on for three minutes the other night and got the infamous "Summon Me!" from a stanger. ROFL These bizzare IMs crack me up. I changed the name in this log to protect the innocent. lol I do not know this person and they do not know me. :O

System The_Avie is participating in the conversation.
System The_Avie has been added to the conversation.
The_Avie Summon me...and who are you?
The_Avie Summon me..
Twiddler why summon you?
Twiddler i dont know you
The_Avie me too
System The person who started this IM has left the conversation. This window will now close.
System The_Avie has been added to the conversation.
System The_Avie is participating in the conversation.
The_Avie Just summon me.......
Twiddler no thanks :) I am doing inventory.
The_Avie plz
The_Avie Are you aboy
The_Avie or a girl?
The_Avie Boy?
Twiddler boy
The_Avie girl?
The_Avie Than summon me!
The_Avie Now
The_Avie you may know me
Twiddler why I dont know you
The_Avie i think you was the one i gave you a hoverboat
Twiddler ROFL
The_Avie i think
The_Avie ?
The_Avie I don't know
The_Avie i can't remeber
The_Avie Just summon me
The_Avie and lets see...
Twiddler im logging out sorry

Second Life Adds Thereian and Therian Names
Second Life is luring more There players; this week they added the last name Thereian. The lifetime basic membership is less than $10 and so many avies are giving it a whirl. I tried SL in early beta and didn't have much fun. It was laggy as all hell and choppy like a mofo. People tell me it's drastically different now. I am very curious about the objects and what has been scripted and so I may break down and give it a quick try. I don't think I'm gonna dive in for 6 hours a night but I may give it a test drive. I'm having too much fun with regular games right now like CoH and with Doom3, Sims2, Half-Life and GuildWars on the horizon, I think time will be limited. Hee hee. I notice that the Linden dollar gets a lot of activity on the GOM site. Here is the page for Welcome Thereians on SL.

City Of Heros First Update - New Villians
There are lots of sneak peak pics of the first update hitting CoH at Gamespy. Lots of fun new villians. Here is Twiddler the fire-blaster. Here are my weapon choices. One of the neat things about CoH is that you have to make so many choices and this creates very cutsom characters. You have to choose the weapons you want and also have to choose how you enhance them for damage, accuracy, range etc. This makes every player different from all the rest since the combinations are iinfinite. Here is the very evil 5th Column. I like to take these guys out solo, which is tricky but I pull a ninja stunt on their butts. They can't fly, and so I teleport to a high ledge or building. I then select one and TP his ass up to me, but I make sure he missed the ledge and I light him on fire as he falls 200' LOL. One he is on the ground he is down to 25% of his strength and I re-TP his butt up to me and give him the spanking. I just hang out on the ledge all day and do one at a time.

Will Harvey Begins IMVU

Bacios!
Yay! finally the Bacio is here. I've heard that the skirts show a little butt crack when hitting the turbo while wearin' the low-rise capris. :O Here are the five models. Here are the Bacios in new releases.

Porta Homes!
In that same new release link above are the Porta Homes! Weeee. Lot's of fun new stuff to play with. Here are the thumbs of the vey slick two story models.

Will Harvey, "I'm Working On Something New"
Pirate Sid tipped me off to this new Gamespot invterview with Will Harvery, cretor of There. This is an awesome interview! The interview is perhaps bad news for There Gamers where it is good news for players of online worlds. Here are some of the comments that caught my attention.

Will Harvey, " I have left the company and I?m no longer on the board. The company is following a different path than I?d like to follow..."

Will Harvey is Gone. Tom Melcher is gone. I'm guessing that Jeffrey Ventrella is long gone. I heard Levi Jones is gone? Who is left? When Tom Melcher disappeared in the middle of the night, I stated "The VCs (venture capitalists) now control the company. Once the VCs are in you know things are in rough shape and they are trying last ditch efforts to make the business work. The last bet they have is the fullfilment of the military contract and hope that the US gov continues to want to re-buy that contract yearly. My guess is that the military is testing many platforms, not just There and it might be dicey to see where this goes. Also, if you have every sold to the government, getting paid is slow. You will get paid but boy it can take some time and so cash flow would certainly be high on my list of worries.

Will Harvey, "I think if I were asked what my most significant mark on There was...that and maybe programming the hoverboat, which has truly delightful vehicle physics."

I thought it was cool that he dug the hover boat so much :)

Will Harvey, "There nailed the business model. Selling virtual items for real money is absolutely the way to go."

I disagree with Mr. Harvey here. Virtual goods is "one" way of making money. It's a difficult way since you have to have large scale participation. This model works for ebay for example, but it's not the only business model that works. For example, with 100,000 subscribers, CoH is printing money at $20 a month. That is $24 million a year. Now let's say you try and make this with a 5% fee on every transaction. Let's keep it at 100,000 players. 5% of what = $20? 20/.05 = $400. Bullshit will you ever get 100,000 people buying $400 worth of goods, each and every month. I do think the virtual model can work, personally I would take the subscription model 99 times out of 100 first. I continue to think this is one of the reasons There Inc stuggled...they tested and were moderately successful with three billing models, but the one that makes the big cash needs the most focus. Hybrid systems can work as well. You could make a "There" with no subscription fee BUT have houses available for everyone and have rent at $T40,000 a month = $20. That might be one sneaky way to do subscription. ;)

And the last thing said was that he was working on something new but not talking about it. Read this inteview!
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/05/28/news_6099558.html

Doom3 Very Soon - July15
I am peeing my pants for Doom3!!! It's mainly a single player game and it will be like a horror movie experience! id always makes top notch games. This will be no exception. Ship Date Set.

Secret Auction Cancel Button
Here is the secret auction cancel page that is hard to find ;) Starley showed me it.
http://webapps.prod.there.com/items/cancelitem

Over Ten Pages Of House Deeds!
Oh My. That is a lot of real estate. List by time left and find the deals happening right now.

KP Chat Lives On

It's rare to find me in-world lately, but even more rare to find me in a Karuna chat circle! LOL I was testing a new Spades object when Cytra pulled the old "I have to show you my new outfit" trick and summoned me into the chat-fest. Karuna is as busy as I remember it from when I was a young noob. It's full of blockies and people all chatting up a storm. If you are looking for new friends to hang with, drop by KP and chat your lips off one evening.

BIG Verticle 3D Spade
Yay! A new object approved. This 3D verticle spade is hella large. I put a walk plank across the whole peak. It's invisible. Check out the new BIG Spade now in auctions!

Domains For Sale
One of my oldest internet buds, "KidSlick', is blowing out 250 of his last mainstream domains. I told him I'd give him a shameless plug. If you are looking for some nice domains, check out his site.
http://www.shortdomains.com/

There In The News At Gamespot

Is There Going Nowhere? - Gamespot Story
Nerina sent in this latest story on There.

Here is a sad quote from that story:
"Key members of There's launch team--including the oft-quoted Tom Melcher, Will Harvey, and Amy Jo Kim--are either long gone from the project or remain on the masthead in name only."

American Idol
Sassy Sid showed me who won.

$T Volume Heavy
Gaming Open Market has seen the six largest days of T$ trading evah. The market seems to be floating in the 60 to 80 range. Today it's starting off in the 50 to 70 range. Heavy volumes.

The Power Of Compounding Interest
For those who want to invest, this is the black ninja god. :) If you play with this chart on compounding interest, use the sliders or it doesn't work right.
Graphical Investment Calculator

CoH Video Testing
I decided to try Fraps on CoH last night. I made a two minute movie. Starley and I and two others were teamed up against some bad lads and near the end of a mission. The fraps video was 200mb. I used the windows media encoder to make it the smalled size and reduced it to 6mb! It's a little blurry. I also decided to run it through honestech video editor and it was much clearer at the small size but also 30mb. Here is the small 6mb movie. This is some of he action fun you can have in City Of Heros.