Thoughts on Star Wars: The Old Republic 1

My wife and I have a blast playing it together. She is a more avid gamer than I am, but I'm the Star Wars fan. I don't think she's seen more than half the films and none of them all the way through, so it's really interesting watching her reaction to the planets we've visited. She really likes Alderaan, but she was shocked to find out that it gets blown up in the far future. It only happens in first hour of the first movie filmed. To fix that, we'll be watching all the films in the order of the events. In fact, we might be seeing the 3D versions of the films as they come out.

As for the money involved, every penny shows up in the dialog, voice acting, music, and plot, to say nothing of the programming and world building. It makes this expensive game worth it.

Watch for more thoughts on the game in future entries.  I'll be putting spoilers behind a cut.

Fast Company reports Russian Overlords want rest of LJ to be more like ONTD; wank ensues

I posted the following to fandom_lounge on JournalFen.  The response there is also DO NOT WANT!

Fast Company publishes an article titled The Return of LiveJournal. This should be good news. It isn't.

According to LiveJournal general manager Anjelika Petrochenko, LiveJournal's planning a major 2012 push based around attracting new users to community sites. Petrochenko told Fast Company that the blogging service was planning between 10-50 new community sites by the end of 2012. These new community sites will offer organizers and admins highly detailed metrics and statistics on user activity that appear to be more detailed than Facebook. Petrochenko also stressed that LiveJournal accounts do not have to be tied to a real name/identity and offered greater anonymity than other social networks. However, LiveJournal has been involved in numerous censorship controversies in the past.

Oh No They Didn't will be the first community site to participate in LiveJournal's initiative. The company designed custom widgets to highlight frequent commenters, instituted new metric tracking and analysis systems, and created a new, community-driven interface seemingly designed to deemphasize blog content. The next LiveJournal-hosted site to get a makeover will be the popular AnythingDisney fan site. LiveJournal is staking their continued American growth on the community model; Oh No They Didn't's Brenden Delzer was hired as an on-staff community editor by LiveJournal several months ago.

The formatting of Oh No They Didn't--which includes advertising and a commenting-heavy interface--is close to what LiveJournal has planned for other communities.
...
LiveJournal recently unveiled a complete redesign that overhauled the service's comments system, emphasized social networking, and set the stage for the upcoming communities blitz. Reaction from longtime users has been overwhelmingly negative--LiveJournal patrons slammed the redesign on the service's official blog.

LiveJournal's leadership has made it clear that their future American business strategy lies in generating new traffic rather than catering to the service's current small-but-loyal membership. The challenge for Petrochenko and other executives at LiveJournal will be redefining the brand's identity in a crowded media marketplace.

The entire article was posted over at ontd_political here. The response has been 150+  ~190 comments (and counting) of DO NOT WANT!