TrueGentleman

But it's important to watch it in order to set up all the characters, particularly since they will undergo a lot of changes over the second and third. It's also fairly short, even by British TV standards.

The description of it as a Fringe-style B-movie series is dead on (a much better fit than the Doctor Who competitor ITV wanted it to be). The fifth series just started airing a couple of weeks ago, so it's as good a time as any to get into it.

Since Ricky Gervais has made no secret of his idolization of Garry Shandling, you might try The Larry Sanders Show, which was an enormous influence on The Office in many ways and is available for streaming on Netflix. As a send-up of celebrity culture and the talk show format, it's still quite recognizable. (It's Garry Shandling's Show was very funny, as "meta" a sit-com as ever aired on network TV.)

Dash it all, was Auntie Beeb jealous? My betting is that "bootleg" copies will surface on Youtube, Daily Motion, etc. soon enough - there are certainly enough "reruns" of chunks when it was a work in progress - so you can try Googling for the full 13-minute version later.

My limited impression of the US Office is that it's very much a network-friendly adaptation and takes a long time to get into its groove.

A series that captures the spirit of the UK Office far better is Party Down, the chronicles of a semi-competent Los Angeles catering crew, all trying variously to break out in the entertainment industry. On top of numerous gold-star cameos, its amazing cast features Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation), Jane Lynch (Glee), Lizzy Caplan (True Blood*), Martin Starr (NTSF:SD:SUV), Ken Marino, and Megan Mullally (both now on Childrens Hospital, which I'd also recommend highly). Naturally, something so good couldn't last more than two seasons, but it's available on Netflix streaming and iTunes.

* Come on, this counts as a comedy.

Since I chose this as worthwhile Booster investment over some of the others, I can only hope...

Hilarious. And for some reason, this is how I picture the interlocutors.

Many thanks for the swift service. The Steampunk Pack is by far my favorite booster, and it's great to know it's only going to get better. Many of these fixes are ones I specifically was hoping for, and I expect there will be more to come (and hopefully soon).

McAvoy sounds like he's quite willing to roll up his sleeves and get into the role of Prof. X (certainly to judge by this recent interview).

Good lord, not only is that the dreaded grasping hand of Bobby Kotick at work, but a completely different type of gaming mentality as well. The staunch capitalists at the Wall Street Journal don't bother discriminating between the FPS in that article and Activision Blizzard's flagship MMORPG, only noticing that the players of the latter pay a monthly fee, too. (Hint: MMORPGs take place in persistent worlds populated by individualized player-character avatars; FPSs are simulated firefights.)

Incidentally, one of the many criticisms levelled at F2P is that it promotes the same uninvested style of gameplay as FPSs and RTSs, where players just log on to fight or mess around rather than participate in a virtual community. Yet such F2Pers often feel disproportionately entitled when it comes to their games and are often quite vocal about it. Or, as one commentator succinctly sums up another MMORPG's recent controversial decision to convert to a hybridized F2P model, "Customers who don't value your product enough to pay for it aren't the kind of customers you want".


That's an implicit admission that F2Pers don't exactly make for valuable members of an online community. Then again, effectively disenfranchising them probably won't promote good virtual citizenship either.

In a world without Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, et al., this might be feasible, but even then, it won't deter gold-farmers or griefers for long.

I blame Crisis on Infinite Earths.

If WB were smart, they'd offer the pilot as an Amazon/iTunes/Netflix streaming video so we could all have a look at the finished product - if this is near to that stage. In the meantime, this review does give an impression of a better show than the reports of the first draft did, and, unsurprisingly, it sounds as though most of the worst parts of the latter were dropped from the pilot.

On the other hand, this review doesn't go very deeply into the quality of the writing, which is supposed to be Kelley's strength. What's the overall dialogue really like, apart from some "cringe-inducing lines" and "clunky" exposition? Does Wonder Woman have any one-liners or catchphrases (groan-worthy or otherwise)? How does Veronica Cale come across as a villain, particularly considering the importance of an antagonist in this kind of story? Given Kelley's track record, I don't have overmuch confidence in his ability to deliver in this genre, so while I reserve my judgment until this hits the torrents - and it certainly will - I suspect that we've deflected a bullet.

Very likely this show will go down as an object lesson in how not to leak images and tease information to fans. The vinyl pants photos struck the wrong note among both fandom and the mainstream, and the impromptu street-chase action shots of Adrianne Palicki hardly showed her at her best. If a self-described fanboy blogger can pick out better screencaps than the marketing professionals, someone isn't doing the job they're paid for.

Yes, yes, a very LULZy opinion, but this is not an either/or proposition, much less a referrendum on penal theory. In this reported case, the hard labor is part of the regular sentence, and the after-hours gold-farming an illicit activity enforced with physical abuse by a corrupt prison system. I'd be most surprised if this were the only prison in China where this particular private scheme were being exploited.

As for why the whistle-blower would have wound up in prison himself, bear in mind that gold-farming is a significant enough issue in China that the government has been attempting to crack down on virtual currency exchange but obviously without much success - or really understanding the problem, frankly.

In any event, gold-farming is enough of a problem for CoHers that this news is all too relevant.

And Doctorow expanded on this idea for his 2010 novel, For the Win. (I didn't know about Anda's Game - it's an entertaining story. I might start forwarding it to non-gamer friends to help them understand the gold-farming issue.)

Just another reason not to buy in-game currency in an MMO.

Are there any plans either to adapt the Veteran Reward Prestige Sprints to the new Path format or to create new Path Auras with their effects (viz. Dash, Quick, Rush, and Surge)?

One can tell that whichever devs are writing the text for the new exploration badges, they're enjoying the task. And as an Explorer gamer type, naturally I approve of the lengthier, more colorful descriptions. (Revising/expanding the old ones would be nice, too, in the devs' copious free time.)

This^100. Throw in an option to crop the face or other elements for Avatars and let a thousand memes bloom. The ball is in your court, NCSoft marketing.

Whatever the reason, necro'ing this thread is entirely apposite

When I was first starting out and checking out other characters' bios in at Atlas Park, I saw a robot-themed hero whose entry read "... loading data" and assumed that was an RP touch from a work in progress.

Oh yes, and I've also waited for a train at the wrong side and added slots to brawl on my first character (a scrapper, naturally).