I’ve recently been following a couple of threads on the Star Wars: The Old Republic fora about the game’s lack of a mac-native client and their plans (or lack thereof) for one. I just posted this and it was one of those things where I hadn’t realized I was making a decision until I’d already written it out and was ready to click “Submit.”

“As much as I love SWTOR, with the lack of a decently performing (or even supported!) mac client, and no plan for one in the foreseeable future, I'm just going to unsub when Mists of Panderia comes out and go back to WoW.

I live my life connected to a network for work, play and leisure and OS X/iOS make that lifestyle so much more enjoyable than any other solution available. Having to stop everything, cut myself off from essential services and boot into uncomfortable, inhospitable Windows just to play a game is more than I can take. It's like keeping my hobby in a rackety old shed that I have to walk a mile through brambles to reach instead of keeping my hobby in my clean, comfortable, tastefully appointed modern home.

I had a ton of fun in WoW for 7 years, and I'd hoped to start a new multi-year experience with SWTOR, but Blizzard is much better at keeping me happy, it seems.

Mods, Macs, and much more end-game - WoW is winning me back.”

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=3592628#post3592628

I wanted to re-post it here because it speaks to a bigger issue. Apple is one of the world’s biggest computer manufacturers (again) and literally the largest, most successful company ever. Companies like EA and Bioware ignore mac-users at their peril.

Tags: Star Wars, World of Warcraft, Apple

Dammit, you snarky jackasses, cut George Lucas a break.

The prequels are exactly what Lucas always claimed they were: Sci-Fi pulp thrillers along the lines of the serials he grew up watching in the 40s and 50s. Shocker: Flash Gordon was pretty goddamn dumb. It’s not Lucas’ fucking fault if you were too old in 1999 to feel the exact same wonder and excitement at a sci-fi movie that you felt as a pre-adolescent in 1978. The second and third prequels were actually pretty damn good. Just appreciate them for what they are, not the unreal expectations they failed to live up to.

Tags: Star Wars

Tags: Method, Advertising

I just had a wild idea…

I live in a rural area, and my income is dependent on a reliable internet connection. Because I’m rural, I’m paying three or four times as much as broadband customers in other regions for much slower access speeds. There are cellular data plans, but they’re not competitive, yet, with wired broadband, and the wireless data carriers aren’t required to stay net-neutral.

I think what we need a national wireless network. A modern equivalent of Rural Electrification to get wireless broadband to every corner of the country. A network where you didn’t have to buy an unnecessary land-line or tv-cable package or cell-phone contract to get connected. A net-neutral on-ramp to the internet that won’t mess with your data or access speeds in order to gain some sort of competitive advantage. A network that every computer, laptop, and tablet could connect to, anywhere, all under a single personal or family account.

Naturally, we’d make this new national network part of the US Postal Service. It’d still be for profit like the current postal system, but it’d be the Public Option for broadband access. Profit isn’t the main directive, providing access to a critical service is. The costs would be low so as few barriers to entry as possible for the average citizen, and there could be federal assistance in place for lower income families. It would be parallel to the existing wireless networks of the cell phone companies, but it’d force them to be more competitive in price and service.

And it would create thousands upon thousands of solid, union jobs.

Too crazy?

Tags: Post Office, Net Neutrality, Justice