Joining the Smart Phone World

Mr. Yoshida did me in.

It was some of his tangy sauce that leaked out of my lunch container and got all over my aging LG Rumor 2 phone, rendering it a sticky mess.

I was able to clean the outside pocket of my laptop bag well enough, but the phone itself was never quite right after the spill.  After putting up with it for a couple months… I don’t make that many calls with it… I decided it was time to replace it.  So I headed over the the Virgin Mobile site to see what el cheapo model I could get to replace the sticky LG.

At the Virgin Mobile site though I found out they really aren’t into phones that are just phones any more.  They have one simple flip phone model these days.  However, since I am as likely to text as talk, I generally try to get one with the slide out keyboard, as I have no mind to master the whole dialing from the keypad thing.

And I didn’t want to go to another vendor, as my VM account was topped up with enough cash to last me a long time.  I have been putting $20 on the account every 90 days for years to keep the phone active, but use maybe a $1.50 of it every cycle.

So I decided it might be time to bite the bullet and get a smart phone.  While there were certainly some el cheapo choices on that front, I figured if I was going to go that route I had best go with a phone that is supported, which left me with the Samsung and Apple options.  After some hemming and hawing, I decided to go the Apple route, in large part because everybody in my family who has a smart phone has an iPhone.

And, of course, there was a cheap option.  The 16GB iPhone 5s was only $199.  So I ordered one and it arrived late last week.

iPhone 5s

This also happens to be the same phone my daughter has so… and it has come to this… she can show me how to use it correctly.  When did I become my father?

The phone itself seems to be a pretty nice piece of equipment.  My only problem so far has been getting a case for the unit.  There are so many case options out there, I am not sure how anybody decides, aside from just hitting choice fatigue and taking whatever looks okay just to get on with their life.

Last Minute Garrison Gold Grubbing

The WoW 7.0 pre-Legion patch goes live tomorrow.

The WoW 7.0 patch notes have the following two items about your Draenor garrisons:

• Many sources of gold from the Garrison has been reduced or removed.
• Newly obtained salvage from the Salvage Yard no longer contains equippable items. Salvage obtained from before the patch remains unaffected.

Both were expected, but you might not be aware of just how much your gold revenue will be taking a hit.  I knew that follower missions that paid off in gold were done for, but I did not know that follower equipment, which is worth a decent amount of gold today, will be worth just 1 copper after the patch tomorrow.

I’ll be cashing all those in when I get home.

Blizzard Watch has a guide up to help you extract as much last minute gold out of your garrison as possible.  Get it tonight, because tomorrow will be to late.

 

Quote of the Day – Goons Will Win the War

We all know how this is going to end. goons will buy off the key people against them, or the allies will simply run out of ISK and /or interest, or CCP will come to the rescue of the RMT cartel.

Any way you cut it, goons powerbase will remain intact, and they will be as stronger than ever once the latest ISK printing press is installed one jump from Jita.

Dinsdale Pirannha, comment on Betrayal at M-OEE8 post

Not actually an April Fools joke, yet it feels like it belongs on this day.

Probably not the person you expected me to be quoting either.

There is something surreal in finding that the person most sure of victory for The Imperium, or at least victory for Goonswarm, is one of its constant critics.  But what of his statements?

The first is that the all powerful Goons will outspend IWant ISK, an online ISK casino that can afford to blow 1.8 trillion ISK on skill injectors just to say they did so.

Also showing off with that wallet balance

Oh, and they are giving away titans during a video stream today.

#slooFlirpA #tweetfleet – 4 titans will be given away tonight on stream.

— 1RonBank (@1Ronbank) April 1, 2016

I am not sure even Goons have the ISK reserves to do that, not to mention that the war against The Imperium has gone past mere rhetorical forum posts along the lines or “Ceterum autem censeo Gooninem esse delendam.”  The war appears to have achieved a life of its own, with or without ISK, with a goal to burn down Deklein and salt its fields so that no Goon may ever flourish there again.  Anybody who swapped sides to join The Imperium now would be savaged almost immediately and be ruined in reputation.  That likely isn’t worth any amount of ISK.

So, since a buy out seems to be out of the question, The Mittani will just Bat phone Reykjavik and tell Hilmar to win the war for him and his team.  “I’ve promised my people we would have that XXL citadel in VFK-IV before the next timer, so make it happen!”

Okay, that is way over the top, but I cannot come up with something that would both win the war for us yet wouldn’t totally destroy the game by making people quit in droves.

I will give Dinsdale credit.  His middle option isn’t at right angles to the situation.  I am not sure the “running out of ISK” aspect is going to happen, given the prodigious amount of in game currency IWI is able the throw around, but running out of interest… getting bored with the mechanics of total war, tired of forming for big fights, frustrated with tidi and the annoying sovereignty mechanics of the moment… that is pretty much how Goons, then the CFC, then The Imperium took and kept their holdings in the first place.

That is pretty much The Imperium plan now, the old stand-by of weaponized boredom.  But to get there we first have to get the war into a stalemate.  Winning fights and objectives, making progress, cancels out boredom.  And in a situation where the enemy can sneak in and reinforce VFK-IV, the one-time heart of the empire and a symbolic location for The Imperium, stalemate might not even be within our grasp right now.

Who did this? (said in angry Snape voice)

So barring the forces of the Moneybadge Coalition getting tired and wandering off, things look pretty bad for The Imperium.

Yet I wonder if there is any outcome that would cause Dinsdale to reconsider his view of Goons and CCP and EVE Online?

I didn’t write this post to be mean to Dinsdale, but he has a long standing reputation in the comment threads of many blogs and has pressed home his views time and again over the years.  He clearly wants to talk about them, and he keeps coming back for more, so I am going to guess he won’t be deterred by any of this.

But is there anything that could shake his views on this topic?

He might be so wed to those views that no set of events could change them.  I don’t know.

But the bigger problem… or at least the problem one can rationally discuss… is that I am not sure that the game would allow our foes a victory near complete enough for him to even consider changing his views.  The problem… if you consider it a problem… with New Eden is that you can never extinguish your foes.  They have to leave the game of their own accord.

So even if the Moneybadgers win a complete victory, take every Imperium system, win every battle, and hell camp any evacuation, some aspect of the coalition will remain.  Enough angry Goons can go on making people mad in New Eden for ages.  Even if the Moneybadgers band together in a permanent alliance and knock Goons down and keep them from ever holding sovereignty anywhere in New Eden again, they can still be a pain in the ass, another Mordus Angels group that can’t do anything on its own but which can sting annoyingly by shooting ratters or reinforcing a tower now and again.  And it would take a lot of work to knock Goons down to that level.

We are now facing a number of foes whom we have beaten in various wars over the years… sometimes on multiple occasions… yet there they are, back at it again, attacking Goons.  And so I suspect that no matter the outcome of the war, some form of The Imperium… maybe rebranded, maybe just flying under the Fat Bee flag, maybe with some leader besides The Mittani… will exist and will flourish and reassert some portion of its power again.

And then Dinsdale could say, “I told you so!  They won in the end!”

Is this a problem?  Or is EVE Online already savage enough?