Well, if you haven't heard, Cryptic's new MMO (makers of City of Heroes) is having a free play weekend.

Now, I haven't played it for more than an hour and a half or so, so please take these assessments for the unfair assumptions they are, but:

(A) It has the potential to be much better than City of Heroes.
With the same great character appearance options right from the start (plus a lot of improvement, like pretty much all the arm/shoulder/leg options can be applied to both, the left or the right side), better power selection options (there's a "custom" option which lets you pick and choose stuff from different power sets), plus genuine RPG-style loot/gear upgrades and slightly more interactible environments (you can pick up, club with and hurl most crud you see in the streets, if you're strong enough, and it looks like throwing a large object is a great "pulling" option)...
...all this means it's much more like what everyone wanted City of Heroes to be in the first place.
(B) It's still a whole hell of a lot like City of Heroes. If you enjoyed CoH, you'll probably enjoy this. If CoH bored you, well... I have no idea what they've done for advancement and late game, since I've only done the tutorial. The devs have had one whole MMO to learn from their mistakes, so they may have figured out how to reward, entertain and retain players better. Or maybe not. Who knows...
(C) It's only a weekend, but it's free. So if you love making characters, playing with the appearance options and checking out what a bunch of different powers feel like as much as I do, you may just get about 70% of the enjoyment you'd get from buying the game, then you can just delete it afterwards and save your money.

But you do have to love a game that refers to "respec" options as Retcons, and plans in a future update to let you repeat quests as "flashbacks".

Time to turn the tables in AGC #428.

They are still fighting in AGC #427. For the first fight of the adventure, they are having a bit of a rough time...

The other day, when walking home in the pouring rain with my umbrella, each time I passed some poor soaking person without an umbrella I had to restrain myself from saying (in a naive but 'helpful' tone) "It's raining". Because most of the time in life, the funniest thing to do is not actually a good idea.

A month from now we should be living in our new house... so much to do...

That's right, I have so much crap going on now that you wouldn't think I'd have any time to update, but in some kind of perverse twist, I'm ahead of myself enough to be overconfident and put up AGC #422 after only four days (whereas I've been pretty faithful to the six-day schedule for like half a year).

It'll probably be every six days most of the time, especially as things get busier, but I'm just in a good mood today (somehow).

Other good news, dad is giving us a hand with the house-buying process, which is really taking some of the stress off, and that's greatly appreciated. Of course, we're fully capable of inventing our own new and varied forms of stress, but still. I hope to have all the main stuff sorted out in the next couple days. Then other things will become the main things. Yay.

Today's comic, AGC #416 I can't take much credit for.


It was right after comic #399 that I got a message from one very astute reader who not only projected who I was planning to make the next GM, but also evoked the image of this comic's parody movie scene. The image was sufficiently compelling (to me, anyhow) that I couldn't resist :)

There we go, AGC 398. I also went back and added more of those little author's notes under the recent comics, though I hesitate to mention them because they aren't really that interesting.

AGC #373, another "WoW one". Don't worry, I'm not planning on doing like ten of these before getting back to the usual stuff (even though I'm prone to that kind of multi-month distraction). Moderation would be good.

A little late in the day. but AGC #366 is up. Enjoy.

CNN's making a big deal of New York mayor Bloomberg's proposal to put up big wind farms in the outlying parts of the city. I think it's a good idea, I think that most people who oppose wind power are way out of line... but they usually win out in the US, so I don't expect this proposal to go anywhere.

Wind power produces electricity without expending any fuel, makes manufacturing jobs (probably local ones, considering the large size of some components and the increasing expense of shipping), as well as maintenance jobs... it's distributed, making it less vulnerable to attack than old style large power plants. It's just all-around superior. Some people think it's ugly... OOOOOOH, freaking UGLY. Get a grip. As for killing birds, there's no way it kills as much wildlife as fossil fuels do.

I finally made the big site update I've been wanting to make. There are obvious changes to the layout of the site, much nicer navigation bars, and a lot of the random stuff has been consolidated (and better organized) on a page called... random stuff. Go ahead and let me know what you think.

The biggest change is probably the AGC comic archives... instead of the old dumb page, there are now Next/Prev buttons and the ability to jump to a specific comic by typing the number in the box. Of course, to do this I've had to renumber the comics, which means that (after a short transition period), the old links (ex: agc.deskslave.org/comics/AGC26-9.html) will stop working. The comics now have simple numbers, and are addressed in this format:

Anyway, I'll probably be updating the Excerpts in a similar fashion soon, but I'm sure I'll have a lot of bugs to track down in the meantime. In the meantime, enjoy today's comic too!

AGC #348: Let the Wookie Win

EDIT: Oh yeah, you may notice that a few of the comics have "author's notes" underneath. While I set it up to allow me to do that, don't go nuts looking for them because I've only done three or four near the beginning. That's something I'll probably fill in gradually over time.