That’s Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, in case you don’t already know. If you listen to The Instance, you probably already know.

Effective this past Tuesday, 27 June 2011, there have been some important changes for players who had not yet bought the first expansion (The Burning Crusade) and those who are interested in trying WoW.

From the Rage of the Firelands patch notes:

• Recruit-A-Friend now awards bonus experience and free level grants to level 80, up from level 60.
• Players with a copy of the original World of Warcraft who had not yet upgraded to The Burning Crusade have had their accounts upgraded to access the content and features of The Burning Crusade expansion at no additional cost.

And from the new Starter Edition FAQ:

• The World of Warcraft Starter Edition allows players to access World of Warcraft for free — all you need is a Battle.net account and an Internet connection. Starter Edition players can play up to a maximum character level of 20 and are able to upgrade to a full, paid account at any time, allowing them to continue their adventures where they left off. The Starter Kit gives gamers who are interested in trying out World of Warcraft a chance to experience the game before purchasing a copy.

The following restrictions are placed on all Starter Edition Accounts:

• A level cap of 20.
• A maximum of 10 gold.
• Trade skills are capped at 100 ranks.
• Unable to trade via the Auction House, mailbox, or player-to-player.
• In-game access to public chat channels unavailable. Players are limited to communicating using only say, party, or whisper. (Ed.: This means gold farmers won’t be able to user starter accounts to spam Trade.)
• Characters will be unable to create or join guilds.
• Characters are not able to send whispers to other characters unless they have been added to the characters’ friends lists or have received a whisper from a character first.
• Characters will not be able to invite other players into a party.
• Characters will not be able to join parties with other characters above level 20.
• Voice chat disabled on Starter Edition accounts.
• Realms experiencing login queues will prioritize players who have full, paid accounts.
• Starter Edition accounts are not eligible for character transfers
• RealID features are disabled on all Starter Edition Accounts.

And that covers all of the important limitations. Got a friend or family member you’ve been wanting to get into the game? There’s never been a better time. Send them to Battle.net to create a free account and start playing now.

Weapon of choice of Aliens, Moon Men, and future humans. The problem with ray guns is that while they’re a great idea, no one ever really sat down and figured out how they would work. Because of that, (and probably other things), we’re still firing bullets at each other.

In addition, our ideas of future weapons have changed, perhaps to accommodate our realization that ray guns aren’t as simple as we had thought. Sure, Star Trek and Star Wars still utilize ray gun type weaponry, but the more recent additions to our ideas of the future still use bullets. Halo, Mass Effect, Avatar- humans travel around space in all of them, but despite that, still use bullets.

This video illustrates the sad excuse we have for a ray gun today; more a “hot tickle” gun than a red or green laser blast.

What do you think, are ray guns still the future of weapons? Personally I think that railguns, coilguns, and energy weapons are the new ray guns. Sure, there may be some point in the future when the typical soldier is issued an Lasgun or phaser, but I think those days are a very long way off.

Download HD 720p

To be honest, I’ve never been a huge pre-Pixar Disney fan. Having two small children, the youngest of whom is a 4 year old girl, I end up seeing quite a few anyway. I am, however, a huge fan of just about anything Pixar puts out. Their films have a singular attention to blending excellent animation with top-notch storylines. Only later did I realize that this movie was made with John Lasseter as Executive Producer, after Pixar was brought in to Disney.

So it was with only passing interest that I watched this movie with my daughter; and by watch I mean play WoW in the living room while she watched. After the first few minutes I actually found myself drawn in to the movie.

The movie starts as Tinkerbell is “born”. Basically she emerges as a full fairy from a floating seed during a gathering of all the other fairies. Immediately she takes place in a ritual to find out what her talent (i.e. profession) is. After finding out she is not one of various nature talents she finds out her profession is… Mechanical Engineer.

Basically the writers took the character’s name literally and made her a tinker. The rest of the movie is about Tinkerbell coming to terms with her talent. At first she rebels and tries to do other “nature” things. Eventually she embraces her inner geek.

So do I think you should go out and get this for yourself? No, not necessarily. However, if you have a young daughter, granddaughter, niece, etc. this is a movie you can watch with her and not want to gouge your eyes out. Plus it has an underlying message that being a girl engineer is cool.

Original article (link) found via BoingBoing

Kindred: The Embraced cover art

Allow me to take a few moments of your time and I’ll give you a bit of history about the show as well as explain a few of its charms.

With all of the love in the media being given to vampires these days, I thought it would be a good idea to look at this earlier attempt to bring the “vampire society” concept to mainstream audiences.  If you’re not familiar with the show, it aired for one season in 1996 and was loosely based off of the much beloved (at least by my friends and I) pen and paper role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade and was one of the first attempts that I can remember that portray the hidden society concept.

The story takes place in modern day San Francisco and centers around a vampire council that, for the most part, runs vampire society in the city and surrounding areas. Vampire society in the cities in the Kindred world are ruled by vampire councils with representatives from different clans and these councils are led by a Prince of the city.  The Prince of the City is a Clan Venture (wiki) vampire named Julian Luna played by Mark Frankel (R.I.P.) (imdb).  If you are versed in the clan aspects from the Masquerade, you will see that Julian fits the classic Venture archetype very well, playing the part of the successful businessman with a powerful fury that can be unleashed when needed.  Also present on the council are representatives of Clan Brujah (rebellious and looking for power, wiki), Clan Toreador (art enthusiasts, wiki), Clan Gangrel (wandering gypsies, wiki) and Clan Nosferatu (think Nosferatu the movie, wiki).

At the time of the show’s airing I was a little scared when I heard that Aaron Spelling’s name was attached to the show.  I mean, how do you go from producing Beverly Hills: 90210 to a live action treatment of a pen and paper role-playing game about vampires?  Somehow, he managed to make the transition, to a certain degree.  There were of course a few “artistic licenses” taken with the show, but this is to be expected.  Notably, some of the clans were missing, including the Malkavian and Tremere clans to name a few.  Also, some fans believe that some of the clan portrayal’s strayed a bit too far from the source material which I can understand.

Artistic license aside, I think the show’s strongest point that it got across was the existence of an entire vampire society living behind the scenes from everyone and putting on a “masquerade” to  trick the human world into believing they didn’t exist.  This particular aspect is what drew me into the pen and paper role-playing game so I was able to identify with it immediately.  Other story points that the show touched upon were various romantic involvements (this was Aaron Spelling after all), a vampire who believed he was practically Jim Morrison reincarnated, war between the vampire clans and human society investigating into the existence of vampires.

There were of course some weak points about the show.  Just reading about the plot points involved can evoke some great images of a world where vampires live out of sight and the struggles involved with this.  To a certain extent, this is what the show delivered.  However, keep in mind that a lot of the acting was very over the top stuff!  I was easily able to overcome this and actually felt it brought a certain charm to the show.  Particularly “guilty” of this was C. Thomas Howell’s portrayal of portrayal of Detective Frank Kohanek.  Howell pulled everything possible from the classic film noir detective archetype and I loved him for it!  He really went all out on the character, and while it may come across as overacted to many, I really enjoyed the character.  Years later, when I played the first Max Payne, I thought to myself that Howell would be perfect for that character because the portrayal of Payne in that game really drew from the film noir type as well.  But you know, no one can do a better job than who they ended up choosing for the Payne movie… (Mark Wahlbergif you weren’t aware.)

Perhaps the biggest hit against the show is that it ends too abruptly.  The decision to not renew the show must have come midway through the original season (imagine that happening on a FOX show… I know, crazy talk right?) so the episodes suddenly take a shift towards trying to wrap up loose ends and it ends up feeling a bit forced.

Okay, that’s enough waxing ecstatic on my part and I hope you have enjoyed my nostalgic recount of a show that I love.  I own the series on DVD and VHS (go me!) and have turned a number of people onto the it by loaning them out.  Of these people, everyone has ended up falling into the stories and wanting to consume it so if you are looking for a good drama about vampires (that’s a strange thought for some reason) or just an interesting series, give this one season show a shot and let me know what you think.