I could talk about my life, or about E3.

I think I'll talk about e3 more. But first. Long story short - I begin working as Resident Java Expert for the BYU Office of IT on Monday. I'm looking forward to it. Good to be gainfully employed again. Many of my thoughts on the events of e3 are listed over on http://quarksff.org/ in the forums. But here's one that's a bit esoteric to talk about there. Tabula Rasa This is one of the MMORPGs that had caught my eye over the last couple of years. FFXI, which I play on a regular basis, The Saga of Ryzom, from those plucky French naturepunk enthusiasts, and Tabula Rasa, from Richard "Lord British" Garriot. TR was promising to do away with some of the tropes that hinder the whole Massive genre. It offered easy teleportation to friends or places of interest. It had private islands, where friends could gather. It did away with intimidating stats finagling during character creation. And it finally divorced the appearance of a piece of equipment from its game stats. It had a set of moral underpinnings, based on compassion. The motto of the dev team was "stable first, then fun, then fast". It had a really cool preliminary soundtrack that still lives in my playlist. But it seemed to be having difficulties. There were some higher-ups on the team that quietly left. There was a serious need to lock down a visual look for the game. And it kept getting delayed. So the big news was that the New Tabula Rasa would be unveiled at e3. I think they managed to cut out every aspect of the game that I found intriguing. It's basically Starship Troopers online. Check out the site: http://www.playtr.com From the videos I saw, all of the elegance that existed in the prior screenshots and starry-eyed explanations seemed neutered. In its place there were "big guns." Have we not seen enough big sci-fi weapons yet? They've found a consistent visual theme, and it does actually echo some of the earlier concepts I saw, but it seems to be wrapped in a layer of machismo that I really find repellent. Maybe the core of what originally caught my eye is still there, beneath the explosions and Bug-Eyed Monsters. What the site says about the role-playing elements is vague enough to allow many possibilities. But the way they are pushing this, as a generic humanity's-last-stand, is not going to attract the kind of people I had been hoping to play Tabula Rasa with.