Looks like a fumble for Sony

Two months back, I posted how I submitted for my share of the PS3 Linux settlement... and fully expected to be knocked down to a lower class because of my limited documentation.  Well, looks like the judge in charge has shut down the settlement.  In brief, it looks like that partly because the settlement administrators were throwing needless requirements in to pare down the payout, and partly because the lawyers involved were scheduled to get a fat payout with little justification.  Well, we'll see how things progress from here, but, as with most things Sony, I'm not exactly holding my breath.

Spoilerrific! Seafall, prologue round

Thought I'd try something a little different this time... my game group just started in on Seafall, a so-called "legacy" game with a nautical theme, where the act of playing the game alters the game permanently for both the current session and future sessions.  I won't go into great detail on game mechanics and such (here is a handy video that covers that pretty well).  More interesting to me is where the game goes from that basic start point... and where better to post that than a little-viewed blog?  So, in case the title of this post wasn't clear enough, this is your final spoiler warning.  SPOILERS AHEAD!

The prologue is different from the main game.  Fresh out of the box, the game starts you out with four mostly-unexplored islands, and the stated goal for the prologue (gather enough glory to claim milestones that let you name each of the islands), combined with the relative ease of earning glory through exploration, says that one primary goal of the prologue is to populate the game board a little more thoroughly, making the coming games more dependent on skill and management rather than simple luck.  The fact that they use this as a no-long-term-detriment play session to get everyone familiar with the rules is brilliant, in my opinion.  Well, no major long-term detriment, at any rate, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Being seasoned gamers, the first players in our group quickly went after the few resources available on the opening round, which turned out to be a mistake.  Early-game exploration opportunities on a fresh board are plentiful, low risk, and guaranteed to earn you one glory for successful completion... plus, you get introduced to the "Captain's Booke", which adds a "choose your own adventure" element beyond the simple "you found a source of iron" that would otherwise prevail, and slowly introduces you to the lore of the game.  It's not just "subjugate the natives and take their stuff", you start to find bits and pieces that don't add up to a wholesome picture, whether that's odd coins in one place, or peculiar bones in another that the natives rush to prevent you from disturbing, or the natives wanting to meet you at the ruins of a port the 1000-year-dead Empire left behind, it's got the hallmarks of something Lovecraftian starting to come to life, but it's much too early to say what form it will finally take.

Once we clued in to the risk-reward of the exploration option, we went after it with gusto, finding more resource sites, naming our provinces, rulers, ships and advisors as we went.  Soon the milestones were falling, and we were all rewarded with the opportunity to name the islands, as well as entries detailing what was going on from the point of view of the provincial rulers and their underlings.  More stories of dreams of glory, grand things to come, that sort of thing... and then, we triggered the final milestone.  Turns out, whatever influence was in play must have gotten its hooks well and truly into the rulers of the provinces, as they basically all sailed west out of sight and were never seen again.  The provinces each blame each other for the loss, which brings each raiding the other, and it's in that environment that the new rulers are raised (so, the rulers you first selected from the initial batch of 10 are destroyed, and you choose from the remainder for the rest of the game).  So ends the prologue, with a little gut-punch for the players who've gotten attached to their leaders... and now, the game and players are really ready to play.

A new Japanese learning tool

About a year and a half ago, I posted some suggestions for people trying to learn Japanese who wanted to keep their costs down... and everything there still seems to hold up.  However, there's a new tool just on the market, from the makers of Human Japanese, that might provide some extra help with learning kanji in particular, called Satori Reader.

The basic description I would give is that it's a website where you can read a variety of articles on various topics in Japanese, but it's really more than that.  Much like the Human Japanese series, it includes full spoken audio for each article.  Past that, it's use of Kanji in articles is very customizable... you can tell the site what your level of knowledge is (be that by how commonly each kanji is used, by grade level, or from a custom list), and the site tailors the display of words based on your preferences (for example, hiragana if you don't know any of the kanji, kanji if you know all the kanji involved, and kanji with furigana if you know some of the kanji involved).  You can also pick out words and phrases for review, which the site offers to you in a flash-card-style format at intervals, in both English to Japanese and Japanese to English formats, based on how you tell it you did the last time you saw that card.  You can even export those words and phrases into external programs, but, as that's a feature I haven't tried, I can't speak to how useful it will be for you.

All that said, it's a pricier proposition than anything I've recommended to date.  While it does have a free trial option, they expect to charge $12/month, or $99/year, for everyone who signs up for it after mid-January.  Until then, they offer $7/month and $70/year options for "Founder Pricing", which is a little more bearable.  Personally, I expect I'm going to go with the $70/year option after the first of the year, which is at least reasonably close to the streaming anime subscription I use that started me on this path to begin with.  For the rest of you, hey, free trial, can only hurt so much to give it a look.

Now the ball's in Sony's court

It's been over 6 years since Sony decided to screw with their customers by removing Linux functionality from their PS3 line of devices without compensation.  I was none too pleased by that turn of events (as posted here), and decided that I was done with buying anything from Sony... and, barring the odd movie that might have come out where Sony's involvement wasn't readily visible up-front, I've been quite good at sticking with that decision.  It's with some mixed feelings then that I went ahead and submitted a claim, just now, for "class A" compensation under their lawsuit settlement process (which, on the very off chance somebody from the verification crew is wanting to make sure the post I submitted is really from a blog I control, my Claimant Number is F0CEDC52DF).

So, first off, any of you with the necessaries that somehow haven't heard, be sure to head to www.otherossettlement.com to make your claim before the December 7th deadline.

That said... if Sony makes good and pays out in full on my claim, they'll be the first company taken off my no-buy list that I can recall.  Honestly though, I'm expecting they'll kick me down to a "class B" claim, since the only proof I have that I actually used the PS3 Linux capability is a brief whine about repartitioning going poorly afterwards, because I never thought to post about playing NetHack on PS3 after having mentioned doing so on PS2's Linux kit prior.  Not that I'm going to rush out and buy a PS4 if they do pay up (6+ years of grudge doesn't slough off that easily), but at least it won't be a reflexive "hell no" if a Sony option does enter the mix.

No Man's Sky 1.1 - one way *not* to update

I considered not posting anything about this, but, hey, it's been a couple of months, ought to put something up, yeah?

Over the past weekend, the folks at Hello Games finally released what they're calling their Foundation Update (as in the foundation on which all their future fun updates will build), also known as version 1.1.  Finally got some play time in on it last night... the changes were a bit disorienting, but not bad per se.  However, it left me with the feeling that, whatever their prior plans and intents might have been, this game is now effectively an unannounced "early access" title.

I don't say that sort of thing lightly.  My last save pre-update was on an extreme radiation planet, but they re-generated the galaxy in the meantime, so I was punted back to the space station.  I went back to the same planet, and it's now an extreme cold planet (fun side story, I originally named that planet after my brother's ex-wife, then named it again for my brother post-update... both tags appear to refer to the same planet now, so, in some way, they're sort of "together" again).  While exploring that planet, I came across some Titanium, and was shocked to discover that I couldn't mine it now, not until I get an "advanced" mining laser.  That prompted me to take a closer look at my craftables and refueling options... most of the crafting seems to have similar requirements (usually adding a minor component where the original recipe only called for one material), but life support looks to charge off of Thamium alone now (as opposed to any isotope including Carbon, which at least made some sort of sense), and the pulse drive now runs on... Iron.  Simply put, an "update" to a game shouldn't alter the base mechanics of the game that radically, if it's a polished end-product.

It's not that the changes are bad or anything... I adapted pretty quickly to needing to gather more Iron for in-system travel, found and claimed a little base on a temperate little planet, landed on a freighter and quickly decided that it's out of my league, price-wise, for the foreseeable future, used my system scanner to get a preview as to what sort of minerals I would find on the various worlds in a system (which is very handy)... but the scope of changes in this first update tells me that I shouldn't invest too much time in this game at this stage of completeness, because things are still in flux as to what it's doing and where it's going, and there's other games I can play while this one works things out.

So, for me at least, I'm going to attempt what I can in the way of a "speed run" for the center of the galaxy now (already got my Atlas Stones), and, once that's done, set it aside until it's a little more fully baked.

Another no-buy: HP

I've been around for a while, so I remember when Hewlett-Packard (as it was then known) was a good company, producing quality products.  I got a LaserJet III used, abused it for a number of years, then passed it on as newer printers with better performance got ever-cheaper.  To my mind, that really stopped about the time HP merged with Compaq, and, given superior options pretty much everywhere, I haven't bought any of their gear in quite some time... but the possibility was still there, should things turn around, or a rare outlier on the quality curve happened to cross my rader.

Now, not so much.  HP Inc., as they are now known, first went and slipped a firmware update for their inkjet servers into the wild, which made them stop accepting refilled and third-party ink cartridges after a certain date... then, when they were called on it, they decided the "right" fix was to prepare an "optional" firmware update for people who know/care to fix what they broke.  At the same time, apparently, they're reserving the right to similarly break their printers in the future.

I'm with the EFF in thinking this is basically a bait-and-switch on their customers... and I won't, personally or professionally, support any company that stoops to that level.

Time for a little peevish whining

I'm comfortably middle-aged at this point, and I know one trap that's easy to fall into as you get older is to let life's little annoyances become your "small-talk filler" in lieu of anything interesting you're no longer doing.  Wouldn't want that... luckily, I have this mostly-barren blog to dump that sort of thing into!

First off, of greatest interest to any potential readers out there... apple pears.  Yes, this is a single fruit, a cross-breeding of two similar kinds of fruit.  I picked up a five-pack at Costco, just to give them a go.  My verdict:  don't bother.  They combine the worst aspects of their respective parents, giving you an oddly-colored fruit with a thick, not-quite-furry skin over a crisp-yet-almost-flavorless flesh.  I didn't even half-finish the one I bit into, and I tossed the whole batch.  You've been warned.

Then, after a long hiatus of pretty much just doing what I expect without issue, Comcast, specifically their Internet pricing.  I've been a constant customer of theirs for a great many years, since they first brought high-speed internet to my neighborhood, so I'm more-or-less "grandfathered in" on a 15Mbps downstream connection, where their closest "regular" speeds on their billing schedule are 10Mbps and 25Mbps.  As a bachelor living alone, 15 meg is plenty for me (since if there's any streaming going on, I'm the one doing it), so I'm in no rush to switch up.  Standard pricing for my area is $49.95 for 10 meg, and $59.95 for 25 meg, and my connection has been $52.95 for quite some time... setting aside any issues of pricing-structure validity in general, that price fell at a reasonable mid-point between the two values, based on what I'm getting.  For some reason, last month, that went up to $56.95, without any sort of notice... in fact, I missed it until I was balancing my credit card statement, even though I check their online billing system every month, so I've even got a little bit of nagging doubt that their system showed the increased price at the time of increase.  In the grand scheme of things, no, I'm hardly going to miss the extra $4 a month... but a price increase for no better apparent reason than "because we can", and with zero notice beforehand, when literally every other entity I pay a monthly bill to goes out of their way to notify their customers up-front that an increase is coming (yes, I actually went through my bills to determine that), well, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Well, enough whining for the time being... things to do, people to see and all that.