I've been meaning to do this for sometime now, and tonight I'm too tired to focus the effort needed to blog about code, so I'm going to blog about blogs. (They say it's the only real way to make money blogging) Behind the Keys will be a series of posts (I hope) on people I've never met, yet read their blogs daily.
Scott Jennings (known to some as Lum the Mad, but more on that later) blogs at BrokenToys.org. He works as a developer in the MMORPG "field" of gaming. (That's Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). He's earned fame in the Internet for his rants, proven by the existence of a Wikipedia entry just for him.
Back in 1996-98 I was stationed in Korea and getting back into computers and programming. I was attending Univ. of Maryland (Asian Division) for a CS degree, but was busy buying books from Amazon because the classes, well... sucked. I was also busy getting together for heavy warfare lan parties. Last, I was following the release of this new game, Ultima Online (UO).
UO is really the first MMORPG (there were other games like it, but not "massive") to be released. It was great and fun, but like many firsts in software it was bug filled. I didn't mind so much, I was having a good time. Some complained. Some were quite vocal. Some ranted in newsgroups. Some started websites devoted to slamming the game daily. Scott fell into that last category.
Now it wasn't the content of the rants that drew me to his website, after all I was enjoying the game. It was his writing style. Scott would post (in what we termed Lum-esce) a scathing rant on this game mechanic, or that developer and under seemingly random words would link out to other websites and images. Sometimes it would be linking a developer's name to a Dan Quayle photo, sometimes to a kitten. Actually, there were lots of kitten links and they didn't always make sense. Scott did this long before Colbert did "The Wørd", and he did it just as well.
Another thing I like about Scott's site was he wrote the publishing system himself. There was no WordPress system to download, in those days you rolled your own or went without. I don't know for sure, but I think this helped him land a job at Mythic as a Junior developer, working on Dark Age of Camelot - another MMORPG I've played and enjoyed.
Of late, Lum has either been killed or brainwashed against us (the gamers). Scott has now been in the machine for sometime and is suffering inside the bottle syndrome. His rants of late are at gamers (to be fair, there are a high number of stupid ones). Part of this also may be that you can't really rant on a company you work for, and ranting on a competitor's product could trigger a lawsuit - or a warning from a lawyer. Scott said it best though when he wrote "please direct all complaints about me being a sell-out corporate whore to www.I Don't See You Paying For My Health Insurance.com". I used to work solely with OpenSouce, and now it's all Oracle and Microsoft - I feel ya Scott.
Perhaps the greatest irony is Scott now works at NCSoft, which is run by Richard Garriott (aka Lord British).
Oh, right... not all of you played UO and are hard core gamers. Richard was the man that wrote the Ultima series and had the crazy idea to create Ultima Online (MMORPGs are now a multi-billion dollar industry). I'm sure they just laugh about the good old days when Scott slammed Richard's game daily... but I do bet there are time when the janitor's cart is left in front of Scott's desk, and Scott gets a little nervous if it means anything...
Posted By Mike On Thursday, December 07, 2006
Filed under life profile |
Comments (2)
Perry
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Thursday, December 07, 2006
12:50:41 PM
My comment is about your inspiration to write about those "behind the keys," and it is very favorable. I like your idea, perhaps because I've thought of doing the same thing to introduce my readers [both of them ;-)] to those websites that are in my RSS feeds. So although I haven't implemented my inspiration as yet and you have already started yours, the thing I think our ideas have in common is that they provide subject material for blog posts when you inevitably hit the wall as a writer and become blocked.
I think it is helpful to think in categories when thinking about "what to blog" -- a topic I know we plan to tackle in January at our Knoxbloggers meeting. So let's use this post of yours to illustrate that particular concept. As we could use Barry's "Friday feast" to illustrate another type of categorical post. I know such posts are formulaic, but sometimes when you're stuck, you need a formula to get yourself out of the block.
Tish
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Saturday, December 09, 2006
1:44:52 AM
I love the "Behind the Keys" idea! :)
