Easily Distracted has a great review of Star Wars Galaxies. I guess my fate is sealed.

(Thanks to Frogs and Ravens for the pointer.)

An excerpt:

SWG is, in my opinion, eventually will be the best of the current MMOGs on the market—but it is not a revolutionary design that takes the genre to new places. It is in some ways the BMW of the first generation of MMOGs, an impeccably built version of the core design ideas of the genre, with lots of bells and whistles and added features. But it is not racy or novel, and in certain ways, remains a bit staid. It is very much a MMOG, and nothing more. Some changes late in development also seem to me to be contradictory or problematic, and may need correction later.

Shared thought speculates:

I'm pretty sure that bodysnatchers have taken over our Supreme Court. The Court's latest ruling overturned the conviction of an adult male who performed oral sex on a 14 year old male...

Maybe on Monday the Court will reverse its Florida election decision that gave the Presidency to George Bush! You can always hope, right?

You know, I really, really hadn't thought of that possibility.

(By the way, as a matter of law, would it even be possible to overturn a decision of that nature? And what would it mean if it did happen?)

Happy Gay Day!

Still needed to get some work done, so, alas, I've been at home, waiting for the masses to return to the Castro, when I hope to rejoin them. Things are oddly sedate now.

Great article by Graff here. One of many interesting datapoints he cites:

In 1992, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 27 percent of Americans supported civil marriage rights for same-sex pairs; in 2001, an astonishing 47 percent did. And in a spring 2002 California poll by the firm Decision Research, 75 percent expected that within their lifetimes, same-sex pairs would win civil marriage rights. High-school students favor LGBT rights and same-sex civil marriage in much higher numbers and with even more conviction -- suggesting an entirely different political landscape for lesbians and gay men in 20 or 30 years.

Tom Ammiano just said that "Sandra Day O'Connor's watching Will and Grace really paid off."

Um, does she really?

Looking over the arguments from Lawrence v Texas, I was shocked to read this: one of the arguments that Texas offered in defense of the statute was that "the petitioners never even proved that they were gay."

Um, what do they have to do?

(This was part of an argument that they were attempting to make that the law was not against gay people having same-sex sexual relations, it was a law against anyone having same-sex sexual relations, gay or straight.)

One thing I've leaned playing MMORPGs: many, many people say "that's so gay!" and think that it's not in the least homophobic. Many people even spell it ghey to be clear about the distinction.

Does it fly?

The best example of this usage comes from the Simpsons (of course), when the bully Jimbo says to Nelson:

"You kissed a girl? That is so gay!"

Little things like Texas v Lawrence and gay pride in San Francisco have somehow distracted me from the launch of Star Wars Galaxies. I'd even forgotten that I'd pre-ordered it. It was delivered at work on Friday but I was at home then.

I'm terrified. Why oh why did I order this? Do I want to go spend so much time in the world that created Jar-Jar Binks? (Or is the appeal that you get to kill him, slowly, over and over?)

Mark says, alas, that the game is fantastic.

But if you've ever played one of these Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, you know what an astounding time-suck they can be. Note to David Foster Wallace: this is worse than TV. When you're not playing the game, you often find yourself combing the many message boards in fear of finding confirmation of the rumored upcoming nerf to your character class.

(And yet...I'm so tired of tirades about the shallowness of life on the net. Hooked, which I caught a couple of weeks ago at the gay film festival, is another depressing example of this kind of critique, complete with testimonials of people who say they hope, somehow, that they will maintain some vestige of "dignity" in spite of the fact that "the net is everywhere" and you can't escape it.)

And so the game sits on my desk at work...