Modern Warfare 2: I Played It

And I played it more…mostly in multi-player.  The single-player campaign was, in my opinion, trite and overwrought.  Modern Warfare 1 succeeded for me on the basis of having an elegant story with a few interesting twists and a significant break from standard game narrative meta-rules.  Modern Warfare 2, by contrast, tried to do both too [...]

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Icecrown Citadel Gating: It’s like Artificial Preservatives for Raids!

I haven’t really had much economics I’ve wanted to talk about.  Frankly, most of my thinking has been nebulously about some weird policy proscriptions and microeconomics – none of it really firm enough for a full post.  My gaming has consisted of flips between Dragon Age, Mass Effect (yeah, I’m late to the party), and [...]

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Activision: No Horse is Ever Truly Dead

Apparently, Activision will never be sure that a horse is dead: they can always rig it with bionics and a robot brain, or infuse it with eldritch energies, binding its decayed flesh to their dark purpose.  So they really will never, ever stop beating it.

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Hungarian Giant Robot MMORPG

Perpetuum looks like a strange mashup of Battletech robots and dropships with Eve-online.  Some of its bullet points include real-time flora alteration (planting/harvesting/burning in a mighty conflagration that you might see the tears of your enemies glisten in the flickering embers of your strength) and deformable terrain.  The designer in me says those are both [...]

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Think These Work on Arthas?

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Another data note: Employment and Seasonal Adjustments

Barry Ritholtz over at the Big Picture is normally a guy I agree with.  He’s smart and obviously has a far better grasp on how equity and asset markets work than I do.  However, today I’m going to quibble with him (and, via proxy, Floyd Norris) over their interpretation of Non-seasonally adjusted Non-Farm Payroll data.  [...]

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Debt Deflation and the Current State of the Household Balance Sheet

I’ve been reading over recent GDP, employment, S&P 500 data, etc., mostly checking for YoY changes, etc.  I was doing this in response to a series of posts by Gevlon regarding his bets on a coming crash in the Western World due to progressive automation of low and medium skill work.  It wasn’t, however, his [...]

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Jesus was Totally a Capitalist

Under the entertaining headline “Profit `Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, After Goldman Invokes Jesus”, Bloomberg released an article detailing efforts of three executives to justify the profits of bankers as compatible with Christianity.  I’m not really interested in judging the success of their efforts, however I am forced to applaud this particularly ballsy rhetoric: “The injunction [...]

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Some basic economic points

Sometimes I simply can’t help myself.  I feel obliged to note some rather glaring lacks in the sophistication of the arguments of others.  Fact of the matter is the world is complex: other perspectives may hold sway, and you may be wrong.  If you’re convinced of your correctness, you’re DEFINITELY going to be wrong.  And [...]

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Why I might venture back into Azeroth for 3.3

Random dungeon in cross-realm LFG.  Seriously.  If Blizzard is correct that cross-realm LFG lowers time waiting for a PUG, then the concept of being able to queue for a dungeon run, much like queuing for a BG, would be enticing.  That this would include the new dungeons, while providing decent badge rewards is merely icing [...]

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