Author: admin

These are some photos I’ve taken recently.

Another entry from the previous mikeschramm.com. I thought I was pretty clever when I wrote this back in 2004 or so.

Malcolm and the Scots rejoice at having found the head of their King, Macbeth. They hold it up! “Thanks to each one and to all at once” for this great effort, says Malcolm.

They carry it back to Macbeth’s body and resurrect him, pull their swords out of Macbeth’s body, pick up a bunch of tree branches and run back to Birnam Wood.

Macduff seems confused and angry, despite the victory. And he’s obsessed with born women for some reason. He yells a bit, but at the sound of trumpets, he runs away.

The resurrection has downsides. Macbeth is heartbroken and moans and whines about “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” and life being a brief candle until one of his servants comes in to tell him that Lady Macbeth has died. Suddenly, Macbeth feels much better.

Meanwhile, Macduff and his men arrive at Birnam Wood and reattach the branches to the trees.

Lady Macduff wakes up and finds out she is no longer dead. Still, she’s been through some trouble — she keeps talking about blood and spots. Macduff, having restored Birnam Wood, heads back to England just in time to find his son and wife meeting with a few murderers. Apparently they had stopped by a moment ago and accidentally left their knives sitting in Macduff’s son and wife. They retrive their weapons, apologize, and head home. Macduff, his Lady, and Junior enjoy some witty banter.

Macbeth meets with the Witches, who tell him that not only will he someday (in a future that’s now in the past) be killed by “no born woman of man,” but also that he won’t be dead until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane Hill.

“Suits me,” thinks Macbeth, feeling much better. “They just put it back a moment ago.”

He goes back to meet with Lady Macbeth and they chat for a bit. Lady Macbeth quickly brings in a banquet, and Macbeth seems pretty freaked out until the ghost of Banquo shows up. Macbeth asks if anyone else can see him, and they all say no, which isn’t surprising because Banquo’s ghost promptly disappears, leaving them to enjoy their meal. Macbeth gets much happier, starts to have a little fun at his coronation, and everyone has a grand old time.

Fleance and Banquo meet up with the murderers and give them back their knives, which they appear to have dropped in Banquo earlier. Banquo and Fleance, completely healthy, go back to the stables, and spend a wonderful day riding horses.

Earlier that morning, everyone’s going crazy over the killing of the King, Duncan. Macduff, specifically, is running around screaming how horrible it is. Macbeth tries to shut him up, but he just won’t stop, so the devil’s porter decides to shut both him and Lennox out of the castle for the night.

Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are also unsettled over the killing of the king, especially because every time they run water over their hands, blood keeps showing up on them. Finally, Macbeth decides to put a stop to it, and goes back into Duncan’s room. When he emerges, he’s holding a knife, the blood is gone, and Duncan is alive again. The king has returned!

After Macbeth is finished, he and Lady spent the better part of a night arguing. She questions his manhood, calling him “too full of the kindness of human milk.” Macbeth doesn’t have to put up with this — in the past few days, he’s been killed, resurrected, and given up the crown, along with saving both Banquo and Duncan’s lives. He’s a real hero!

He finds himself wishing his wife would go insane again, until he decides it’s probably better if he and Banquo take a little vacation to Duncan’s castle.

On the way, they’re met by the Witches, who say that Macbeth will soon be Glamis, Cawdor, and King of the Scots. “Been there, done that,” thinks Macbeth, who beckons Banquo and sprints away to go fight some wars (which he likes better anyway, to be honest). The Witches are left by themselves on the dark and lonely heath, blabbering about Hecate and her spirits.

Back at Duncan’s castle, Macbeth is honored for his prowess on the battlefield. Duncan goes on and on about what a great guy Macbeth is. He forgets to mention that he saved his life, but Macbeth is feeling better than he ever has and doesn’t worry about it. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow was yesterday, after all.

Macbeth decides a soldier’s life is the place for him, and heads back to the battlefield to do some heroics, away from Lady Macbeth, Macduff, Duncan, and pretty much all of Scotland. He sees the Witches on his way back, and gets out of there before they can make any more predictions. The play ends with the Witches onstage by themselves, chanting that “foul is fair and fair is foul.”

Back in the early days of mikeschramm.com, I would write little pieces here almost every day. This was one of them, a fun little flake of an idea that I turned into something fun at the time (and still relevant, I think, if a little precocious). This is a real album, and these song titles are real. This first showed up on my site on December 16, 2004, and it’s notable to me both because I still like it, and because it got a link on the old Defamer, one of the best sites in the badly mistreated (in my opinion) Gawker network.

ME: Lindsay, how are you? I wanted to chat with you about something, if I could.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Speak.

ME: Of course, of course. You don’t have to be so pushy about it. Ever since that remake of The Parent Trap, I figured you were a pretty nice, head on shoulders kind of girl. But then, of course, the rumors started…

LINDSAY LOHAN: Rumors?

ME: Yeah, you know. That you’re a crazy drinker, that you’re hanging out with Colin Farrell, that you went to a clinic, that you were hooked up with Fez for a while.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Over!

ME: Oh, right, sure — that’s finished now. But still, you have to admit that you’ve got your issues. Which makes me wonder, Lindsay, why America seems to be so ga-ga over you. Just today, I was at work, and some woman saw you on the cover of Entertainment Weekly naked but for stockings, and she went crazy. She was fed up with you– she gestured wildly right at me, and yelled “She”s only 18!” as if I had put you on that cover myself, wanting to rip you from your innocent childhood.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Something I never had.

ME: Well, sure, that’s a factor– you never really did have a childhood. Maybe it’s because you were a child star that you seem so hooked on fame. What other reason do you have for going on SNL this past weekend just to remind everyone that your breasts are real, or mention in every interview you have that drinking illegally in clubs at 18 “isn’t a big deal”? Maybe you’re just a little out of touch.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Disconnected?

ME: Right, disconnected. But I think the truth is more complex than that, Lindsay. The truth is, America wants it both ways. That woman went crazy because she was outraged that you were being made a sex object even though you’re underage. But while I’m sure plenty of guys are attracted to you (no straight guy will ever call a movie star redhead unattractive), I’m not so sure that’s why you’re popular. “Mean Girls,” though smartly written, wasn’t exactly a guy’s kind of movie, nor was “Confessions of a Drama Queen,” And I highly doubt that many red-blooded straight males are out there this week picking up your album “Speak.”

LINDSAY LOHAN: Nobody ’til you.

ME: No, I didn’t buy it either — I just copied the song titles off of it. But my point, Lindsay, is that I think America wants it both ways. They want a hot sexy star to idolize and put in their movies and live it up like they can’t. And on the other hand, they also want to be shocked that you’re naked on magazine covers and gossip about your breasts and laugh at you in the tabloids.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Anything but me!

ME: No, Lindsay, they want to laugh at you. They want you to be better than them, and yet they want to feel better than you. And, while you or other stars your age may disagree, that’s too much pressure to put on anybody that young. That’s what will cause you to party all night after working all day, or show up in weird places talking about things you have no right to. Frankly, you’re being used, and because you get in all the clubs for free and you get paid plenty of money, you probably don’t even understand that that’s true.

Of course, even if you figured it out, and decided to move in either direction– towards a Britney Spears kind of tabloid crazy, or a Mandy Moore kind of psuedo legitimacy, the public would realize that you’re not playing into their plan, and drop you off the magazine covers and charts. But that won’t happen, will it, Lindsay? Because where have your parents and managers told you you want to be on the charts?

LINDSAY LOHAN: First.

ME: That’s right. They’ve made you do anything you can, just so they can be in the shadow of your fame, and yet you’re paying for America’s (and their) needs. It’s a shame, Lindsay, it really is, and I only hope that you make it out of there with your mind (and your dignity) intact.

LINDSAY LOHAN: The very last moment in time.

ME: Oh, do you have to go? What is it, the new Herbie the Love Bug movie? Ok, Lindsay, I’ll let you go. Just know that you’re being pulled in two different directions at once, and if you don’t settle down and get your head on straight, you’re going to end up in even more rehab. Stay cool, girl. Stay cool.

I originally wrote this for Joystiq, and published it back on May 31, 2012. My enthusiasm for the game was fairly controversial at the time — Diablo 3 suffered from server issues, and a lot of people had a problem with the in-game Auction House (which basically connected a real-life currency value to each procedural item in the game). I stand by my original opinions, though, and Diablo 3 has sold over 30 million copies across lots of platforms.

Hack-and-slash action RPGs, pioneered by Blizzard’s Diablo, are essentially slot machines. You click the mouse, and every time you do there’s a chance you’ll get the loot you want. Yes, the trappings of role-playing and combat mechanics are there, weaker in some cases and stronger in others, but in terms of brain chemistry you’re playing for the jackpot.

As anyone who’s been to Vegas will tell you, there are different kinds of slot machines. There’s the rickety old unit sitting in the gas station near the airport. And there’s the junky Jokers Wild machines blinking and chirping in that one casino downtown, where the air smells too much like your grandmother’s bathroom.

And then there are the machines in that one room in the Bellagio, where velvet seats wait underneath crystal chandeliers. That’s where the shahs from Dubai come to play with thousand dollar tokens, where pretty ladies serve you drinks as you play, and where a private concierge will happily help you order up a steak, buy a Brooks Brothers suit, or get you anything else you might want. Blizzard’s Diablo 3 is that Bellagio room, high stakes and luxurious and ready to cater to your every dungeon crawler need.

The genius of Diablo 3 is in the pacing. While we haven’t seen a sequel to Diablo 2 in nearly thirteen years, Blizzard has been iterating on this type of gameplay all that time with World of Warcraft. And all that experience has given the developers an incredible sense of what players want and will do at any given moment.

At its core, Diablo 3 is a series of combat encounters and, when you realize just how carefully it’s put together, Blizzard’s expertise is staggering. Again and again, the pattern shows up: You see one wandering enemy, or a glimpse of light ahead, or a small glowing object you can interact with on the ground. You click to attack, or move forward, or interact. Suddenly, the enemy has friends, or that light opens up into a room full of bad guys, or that object spawns four huge creatures, who would just love to crush you.

You hammer away with your various weapons and abilities, your health constantly falling and being caught just perfectly by a well-timed potion or a random health globe, and just as you think you’re overwhelmed the tide turns, and enemies start dropping. After you pick off the last of the bad guys, what’s left is a small area scattered with gold and loot of various qualities. You grab them, wander away for a bit, and then notice, just offscreen, another pool of light, or a wandering enemy, and the whole process begins again.

This pacing works perfectly throughout a number of environments, and while, yes, all you’re doing is clicking and popping one of six abilities when needed, it never once gets old. That glimpse of what’s ahead never fails to push you forward, that triumph of winning in battle always excites, and that loot, that sweet loot, always falls right into your pack with satisfaction.

Diablo 2 was famous for its talent trees – long lists of class-based abilities into which you could put points – and that idea has spun off into countless other games (including World of Warcraft). But Diablo 3 smartly reduces basic ability choices into just six options, which themselves are unlocked as you level up.

Once fully open, the system is just as complex as the Diablo 2-style talent trees, but the pace of leveling and unlocking makes everything much easier to understand. You have one skill at level 1, at level 2 another one opens up, and as you level up abilities unlock just as quickly as you can learn how to make effective use of them. Later in the game, switching abilities out (which you can do whenever out of combat) becomes paramount: For crowds, you’ll switch to AoE, and bosses will have you picking single-target skills. The fact that you can easily and quickly narrow down exactly what you need from thousands of ability and rune combinations speaks to how powerful this new system is.

And no matter how you choose your abilities, using them is exhilarating fun. All of the particle effects and crashing and bashing sounds are just syntactic sugar on a loot-based slot machine, but it’s delicious. Blizzard’s legendary polish is brought to bear all the way through the game. Enemies animate beautifully, spells are clear and gorgeous even with four players on screen at a time, and, oh boy, the sounds! My Barbarian’s bash sounded almost like a cannon shot whenever I landed a mace right on the crown of a drooly demon’s head. The voice acting drips with charm as well, and lootable audio log items have you listening to stories almost the whole time.

For all of the hack-and-slash RPGs out there, no one has ever done the constant, grindy dungeon crawling battle as well as Blizzard has here. One segment in Act 3, called Rakki’s Crossing, is the most memorable action RPG battle sequence in recent memory. I had my Barbarian slicing through demons for a good twenty minutes, all while I laughed in glee at the carnage on the screen. Only at one point in Act 2’s wide open desert landscape does exploration slow the pace down a little too much for my liking. Throughout the rest of all four acts, it’s nothing but pure, glorious dungeon crawling.

There are four difficulty levels after Normal, and the game is designed to take one character through at least twice – the really good gear only starts to appear at the end of Normal, and some runes and skills don’t even open up until Nightmare. There are five classes that all play differently as well, from the revolting pets of the Witch Doctor to the dark ranged attacks of the Demon Hunter.

The game’s famously been attacked for requiring an Internet connection to play. Once you log in past Error 37 (an issue that’s hard to forgive, but forgivable nonetheless), you can see why that connection is there: Blizzard has not only closely integrated the game with an online auction house, but the social system is deep and powerful as well. You can see where your friends are playing at any time, and jump in or out with them on demand. Public games are easy to find and join, and every player only sees their own drops, so there’s never any fighting over loot. Quests are the only place where the social connection can fall apart: Entering someone else’s game puts you on their quest in the story, which can be confusing when you return to your own. But the out-of-game menus can easily let you go back to whatever you’d like to play.

The weakest part of Diablo 3 is the story. Again, Blizzard has learned a lot about storytelling from World of Warcraft, and it has worked hard to draw characters in this game with clear and interesting lines. The Followers (more or less required for single-player) each have their own memorable personalities, provide some excellent chuckles, and do a great job of pointing out more loot, or just filling out the environment (my Templar told me once that the ground in one demonic sanctum “yields like flesh,” providing quite a mental image).

Though Blizzard leaps into these personalities with style, it fumbles the landing. The game’s plot turns are almost comedically telegraphed (as World of Warcraft players know, anytime there’s a lot of power around someone will go mad with it), and the ending, at least to Normal mode, is as abrupt as a pop-up screen that tells you the game is over. The setting of the game is suitably epic, and there’s a lot of great characters to care about here, but most of them are forgotten by the the time the credits roll.

Of course, there’s undoubtedly more content coming. PvP content wasn’t included at launch, but is scheduled to show up in a free patch. And the real-money auction house (which may end up being the real legacy of Diablo 3) has been delayed past not only launch, but its planned debut date as well. There is already an in-game currency auction house up and running, but Blizzard wants to make sure the servers will stay up before real money starts getting passed around. If its current efforts to keep the game up are any indication, it may be a while.

Even without those features, however, Diablo 3 is a masterpiece. It advances the classic form of Diablo 2 past the World of Warcraft era, including its own versions of mechanics like crafting and the Auction House that worked so well in Blizzard’s MMO. At the same time, it remains Diablo – Torchlight added a pet that will sell items for you, among other innovations, but Blizzard has remained characteristically traditional on that. You go out, you kill monsters and pick up loot, you return to town to buy, sell, and upgrade. Rinse and repeat, forever and ever, amen.

These days, dungeon crawlers are everywhere – you can play them on any console, any operating system, any smartphone you can find. They’re like slot machines in Vegas: You’ll find tons of them, and all of them will give you that addictive rush of killing bad guys and leveling up, of dropping the coin and pulling the lever. With Diablo 3, however, Blizzard’s running the best room in town.

[Five Stars]

I wrote this to be the very first post on Massively, then a brand new site in the Weblogs Inc. network (then owned by AOL). First published on November 2, 2007.

This is it. The design is in place, our bloggers are trained and at the ready, and the password has been lifted from the site. Our brand new blog, Massively, is now live and ready for your perusal, your comments, your tips, and your eyeballs. Here, you’ll find breaking news about MMO games both upcoming and established, insightful and wisecracking commentary about your favorite worlds, tips on how to get all your characters in all those universes the best they can be, and the high level of quality you’ve come to expect from WoW Insider, Second Life Insider, Joystiq and the Fanboy network. This is Massively, and welcome to it.

“But wait,” you say, “we’ve already got tons of MMO sites out there. I’ve got sites I read for commentary, and sites I read for news. I’ve got dev blogs, community forums, and even sites that sift community forums for me. There are guide sites that have their own guide sites, and everybody and his cousin is already blogging about MMO videogames. Why do we need one more MMO blog?”

The answer is: because this is the place where all of those things come together, in one location; because of our commitment to producing top-notch original features; and because our incredibly talented staff of writers have spent as much time leveling their word-smithing skills as they have spent leveling characters in the virtual worlds we’re going to be covering.

We’ve got every MMO you play covered, from Age of Conan to World of Warcraft, and even about 400 you don’t (seriously, does anyone even play Planetside anymore? We hope all three of you will enjoy our posts about it). If you’ve ever read WoW Insider, we’re like “WoW Insider for more MMOs than you possibly have time to play.” If you’ve ever read Joystiq, we’re like “Joystiq for MMOs,” but even better, because Joystiq doesn’t do strategies and tips, and baby, we do.

And, of course, we’re a blog — and that means you as readers help us make the site a great place to go to for intelligent discussion about MMOs. We’re aiming to elevate the community, to spotlight the incredible culture that massively multiplayer games are producing, and to show off how talented and creative the fanbase is. Massively is your place to voice and share your opinions about the hottest topics in online gaming today.

We’re also working with some of the most successful developers in the business to bring you exclusives and interviews on some of your favorite games. Plus, there’s always the schwag — we’re going to kick off this site with a whopping two weeks full of contests. If you stick around and leave some comments, you’ll have the chance to win a metric ton of prizes, including beta keys, games, game time cards, special in-game items, game merch, an iPod, a high end video card, and even a 24-inch flatscreen monitor. Everything that developers give to us, we give away to you — it’s policy.

And we also get to break some rules. We’ve escalated the gold ad issue up the ladder to the suits who’ve never even heard of World of Warcraft and convinced them to let us remove the Google AdSense ads that, no matter how much we blacklist, keep turning up new power-leveling and gold selling ads. We’re taking a stand against gold ads and we hope you’ll support us by… reading us!

We’ve assembled an appropriately massive team of some of the best MMO writers out there, and we’re going to go in-depth, every day, on all the games and news you care about, and then some. So get involved — drop us a tip on what you think of the site, or a newsworthy item you want us to cover. Get involved in the discussions in the comments — if you’ve visited our other sites you’ll recognize that your login works just like it does with all the other Blogsmith-powered Joystiq network sites. If you’re new to the family, just leave a comment and click on your name to access your profile and change your custom avatar.

Add us to your RSS feeds or bookmarks folder, not only because you’ve definitely got to come back and check out our contests in the next week (seriously, we’re giving away another Murloc costume from BlizzCon!), but because we’re going to be hitting hard with non-stop, in-depth coverage of your favorite games.

Welcome to Massively!

This is probably my favorite piece that I wrote on the original mikeschramm.com website. Originally published back on February 14, 2005.

Godzilla was in America, and depressed.

His latest movie had opened and crashed within a weekend, and he had become the big, green laughingstock of Hollywood.

Godzilla sat in his hotel room and watched reruns of Miami Vice and The Commish and drank vodka until he passed out. In the morning, he would wake up, shower, and do it all over again.

Sometimes he would wander out to get something to eat at this diner down the road.

People would shout things at him as they passed.

“You suck, Godzilla!” is what they would say.

Sometimes they would throw things at him, sticks and beer bottles that they found on the side of the road.

And sometimes, they would stick their arms out in front and waddle back and forth slowly and say things like, “I’m Godzilla! Look at me! I’m Godzilla and I suck!”

Out of all the things they did, this hurt Godzilla the most.

At the diner, the waitress wasn’t ever friendly to him, and always brought his food late, and put it down without saying anything. Godzilla would pay his check and leave without talking to anyone. He heard snickers and whispers as he walked by the other patrons.

“‘Zilla, baby,” said his American agent, a fat man named Harvey (Godzilla didn’t know if it was his first name or his last name).

“‘Zilla,” he would say, “I gotta say– things don’t look good. I want to give it to you up front, I think you’re talented– you’ve got name recognition, and that’s good. But there isn’t a lot of call for big green lizards right now. Especially one that’s.. uh… iffy at the box office.”

Godzilla would sigh. Godzilla sighed a lot when he talked to Harvey.

“‘Zilla,” Harvey would say, “I’ll call you when something comes. I mean, don’t wait up or nothing. But I’ll call.” Godzilla sighed and hung the phone up, then opened another bottle of vodka.

Something was missing, he thought as he swallowed a gulp and the familiar warmth spread through his throat, stomach, tail, and scales.

Something was missing, and he didn’t know what it was.

One morning, he woke up and it was dark outside. It was probably evening, actually– he lost track of time, none of it ever mattered. He decided to walk to the diner and try to get some coffee and, maybe, perspective.

He walked down the street, which was empty.

It must have been very late at night. He made it to the diner, and looked in the lit windows, saw the ugly guy behind the bar that always stared at him, saw the mean waitress.

He decided maybe going to the diner wasn’t what he needed. But he didn’t want to go back to the hotel.

So Godzilla walked on, through the streets of Los Angeles. He walked past the video stores and all night doughnut shops and clubs.

He walked towards the beach, past the surf shops and clothing boutiques, all closed up, lifeless, and dark in the deep of night. He made it to the beach, and walked across the sidewalk, over the grass, out onto the sand.

Godzilla stopped and looked at the water, the sand, the sea, the sky.

The water splashed against the grains he stood in, and he dug in deeper to the solid wetness beneath him. Something is missing, he thought. Something I have to find. And Godzilla took a step toward the water.

And then another and another, until he was running through the tide, and jumped in and swam.

He swam away from the beach and America, from his terrible movie and the jerks who made fun of him and the man named Harvey who always told him things didn’t look good. Godzilla swam.

He swam for hours and then for hours more. The sun rose behind him, and he swam until it set in front of him. It looked beautiful, the red sky and clouds reflected in the water.

Godzilla knew this was right, that what he wanted was this way. He swam some more.

And then, maybe three or four days later, he saw something on the horizon.

It was a series of bumps rising from the line between the sea and the sky.

He swam harder and faster, and the bumps grew and defined themselves, turned into pillars, with shorter pillars around them.

He swam closer, and the pillars grew lights and shapes. They were buildings.

Godzilla swam closer.

It was Tokyo.

He reached shore, and the Japanese went crazy.

They didn’t throw bottles at him or make fun of him.

Instead, they were terrified.

Old men and schoolgirls pointed and ran around and screamed things like, “Gojira! Iz tan poko Gojira! AAAAAHHH!!”

Godzilla roared.

He knocked over a few buildings, stepped on some Hondas. He even knocked out a few planes with his radioactive breath.

And, from one of his lizard eyes, a tiny tear fell.

It was a tear of happiness.

Godzilla was home, and he had found love.