Interview with Jonas Luster regarding Addons in Allods Online

Some of you mmorpg news followers may know this next name. Or maybe you open source lovers! I have had the pleasure of interviewing the one and only Jonas Luster. Without further ado, here is the interview with Jonas Luster:

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Not much to tell about me. I got a degree in social psychology, left that field to join the dot.com craze in 1998, worked as an Open Source project manager (yes, paid , game designer, that stuff, and left in 2006 to completely forsake all reason and job security to become a chef. I still code, quite a bit, and appear every once in a while on the scene to act as if I know a thing or two about MMOs.

You have a history in mmorpgs, care to share a bit about that history?
I started innocently enough, trying to impress a flame of mine in college. She spent her free time, instead of bars or parties, online playing a MUD called Tropolis. That was 1993, and I (a psychologist by trade) knew nothing about MMO and MUDs. But to impress her, I learned C and started coding for the MUD. Suffice to say, she didn’t fall for it. From MUDs I moved on to UO, EverQuest, played some more obscure ones when I got my hands on them, and finally got into the WoW closed beta and from there into WoW. These days I share time between Allods Online, Warhammer Online, and sometimes log into WoW from a friend’s computer, but it’s not even installed anymore .

You have written several addons for other games. Why do you take the time to write these addons?
The first AddOn I wrote, Lootso, was exclusively an attempt to resolve tensions within the guild I was in. People claimed favoritism when we first attempted Molten Core in WoW, and I needed a way to somehow prove there was none. From there on, I stumbled upon the abandoned project files for FlexBar, which a guy named Dagar had taken over but didn’t didn’t have time to work on. So I took over, learned a lot about Lua, WoW programming, and working under a restricted API as opposed to the very open MUD development. I also kind of learned to deal with a few hundred to thousand users who didn’t think of me as a developer but as a provider of services.

Warhammer AddOns I write to overcome some of the less optimal design decisions. In general, I try to improve visibility and data accessibility with my work, not to automate game play. FlexBar might have gone a … little(!) … too far, there .

Allods Online does have minimal addon support at this time. Do you dislike or like the current system so far?
From what I can see, and let’s keep in mind that there’s no official word from the Developers or CMs yet, AddOns are possible but have to be in a packed binary format (.pak). For the obvious reasons, hacks and sneakiness being some of the big ones, I dislike that. I am very, very, happy that there seems to be AddOn support and I’ll jump in like no tomorrow the day we have an official word on the future of this feature.

What do you like the most about making an addon for Allods Online?
Right now? Simply the fact that it’s like being on a Safari. I know most of the basics, know how to code things, but the API, the language have to speak to communicate with the game, is completely foreign to me. So there’s lots of trying and learning, and that’s very exciting. In a sense it’s more exciting than playing my Warden .

What do you dislike the most about making an addon for Allods Online?
Again, right now it’s the lack of certainty as to if this feature is supported and if it will persist. The staff on the forums has been nothing but nice and helpful, but there’s no one we could ask, at the moment, if we wanted to learn more.

What can the Allods Online team do to make addon support better in their game?
I think an official word on the future of AddOn support would be a great first step. Something along the lines of “sure, it’s not supported yet, but you’re not treading in dangerous waters or working on something we’ll shut off in six weeks”.

Anything in other mmorpgs addon supports you’d like to see with Allods Online?
Both WoW and WAR as well as ROM (Runes of Magic) have official words on what an AddOn can and can’t do, that and how much they support it, and what our responsibilities as authors are. Other than that, a well documented access to both the look and feel and the datafeeds in-game, that’d be … heaven

Why do you prefer Lua over Pak?
Well, Allods Online AddOns are written in Lua as well, however the code files and resources (graphics, sounds, etc.) are then packed into one file with a .pak extension. Where this gets problematic is simply with peer review and critical oversight. WoW addons are read by a lot of people who’d never write their own. From curiosity to, yes, paranoia .

Here’s hoping that once (if) the AddOn support in Allods becomes more of a maintream thing, they’ll rethink that.

A big thanks to Jonas for taking the time to doing this interview. . Also be sure to check out this interview by Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV of Jonas Luster and his son that can kick your ass in PvP apparently. o.o.

[Via http://novogradtimes.com]

50 Cent’s Co-Author, Robert Greene, Got a Story to Tell

Lil Kim said it best, “Money, power, respect… That’s the key to life.” In hip-hop especially there are no greater motivational tools than those three. Dissect the importance of each, and you’ll see that the first and third are byproducts of the second. And there are few scholars out there with more knowledge on how to obtain power than writer Robert Greene. A New York Times best-selling author, Greene is best known for his 2000 book, The 48 Laws of Power, which has become a guiding force behind the dollar-chasing pursuits of Wall Street types and politicians, as well as music industry elite.

Perhaps Greene’s biggest rapper-fan is Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, whose appreciation for the Los Angeles-born scribe’s work culminated in their collaborative text, The 50th Law. Released this past September, the book breaks down the key to triumph as a not-too-simple conquering of one’s own fears. To compile the nearly-300-page tome, Greene shadowed 50 for six months back in 2007, everything from attending meetings alongside the megastar to spending time at his Connecticut mansion. XXLMag.com recently caught up with Greene to discuss his time with the rapper/mogul who directly inspired The 50th Law. His insights may just paint a whole new Curtis Jackson picture.
XXLMag.com: How did you and 50 first meet to work on this book?

Robert Greene: Someone in his team had reached out to me in, I think it was early 2006. He’d read The 48 Laws of Power [and] found it very helpful, dealing with the music business, like a lot of other rappers. So, he wanted to meet me. I didn’t precisely know why at that time; I thought he was thinking about a book, and also there was all that stuff going on with Game, and he wanted to talk about that, which we did talk about. We met in this steakhouse in Manhattan, [in] the backroom. He had his entourage of about 10 people, and I was just by myself. [Laughs].

XXLMag.com: That must have been intimidating?

Robert Greene: His son was there, and his manager and agent and a few others. It was really good. I didn’t know what to expect, so I was a little surprised. He was more open, and he wasn’t intimidating at all. And I think I wasn’t what he was expecting—he was probably thinking this old man, kind of like Henry Kissinger, and I wasn’t like that. So I think we were both surprised, in a good way. We felt really comfortable.

XXLMag.com: Where you even familiar with 50’s music at that time?

Robert Greene: Well, I knew his music. When I was writing my 33 Strategies of War… sometimes, when I write my books, I like to have a bit of an aggressive energy, particularly when I was writing the war book. Sometimes, I just would wake up and it wasn’t there. 50 was one of the few hip-hop artists that I would put [his music] on and it put me in the kind of war-like mood.

XXLMag.com: Any songs in particular?

Robert Greene: Well, there were things like “Position of Power” and “My Toy Soldier,” and “Hustler’s Ambition.” I had Power of the Dollar, somebody had passed it to me secretly, and there were some songs I really liked. I don’t have it in front of me, but I had the hard stuff. And the one where he’s really dissing Ja Rule…

XXLMag.com: “Back Down.”

Robert Greene: Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff I like—the nasty stuff. So, I knew his music that way. Then, before I met him, when I knew the meeting was coming, I got a copy of From Pieces to Weight and devoured that. I think it’s a great book; I found it inspiring… When you first meet him, you’re kind of expecting that “gangsta,” intimidating presence, and I think he uses that to an effect. He knows that most people, particularly White guys like myself, when we first meet him we’re expecting that, and he uses that to his advantage, because it’s very disarming when you realize that he’s not. So my first impressions were, at first, he’s really nice and charming. He’s not like all ego-ridden. He looks you in the eye when he talks to you.

XXLMag.com: Earlier you said when you guys first started talking that he spoke to you about the Game situation. Was he looking for advice on that?

Robert Greene: I don’t think he was looking for “advice,” per se. Because, who am I to give him advice? But, maybe he was. We talked about it, for sure. To be honest with you, I wasn’t too up on the situation. I knew that there was a beef going on, but what was behind it? How did it start? I really didn’t know. So, talking about it then, what I would’ve said knowing what I know now about the whole thing, it would’ve been different. So I don’t know if my “advice” was particularly insightful at that time. That’s when I thought he was a very crafty person. He was really strategizing in a hardcore way, about how to make this guy go away. Not in the Mafia sense, but how to end [the problem], so it doesn’t turn into this mutually destructive war… I was impressed about how he was weighing certain options and not just going with raw emotion, because you’d expect someone with the persona that he projects—which really isn’t who he is—that he would be looking for something kind of ultra-aggressive. That’s the entertainment part of 50. The real 50 is much more strategic.

XXLMag.com: In order to write The 50th Law, you trailed 50 for nearly six months straight. Do any memories from that time stand out in your mind as being exemplary of his character?

Robert Greene: I remember we would talk about how he had learned to adapt to the business world. A lot of the book, at first, and even as it came out, was about him as a hustler on the streets and how that translated into working in corporate America… He said that he was always learning on the job. He noticed that Lloyd Banks, whenever he would be in a meeting, would be kind of surly, and didn’t want to talk to anyone. But because of that, people would always be trying to please him, and giving him attention, thinking he was upset and they needed to win him over somehow—but that’s just his personality. 50 noticed that he needed to talk less in these meetings, and act a little bit like he wasn’t totally happy, and then people would work harder to please him—a little psychological ploy. Then we went into a meeting and I saw him do exactly that. [Laughs] This group of four or five very conservative White people from the Midwest. He did a little seduction number on them, making them feel like he wasn’t totally happy with what they were offering, and it worked like a charm, just as he told me it would.

XXLMag.com: In the book, you talk about how the infamous throwing-the-plasma-TV-out-the-window incident, in response to his “Follow My Lead” video prematurely leaking online back in August of 2007, was staged, and how that showed his tactfulness, in a way.

Robert Greene: That was an amazing thing to watch, because I got to see how he handles a crisis, and how calm he was compared to everybody else, who were like chickens with their heads cut off. [Laughs] He came up with this kind of weird, made-up problem of him getting angry, and the television screen and all that, which I thought was really quite smart. And then, the next day, the management team at Violator had a meeting about this, which I attended, and they were really not happy with what he’d done, because their whole method of handling it was to suppress the video, and he had done the opposite. So there was this confrontation—not angry or anything. They were telling him, “You just can’t do that kind of thing,” and he was telling them, “No, the story is already out there. I’m not going to, like, stop something that’s already out there. You have to make a story out of it.” I thought it was really indicative of how he operates.

XXLMag.com: Another side of 50’s personality is that he seems to fully embrace this “bad guy” role that he’s been put into. How do you think that helps him as an artist?

Robert Greene: Well, it helps him, but it [also] hurts him, and that’s a real strategic bind that he’s in. It’s the entertainment character that he created, and it’s kind of a cartoon character, which he’s done all on purpose. He knows that he can’t be too subtle when you’re a celebrity like that. People want a good guy, a bad guy… You can’t be a mix, or they get confused. So he plays it up, particularly in those very public beefs that he seems to always choose. But then, on the other hand, you start getting older and you can’t keep doing that forever… Younger people come up. And it’s also just not the space that he’s in right now. He’s in this very comfortable world. So you can’t keep doing it forever. You get stale and people will grow bored with it. He’s trying to figure out how to keep that.

XXLMag.com: You think so?

Robert Greene: You know, the music sells when it’s more aggressive. He knows that. The ballads and the soft stuff, although I think is good and he likes it, just doesn’t have what people seem to be looking for. So he knows his audience, he knows what people want, and he’ll play that up, but at the same time, he has to figure out a way out of that. He has to figure out how in five-to-ten years he’s going to morph into this interesting business mogul. He just can’t keep doing it… He’s really hyper aware of how it works, how he can use that aggressive edge, and how if it can’t how he has to adapt it. Unlike a lot of rappers, who becomes sort of prisoners of their image, he’s thinking about it. He’s trying to solve it some way

[Via http://iamnotarapperispit.wordpress.com]

Mistake # 98: End the year unprepared for the next budget year

I’m just not going to make it, and I’m scrambling. I need to have people in place to make next year rock and roll, and it isn’t going to happen. I’m trying, but, with the holidays, me working from afar during the two weeks of the holidays, it is going to be a rope walk. Not having the right people in place means that I do some of the work, pulled from what I should be doing. Just two weeks ago, I had to pull together a proposal that a sales person didn’t follow through on. He submitted less than mediocre work, and I had to jump in to salvage it prior to delivery. That is not good.

The people you have on your team need to be stellar – they need to be rock stars to make the company a rock star.

Rock on!

[Via http://redditto.wordpress.com]

Five questions for Taylor Gordon

Name: Taylor Gordon
Title: Freelance Ballet Dancer
URL: www.taylorgordononline.com

Photo by Arthur Coopchik

1.   Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in a small town about an hour outside of Boston.  But if anyone asks, I’m from Boston;  I spent more time going in and out of the city for ballet class, at Boston Ballet School,  than I did at home anyway . The commute and the drone of small-town life was not appealing,  so the summer I turned 15 I moved alone to The Rock School, a ballet boarding school in Philadelphia.

Though I had known New York was the place I wanted to be since my first trip here around age 7, (to a dance competition at the magical Marriot Marquis in Times Square), Philadelphia was a decent place to grow up fast.  I spent two long years there, graduated from high school at age 16, and immediately signed up for my first New York apartment: a college dorm in midtown Manhattan. This is my 5th year in NYC.  It’s home, and I hope I’m here forever!

2.    Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

Is it cheesy if I say The Nutcracker? I first saw Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker when I was probably 4 or 5 years old and my parents say I was just mesmerized by it. Two years later I danced my first season onstage in that same production, and it was the start of my obsession with performance.  All I did was stand there as a “doll” during the battle scene, but oh, that stage.  If it wasn’t already clear, I knew then that I wanted to dance forever. To this day when I see or hear Nutcracker music playing it has a huge influence on me…

3.   What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

It depends on the day.  There are so many things I want in life.  Some days I wish I could sing.  Some days I wish I could not worry so much about the future.  Some days I wish I were blonde.  For me life is constantly about the pursuit of those skills, talents, attributes, and whatnot that are so elusive.  I think it’s boring if you’re simply satisfied with what you have.

4.   What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

Right now I am fortunate – SO fortunate – enough to be making a living from my dancing. I’m currently dancing in my 2nd season of The Radio City Christmas Spectacular as an ensemble dancer.  It’s an insane schedule and a physically grueling job,  but I can’t express how thankful I am to be an employed dancer – at least for 3 months of the year.

A normal day depends on what our show schedule is like. If we have only 2 or 3 shows that day (the norm) I start my day with ballet class.  Most of the rest of  the cast thinks I’m crazy for getting up and dancing even more than we have to.  My body needs it though, and I love my teacher.  Her class gets me set for the day.

Then I’ll usually grab lunch and/or more coffee,  and head to the theater.  Hair and makeup take about half an hour, then I check emails for another half an hour, and then at our half hour call I start to get dressed and stretch a bit for the first show. That process repeats for 2, 3, or 4 shows a day. Home – crash – repeat the next morning.

5.    Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art?  What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

I don’t know that I’ve ever had to make an extreme either – or decision between the two.  I like to find some kind of compromise.  I think the biggest fork in the road I’ve faced so far like that was deciding to go to college right after high school, whereas many ballet dancers on a  path similar to mine opted out.  I had a strong interest in writing/journalism, and I really didn’t want a degree in dance, so in my 3 years of college/grad school I chose to bombard myself with work and pursue a double life:  work in publishing through many, many internships on top of school work, while simultaneously training 30 hours a week at Ballet Academy East, a professional ballet school.  It wasn’t easy to find that balance between work and art, but it’s always been worth it to me.

[Via http://culturebot.org]

What are crystal children?

On her website, Swiss crystal child Lena speaks about crystal children: Each person has 7 senses but most of them don’t know them or don’t use them. Crystal children are similar to Indigo children. The aura of Crystal children shines in all pastel colours. Their energy is clear, calme, peaceful and they radiate a lot of love. They are very sensitive and can feel the emotions of other people, feel energies and thoughts. On the other side they are very sensitive and get hurt very soon. They are peacemakers. Because they don’t like fights, they do everythin with love and respect. The Crystal children have a big knowledge. For example they know what they did in past lifes, what happens with people, why they are ill or where their way goes and so on. That’s why they are a bit bossy and don’t like teacher so much. They don’t like if other people instruct them because they know it already. The Crystal children like nature and animals very much; they are very important for them. They know about their feelings and are very clear about what happens in their body or in their life. They love everything. To the angels, ghosts and invisibly friends they have a good contact and can talk to them. Telepathy is easy for them. The eyes of Crystal children are mostly big and shiny. They can talk with their eyes.

For those of you who are interested in the subject, Lena (23) will give a one hour LIVE interview on 2012 and beyond this Friday evening, December 11th at 9 pm CET (8 pm GMT, 3 pm EST). Don’t miss it!

[Via http://inspiringnews.wordpress.com]

10 Questions for Glee Co-Creator

brad falchuk

Did you know someone besides Ryan Murphy helped create Glee? I didn’t, until now.

Wired.com sat down with co-creator Brad Falchuk (there is a third creator, Ian Brennan, as well). Interviewing him was Curtis Silver, known to wired.com readers as GeekDad. Man, this show is reaching everyone!

Read the interview to get all 10 answers, especially to my favorite question (and a controversial topic amongst fans and foes alike): I’ve noticed that sometimes it seems (clearly) that the songs are being lip-synced — though actually sung by the actors right? And other times, it seems like they are actually singing while filming. I’m not going crazy right, that is happening?

Just so you know, spoilers were off limits during the interview, so you’re okay in that area!

[Via http://clubglee.wordpress.com]

Kanye West - VH1 Storytellers (Artwork)

Def Jam is releasing a DVD/CD package of Kanye West’s VH1 Storytellers performance on January 5th, 2010.

The DVD contains over 70 mins of performance footage from Kanye plus a special Q&A interview piece. The CD contains the live audio of the 9 song performance set that aired on VH1.

[Via http://iamnotarapperispit.wordpress.com]