Gabriel's World of Warcraft account got hacked, which (as a practical matter) means that this guild got hacked, and the deep vault of its guild bank tranched, and his character left to shiver nude in some digital hedge. Panel One was a literal conversation, and it's a little spooky to think of some malevolent force in control of your character. I'm talking about something separate from the acts they commit, which tend toward the upper bound of nefarious. I mean that, for anyone else logged on, it was Gabe. Did they greet this monster?
Did he reply?
Gabriel - or Mike, as he was known then - had his car broken into and all of his CDs stolen, I believe on more than one occasion. The process was greased into effortlessness by the large binders people once kept music in, before virtually every person you know carried portable hard discs or solid state media with them everywhere they went.
I'm starting to realize how long ago this was.
What's important is that he felt substantially more violated by the account hack, even though the other theft took place in the actual world, because he's been playing this game for more than six years and those years are (in some strange way) captured in the comings and goings of these electronic dolls. He got all of his shit back, and more importantly all of the people he plays with got all their shit back, their motes and their God Pelts or whatever you're being asked to collect now. He's got an Authentimicator installed to stand vigil over his credentials and over his clan's immense mystical wealth. But he had to take that machine to ground - looking over the byzantine cryptographic soup that was his password, it wasn't hard to imagine a keylogger or some other scrying instrument in residence on the machine. That part may be worse; the ur-treachery that contains the other treachery within it. That kind of surveillance has its own psychic payload. Plus, he's into some weird stuff. I used to live with him; I know the kinds of shit he gets up to.
Outside of Gaijin's reliably awesome shit, I don't spend a lot of time or money on WiiWare. It's not an assessment or some pointed analysis of the content on there, it just doesn't occur to me - the browsing experience on there was never especially inviting, and it's just not the way I think of the device for whatever reason. That is the machine I turn to exclusively for Teen Elves, daring Italianos, and Samus Aran. For some reason, though, RedLynx (who you may know as the Trials Guys) is releasing something called MotoHeroz exclusively on WiiWare. It is a game that is about (near as I can tell) Monster Trucks and Happiness, and I want very must to go to there.
(CW)TB out.
