The Internet is full of haters. Haters hate. Nothing you can do. But what has surprised me over the years is seeing cliques of haters. That is, specific groups of people who are friends who get off on trying make someone else miserable.  It’s a stunning thing to see on message boards I lurk on from time to time.

I’m on the plane now lurking on various gaming and tech forums and I just feel disgusted when I see what is a reasonably organized effort to harm some other forum goer for whatever reason. Usually, the target is someone who definitely leaves themselves open for it. Maybe they look weird or post way way too much about their Furry thing or what have you. But in most cases, the target has done nothing to these people other than being an easy target.

It really saddens me when it’s people who are in my industry doing it.  The closest personal experience I’ve had to deal with was when a group of people like that smeared my book on Amazon.com (and one making a stand alone web review under the guise of objectivity when it was actually a pretty transparent effort to “avenge” her husband’s banning for stalking me on a particular web community.   This was awhile back.

And we’re not talking about dumb people here. We’re talking about highly intelligent people who choose to spend effort to make the world a little crappier of a place.

It’s called Aerotitus. And it sucks.

Every time I fly I get vertigo. Every time.  When I was a kid, I had a lot of ear infections and is messed up my Eustachian tubes.  So when the plane takes off or lands, my ears plug up and I get vertigo.

Over the years, I’ve tried pretty much everything to address it.

Gum chewing. Pinching my nose and blowing air. Yawning. Decongestants.  Nasal Sprays. Ear plugs. Patches. Ginger. Asperin. You name it.  They all help to be sure.  But they don’t eliminate it. They just make it less horrific. And sometimes, like today’s flight, it is still pretty darn horrific.

My next step is to go to a specialist.  Not that’ll help. They’ll prescribe a steroid to take before the flight. But it will only reduce it.  Sucks.

For more information:

http://medicalsymptom.blogspot.com/2010/03/aerotitus-ears-pain.html

At the top of the Journals page we’ve set up a new poll.

We’ll be getting into a lot of details about Fallen Enchantress as we near the beta (which we anticipate starting this Spring).

Below, are 10 random facts (amongst many) about it:

1. It is a stand-alone title – you don’t have to have anything previously installed.
2. It will be free for everyone who bought the first Elemental title (War of Magic) in 2010 and those who buy War of Magic prior to Fallen Enchantress’s release will get a discount.
3. The Lead Designer of Fallen Enchantress is Derek Paxton (Civilization IV: Fall from Heaven)
4. The campaign for Fallen Enchantress is written by fantasy author Dave Stern and is being designed by Jon Shafer (lead designer of Civilization V)
5. The tactical battle system is 100% new and based on initiative rather than teams taking turns.
6. The economic system is all new.
7. The food/housing/prestige mechanic is gone and replaced with something more intuitive and we think funner.
8. The combat system is very different with damage types, resistance types, etc.
9. Its user interface will be new.
10. It will have no boxed version, no retail version so that the release date has no outside influences other than being a great game.

Feel free to write in the comments section any questions you may have as we plan to start back with FAQs in March.

Don’t forget to answer the poll!

If you didn’t see the recent Gamespot updates to Fallen Enchantress, you can see them here.

While the art-style in Elemental: Fallen Enchantress won’t be completely different from Elemental: War of Magic, it will be different enough that there will be no confusion about which game you’re looking at.

Ironically, the screenshot I show at the right shows barren land. But the big change in Fallen Enchantress is the sheer number of terrain types. In War of Magic there were only a few. As a result, the world tended to look either “brown”, “very green”, or “very dark brown” with the occasional bits of snow once in awhile.  In Fallen Enchantress, the Fallen areas are being revisited to not give off the “evil” vibe. 

Just wanted to give you a head's up that Gas Powered Games has been selected as the lead developer for Age of Empires online.

A big congratulations to all our friends at GPG! 

Remember when people said that Microsoft's customization site, Gallery.Live.com was going to kill off sites like WinCustomize?

Well, over the past couple of years it's gotten more and more crippled to the point that they're not even hosting Live add-ons anymore. That's right, Gallery.LIVE.com isn't hosting Microsoft LIVE based content anymore.  Unbelievable.  I use Live Writer regularly and it's a big bummer that Microsot seems to be abandoning their various sites.  

Check out the various Microsoft related blogs on Spaces while you're at it. There's places where there's just errors as if it is some old dot-com site that ran out of funding.

This is a big pet peeve of mine of modern Microsoft. They jump into something and then abandon it. 

If you use Gmail, I recommend trying the mouse gestures option in the settings->labs area. Now, when I hold the right-click button in a message and move the mouse left or right it takes me to the next or previous message. It makes going through messages much nicer.

Greetings! Relative to other games you’ve played this year how is Elemental: War of Magic doing? How are other games you’ve bought this year doing that were released in the same time doing?

Example:

AT RELEASE:

E: War of Magic:

Civilization V:

Starcraft 2:

Fallout: New Vegas:

END OF 2010:

E: War of Magic:

Civilization V:

Starcraft 2:

Fallout: New Vegas:

NOW:

E: War of Magic:

Civilization V:

Starcraft 2:

Fallout: New Vegas

Bonus question:

Did yesterday’s beta build (1.19c) solve your memory issues if you had them?

Ever deal with a Word document that is amazingly slow in getting through pages because of graphics? Why is that?  The answer has to do with the graphics format.

When you drag and drop images into Word, it tends to default to HTML format which drastically slows down Word.  Instead, use Paste Special and PNG for speediest results:

Nothing will bring Word to a crawl faster than a lot of HTML or odd graphics objects. Use Paste Special.

Derek and the team have been interviewing candidates for various positions this week. It’s been really interesting how far Derek, Bruno, Mat and others have been able to take our interview process in terms of evaluating the skills of different people. I’ve never been interviewed for a real job, I founded Stardock while in college until I could get a real job – which I’ve never gotten yet.  So my knowledge on what a good interview process is comes second hand.

One area I do care about a lot is cultural fitting. We have basically zero voluntary turn over here. And I think a lot of the reason is how fun the environment is.  It’s a weird crew here. A silly silly crew. 

Speaking of weird, I don’t normally pimp other people’s books but Cracked.com has released a hilarious new book that I highly recommend (You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News.. ) holy cow is this hilarious.  But to get an idea of our culture here, this is the sort of thing we talk about a lot (weird stuff).