Sensibilium Blog

SOPA/PIPA are more than simpyl cracking down on piracy. if either passes they become a tool by the RIAA/MPAA to bypass due process and extend their litigations across seas.


teh stated public aim of these bills is to be ale to attack sites and services that operate outisde of us law enforcement and judicial jurisdicitions.

the way they do this is by the IPR holders/representives, asking the us attourney general to requeswt a court order to bring down that site's domain and dns entries. o rblack list them. the judge is then obliged to comply with this request, without any normal due process.

how is this even possible?


the internet's domains are regulated and maintained by a US gov't sanction monopoly, a US based company called ICANN. ICANN regulates every kind of domain suffix WORLD WIDE. as well many global DNS companies are US based.

the court order essnetially asks ICANN to black list targetted domain names, making it impossible to resolve the IP via domain name in yoru address bar, or google search result links, or bookmarks.

this means, that a blog like sensi, that has content like my videos, or those OWS video that got DMCAed that mr orange posted, can also be taken down, and the burder of proof and legal costs would be on the owner to prove that he was not infringing. otehrwise withotu court review ICANN would be obliged to black list the domain name of www.sensibilium.com.

simply because someone claimed to own the IPR to the videos that were posted here. unlike the DMCA, you can't simply fill out the counter claim form to have the host restore your content and wait the IPR holder to move further into challenging yoru rights wether fair use or original content, rather you woul dneed to hire a US based lawyer to challenge the take down in court.

this gives big business free reign to take down their competition, the indie artists and the little guy bloggers and fair use content creators.

hmm i had a smoke then forgot i was writing this. perhaps more later.

so when rift was in beta, there was some hype around it on the forum i hang out on most of my day, and some hardcore fanboyism going on about how it will kill wow and it's revolutionary and such. desptie the fact we didn't have much interest in it as we were busy with wow cata and our VIp beta keys were sitting unused, the bullshit being output on our doorstep abou thow amazing this game is and you have to try it etc piqued our interest and we chose to try it out.

the regulars of our section of that forum decided to form a guild together for the lulz, and try the game together. no one wanted to GM it, so i took up the reigns, and we used my bro's mumble server we bought for our attempt at makign our own wow guild.

so we're playing this game and it's decent enough, w/e. i was about to quit but got asked to stay on for the guild, and with that i chose i search for a guild to merge with.

we decided to merge with a guild on our server called dexteram telera. we advertised we were looking for a social casual guild to merge with and these guys seemed to be of similar mind as us, although we had to moderate our voice comms language some what from 4chan lite to something mor elike HBo comedy hour.

we had a great time playing rift together, but as many members wnate dto raid, adn the server's recruitment pool was dried up overnight by free transfers allowing zerg guilds to kill smaller guilds + the gating on raid content making it hard for later comers and non zerg guilds to get in at all. so we wound down our pve acitivties and swithced to more pvp type stuff+ our social type activities.

so what were our social activities? we were farmign craft rifts in a raid of 20 players, where for 2 hours we sit in mumble an dchat off our heads while farming these things, then mov eon to raid rifts, which needed a little more vocie comms discpline but still pretty casual type stuff.


we also did some roaming pvp action in raids of 20 or less, where we'd go around killing everyone we saw and doing the world pvp dailies.

we'd often have a few guys drinking some beers when we did this stuff(*raises hand*)

in swtor we're going a bit further with the social stuff, while tryuing to have a goo dmix of the pve and pvp stuff. while we're planning to raid next month(which swtor is very friednly to newcomers and casual guilds with entry requirements), we've been doing roaming pvp and world boss nights on a regular basis as well.

last nihgt we did some roaming pvp(see video below) as well we introduced a classic DT favourite, mumblaoke(in teh past it was called ventrilaoke as they used vent)

anyways you'll have to forgive me, i did up these videos while drunk and apparently fucked them up or i was having bugs with vegas or fraps or idk what was going on, although rendering 2 videos at once may not be a good idea either. then i drunkenly deleted the fraps files so i couldn't try and fix them sober today.


so basically we were locking down the area republics spawn in to voss ka bothing comin into teh planet and goign to leave from quest areas. one guy chose to spend 30+ minutes instantly rezzing in front of us over and over again. ye swe are terrible people, but it should be known there is no death penalty for being PKed.


so idk wtf is going on with teh flickering and such, so you may want to listen to rather than watch this video. i also foudn the bits i recorded of myself singing were drowned out by the music, which i belive i have steps to remedy for the next time we do this. anyways, drunk dutch people sound funny when singing selena gomez. XD

in a way, our iteration of the social casual guild is kind of like the old school mmo guild/clan. we use the guild as a means to meetg and hang out with cool people and have fun playing with them and telling jokes and dickign around together, rather than to solely pursue shiny lewtz and make ourselves look bad while pretending to be pro skillz like other types of guilds today.

nwo to be frank, if you join a social casual guild in wow, they won't resemble this at all. you'll get some half assed gchat no voice usage and a hald assed attempt to raid and might as well be PUG premades for bg's and arenas. when i qqed about this i was told to stfu and deal with it it's normal for wow guilds. w/e fuck them. we're OG

if you enjoy trying new mmo's as i do at launch/beta, you may have encountered some tropes relating to hardcore gaming. this is the shit that makes me lol the most in these games because almost universally the peopel calling themslves hardcore are unequivocally the worst players in terms of skill and ability to do more than fight leg cramps for hours.

no doubt youve' come across a thread on a game or mmo forums that's in beta or newely launched that reads soemthing like

hi i'm a top raider/#1 arena player, and played cod/halo/cs/wc3/sc1 professionally

which means, they were a server first raider in a guild that kills dead wow servers and got gladiator on a shitty battlegroup as a drood or pali.(if this makes no sense to you don't worry)

and by professional they mean they had a razer sticker on their lan box and maybe got a discount on lancon tourney entry fees or maybe even just used a league which boils down to a 3rd party match making and ladder service with regular irl tourneys, as opposed to what we consider to be professional in the real world, ie making money from the thing you are calling yourself a professional in.

the next part of this post will go some thign like

this game has a lot of potential to eb the next top esport raid/pvp game

but only if you listen to me

and nerf x class and buff my class and make this game more/exactly liek daoc/eq1/wow vanilla/wc3/dota/uo/eve

i ended up playing tbc wow in a guild like this, where the top leadership were full of how awesome and unique their skills were and how they were the best healer or w/e and they woudl teach us how.

the fact even being carried by gladiators these scrubs couldn't get the 1750 rating shoulders with the fotm comp shows they were full of shit, nevermind my f team in teh guild lost the most whenever any one o fthem subbed in.

so i got bored of playing mmo's with these so called hardcore 1337 pros, and in new games would hook up with random small guilds, that qualify as social casual under guild type discriptions.

what is a social casual guild? they are guidl that dont' focus on eithe rpvp or pve/raiding specifically but essnetiall yod a mix of activities, and generally with a social angle and with the mind of doing them in smaller time slots, with more room in the ranks for the 2 hours a week player, as opposed to "raid guilds" or "pvp guilds"

often these guilds will feed raid guilds after members hit the level cap. as for pvp guilds, calling your guild a pvp guild is essentially like saying "we can't hack it in everything so we farm Hks in premade normal mode BGs and grind to low ranks in arena/rated pvp, and level through pvp because ewwwww mobs"

more to follow

so i'm running swtor on my i7 2600k w/ 480 gtx and i see some silly things being said about it killin ghardware or shitty fps on high end rigs or claims that it only uses one thread(core).

well here's a screen shot of swtor runnning iwth evga precession and task manager's resource monitor on the 2nd screen:

http://i.imgur.com/o7OUP.jpg (it's a big image and i'm not sure if mr orange has autoresize for images on here)

missing info is my lcd temp monitor showing the cpu is at 47c

so what we see here is pretty interesting, it uses 7/8 cores, and i have confirmation from my bro that on 6xcore intel cpu';s(ie 980x) it will still only use 7 cores.

now it seems that people on amd cards or cpu's may experience low fps in warzones(instanced pvp) an don teh fleet stations( primary social and grouping hubs)

however i have good fps(enough to not look at my fps meter, ie it's smooth framerate) though i do get some stutterish fps drops down to ~15fps on fleet during peak times when there are like 50 toons on screen.

now mind you my pc is fairly high end, so what is this crtiical threshold of hardwarfe levels you may have heard of to avoid moments of unplayable ness*

what you're looking for is

core i3, 1st or 2nd gen, or core 2 quad desktop proc, recomended is core i5 quad core bin

amd phenom 2 x4 models are decent too, but not good enough to recommend for this or any other mmo. stay away from bulldozer for gaming (or anything else really) and anything less than a x4 is shit, and x6 are pretty mcuh shit for gaming too.

video card: amd 5770 or 6770, or nvdia 460 1gb or 550ti, or any cards above these will run the game at playable** fps more or less maxxed out at 1080p. keep in mind if you like aa on, nvidia cards will perform much better at higher levels of AA than amd cards.

*regardless of hardware configaration levels, you WILL encounter fps drops and such, as not all maps are well optimized, as wlel as other bugs and such, this is relatively normal fo ran launch state mmo. for example, wow cata had stuff like this too at launch.

**we consider "playable fps" to be in the 40-60fps+ range. just because you raid LFR deathwing in wow at 10fps doesn't mean it qualifies as playable. if you aren't getting 50+fps yoru computer can not *run* the game at ULTRA or high or MAX effectively in a way that means anything, so please do not say "my amd athlon 2 x2 with intel GMA IGP runs wow maxxed out at 1080p", because no sweetheart it does not.

if you have an ultra high end rig and want to play with eyefinity or surround, then keep in mind that no single gpu card can reasonably run any games worth playing using it at high/max settings @ XXXX*1080 and you'll want 2 relatively high end gpu's wether in dual or single card configurations to do this kidn of gaming. AA will require more vram at these resolutions as well, so keep that in mind.

So after the initial worries about the game using Origin after some bad Battlefield 3 experiences, I got to play 3 1/2 hours of SWTOR last night.
I went with the Republic to start with as it seems that they are short of numbers and I am nice to be nice kind of person (no lol's Oblong).

I um’ed and ah’ed about class choice for a while, I did not want to go for the obvious Jedi Knight and toyed with the idea of Jedi Consular as it seemed interesting but in the end I went with the Trooper.

After sorting out issue’s with my Asus Xonar sound card I finally got to see how the Star Wars world had changed since SWG. Initial impressions were good if a little cartoon like, if you have seen the clone wars film it’s a bit like that.

I very much liked the thrown into the deep end initial class mission even if I found the combat system a bit strange. The fact that one you have engaged a target there is no default attack, you have to keep selecting from the skills bar seemed bizarre at first. Once I got used to hitting the “1’s & 2’s” and got a few more skills it soon started to flow.

I soon got up to level 8 and bed time loomed with only a couple of deaths taking on mobs out of my league, there were a few occasions where I strayed to the dark side and could not resist the need to tell a NPC to go forth and multiply.

Hopefully tonight will bring advanced class choice and my first companion.

so swtor launch has delivered all it promised and more, lulz wise. overall we're a bit dissapointed with the lower amounts of world pvp whiel leveling, part of which is due to low republci numbers on our server(and on pvp server in general - pve servers tedn to have higher rep numbers).

we're playing on US bondar crystal empire, and having an over good time of it. here's a couple of videos i've put together with and for my guild:

our recruitment video:


a little random casual roaming pvp action:



what i forced my foreveralone.jpg guildies to do on new years eve:


a brief glimpse at our world boss run from the other night:


there's a couple more less interesting videos related to swtor such as a performance bit of swtor laoding times on ocz vertex 2 60gb with wow cata load time video i did linked on it as a video reply, and an reply to teh assertion that the game feels empty to some people(most pubs on pvp servers)

so swg, my first mmo, a certain local someone once enticed me to play the game back when it was relatively new. it was an odd curiosity, and i didn't really understand wtf was going on with it at all except there were alot of people online in my same area/map at the same time, and i could chat and group up with them in ways that was ju t not possible in any of the endless fps mods and games i had been playing at the time.

i rolled on a european server, farstar, where i generally ran around RPing a hunter of sorts, with a gimp template and forming 20 man groups to grind exp and credits to fund my casual hunts (ie buffs, weapon and armour replacements) and player mall shopping.

occasionally our local friend ran me through what SWG called themeparks, which seemed to be alot of running around to kill small groups of mobs for no clear rewards or easonign beyond getting a poster for my house which generally served as my messy closet for discarded armour and weapons.

i ended up losing interest after the CU(or CURB as it was called at the time), in part due to despite being master marksmen suddenly being unable to use my useful in terms of dmg stats pistols i had paid good money for from a reliable supplier. i very nearly gave up on mmo's altogether until some IRL friends got me to try lineage 2 with them a few months later...

fast forward to last september, when i was between regular games, and heard that SWG was closing for good to make way for swtor, and that anyone who subbed before sept 15 would be subbed till the end of the game in december. for nostalgia reasons me and my guild's GM decided to give the old gal a send off and subbed some accounts.

with my pre cu account being rerolled as a dancer an transferred to join my brand new jedi, i hit 90 pretty quickly and started the endgame gear grind which consists of being rejected by groups for being a jedi and grinding elite mobs solo competing with AFK macro non jedi class players for spawns. during this process we had been slowly brainstorming ideas for an RP machinima video.

then we got accepted in to different beta test groups for SWTOR and it seemed our plans for the video were dashed. until a new build went up for the beta, and my GM with no beta servers to play on was nagged to death to finish writing and help me film our video.

the result is below:



ultimately there's not much left for me to do in SWG, i log in about once a week to shop around for holos i am missing after readin teh patch notes hoping for blue FROGs to be added so i can be at all viable for the final battle, onyl to be inundated by random PMs about how i'm a baddie and my SWG guild are terribads and how i cried about a duel or something, which is goign to be hilarious when these people migrate to more modern mmo's and suddenly shocked by the relatively low time investments required to be viable or the fact that simply no one gives a fuck if you win or lose a duel.

hey folks, DK here. you may know me by another name, but i've retired that name years ago and not a big fan of posting under it so here's my current main online name, mostly related to mmo gaming.

i'l be bringing you fine folks videos and tl;drs related to mmo gaming mainly, including my mmo pvp videos, insights into guild management, and general mmo related lulz. i already have a few ideas about articles i can write for sensi on these subjects.

for now, here's an anthology video i just made for my youtube channel of all but 3 games i've made videos for in the past 6 or 7 years. my youtube channel can be found in my sensi profile for all my remaining videos i haven't lost. you'll also find some original music i made about 10 years ago and a few songs by the occasional myspace type band/artist that couldn't otherwise be found on youtube when i uploaded the videos.


stay tuned for a series on my machinima videos coming up.

if you can't see my videos, it's probably because you're in germany and the IPR mafiaa hates you and your country men. fear not, a VPN or proxy can have you enjoying all kinds of great youtube videos in no time!

I've been working hard on the site redevelopment, and I just wanted to inform everyone how far I've got in the process.

The MVC for the Blog display pages, including share links and comments form (but not comment submission), user login and logout, the about, gumbo, and downloads areas are pretty much completed.

The site design is crawling along behind as I don't want to do much of that until the complete functionality of the site is ready. But it's looking a lot cleaner so far at least.

Breadcrumb navigation is generally up and running, although I still have to work on the Writings section so that will mean some further updates are required to it. The same is true for the next / previous links (working as expected in the blog area).

The code has been cleaned and performance improvements have been introduced. Still a long way to go, but I am doing it, honestly! Things are being made easier through my use of Eclipse and running everything locally in my Linux installation on my laptop. Although programming with an annoying touch-pad constantly moving the cursor around and randomly highlighting stuff is something I wouldn't recommend to anyone. But for me, needs must.

Okay, time I went back to coding.

Exciting times ahead folks! I'm working on a brand new design for Sensibilium, and not only that, I'm working on moving the underlying code into the 21st century, by utilising the power of MVC (Model, View, Controller). This is how Ruby works, keeping the database interaction away from code processing of said database data, and again separated from the page you see when you load it.

I will also be attempting to get some AJAX with jQuery up and running, but haven't really gone there yet, need to get everything else moved across to the new way of doing things first.

Obviously, considering the size and complexity of the software powering this site, this will likely take a very long time, so your patience is highly appreciated.

I already have an idea of what to do with the CSS and XHTML, and it just a case of re-programming all the underlying code, and hence make it a whole lot easier to update in the future. Of course, this code will be transferred into further development that will include my eCommerce software which is still not ready after all these years. It's not far off though, just need to get the time to spend on it.

Sensibilium as ever comes first though, can't really practice on a commercial website.

PS: The blog search facility is broken, likely has been for a very long time, and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future.