Otaku No Zoku

Mike Hammond tries not to get in to any pick-up groups while driving because it’s a distraction, but in a pinch, when his guild really needs him to log on his level 110 Night Elf Priest or off-tank with his Feral Druid, he’s ready to take up the call to arms.

“I think everybody has those little guild emergencies,” the 46-year-old Long Island resident said.

Whether it’s a guild emergency, a lowbie character needing help to complete a quest in Duskwood or a chance to just earn some loot, more people are playing games on Microsoft Windows Automotive than ever before.

Statewide and locally, the number of crashes in which a games playing automotive computer was a contributing factor has been increasing since 2019. Trident County has had three traffic fatalities linked to MMORPGs between 20018 and 2023.

“I think every police department realizes it’s another distraction out there,” Regional Police Chief William Mahone said.

His department investigated one of the fatal crashes in which a teenager was raiding in a pick-up group when the car she was driving lost internet connectivity causing her game client to log her off of the server. Rather than waiting for the server to attempt a reconnect William Mahone believes that the client log files show that she attempted to manually reconnect and that caused enough distraction for her to swerve across the median into oncoming traffic.

At 50 mph, a car travels 225 ft every three seconds, about the length of one game tick in World of Warcraft, said Marcus Haight, director of the Center for Traffic Safety which serves Trident County.

“If you’re waiting for a spell cool down from a Greater Heal or AoE damage spell then that time you are glancing at your hot bar is time you are not spending looking at the road ahead,” he said.

Adam Fritz, a long-distance truck driver from Los Angeles has a different viewpoint on the matter. “It’s not like I’m dual boxing when I’m operating my truck,” he said, “I save that for when I’m at home. The biggest distraction for me is making sure no stinking Alliance try to interfere with our world boss kill.”

Others also don’t see the harm in game playing while driving, “Lumines 7″ is a popular casual game amongst soccer moms that puts the user in to a meditative state. Jenny Polo put it succinctly, “I don’t play those distracting MMORPGs, I just don’t see the appeal, though my kids do. But when I’m running them back and forth to school I need something to take my mind off of the squabbling in the backseats over whether they watch Little Mermaid 12 or Little Mermaid 15 on the in-car entertainment system.”

A pet peeve of mine, and of many of my friends is people who talk on cellphones while driving.

I’m not talking about straight line driving.

I’m talking about people negotiating intersections, pedestrian cross-walks and very busy town centers where motor vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians are apt to “appear out of nowhere.” States are now attempting to ban driver distractions.

A few weeks ago I jokingly mentioned to several friends that some time in the next two decades, as on-the-go high bandwidth communications and in-car computers become more ubiquitous, states will begin enacting laws that ban drivers from playing MMORPGs while operating a motor vehicle. And of course we can expect the usual public outcry from drivers who insist that they are fully capable of operating a motor vehicle while off-tanking/off-healing for a full 40-man raid on their high level Bloodelf Paladin.

Seth Godin has noticed a spate of flute playing around his area, and whilst I’ve never seen this personally, I have seen people balacing a coffee on the knee, cell phone glued to their ear with one hand and a contract or script propped up on the steering wheel that they are reading through as they make their way to the office in pouring rain along the I405 all the time travelling at high speed close to the vehicle in front of them.

If companies like Google and SUN are going to create large data centers inside of storage containers, and my proposal for using breast implants as a means of both storage and a mesh network ever take off, why not combine both ideas together? That way we can store local cached versions of popular pieces of data in an interesting data storage container.

A small section of society enjoys dressing up in “interesting ways” that generally invovles latex, corsets, rubber and other novel clothing items only available at select stores in certain parts of San Francisco. Some even “enjoy” wearing the modern day equivalent of a chastity belt or other restrictive device.

So why not make the chastity belt, or whatever happens to be your bondage item of choice, RFID controlled? The belt could contains a detector scanning for a correct signal from a matching RFID “key.” The belt remains unlocked only when in proximity to this “key.” A sort of digital leash.

Now you could be boring and wear the key on a key chain, but hey, everyone is getting RFID implants these days, so just stick the RFID key beneat the skin in your hand or your genitalia and you’re good to go.

The strange things I think about when drunk on a Christmas day.

What happens when you reach the complexity limitation of a piece of software?

I’ve talked about this a few times with colleagues and associates and for the past two years have constantly been running in to it with a piece of software I use on a daily basis. The software is iTunes, which works great if you’re like 99% of the people out there who have a few thousand music tracks and a couple of dozen music videos you’ve downloaded.

But what happens when you have over 80,000 music tracks ripped from your vast collection of CDs you own, more than 500 audio books, and weeks worth of music videos, literally thousands of music videos that you’ve ripped from your music DVDs and VHS tapes that you’ve acquired through the years?

iTunes was never built to handle a library like that. It takes forever to start-up and shutdown and becomes slow as molasses when scrolling through lists or attempting to do searches. And whilst Apple has made some performance improvements in the latest version to keep memory usage down, it still consumes upwards of a half-gigabyte to hold the index in memory.

When your entire audio and video life is digital, simple programs like iTunes are no longer able to keep up. Is there anything out there even remotely approaching the ability to make sense of that much personal content?