At midnight this morning, Cryptic Studios finally unveiled that their next project was going to be the resurrected Star Trek Online MMORPG.  If you’ve been paying attention at all to the buzz in the last few months this news really did not come as much of a shock, but it was really nice to see it finally made official and see some actual renderings from the game.  The forums there are already buzzing with activity, and despite the fact that the game is not even in Alpha yet there are already folks on their forums recruiting for alliances.

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I really try not to make too much of a habit of talking about where I work here in the old blog.  As a general rule it’s really not a good idea, because once you’ve associated your job with your online presence you kind of run the risk of getting in trouble at said job if something about your online presence irks a fellow employee or customer.

Of course, the easy solution to that is never doing anything online that would get you in trouble with your job.  With as connected as things are getting these days it’s a really good habit to get in to anyway.  More and more companies are looking at places like MySpace to see if you have any half-naked pictures of yourself doing questionable things with farm animals before they hire you, so it’s really not a good idea to have that stuff out there to begin with.

And really, what did that chicken ever do to you anyway?

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Finally!  You’ve waited!  You’ve anticipated!  You’ve dreamed!  Now you can see the stunning epic…RETURN ON ASSETS AND YOU!

Er…I’m kinda having a hard time getting it to embed properly.

Check it out here.

One of the things that struck me was interesting when I first started playing City of Heroes shortly after it launched was the badge system.  I’d been playing Everquest for several years, and Badges were an interesting twist on the standard “kill monsters, get experience and loot” reward system.  Essentially a Badge was something you could earn by exploring a certain area, defeating a set number of foes, completing a mission, or other similar in game accomplishments.  You didn’t get any real benefit from having a badge in the way of character advancement or game play (although I believe that  a few of them may have unlocked different costume options), and there wasn’t any real “point” to them other than to say “I’ve earned this badge.”

In other words, bragging rights.

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The following video just came across my Boing Boing feed.  I think it’s achingly beautiful, in the same way that Post Secret is.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_IrqTbpTeA]

So what’s yours?

I’ve been on my latest physical activity stint since just after Christmas in 2006.  I exercised during my first big weight loss push (when I went from 419.2 pounds down to 232), but all I did during that period was walk 2 miles every day.

For the record, let me stop right here and say that for most people walking 2 miles a day is probably the best way to get exercise in and promote weight loss.  Most people seem to think that in order to lose weight you have to go to the gym or get some kind of home fitness equipment.  This is untrue.  Don’t get me wrong – a gym membership and regular routines with a personal trainer will certainly give you a much more balanced and focused workout, but if all you have the time for is a 2 mile walk every day it’s more than enough to kick start your metabolism and lose weight.

I pretty much stopped exercising for most of 2005 and 2006.  I played some lip service to it occasionally, but my workouts were not consistent at all.  Not surprisingly I put on a good deal of weight during this period and shot back up to around 289 pounds.  Recognizing that I was on the way back up at a fairly rapid pace I re-focused at the end of 2006 and started working out regularly with Yourself! Fitness.  I eventually worked my way up to a point when I was working out with Maya (the personal trainer in Y!F) an hour a day, six days a week.

Then I got cast in Gorey Stories.  I’m pretty sure anyone who has ever done a show as an adult will back me up when I say that keeping a regular workout routine while you’re doing one is a huge pain in the ass.  I didn’t stop completely, but my workouts got much less frequent.  Once you get knocked out of a good workout routine it can be a bitch to get back into it, and to date I still haven’t gotten back to a regular “six one hour day” week.

Part of the problem there is that I’m bored with Y!F.

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Hey gang…Those of you following mcmcgreevy have probably noted that my epic length posts don’t get cut the way I have them formatted on my site. I’m going to work on tweaking the code a bit so that excerpts will be acknowledged in my RSS feed, but when I do so I may need a different rss feed set up and as my paid account has expired I can’t set up any more.

Thanks for following. I’ll try to clean it up for you ASAP.

Yesterday morning I spent several hours being filmed for an in-house training movie.  I have two roles in this short film.  The first is “Mr. TME,” who is the “hero” of the movie.  TME stands for Total Member Experience, which is our company philosophy on how we treat our members.  The other role I’m playing is “Mr. TNT,” the bad example of customer service.  Mr. TNT has a handlebar mustache.  This is why I had to shave my beard and goatee.

The movie is being done in the style of a 1950’s educational film, and what I’ve seen so far is pretty cool.  I’m really hoping to get permission to post it here when it’s complete.

I just got an email from someone over in Marketing, though, that made me wonder if my humiliation was going to extend far beyond this little film.

“I just saw the Mr. TME poster down in the print shop.”

Er…ummm….

What?

I just stumbled upon the following while reading Moby Dick on my Kindle.

Squeeze!  squeeze!  squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm until I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm until a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands into it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.  Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, –Oh!  my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!  Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm forever!

At this point the fact that my Uncle claims this to be his favorite book bothers me greatly.

On his way back from a wild and crazy weekend in…er…Ohio…our old friend Ross asked the following question on his twitter feed –

If you were starting a new RPG campaign, where would you start?

I asked him what system he was referring to and his response was “I don’t believe the system should matter.”  I’ve decided to rise to the challenge of that question, and thus I present to you Michael’s Totally Awesome Campaign of Awesomeness.^*

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