For the second time in less than a month, NCsoft has shown wanton disregard for my already-prepared comments for the week, derailing the scheduled Wings Over Atreia with some out-of-the-blue announcement. And not just any announcement, but one that can have a profound effect on Aion in the coming months. What is this announcement, you say? Shall I help you out from that rock you've been slumbering under? Why, last Wednesday's bold free-to-play announcement, of course!
Now, before hyperventilation sets in -- either from glee or disgust -- note that there are set parameters to this specific conversion, including first and foremost that it is for the European market only. And while details aren't exactly pouring forth, there are a few tidbits to pass along, just enough to whet the appetite of future F2P Daevas or enrage current ones.
Breathe into the paper bag and join me past the break for a look at the details that have been revealed and some thoughts on those that have not!
Given such a major announcement but few details, I am sure readers have some questions. Never fear, MJ is here! I shall guide you through what information is currently out there and offer some basic translation/personal commentary/wild speculation. Using my elite powers of information-gathering (no, I really don't have a captured developer locked down in my basement, but that's a good idea...), I bring you The Word.
So here's the scoop: Come February 2012, Aion will convert to a free-to-play subscription model in the European market. What does this mean for folks on that side of the pond? According to the PR machine, it means little will change except opening the market up to a wider audience. In fact, NCsoft expects that there will soon be plenty more Deavas flocking to Atreia for grouping and PvP goodness. Well, ignoring the likelihood of a launch-day fiasco, who can argue against more compatriots and more enemies filling out the server? Other than that, NCsoft's devs were quick to say that little would change for current players.
Surely there is more to it than that, you say. But of course, I reply! Though stop calling me Shirley. Of the details revealed, the outline of the payment models captured my interest most. There will be three distinct levels: Starters (the free group), Veteran, and Gold Pack. The free group is -- drum roll -- free! There will be no cost to sign up, install, or start playing. Starters will have access to every class, level, quest, region, and all equipment in the game. Sounds like a far cry from what many other free-to-play models offer, right? The Veteran group will be comprised of all those who have ever bought and subscribed to Aion in the past, whether the subscription is active or not. This group will enjoy privileges similar to the Gold Pack. The Gold Pack will be a temporary purchase that gives Daevas "full functionality" as well as bonuses like higher AP payouts and (see below) shorter instance cooldown timers.
2011年12月28日星期三
2011年12月27日星期二
Janet Jackson admits: My weight, I struggled with my entire life!
Losing Weight The figurehead agreed to the singer Janet Jackson said openly the problems with which he has struggled for years.
My weight, I struggled with my entire life and it has been for me a difficult thing, Jackson says.
Singer believes that the dream of weight loss is easy for people to identify with him, because he knows exactly what he is talking.
People are easy to identify with me, because I know what I'm saying. I understand completely what it is like to struggle with weight loss, wearing too much make you fat, pounds, or more than is healthy for longer, Jackson says.
Years after the Battle of the singer is now comfortable in her own. The latest diet to hoikistunut Jackson is also in the eyes. Although the dreams are still a few kilos of weight loss, he did not let the project lyhist?? themselves.
I do not want to tell you how many pounds I have dropped so far, or how many pounds I'm going to drop further. Now I have a good feeling. I want to maintain this state of mind. I still have sarkaa left, even though I do not want to lose weight no longer many pounds, Jackson says.
Over the years, Jackson learned to know his own stumbling block at times all too well. Difficult times is a good mirror, however, well-being, which the singer is now losing weight flagship program achieved.
When I'm under the weather or stressed, I tend to resort to eating. I have also had problems with my body. It is therefore particularly important that I'm comfortable now, Jackson says.aion
My weight, I struggled with my entire life and it has been for me a difficult thing, Jackson says.
Singer believes that the dream of weight loss is easy for people to identify with him, because he knows exactly what he is talking.
People are easy to identify with me, because I know what I'm saying. I understand completely what it is like to struggle with weight loss, wearing too much make you fat, pounds, or more than is healthy for longer, Jackson says.
Years after the Battle of the singer is now comfortable in her own. The latest diet to hoikistunut Jackson is also in the eyes. Although the dreams are still a few kilos of weight loss, he did not let the project lyhist?? themselves.
I do not want to tell you how many pounds I have dropped so far, or how many pounds I'm going to drop further. Now I have a good feeling. I want to maintain this state of mind. I still have sarkaa left, even though I do not want to lose weight no longer many pounds, Jackson says.
Over the years, Jackson learned to know his own stumbling block at times all too well. Difficult times is a good mirror, however, well-being, which the singer is now losing weight flagship program achieved.
When I'm under the weather or stressed, I tend to resort to eating. I have also had problems with my body. It is therefore particularly important that I'm comfortable now, Jackson says.aion
2011年8月18日星期四
'An Anatomy of Addiction' by Howard Markel
Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine
Howard Markel
Pantheon: 352 pp., $28.95
Sigmund Freud sniffed it. William Halsted injected it with a hypodermic needle. Both men, as ambitious and driven young doctors in the 1880s, became addicted to cocaine. History suggests that Freud kicked his habit; Halsted never did. Halsted pioneered a host of surgical methods, the use of anesthesia, and antiseptic procedures in surgery rooms. Freud gave us a lantern with which to illuminate the dark labyrinth of the subconscious. Both men played their part in the invention of our modern world, and their stories, as well as that of cocaine itself, are braided together by Howard Markel in "An Anatomy of Addiction."
When Freud and Halsted first became acquainted with their chemical bête noire, they "fully expected cocaine to be the wonder drug of modern medicine," Markel writes. Neither had any idea about cocaine's dangers. Addiction as a medical diagnosis had not yet entered the textbooks. Freud was treating a friend, a surgeon who had lost a hand and was reliant on morphine to quell the pain. Freud hoped that cocaine would help his friend break free from morphine.
"The initial results were nothing short of miraculous," Markel writes, but then the friend's condition "soon plummeted." Meanwhile Freud, unwilling to experiment with a drug without personal scientific knowledge of its effects, started taking cocaine himself, and discovered that he liked it, not least because it gave him a sexual thrill.
"In my last severe depression, I took coca again, and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magic substance," Freud wrote to his fiancé, Martha, on June 2, 1884.
That "song of praise" became "On Coca," a scientific paper that Freud published in 1885 and hoped would make his name. Freud analyzed his responses to cocaine in that paper, and this new system of autobiographical self-probing would prove crucial to his career, but he completely missed something else — cocaine's effect as a local anesthetic. That potential use was discovered by Carl Koller, one of Freud's rivals at the Vienna General Hospital, and it was Koller's paper, much to Freud's chagrin, that flew around an admiring world.
"The development of an agent that could be safely injected under the skin, leaving a patient completely awake yet insensate to the surgeon's pointedly sharp manipulations, was earthshaking," Markel writes, and news of Koller's cocaine breakthrough was seized upon by Halsted, a young physician working simultaneously at Bellevue and various other New York City hospitals. Halsted came from a wealthy New York family. At Yale he'd been captain of the football team. Against the grain, almost, he'd become a doctor, a disciplined and daring surgeon of "incandescent curiosity." Halsted started experimenting with cocaine as soon as he heard about it. Like Freud, he used himself as a guinea pig and soon became an accidental addict.
A professor of medical history and a doctor who has treated addicts, Markel attempts to apply a novelist's touch to his tale that can be heavy-handed. "The atmosphere was thick with the exhaust of cigarettes, cigars, and inspired minds," he writes, evoking the atmosphere at the Café Landtmann, a "pungently academic restaurant," and suddenly plunging us into Freud's Vienna as Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy might conceive it.
Markel is terrific, though, when writing about the greasy pole of medical ambition, and when detailing the scientific stuff. Here the prose feels more energized and more solidly grounded, and he offers excellent sidebar portraits, including one of Angelo Mariani, who marketed "Vin Mariani," a French tonic drink laced with cocaine. "His great eureka moment arrived when he mixed ground coca leaves with a far more traditional French intoxicant, Bordeaux wine. Through careful experimentation and measurement, the chemist realized that the alcohol in the red wine acted to unleash the power of the coca leaves. In the decades that followed, scientists discovered that when alcohol and cocaine are combined a new, even more intoxicating compound, called cocaethylene, is formed in the liver."
Small wonder, then, that Vin Mariani was a huge success, endorsed by Ulysses S. Grant, Queen Victoria, the shah of Persia, Thomas Edison, Arthur Conan Doyle and a host of others. Cocaethylene populated the Victorian world with unknowing cokeheads. "If nature set out to design an addictive drug, it could hardly do better than cocaine," Markel writes. "This is because the drug brilliantly fools the neurons ending in the nucleus accumbens into sensing a virtual abundance of enjoyable feelings and emotions."
Cocaine freed up Freud's writing and a cocaine-induced dream opens his first masterwork, "The Interpretation of Dreams." Ideas of pleasure, pain, suppressed guilt and subsequent liberation, all of which Freud came to associate with the drug, lie behind his development of psychoanalysis, the talking cure. The analytic process, for those who've experienced it, is itself almost like a narcotic, inviting the subject to wander, trance-like, through the ruins of dream and memory.
Howard Markel
Pantheon: 352 pp., $28.95
Sigmund Freud sniffed it. William Halsted injected it with a hypodermic needle. Both men, as ambitious and driven young doctors in the 1880s, became addicted to cocaine. History suggests that Freud kicked his habit; Halsted never did. Halsted pioneered a host of surgical methods, the use of anesthesia, and antiseptic procedures in surgery rooms. Freud gave us a lantern with which to illuminate the dark labyrinth of the subconscious. Both men played their part in the invention of our modern world, and their stories, as well as that of cocaine itself, are braided together by Howard Markel in "An Anatomy of Addiction."
When Freud and Halsted first became acquainted with their chemical bête noire, they "fully expected cocaine to be the wonder drug of modern medicine," Markel writes. Neither had any idea about cocaine's dangers. Addiction as a medical diagnosis had not yet entered the textbooks. Freud was treating a friend, a surgeon who had lost a hand and was reliant on morphine to quell the pain. Freud hoped that cocaine would help his friend break free from morphine.
"The initial results were nothing short of miraculous," Markel writes, but then the friend's condition "soon plummeted." Meanwhile Freud, unwilling to experiment with a drug without personal scientific knowledge of its effects, started taking cocaine himself, and discovered that he liked it, not least because it gave him a sexual thrill.
"In my last severe depression, I took coca again, and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magic substance," Freud wrote to his fiancé, Martha, on June 2, 1884.
That "song of praise" became "On Coca," a scientific paper that Freud published in 1885 and hoped would make his name. Freud analyzed his responses to cocaine in that paper, and this new system of autobiographical self-probing would prove crucial to his career, but he completely missed something else — cocaine's effect as a local anesthetic. That potential use was discovered by Carl Koller, one of Freud's rivals at the Vienna General Hospital, and it was Koller's paper, much to Freud's chagrin, that flew around an admiring world.
"The development of an agent that could be safely injected under the skin, leaving a patient completely awake yet insensate to the surgeon's pointedly sharp manipulations, was earthshaking," Markel writes, and news of Koller's cocaine breakthrough was seized upon by Halsted, a young physician working simultaneously at Bellevue and various other New York City hospitals. Halsted came from a wealthy New York family. At Yale he'd been captain of the football team. Against the grain, almost, he'd become a doctor, a disciplined and daring surgeon of "incandescent curiosity." Halsted started experimenting with cocaine as soon as he heard about it. Like Freud, he used himself as a guinea pig and soon became an accidental addict.
A professor of medical history and a doctor who has treated addicts, Markel attempts to apply a novelist's touch to his tale that can be heavy-handed. "The atmosphere was thick with the exhaust of cigarettes, cigars, and inspired minds," he writes, evoking the atmosphere at the Café Landtmann, a "pungently academic restaurant," and suddenly plunging us into Freud's Vienna as Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy might conceive it.
Markel is terrific, though, when writing about the greasy pole of medical ambition, and when detailing the scientific stuff. Here the prose feels more energized and more solidly grounded, and he offers excellent sidebar portraits, including one of Angelo Mariani, who marketed "Vin Mariani," a French tonic drink laced with cocaine. "His great eureka moment arrived when he mixed ground coca leaves with a far more traditional French intoxicant, Bordeaux wine. Through careful experimentation and measurement, the chemist realized that the alcohol in the red wine acted to unleash the power of the coca leaves. In the decades that followed, scientists discovered that when alcohol and cocaine are combined a new, even more intoxicating compound, called cocaethylene, is formed in the liver."
Small wonder, then, that Vin Mariani was a huge success, endorsed by Ulysses S. Grant, Queen Victoria, the shah of Persia, Thomas Edison, Arthur Conan Doyle and a host of others. Cocaethylene populated the Victorian world with unknowing cokeheads. "If nature set out to design an addictive drug, it could hardly do better than cocaine," Markel writes. "This is because the drug brilliantly fools the neurons ending in the nucleus accumbens into sensing a virtual abundance of enjoyable feelings and emotions."
Cocaine freed up Freud's writing and a cocaine-induced dream opens his first masterwork, "The Interpretation of Dreams." Ideas of pleasure, pain, suppressed guilt and subsequent liberation, all of which Freud came to associate with the drug, lie behind his development of psychoanalysis, the talking cure. The analytic process, for those who've experienced it, is itself almost like a narcotic, inviting the subject to wander, trance-like, through the ruins of dream and memory.
订阅：
博文 (Atom)