meditation
Latest
The iPhone 4 and the growing art of self-photography
This little piece over on the New York Times Fashion and Style page is only tangentially related to our subject at hand, which is that the onset of the iPhone 4 and its front-facing camera has put a spotlight on the growing art of self-photography and the casually narcissistic tendencies that drive it. I still found it very interesting, both as a series of tips on how to make some fascinating self-photographs, as well as a little meditation on what it means to learn that cameras are slowly turning around on their owners. When cameras were first created, the photographer was almost removed from the equation -- viewers of photographs were given direct views of subjects. As time has gone on, the photographer has become more instrumental and important in the camera's life. At this point, in 2010, most of the pictures taken today are taken specifically to be shared on Facebook or Flickr -- here's me at the club, here's my new shirt, here's my and my girlfriend, and so on. Instead of looking through the photographer's eyes at the world, the iPhone 4's camera looks through the photographer's eyes ... back at the photographer. Maybe that's too serious for the Fourth of July weekend (and if nothing else, the NYT piece offers a great bit of advice for being on camera anywhere: "smile"). But it is interesting that, as front-facing cameras become more popular (and even technology like Microsoft's Kinect, which is basically a camera watching you, the player), the art of photography itself is changing. Going out and "taking pictures" may eventually come to mean "taking pictures of me."
Buddhist leader says video games are cathartic
24-year-old Ogyen Trinley Dorje wasn't selected, in childhood, as the 17th Karmapa* (think: the Dalai Lama of a different sect of Tibetan Buddhism) for his suitability with the modern world, but he's still a fan of a number of aspects of popular culture. In a recent interview with The Times of India, the Tibetan Buddhist leader's aforementioned fanhood surfaced while discussing the cathartic properties of video games. "For me sometimes it can be a relief, a kind of decompression to just play some video games," the Karmapa explained. "If I'm having some negative thoughts or negative feelings, video games are one way in which I can release that energy in the context of the illusion of the game. I feel better afterwards." Forget all the studies arguing this point -- when it comes to video games' therapeutic properties, we're inclined to believe the input of a professional meditator. *It should be noted that there is a dispute over who is the 17th Karmapa. Trinley Thaye Dorje has also been recognized as the current Karmapa by some authorities. Maybe they could settle it once and for all in a proper match of Madden or something?[Via Kotaku; image credit: Prince Roy]
Jade Dynasty goes into open beta, supplies new trailer
Perfect World Entertainment's new flagship game, Jade Dynasty, has pulled itself out of closed beta right on time and has jumped into open beta, swords and magic at the ready.If you're looking to check out this new free-to-play MMO, or at least judge some of the controversial game options for yourself, you can head right on over to the Jade Dynasty website, sign up for Perfect World Entertainment's portal, and jump into the game with no beta key required.With the release of the open beta client comes a new trailer, and we here at Massively have cleverly embedded the video after the break. If you want to see some high flying combat, just hit continue reading and enjoy the video!
Spiritual Guidance: Shadow as a secondary spec in 3.1
Every week, Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host today is Alex Ziebart who doesn't have as many cool links to plug up here as Matticus does but will try anyway. This week we get our Shadowform on.. Dual specs are coming, probably only a week away, and I suspect that many Holy and/or Discipline Priests out there will be picking up a Shadow build as their second spec. Priests, like most classes, can have many little build variations to fit your playstyle: Raiding, soloing, doing Battlegrounds, doing arenas, all of that. I'm going to look at a couple of good PvE specs to use in patch 3.1, but unfortunately avoiding the PvP specs for you arena junkies in our audience. Trust me, you don't want to take my advice there. Discipline PvP maybe, but not Shadow.PvE Shadow - RaidingMMO-Champion has a great tool for setting up talent specs, because you can include your glyphs as well, so we're going to be using that. This spec (14/0/57) will be a fairly cookie-cutter raiding build in patch 3.1, with only very minor variations from person to person. The Shadow tree isn't a very complicated one. Either a talent boosts your DPS, or it does something else. For a raiding spec, you want all of the DPS talents and you can skip all of the 'something else' talents unless they're mandatory for a DPS talent. It's pretty straightforward. Even in the Discipline tree the ultimate goal is to pick up the DPS talents, Twin Disciplines and Improved Inner Fire. Meditation isn't a direct DPS talent, but having no mana is certainly a DPS hit.
WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Shadow Priest changes
The PTR patch notes have hit, and while we don't have the entire spread of changes yet (they'll be coming in waves), we do have a lot of pretty good material to look at. Personally, I think the Shadow Priest changes are pretty great this time around. PvP Shadow Priests might feel a little disappointed, but PvE Priests should be fairly happy with how things are going so far.Even PvP received a few good buffs, but while it's a step in the right direction, it simply isn't enough. It feels as if they're trying to approach some of the big issues carefully, when they really do need to go in there and start making pretty sweeping changes to the PvP-centric talents of the Shadow Priest. A lot needs to change to make the Shadow Priest relevant in PvP again without strapping a Warlock to their hip at all times.Enough of that, though. Let's look into the changes, shall we? Shadowfiend: Health scaling increased. Now receives 30% of the master's spell power. Mana return increased to 5%, up from 4%. The Shadowfiend now receives mana when its melee attacks land, rather than when it deals damage. Movement speed normalized to player movement speed. Tooltip revised.
Ghostcrawler gives specifics for patch 3.1 mana regen changes
One of the big changes coming in patch 3.1 is the change to mana regen, and it has a lot of people pretty frantic. The last thing healers want is for their life to become harder, right? Well, Ghostcrawler hit the forums today with some clarification on the subject.Base regen (which is an equation that factors in both Intellect and Spirit) will be nerfed by about 40%. This means the mana you would regen while just standing around doing nothing will be quite a bit lower than it currently is. However, in exchange, regen-while-casting talents such as Meditation, Intensity, Spirit Tap and many others, whille be buffed so your in-combat mana regen shouldn't be harmed very much. It'll essentially prevent you from trying to wiggle in and out of the 5 second rule for big regen ticks, while not terribly bothering your mana regen while you're actually doing things.
Keep your New Year's resolutions: a Holiday Gift Guide
Ahhhh, New Year's resolutions. You promise that you're going to take better care of yourself, improve your life, and then you usually break all of those resolutions by January 2nd. This year's going to be different, right? Here are some gift ideas to help you keep your 2009 New Year's resolutions. Weight Loss Unless you're the lean and mean marathon Mac man and real-life action figure Adam Engst, you could probably afford to lose some weight. Resolving to lose a few pounds is a classic New Year's resolution, and one that's very easy to break. Fortunately, there are some Mac and iPhone applications that can help you to stay the course: CalorieKing Nutrition & Exercise Manager for Mac OS X -- This US$45.00 application has a huge food database and makes it simple to drag-and-drop caloric information into a food diary. Exercise tracking and a weight log are included as well. BeFit -- TUAW covered the debut of this US$15.95 Mac application earlier this year, and it remains a good program for tracking what you put in your mouth. Remember, you can get BeFit at half-price if you're a current Jon Brown Designs customer.
Shadow Priest talent build for Patch 3.0.2
Echoes of Doom is here, along with all of its tasty new talent points. Things haven't changed very much for us Shadow Priests. If you enjoyed the Shadow Priest playstyle before, you still will. The numbers you put out in terms of Healing, DPS and mana regen are wildly different, but the buttons you push are pretty much the same. If you found Shadow Priest playstyle (not necessarily the numbers game) a little stale before patch 3.0.2, this patch and even Wrath itself won't change that very much. If you plan on sticking with Shadow, good on ya.I'm going to lay out my current Shadow talent build and explain why I picked the talents I did. Keep in mind that this spec is not for every aspect of the game. It's not even for every player. I'm using this spec as a level 70, PvE raiding spec. It's not perfect, I'm not completely happy with it, but I think that's because our trees are currently meant for level 80 and not level 70. I haven't been able to come up with something I like better yet. When I plan ahead for level 80, it feels much more complete. We don't have the luxury of those extra 10 talent points yet, so this is what I'm using for now:ShadowTier 1I skipped Blackout because its raiding applications are very limited. It works on some trash, but never bosses. That's a big 'meh' for sure. I went with Spirit Tap and Improved Spirit Tap, because that's going to act as a Shadow Priest's Meditation for now. Finally, Tier 1 of the Shadow tree has something genuinely useful to raiders!
Ask a Beta Tester: Spell power, phasing, and more
The image above has almost nothing to do with the content of today's Ask a Beta Tester, but I found it funny so you get to deal with it. We'll jump right into things with Turfing's question... I have a priest alt getting close to 70. Planning on doing healing come Wrath. With the conversion to spell power should I be picking up healing gear or damage gear right now? How is, for instance, Spell fire stacking up against Primal Mooncloth? Is spellfire actually able to heal better right now in the beta? How about damage?I strongly recommend hopping over to Wowhead's Wrath site and doing some research on how the numbers turn out. In most cases, DPS gear has better DPS stats (hit, crit) and Healing gear has better Healing stats. The spell power numbers are just much, much closer. In your particular example, the Primal Mooncloth Robe has more spell power than the Spellfire Robe, but it has mp5 and the Spellfire has crit. A DPS spec/class would rather have the crit.A few weeks ago I covered the effects of the spell power change in Hybrid Theory, with some raw numbers to look at. You can read that over if you'd like, but I mostly just suggest hitting up wotlk.wowhead.com for specific items.For more answers to your questions, read on!
Video games treat chronic pain better than drugs
The last thing Merck or Pfizer want to hear is that their drugs aren't needed anymore. According to Diane Gromala, a Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) professor, that may just be the case. She bases her belief on the many experiments that consistently show people who suffer serious, chronic pain (which Gromala suffers from herself) often find more relief in virtual reality environments than drug-based treatments.According to a CanWest News Service article, Gromala is currently working with doctors to learn why subjects who are distracted in virtual reality worlds report less pain than those using drug-based pain therapy. She believes that controlling pain through computerized VR and biofeedback mediation gives people ways to express, control, and keep track of their pain that pills can't. Video games have been shown to help patients in drug addiction therapy, why not pain management as well?If her studies pan out to be true (we first learned about this story from the folks at FileFront) , it will most certainly help vidicate an industry that has otherwise been villified for everything from mass school shootings to creating a generation of slackers. A little bit of good PR for video games would be a nice change of pace.
Breakfast Topic: WoW as meditation
There are a million ways to relax in this modern era. Yoga, taichi, zen koans, transcendental meditation, knitting, and yes, video games. It might seem odd to mention video games in the same sentence as "zen" or "meditation," but think for a moment: most forms of meditation involve focusing on one simple thing, such as the flame of a candle, or the repetition of a mantra, and excluding all other thought. Doesn't World of Warcraft call this grinding?Now, granted, there are plenty of complicated and interesting things to do in WoW that involve lots of concerted thought and could not be considered meditation. But couldn't grinding away on daily quests or farming for materials be considered a very modern way for some people to wind down, clear their mind of daily frustrations, and just be nothingness itself for a little while? I know for my part, playing WoW by myself for a while certainly isn't ecstatic communion with the divine, but it can be a great way to just put everything else away for a bit and come back to life feeling refreshed. What do you think: is grinding a form of meditation for you, or is it just something to do when you're bored out of your mind?
