Anniversary: Being Witty Librarian Online

So near around my birthday back in 2004, I spotted a PC game box on the shelf that had a bunch of superhero characters on it and asked the store clerk "What was this all about?"

That, said the clerk, was one of the newest Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games called City of Heroes.

I knew what MMOs were. Up until then, they tended to be fantasy-based like Everquest or Runescape, and I wasn't too enthralled about them. I was more into science fiction than fantasy, and more into comic books than either at the time.

Having a superhero based online game was tempting to pass up, though. So I bought it.

And... got addicted to it.

Welcome, to Paragon City!
Don't mind the Level 1s...

Part of it was the gameplay: Relatively simple compared to other MMOs of the time, with different means of crafting boosts (enhancements) to give your character more power and durability in battle. Another part was the roleplay:  A healthy mix of different (Arche)Types to roll made mixing and matching powersets reasonably fun and gave you a chance to build different ATs to test which ones - Blaster (Ranged Damage), Controller (Holders), Defender (Healers), Scrapper (Melee Damage), or Tanker (Meat Shield) - worked best for you.

One of the things about being into superheroes was being into the set universe - DC, Marvel, other - that allowed for fans' imaginations about being a hero in that 'verse. While CoH was its own franchise - and indeed ran into issues stopping players from rolling trademarked builds - fans still have in their heads a stable - entire teams worth - of different types of heroes they'd like to be.

It was common for players to roll multiple alts. The game gave you 10 slots per page (and a ton of pages) to fill, and people would just get about 50 or 60 of them built before maxing any of their levels up (first to 40, then to 50). Altitis (altoholism) is a thing, and CoH contributed to it. New ATs like Brutes, Corruptors, Dominators, Masterminds, and Stalkers added even more addictive appeal.

Say hello to Witty Librarian, on the Homecoming's Excelsior server!

When I first got the game in 2004, it had just finished its Beta testing phase and was actually two-three weeks into gaming. I stumbled around on the various servers before settling on Champion server where I was able to meet people who were willing to team up. One of the things about leveling in-game is that you have to run missions, sometimes story arcs provided by NPC contacts, or Task Forces that doled out bigger item drops. So there's a lot of PvE (teaming) involved. Finding an active Supergroup - think Avengers/Justice League - was a must.

(In terms of PvP - player vs. player - City of Heroes attempted that by adding a new side City of Villains and then created Arenas and shared Hazard Zones where PvP would happen. Two things happened: 1) The developers brought it in too late and the PvP fans weren't interested in the game and 2) Too many people had gotten into the teaming part of CoH/V to where they didn't want to play against each other, so the PvP aspect remains minor)

Soling this mob at Level 8 in Perez Park would be a mess. Find a team first!

Thing about the game, certain ATs played better early on that others. Blasters (think Superman's heat vision or Iron Man's repulsors) were extremely popular early because they were easy to figure out and doled out the most damage. Later updates (Issues) began nerfing or boosting other ATs to where Tankers (think the Hulk) became the preferred type to roll. There was an epic nerfing of armors in Issues 5 and 6 that almost killed the whole game, but the players tolerated it as later Issues course-corrected those mistakes and allowed the game to be more fun.

As I said, Tanker became very popular, to the point where it's one of the often-seen builds in the game. A group in one of the servers began hosting Tanker Tuesdays on a weekly basis, which quickly built a following and a good way to find people to team with on other days of the week. Up above is one of my many Alts, Witty Tanker. Yes, there is a theme. Gamers will tend to name alts after a common nickname/identity. My in-game nickname is Witty, short for Witty Librarian, and so I've rolled numerous Alts with Witty in the name.

You'd be amazed how quickly names can go in-game. When murder hornets hit the newswire late April 2020, I immediately logged in and created a Murder Hornet alt. Within minutes of my doing that, I started receiving in-game text messages from angry players that I had gotten to it first.

Time to GO HUNT, KILL SKULS before there are any
DUPING RARES.

All those screenshots are from last night's Tuesday Tanker run (missions team running high-level door missions to help lower-level builds that are SideKicked can get better XP to level). You can see a lot of different uniforms and costume styles, part of the CoH allure. City of Heroes gained a reputation for one of the most diverse and colorful costuming among all the MMOs - better than Warcraft - and allowed for even more Alts to get built around themed costume designs.

And THAT is what it looks like when your Alt hits a new level up!

Oh no, the abandoned mine map! Veterans of the game
aren't a fan of these (too narrow, and one map has a nasty room
we called the Layer Cake).

While it was fun to play - and needed a few months here and there to step away to keep from getting too addictive - it all came to an end when the game's owner NCSoft decided to end it (in spite of its popularity in the US and Europe, the South Korean company never understood the appeal and wanted to expand newer franchises) by 2012. The outrage back then was intense, even from non-players. Attempts were made to buy up the rights, but they all fell through, and it all ended with fans standing in Atlas Park holding up torches in remembrance.

The Last Night in Paragon City 
November 30, 2012

Except...

A number of gamer fans had gained access to the base code, and had begun underground servers to maintain and keep a core set of players going. Due to the illegality of it - NCSoft still owned the rights - they kept it hush-hush as much as possible, inviting back players they knew would keep their damn mouths shut.

(Glances about) (whispers) I got invited to the secret server around 2018.

Until 2019, when someone finally blabbed on a public forum, due to concerns that the game code contained the personal information of those who had paid to play between 2004 through 2012 (some MMOs required full registration for full access, some offer limited access for free, and CoH had both). Immediately, hundreds of thousands clamored to get back on the game, even with the pending legal battle that NCSoft was sure to unleash.

Except...

NCSoft decided not to pursue the matter as long as none of the server providers required people to pay (they could donate monthly to help pay for server space/office bills instead). Someone must have explained to the bosses that this was an audience that could - and would - pay down the line if they ever brought it back as a fee-based MMO.

A number of alternative CoH sites sprang up, with Homecoming - formed by the people who ran the secret server - gaining a sizable advantage. Homecoming also made back-room discussions with NCSoft to be the official provider, with all of the talks wrapping up this past January to where the game is officially back.

Whether they will convert the current setup to a pay-to-play model - which could reduce the number of active Alts and the ability to build post-50 Veteran-level Alts - remains to be seen. In the meantime, there are nights when multiple servers on Homecoming are packed, there is ongoing interest in playing the game, and demand for new power sets for more Alts remains constant.

So I may have my Shardtobers back after all! If I can convince people that the gameplay's improved to where we can run those Task Forces in under two hours now.

Witty Librarian in figurine!

And don't even get me started on all the Badge Hunting that happens in-game...

Updating My Wittylibrarian Art

Still working on getting this definition / logo updated for self-merch and stuff.

So now I need to add this to a coffee mug somewhere... brb.

Update 7/25/21: Okay, got the coffee mug made at VistaPrint, and it got shipped in solid condition, which was way better than CafePress' delivery.

Gonna show this off at work, krewe!!!

I think I got some neat giveaway items for the next comic-con I'll be attending...

Anybody Good With Zazzle?

Hola, peeps. I gave up on Cafe Press as a place to market Witty Librarian merch - the coffee mugs kept getting cracked in shipment - so I'm switching over to Zazzle to see if things are better over there.

So um, I uploaded my Witty quote banner to the site and got it attached to a coffee mug and... well, now I'm trying to figure out how to transfer that banner JPG onto other items like mousepads, t-shirts, and SUVs.

Anyone got any tips on that? The instructions all keep saying I need to transfer to a Template format but it's not giving me the ability to upload to Template. Unless I missed a step somewhere...

Updating Witty Librarian Stuff

It's been awhile since I've tried marketing meself as a Witty Librarian, working with a Cafe Press service that I haven't made sense of for the last decade or so.

I'm thinking of going to Vista Print, where I've made bookmarks and handouts for my book vendor appearances, to see about creating mousepads and signage. In the process, I discovered I needed to recreate decades-old logos done on low-resolution. So I'm redesigning the stuff I've had to this:

I used to write it as "Smart@ss" but people thought it was a bad email link. /sigh

Is the shadow drop too much?

Still doing this graphic design on my own. I worry I'm not getting the images clean enough to transfer to printing on mugs and t-shirts. We'll see.

What Did I Do To Upset the Canadians THIS Time?

'Cause here I was checking my blog traffic this morning and I came across activity coming from Canada.  So I follow this link back:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-kc-libraries-trade-barbs-over-jays-royals-playoffs-1.3282719

and I find that someone added this blog address (and in the Canadian format wittylibrarian.blogspot.ca rather than the .com of the GOOD OLE USA) to one of the comments.

And the CBC news site has locked the Comments down, meaning I can't get on there to defend myself.

Because I don't want to get into the middle of a fight between Toronto Blue Jays and Kansas City Royals fans.

Listen up, Canada.  I'M A TAMPA BAY RAYS FAN.

/cries

Summer Librarianship: Keep the Kids Reading

Just to note, it's summer.  Libraries use this time to encourage kids and teens to read.  It's helpful: it keeps the youth engaged in a needed skill - reading and literature - during the two/three months between schooling.

The theme this summer is Heroes, which is an appropriate one for meself as a fan of comic books and hero gaming.  Here at Bartow Public we're hosting a lot of superhero-themed events for the youngsters.  I worked with our Children's and Teen librarians hosting an event where kids got a superhero name and they crafted their own superhero outfits (although I would have said no to the capes like Edna would).

As such, I need to get this printed out and hanging on a wall at work:

Libraries run a READ campaign.

I really REALLY miss City of Heroes...

P.S. this is post 300.  Hi, everybody!

Anniversary: My First Full-Time Job

Twenty years ago - Spring of 1994 - I was looking for full-time work.

I had a part-time Library Adjunct position at the St. Pete Junior College Clearwater campus off Drew St. at the time.  It was nice, working the reference desk, helping students get on the CD-ROM databases and look for books in the two-story building.  I had just gotten my Masters degree in Library and Info Sciences at University of South Florida (GO BULLS) and was hoping to find a full-time spot at an academic-level library.

While it wasn't an academic library, I got a call from Broward County Libraries to interview.  The county system was this large, spread-out system that used regional libraries as nexus points for the smaller community libraries that dotted the packed urban/suburban landscape.  They were going with a novel idea at the time of sharing the large regional libraries with the Broward community college campuses.  They were building a brand new building for the BCC North Campus, and needed full-time staff to cover the expanding Reference desk (BCC provided two existing librarians to staff the desk as well).

I had scored well on the civil service exam I took at the ALA convention back in 1993 apparently, and passed the phone interview well enough to get the face-to-face.  They had asked me to bring my MLS degree with me so they could photocopy it.  Foolishly, my parents already paid for it to get framed and we couldn't get it out of the mounting... so I lugged this bulky framed degree under my arm into the interview where I got hired.

There was the rush of driving around the county with dad to find an apartment complex I could rent out within a month.  There was the hassle of figuring out what to pack and carry down.  There was the confusion of figuring out which roads to take and which led to nowhere (if Broward County had one thing going for it, it was that most of the roads were in a grid pattern: figuring out intersections became the easiest thing to do).

And then it was May.  My parents helped me move down from Pinellas County.  May 8th was my birthday (and also Mother's Day, which we celebrated at a nice restaurant, I forget where now) that Sunday.  I was twenty-four years old.  And then Monday May 9th I started my first full-time job at North Regional Library.

The library itself was already open, at least on the first floor where the college students used the computer lab and study rooms available to get their work done.  Reference was on the second floor, and there was still a lot of work to get done before the official opening in June.  Books still to unpack and shelve: the county library system shipped us boxes of used, moldy reference books from a defunct East Regional library that had gotten flooded out.  We spent three days trying to integrate those books with their bad Dewey numbers and worse book bindings before our bosses were able to argue to the county to get rid of those poor things.

We had to set up our desk policies and our shifts.  We had to undergo a crash course on the weeding policies that Broward County required.  Our assistant reference department head at the time was very strict about collection management: I could never convince her that the college students we'd be getting would need history books on specific time-frames (to her, a book covering just one year of history wasn't for us: she seemed to think broad history books were the only ones worth having...).  She was right about weeding out travel books as quick as possible, though...

It was my first full-time job.  In a brand-spanking new library building with this open stairwell and pretty glass-framed sculpture dangling from the ceiling.  I had my own workdesk.  We shared two staff computers using WordPerfect 5.1 and then 6.0.  We had a spacious staff lounge, fresh carpeting, chairs with rollers...

It was twenty years ago.

A lot changed since then.  I've been to other branches in Broward County Libraries since then, and then went up to Gainesville to work at the University of Florida for a few years (my other alma mater, where I earned a Bachelors in Journalism).  From there I worked at Pasco County for some time, until that all went sour in the wrong ways and I found myself unemployed for four years (!) before Bartow in their infinite mercy hired me on as their reference/computer expert.  Where I hope I am flourishing.

North Regional, though, remains a fond memory, a good start to my career in libraries.  They're hosting a 20th Anniversary celebration in June.  I'd like to attend just to see the place, see any familiar faces, say hellos and farewells and whatnot.

I just wonder if they ever increased the Jamaica history book collection.  I had a hard time finding more books to order to fill the demand...

New Logo for Witty Librarian at Cafe Press

Having received some concerns about the legibility of the text on my original design for the Witty Librarian store, I looked into creating a larger logo with slightly bigger text:

How does this look to you?  Please comment.

To The Seven People Who Read This Blog: Cafe Press For the Holidays!

If anyone's got moneys to spare, and any friends or relatives who work as librarians, I do have that Cafe Press store of Witty Librarian gear. 

I just added some Christmas ornaments, a vanity plate for cars, a few more shirts and sweaters, and ereader (Kindle and Nook) sleeve covers!  If you are looking for any fun merch for Festivus/Saturnalia/Christmas please check it out!

Witty Librarian and the CafePress of Doom

I've been meddling in the affairs of shoppers by creating more items with Witty Librarian quote-age and Logo over at the Witty Librarian Shelf of Stuff on CafePress.

So... if you know any librarians with truckloads of money to spare...  uh, lemme rephrase that.  If you know anybody with truckloads of money to spare who wants to purchase gifts to librarians, send them my way.  :-)