I’ve been talking to a friend a lot about creating a hero to reflect the fact I’ve been playing City of Heroes ever since Issue 1. So I finally got around to it tonight.

For the name, I went with The I1 Veteran for obvious reasons. I decided I wanted a grizzled, Nick Fury-esque feel to the character (hence the eye-patch really), and since the various faction logos are one of the later veteran rewards, I thought I’d get some use out of them by making him a member of the Paragon PD, with their logo on his flack jacket.

He’s an Invulnerable/Axe Tanker, although his character description just describes his powers as being “hard as nails”. I always find playing Tankers a bit more challenging, since my natural playstyle is for ranged, blaster-type characters.

Too Many Linux Distros Make For Open Source Mess - Wolfe’s Den Blog - InformationWeek

I wonder how many of those actually get used by a reasonable number of people. I suspect the list of “main distributions” is probably only about 10-15. However, this kind of thing really doesn’t help convince people to pick up Linux.

Its this kind of thing that made me really like all the publicity Ubuntu was getting a couple of months ago. Playing up desktop-oriented distributions in the media is what’ll help, rather than confusing people.

The other day I noticed I hadn’t received any veteran rewards in City of Heroes since Issue 8 (in which they were introduced) had gone live. I went in and checked my account details, and sure enough what seemed to have happened is that only my UK account time was being taken into account.

However, I had originally had a US account for about a year, so I emailed the NCSoft Support guys asking if that shouldn’t have been taken into account. Well, GM Max got back to me, and sorted the whole thing out. So now I’ve got the full three years worth of veteran rewards and am proudly displaying my “Addicted” badge as my title.

Above you can see Reilly (my level 41 main) with his new Nemesis Staff and Clockwork pet, in our Supergroup base beside our new Longbow Chaser. Excellent

And here’s Colonel Lightning, my Electric Blaster with her Blackwand and Rikti Monkey pet.