Best posts made by Arkandel

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@Arkandel
I just don't see the difference between typing things out and filling out a webform, when it comes to making a MUSH character, other than the UI. You still have to write up a description, you have to select all the nibbly bits of Stats, Attributes, Powers, Weapons, Merits, blah blah blah...

But the UI is a tremendously important part of the exercise. Imagine if, in order to use Google Maps, instead of typing in an address (and being presented with potential matches you can just click on) shown on a map, you had to type in a long command, then manually grep through the text-only addresses to find the one you want, then having to paste the one into a second command to actually start being navigated there... in text, rather than being shown the roads.

Same thing, completely different experience.

It's not a dramatic example though. Even today to walk from Room1 to Room5 you need to get exposed to five rooms' worth of descriptions, character (or NPC) names, etc. It can easily scroll your screen a couple of times.

Now do that in a web client, picking from a map overlay, clicking on your destination... and you are done. Your main window is unaffected - in fact you can show or hide any unnecessary information at will.

Different experiences.

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@kanye-qwest said in MSB Popularity Contest:

@arkandel Ok it was already moved there, and both the other moderators commented on it. Calm down, guys.

What do you mean I need to read things before I do other things?

Speaking of Brandon Sanderson, The Reckoners is a damn good YA series based in a dystopian world where superheroes are assholes.

@Auspice I think I've mentioned this before but...

We were in a three-person scene that had been going on for a bit when this guy comes in from outside. Immediately, and without waiting to see what was going on or ask OOC what we wanted to do, he posts about him being bloodied because of the pitchfork-carrying mob outside trying to get'im.

In all my years in the game that was the grossest attention-seeking I've actually seen in practice. I still can't quite imagine a bigger 'fuck you and what you were doing before, from now on it's about me' than that.

Anything filed under "I was woken up in the middle of the night on a Monday" would normally belong to a different thread, but at like 4 am my oldest kitten barged into the room desperate for affection.

Like... he must have gotten up feeling severely love deprived or something because he just jumped on the bed and lost his shit around my hand trying to purr-position himself around my fingers to get petted, writhing like an idiot to increase the petting area. He ended up sleeping under my armpit, which made me unable to switch sides without waking the fucker up which was important somehow.

Goddamn cats.

When I was in the sixth grade a friend brought The Hobbit to school and lent it to me. I had never read anything like it, it took me like... three days to go through it, and loved it.

Then when I brought it back and thanked him, George told me there was 'another book picking up the story'. We didn't even have a name for a sequel at the time - I had no idea books could do that.

So he lent me The Fellowship of the Ring, which I just refused to put down for several nights straight. It didn't just blow my mind, it left me in awe.

I'm still chasing that feeling of awe.

@Coin said in Good writin'.:

This sort of attitude just kind of glosses over the fact that being polite and considerate is something that would be great. Like, I get it, 'public place, fair to do whatever!' but what this completely ignores is that we're supposed to be playing a cooperative game. Wouldn't you prefer to play that sort of scene with people who want to play it? Why would you foist it on someone who is having fun playing another type of scene already, especially without asking if they'd prefer what you have planned?

Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at too. We can have various expectations of the players around us - that they don't treat the game as a sandbox, that they make themselves available for RP to more than their inner circles, that they take into account some in-game themes into consideration for their responses (the metaplot, IC ranks, etc) - but ultimately none of these things are worth a damn if they're forced on people who don't like playing them out right at that time.

So yes, my idea of a cop car chase going badly and the bad guys bursting into the restaurant to take hostages might actually be awesome and fun under most circumstances but if I try to just go ahead and put it into motion even with the best intentions in mind ("this is ten times better than a generic bar scene! these guys are gonna love it!") and be met with 'meh' and unenthusiastic responses then what good does it do anyone?

There's a reason we announce PrPs and allow players to sign up instead of just picking rooms people are already playing in to run them. Opt-in is a great thing.

Along with Kingkiller Chronicles (which is fucking amazing) my other favorite book series' latest instalment is coming out very soon so I wanted to recommend it.

Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson is the third book in the Stormlight Archive series. It's so original - it's fantasy set in a world periodically ravaged by superstorms, where humanity is engaged in a war with a race they don't understand, themselves separated into castes based on the color of their eyes.

The spotlight is shared by several really interesting characters, both male and female, each with developing special abilities and all interwoven into a massive plot by Sanderson (it's his forte, the guy is really good at spinning threads and then bringing them together) which is set to last for ten books... and he will pull it off, too. The guy is a writing machine.

I can't recommend it enough.

“People are going to die who don’t die in the books, so even the book readers will be unhappy,” Martin said. “So everybody better be on their toes. David and D.B. are even bloodier than I am.”

Kill everything! All of the things!

@ghost

@runescryer Well, and that little issue of settling who the Dragon Reborn is.

Frankly at this point I don't quite understand the online furor about it. It's pretty obvious they aren't changing that character's identity, come on.

Something I read in a history thread and loved it. I can't guarantee it's true. It's funny though.

The headlines of a Paris newspaper from the time Napoleon was coming back from exile:

March 9
THE ANTHROPOPHAGUS HAS QUITTED HIS DEN
March 10
THE CORSICAN OGRE HAS LANDED AT CAPE JUAN
March 11
THE TIGER HAS ARRIVED AT CAP
March 12
THE MONSTER SLEPT AT GRENOBLE
March 13
THE TYRANT HAS PASSED THOUGH LYONS
March 14
THE USURPER IS DIRECTING HIS STEPS TOWARDS DIJON
March 18
BONAPARTE IS ONLY SIXTY LEAGUES FROM THE CAPITAL
March 19
BONAPARTE IS ADVANCING WITH RAPID STEPS, BUT HE WILL NEVER ENTER PARIS
March 20
NAPOLEON WILL, TOMORROW, BE UNDER OUR RAMPARTS
March 21
THE EMPEROR IS AT FONTAINEBLEAU
March 22
HIS IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MAJESTY arrived yesterday evening at the Tuileries, amid the joyful acclamation of his devoted and faithful subjects

@derp said in The Wheel of Time:

That would be like someone just giving up on G. R. R. M. if he writes something in his books different from what the HBO series went into, assuming that we ever get the others. That would be kind of silly, IMO.

I'll give you two reasons. Again, this is just a personal preference; I don't think people are terrible or anything for being okay with the same things I'm not.

So I'm fine with relatively departures which are perfectly plausible within the context of the original work (such as the relationship we saw today in WoT Ep 6). This didn't happen in the books but there was no reason that it couldn't have.

I'm also entirely fine with changes made to accommodate the story in the format it's being told. The most obvious example here is in Lord of the Rings where Tom Bombadil - an important but not strictly relevant-to-the-plot character was taken out entirely. It'd have added another good half hour to an already long movie - it was the right call to make.

On the other hand I wouldn't watch a Silmarillion series where Morgoth is killed by Beren. I wouldn't want to watch Lord of the Rings either where Saruman makes his own Ring of Power and the characters have to go take it from him. Either of those might make for a great fantasy movies - but it wouldn't be Tolkien. It'd be too different from the books for my tastes.

Now I'll put some spoiler tags and I'll explain my reasoning for the identity of the Dragon Reborn specifically.

***=You've been warned!***

If you lost all of your weight you wouldn't have to use it!

The trailer for The Sandman is very good.

This is such a difficult piece of work though. Even though I'm happy to complain about other adaptations of my favorite works into TV series, but I'm not going to blame the producers in this case even if it doesn't translate well.

The original series uses amazing prose, inspired lettering, great - often moody - art... subtleties and wordplay that I have no idea how they can pull off on a TV screen. My hat's off to these folks if they do succeed, but I wouldn't hold it against them if it falls short.

@dontpanda said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:

And here's the kicker: That's not even the end of the list of stories that couldn't possibly be true except it's Mr Rogers and they totally all are.

When I got my Amstrad 6128 my only experience with games was through the arcades, and it was supposed to just be a coin-less one-time investment to let me play the same stuff at home; instead it launched by programming career, but I didn't know that at the time and it's not relevant here.

Back then I didn't even know you weren't supposed to pirate games. It wasn't frowned upon, it just... all the kids like me used to go to one of several computer stores, where they had these big lists of titles, and for a (pretty affordable) fee you could get any of them copied to a floppy disk and take it home with you.

That meant I had a huge list of titles within a few months and I barely played most of them, but the ones I did... man. Taipan! comes to mind, Gauntlet of course (for so many hours), Bard's Tale, every single thing Sierra online was putting out but special mention needs to be given to Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail, end those text-only adventure games... damn. I still remember how I finally solved a riddle in Gnome Ranger 2; Ingrid's Back and it's been like... twenty five years ago since?

Oh and Loom. Loom was so good.

Then once I got a PC, I still remember the original Wing Commander on my VGA which was like... 11 floppies? But I had a hard drive to copy it to, guys! All 40 MB of it ("what are you going to do with all that space man? That's for professional computers" the person at the store had counselled me) and my friends were marvelling at the graphics. One of them went, "holy shit, it looks just like Star Wars!".

Objective physical improvement. When I was started riding a bicycle to work again at the beginning of spring some uphills were pretty hard. I could do them but I was feeling the burn and was out of breath for a few minutes afterwards. This morning I didn't realize I was doing it until I was past the hill since I was thinking of other things at the time; that challenge got turned into just another regular stretch of road.

For me it's really simple.

I've already spent a lot of money to buy games on Steam, where I have a semi-decent catalog built up over time. I also 'trust' it just because I've used it long enough I have reasons to think there won't be any surprises in the future.

Given that I don't want to have multiple launchers if I can help it, any other service wants to compete needs to be clearly superior. They need to offer me more than that. If I buy into them for a single game then the day I stop playing that game I'll stop using its launcher.