Posts made by Packrat

I definitely have an interest in this, so if it ever finishes I will certainly take a look.

@fortydeuce I give quite a lot of training courses and this is so important. I try to structure things into roughly 50 minute blocks with 20 minutes of 'lecture', a re-engagement such as a quiz or exercise, then another block. Ten minute breaks every hour to let people hydrate and stand up.

I now have my desktop back! Which is great, the motherboard was replaced and I only had to pay for shipping to get it back to the supplier.

Less fun was the way they sent it back without the hard drive plugged in and with the power leads for the graphics card threaded through and neatly tied to leave them... Right at the top of the case, nowhere near where any card might be. So much for how lovely and tidy they left the inside of my PC.

I played Andromeda for a few hours, like... 3?

Then I never felt the motivation to load Origin to play it again so it was just a huge waste of money and hard drive space. It just lacked whatever it is that makes me actually find a game worth playing.

One thing I would like to see would be that feudal structure being messier and 'flatter', no 'each duke has X number of counts, who has Y number of baronies' with the relationship between them being fixed.

Have barons who are sworn directly to kings, have counts who are richer than dukes, etc. It makes things a whole lot more interesting and also reduces instances of 'Well all the duke slots are full, so I will play a count, who is identical to a duke when it comes to interacting with Noble Power stuff but shittier'.

If you decouple noble rank from a weirdly strict hierarchy you get much more in the way of fun options like 'upjumped' minor nobles with great wealth and power due to recent family fortune, barons who are key to the crown due to being close allies or a cadet house with direct allegiance, snakepit marriage alliances or ailing ducal houses in terrible debt, etc. All sorts of fun.

I have been listening a whole lot to this channel

Ideas of Ice and Fire

Obviously a channel that was originally Game of Thrones oriented but it has been going heavy on Dune recently and is well worth listening to.

This weekend I took part in a zombie event thing that involved running around a huge derelict factory in mostly complete darkness with BB guns and very few torches, teams competitively completing objectives whilst battling actors dressed as zombies.

There was also the 'invincible' zombie with the chainsaw, at one point we fled him into darkness only for six of us to end up rammed into a doorless toilet cubicle and failing to hide from a man wielding a chainsaw. Good times!

But one girl thought it was a good idea to wear golden flipflops to the event instead of ankle boots.

@arkandel I have attempted to MUSH using a tablet but it is horrible, if not as bad as a phone. I absolutely have RPed using Blowtorch on a phone but it was with somebody I knew well and who was very accepting of the fact I would take a long time to deliver occasionally gibberish poses.

Forums on a tablet though? Sure! I tend to browse rather than post but in this instance a kitten decided to 'help' me type with the result I (or she?) ignored @Auspice

It might have been deliberate given that it is obviously not allowed for me to pay attention to forum posts when a cat wants head scritches.

@Auspice is apparently not popular with my kittens, Artemis just decided to 'help' me by tapping at my tablet and setting an ignore. I was just away for two days and they are going nuts with excitement now I am back.

I have (translated to US sizes) size 14 shoes, so you cannot have them, those things are expensive and will make you look like you have clown feet.

Also this is really annoying if I am auditing a factory and need to wear safety boots but they do not have any my size, I get to try to pay close attention to processes in a loud factory as I limp around with pinched toes.

@jibberthehut Mostly Artemis has developed the ability to teleport if she hears a tap being turned on. Then she very excitedly examines the falling water before splashing it with her paw, endlessly, she can be entertained by a running tap for 15+ minutes.

Hera by contrast will, upon hearing my alarm in the morning, start slamming her body into the bedroom door until I let her in, something she will continue to do until I do let her in. Then she will begin purring, run to the bed and flop on it until I give her head scritches for a few minutes. Then she wanders off.

@jibberthehut She is really rather cute, especially with her huge eyes and the fact she has to investigate everything that moves or makes interesting noises.

Her half sister by contrast is only seventeen weeks old and is turning into a floof monster of unprecedented size. Here she is stretching and giving me a look because I am not changing position to scritch her chin.

Keep in mind that the foot to scale is a US size 14 and at her age she is going to be a month and a half at least from being half grown.

Artemis is 18 weeks old today. Here she is squeaking at me to play with her.

So I was reading through the thread and one thing did strike me, Seedless being physically superior to the Seeded to a significant degree. It seems pretty unnecessary and also typecasting for Seedless.

Why not just say that the Seedless who are player characters are particularly exceptional people and give them more points for stuff in character generation without it being an overall population trend? With the opposite being that if you are a scion of a great house with the ability to turn the sky into fire then you are more of a random averagely capable person beyond your political/social/wealth status and awesome magic strength.

That also helps avoid weirdness like you have on Arx where every member of a major noble house is a world class talent and prodigy. Something that remove a whole lot of stories that naturally result from positions of authority being inherited.

So my motherboard died, no desktop for a bit though fortunately it was under warantee and so I am getting it fixed. In the meantime though I fired up the old laptop from the cupboard and...

Wow, this is terrible. Any recommendations for a laptop in the $700 or less range?

The kittens conduct their comprehensive review of the packaging material for their new water fountain.

Update: Well they definitely love the water fountain, they are drinking a ton more water than they used to or just spend time staring at it.

Well I am going to have another go at streaming, this time with a microphone that works!

Twitch Link

@thenomain It is okay, I do not live in the US so I do not have to worry about Best Buy.

There is Curry/PC World though which I understand is pretty much the same thing. Fortunately though I have Amazon Prime and my commute home every evening takes me past a post office.

For now I tried messing around with uninstalling and reinstalling my drivers and at this point the ethernet is not working at all, it is my motherboard socket as well so for now I will stick with the old wi-fi card I found in my crate of random cables and computer bits.

I tried changing the gateway addresses and similar now that I am done with work.

No luck, the computer also seems to work fine if I USB tether my phone into it but that is not me getting to use my lovely fiber optic connection.

So probably something wrong with the network adapter but I do not know what would cause it to work for about ten minutes then fall over. I cannot even work out how to get it working again other than a full computer restart.

So my desktop has started to misbehave seriously. It began today with no changes having been made.

It works fine for about ten minutes then the Internet stops working, with bad gateway messages.

Restarting immediately fixes it but then it happens again ten minutes later. I have tried reinstalling and updating drivers, restarting the router, etc. The Internet works fine for everything else and I am using ethernet.

No idea what might be causing it but it sure is annoying!