Best posts made by Sparks

Okay, since we're talking about book 1/season 1 here, I'll stay outside of spoiler tags as well.

@Arkandel said in Game of Thrones:

Ned was an excellent liar. In fact he kicked ass with it - he had a secret which he kept from everyone for many years, including his own wife, and in fact he used his immaculate reputation as a way to perpetulate that lie; no one questioned how this honorable man had a bastard with some random chick because why would he lie about it? Duuuh.

Yes, and (at least in the books) it's made quite clear through his internal dialogue that it's the only lie he's ever told (even if, in the books, we've never had true confirmation about what that lie was), and that he only lied because he swore an oath to do so. And that the conflict between "I must not break my oath" and "I am perpetrating an immense lie" was eating him up inside in many ways.

As for choosing his people over his honor at the end, I agree 100%. However, I think what you seem to be saying is an example of what Ned always was, I see it as Ned making a choice to be something different. He agonizes a lot about whether to make a false confession. And the moment when he decides to do so—making the choice that maybe his honor didn't matter compared to the good of his people and family—seemed like a turning point to me. Yes, that decision cost him his life, but it (mostly) spared his people; I view it as when he stopped being an example (this paragon of honor and truth) to his people, and made a choice as their leader.

In the end, I think we're looking at the same events and interpreting them differently. But, hey, that's part of the fun of fiction!

@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I was explaining to someone recently that I sort of have to use my phone at night to be able to sleep. Because if I just lie there... my brain will never shut off. So I have to just queue up a bunch of mindless YouTube videos to keep my mind occupied enough that I can start falling asleep during them.

I usually read before bed on my Kindle, because the phone's back light—even with Night Light/f.lux type stuff—can make me more awake. Reading works better because it still occupies my brain enough to keep it from doing the 'race around the house like a panicked cat' thing, but doesn't have the backlight to keep me awake.

(The downside to this is that sometimes instead of slowly letting fatigue take over, I get really into the book and then it's like 4am and I'm like "well, shit".)

@Auspice said in Good TV:

@Sparks said in Good TV:

backs away from this conversation slooooooowly, so the motion draws no attention

So how bout them Final Fantasies?

returns to conversation, vehemently waving FF6 banner, accompanied by Terra's Theme, and wielding large stack of arguments why it is the best FF game... then realizes this is the TV thread and there's really no justification for starting that conversation here as well

@Kanye-Qwest said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

things i have RECENTLY become obsessed with during hyperfocus holes, to the point i have read and watched dozens of hours of content about them:

arctic foxes

(It seemed the appropriate gif.)

@Ghost - Cars that can be told "do not let the interior get above X" while you are parked somewhere outdoors in the summer are one of the best innovations in automotive technology, I swear. (Being able to check the temperature remotely and adjust the climate control before returning to the car is also acceptable.)

@Runescryer said in The litRPG thread:

@Ghost said in The litRPG thread:

@Auspice said in The litRPG thread:

Sooooo.... Reskinned .hack?

Kinda, but I think SAO is better by far. I also like that they change games between seasons.

Also, to be fair, while .hack//SIGN is the first litRPG story I can really think of, only Tsukasa was stuck in The World. In the Aincrad arc of Sword Art online, it's literally everyone who happens to be online at a certain time who becomes trapped in the game, unable to log out, and if the Nervegear is removed it will microwave their brains. And if they die in game, it's literal permadeath, as the Nervegear will also microwave their brain in the real world.

@Runescryer said in The litRPG thread:

I love SAO, but the biggest disconnect for me is that each season, the dangers of the interface tech are exposed and explored, and PEOPLE STILL USE IT.......smdh

To be fair, they got rid of the Nervegear and its successor is entirely safe.

***=The only reason anyone was trapped in ALfheim Online in the Fairy Dance arc...***

***=And during the Phantom Bullet arc...***

***=Ordinal Scale was an original story for the anime, and...***

***=During the (extremely freaking long) Alicization arc, which the anime has only covered like the first third of...***

***=In the current (novel) arc, Unity Ring...***

@Runescryer said in The litRPG thread:

Also, if you didn't know, Excell Saga is sort of the sequel to SAO. Or SAO is the prequel to Excell Saga.

*whispers* I think you mean Accel World, not Excel Saga.

@deathbird said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@Sparks wow that was really nice of you to do that. Thank you!

No problem!

Also, even if you do the development of whatever it is in-house, I highly recommend finding a product development firm with NPI experience to help shepherd things into production. Even the best-organized projects from first time folks often run into huge issues once moving into production. (Poor tooling, parts that are bought

I'm willing to try to answer stuff if you've got questions in general; I've seen so many very enthusiastic projects break up on the shoals of underfunding and ill-preparation, or ending up going way over budget dealing with issues once they get to production/manufacturing.

Like I said, literally my day job.

@Lisse24 - The books are equally good; there's only one left (the ninth book) and then the series is done, and I have very mixed feelings about that. It will be nice to see the last remaining plot threads pulled together, but it will also be sad to know there's no more Expanse books coming.

The first book (and first season of the show) is based off of online RP.

@Atomic said in RL Anger:

I think I know this person. I have known them since high school. They have been nothing but good to me, even through rough times and dark places.

I never met the person in question in MU*ing; I know them in-passing from the writing community. (They're more a friend-of-a-friend than someone I know directly.) But they've also always been nothing but pleasant in the interactions we've directly had, and nothing but pleasant to mutual acquaintances in that sphere of life (i.e., writing).

That said, I think people can act very differently in different contexts, and some environments are wildly unhealthy for certain people. We've all seen people who use MU*s as therapy outlets instead of actually seeing a therapist, for instance. Or people who are perfectly nice individuals offline when you meet them face-to-face, but who become aggressive, competitive jerks when you put them into an online gaming context; the sort who would never insult someone to their face, but will scream insults over voice chat in the middle of an Overwatch or Fortnite match. And in those cases, if you remove the person from the situation, their toxicity vanishes.

I suspect maybe MU*ing was one of those cases for this person. Or maybe they've matured in recent years.

Back on topic. As for my own RL anger, why the heck does it feel like my family cannot get a break? Mom wasn't able to stop chemo at the end of the treatment this time; she's going to be on maintenance levels of chemo forever, as while she's on it her levels are down but when she comes off they immediately start to spike back up. Dad's Parkinson's is getting worse and worse. My uncle's on dialysis. My aunt's tendons are going loose and bones are crumbling a bit below the pelvis, making it impossible for her to walk without crutches.

So I've been working with my folks to discuss end-of-life arrangements for mom (we might have her for a few more years, but she wants to have that all squared away—especially after watching how quickly cancer took my writing mentor), and how dad could get cared for as his Parkinson's get worse after mom's eventually gone. Which means they're getting a condo in Phoenix (where my little brother lives) to move there six months out of the year, then they're going to downsize everything in the house up here, sell the house, and buy a condo up here so they have less to take care of.

I have no idea what's going to happen with my aunt; she's not really self-sufficient at this point, whenever she needs to leave the house. Plus, her house is in no way accessible—it literally has four feet of stairs to climb to reach the front porch—and I'm fairly sure she's going to have to move to a wheelchair in the next year. Mom or I have to drive her everywhere now, and while mom's retired, I am not and cannot be on-call during weekdays. If mom and dad are in Phoenix...

Combined with some stressors at work, it's just... a lot. I feel like I'm kind of drowning a bit, and I'm not sure how to alleviate that. I've been distracting myself with GM'ing and writing, but that's maybe not a sustainable method long-term.

@Rinel — For what it's worth, that's apparently a very common experience among trans women who have ADHD.

So, speaking of animated kids' shows...

There's a set of graphic novels by Mike Maihack which I have adored for years (since back in its webcomic days), called Cleopatra in Space. The comic is six volumes long; five of them are already published, with the sixth and final volume coming out next month. It's a mostly lighthearted adventure comic, albeit with some darker moments to it.

The basic premise is that Cleopatra, in her teenage years, discovers a mysterious tablet and gets thrown 30,000 years into the future, where the Nile Galaxy is threatened by an alien overlord named Octavian. There's a prophecy that only Cleopatra—someone presumably dead for, y'know, literally tens of thousands of years—can save them, one which has been largely discounted by almost everyone, right up until a very, very confused teenage Cleopatra falls through this inexplicable time rift...

But hey, no pressure, right?

Anyway, I had somehow overlooked the fact that it has been turned into an animated series by Dreamworks. The first season—which I guess is roughly an adaptation of Target Practice, the first graphic novel—aired in Southeast Asia last year, I guess but now it's out here! They've changed some things; Cleo's friends Akila and Brian (both human in the comic) have been turned into an alien and a cyborg, for instance.

Despite that, from what I've seen so far, it seems to stay pretty true to the spirit of the comic. (Not surprising, since apparently Maihack is the show-runner.) So I'm looking forward to watching this.

(Also, the opening theme is oddly catchy.)

@surreality said in RL Anger:

This. Be there. Be there in more but body as much as you can, and if you can't be there in body be on the phone or texts or skype or something else. Be engaged. Do things with her as much as possible in that time.

My mother failed hard on this with me and it's something I struggle with. (While her daughter was dying according to the docs, my mother was reading a book and ignoring me, and crying over a character in the book dying and ignoring my attempts to talk with her or watch something fun with her and so on. DO NOT BE MY MOTHER. I am a pretty forgiving person but that one will take a while...)

Ironically, my mother's made it pretty clear that at least right now, she wants the opposite of engagement; she wants the presence more than attention, at least at this stage of things. She wants people there and reading while she reads, or watching TV with her, etc. (She's gotten on my dad's case a bit about him not letting her just read or play Solitaire on her computer, but wanting to sit and talk or something instead.)

I think everyone has different ways of coping with recovery. Though I expect once she's recovered from the surgery and the chemo starts, her feelings on this may change.

@Thenomain said in RL Anger:

I wrote this code yesterday. It works. I can no longer figure out why it works.

One of my earliest code projects, with my best friend when we were kids... we had a naming scheme for our global variables. (This being in BASIC, where you had very strict naming schemes for variables.) We discovered if we assigned a value to one of these global variables, it would break the program.

We searched the entire codebase, and confirmed we had never used that particular variable anywhere else. And yet, assigning a value to it anywhere caused the program to fail.

We finally just added comments declaring the variable 'the God variable' and not to be touched, and moved on with our lives.

Much as I loathe HipChat, it integrates well with all the other software that I loathe. JIRA, TestFlight, etc. So there are valid IT reasons in some cases to use it, if you need everything to interoperate.

Of course, more and more the Silicon Valley companies are using Slack instead, which is like Discord for business. (Well, since Slack was out first, I suppose more Discord is Slack for gamers.) And Slack is at least less obnoxious than HipChat.

@Monogram said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

@Sparks said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)

Many people forget that the beloved ME 1(which is still my favorite in the first trilogy)was the exact same way. Exact same looking caves, or bases or hideouts. Recycled the same three or four layouts that looked exactly the same. Enemies popping in? Happened. But people are so quick to harp on DA2 for it but completely ignore the fact the fact that ME1 did the exact same thing. It wasn't anything new.

I think for me DA2 was more jarring than ME1; a mass-produced modular structure plopped down on some alien world made more sense than a supposedly-natural cave having an identical layout to every single other cave ever.

I mean, even in MEA, half of the buildings in outposts look more or less identical, but given that people are basically slapping down the construction equivalent of shipping containers, stacking them on each other, and connecting the rooms...

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

[citation needed]

I'm not saying I don't believe you. I'm saying I don't have very much information on this and would like to see some more. What little I do have says vaping is far less harmful to both the user and the user's environment than is smoking, but … studies can be bought.

It depends. Arguably it's better in many ways, but you still introduce a lot of crap into the air:

During the vaping sessions substantial amounts of 1,2-propanediol, glycerine and nicotine were found in the gas-phase, as well as high concentrations of PM2.5 (mean 197 μg/m3). The concentration of putative carcinogenic PAH in indoor air increased by 20% to 147 ng/m3, and aluminum showed a 2.4-fold increase. PNC ranged from 48,620 to 88,386 particles/cm3 (median), with peaks at diameters 24–36 nm. FeNO increased in 7 of 9 individuals. The nicotine content of the liquids varied and was 1.2-fold higher than claimed by the manufacturer.

—Schober, W, et al. (2014). Use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) impairs indoor air quality and increases FeNO levels of e-cigarette consumers. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, 217(6). pp. 628–637. doi:10.1016

Now, whether or not that one's a completely reputable journal/article, I'm not sure! But I can find plenty of similar results with a few more quick journal searches.

Anyway, vaping's probably a lot better than normal cigarettes, you're not wrong. But it's not harmless, either, and if I'm an asthma sufferer I'm probably not going to feel particularly well-disposed towards _anyone) riding the bus or whatever who's putting crap in the air that makes it hard for me to breathe; whether it's normal cigarette smoke, pot (HI I'M FROM SEATTLE AND BOY THERE IS A LOT OF THAT BEING SMOKED AROUND HERE LET ME TELL YOU), or e-cigs/vaping is not particularly going to matter.

Well hey. http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428

@Ataru — As someone born and raised here, rose-colored glasses are a reality, you're not wrong... but our housing costs and traffic were sure as hell a lot saner before Seattle became "cool". We've expanded without any sort of sane urban planning, and it's hurting the region badly.

(What drives me insane are the other native Seattle folks who have this whole desire to cling to those rose-colored ideals of the past, and who don't like the change we need for a city this large. "I don't want light rail where I can see it from my house!" "I don't want apartment buildings in my neighborhood!" And so on.)

@Cheesegrater said in I Need Career Motivation:

If you like getting paid and don't like web development, Embedded systems are booming right now, what with every new product needing to be on the IoT or controllable via a smartphone app.

Welcome to my life! Though we've definitely gotten to work on some cool stuff.

@Paris said in RL Anger:

@Admiral unfortunately opiates don't do much for migraines, and often make them worse.

Barbiturates will sometimes block the pain, but I refer to it as a zoo cage. It's like the difference between standing ten feet away from a hungry lion on the veldt, or standing ten feet away from a hungry lion with thick zoo glass separating the enclosure from you. In both cases there's a lion ten feet away from you, but in one you can still perceive the lion even though it can't eat you.

Unfortunately, they also only last a few hours, and tend to have plenty of other side effects. (And I'm not fond of the idea of becoming dependent on pain suppressors to function as a human being.)

I've yet to find what truly works for me, either way. Topamax worked best so far to reduce the migraines, but made me feel like half of my brain was missing and the remaining half was running at a very high latency.