T w e n t y S i d e d
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Live free or die, man. Live free or die.
DM of the Rings XL:
Does it come in avacado?
More popular pictures at Popular-Pics.com
5MB Hard Disk in 1956 – The Volume and Size of 5MB memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data. Let us start appreciating your 4 GB jump drive!
Hat Tip: James Hudnall
Session 10, Part 2
Eomer talks to the captain in charge of this mining camp. Eomer bluffs his way though this, making the captain think that the players were sent from Fol Thron to deal with the rioting and work stoppage. This is made easier by the fact that they do have papers proclaiming them to be in service on the Queen, and the fact that the captain would really rather let someone else handle this. They get a lot of license for how they want to handle the problem.
The players have already decided they want the slaves free. Now they need to figure out how to pull it off.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Session 10, Part 2”
D&D Campaign lives again!
Due to the repeated requests, I sat down this weekend and finished the D&D campaign I left hanging waaaay back in May. I apologize to everyone who read through that half-finished story. I didn’t want to start the story again only to stop it again, so now I’ve completed the whole thing. It’s done. I’ll post the next installment later today, and I’ll post the rest Tues-Thu-Sat until the end.
Thanks to the gentle prodding from everyone, and the interest you all expressed in the story.
LATER: I should add that this effort ate into the time I usually spend making the DM of the Rings for the week. Let’s see if I can ALSO get out three comics before the weekend is over. We’ll see.
Still, I feel a great sense of accomplishment right now. This thing has been a little splinter of guilt that would bother me from time to time. The D&D campaign was the original reason for this entire blog, and the fact that I’d left it hanging had been eating at me. So nice to have that done.
RE: DM of the Rings
I made some comments expressing my envy of Rich Burlew, and Wonderduck responded with this comment:
He doesn't have a choice, that's how he is. He's one of those people that thinks that anything he creates is crap-on-a-stick and he's embarrassed to inflict it on people… Fred Gallagher of Megatokyo is another one of ‘em.
[…]
[…]
Okay, I have seen Fred do this and it does indeed annoy me. In fact, his self-loathing is one of the things that drove me away from MegaTokyo desipte my love for the artwork. I didn’t even realize I was doing this same sort of thing until Wonderduck pointed it out.
Part of the problem is that I really don’t laugh at my own jokes. (You can’t. By the time you re-word and re-arrange a joke a couple of dozen times the humor is gone. By the time I’m done with a joke I’m sick of it. I doubt most people laugh at their own material.) This leads to a lot of self-doubt and second-guessing. If I made one that was spectacularly un-funny, how would I know?
Okay, so here is my promise: No more of this navel-gazing crap. I’m grateful for my readers. It doesn’t matter if there are a thousand of you or just my mom, I’m glad you like the strip. So from now on I promise not to do any more of this Cloud Strife “Everyone believes in me but I still suck” self-loathing and angst.
Cool? Cool.
Also:
The Ferret has posted a generous and thoughtful review of DM of the Rings. I just want to tip my hat in return for the link and the praise.
The only thing I want to add is that The Ferret says that the strip is made from screencaps found on the web. Just to be clear, I own all three movies and rip the images myself. The over-compression and JPG damage is the result of my tightwad attempts to save precious bandwidth, not a result of being careless with the images. I have unspoiled higher-resolution originals that I plan to release someday.
And finally:
I’m going through the comments in old posts and making a FAQ for the strip. If you have any questions relating to DM of the Rings, ask away.
Thanks.
Snow Day
I love the feeling when I open my eyes in the morning and the light in the room is totally different. It’s brighter than it should be, and the light coming in the window is uniform instead of directional. When I see this I know that it snowed overnight, and that the snow has stuck.
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WordPress Bug?
Here is a strange one for you. Open up WordPress, and make a new post. Into this post put the words:
“Delete”
Then the word:
“from”
Hit save.
Watch WordPress puke all over itself.
This is a very strange bug. Both words must appear in that order with no other letters between them, but you can have line-breaks between them and it still happens. What on earth is going on here?
The problem surfaced when I tried to edit this old post. I saw a typo I wanted to correct, so I edited the post and hit save, which led to the Bizzare error:
Precondition Failed
The precondition on the request for the URL /twentysidedtale/wp-admin/post.php evaluated to false.
Halfway down the page I quote Lileks, and that quote contains the deadly words. It took me a long, long time to figure out what the problem was. Obviously I wrote that post in an earlier version of WordPress that doesn’t have this bug, and now that I’ve upgraded I can’t edit the post without removing those words. I spent a long time removing secitions of the post until I had isolated the offending words.
One guess is that the phrase “de1ete from” is getting misunderstood or misused as part of a command to mySQL. Still, that really shouldn’t happen.
FURTHER NOTE: I’m using WP 2.0.2 and I have the fancy-pants editor turned off.
From The Archives:
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.