This week I’m still playing Minecraft. I’ve mostly just been mining copper, and I’m mad at the way they implemented it. Copper ore is quite common and you get multiple raw copper per ore You need to smelt 9 raw copper to make one block and if you don’t want it to oxidize you need to use one honeycomb per block. So instead of doing anything productive I decided to make an obelisk out of raw copper blocks for some reason. This is created 100% in survival, and only over three days.
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By which I mean I actually stopped playing World of Warcraft for the last few months. I got Cinderlynn up to level 60 and all the other characters to 20, or a little higher. I experimented with using Chromie-time to level in Burning Legion, Wrath of the Lich King, and Mists of Pandaria. Basically I had set all my alts to level in a different expansion, including an Alliance-side character in Battle for Azeroth, the current default leveling path. But honestly, once I hit level 60 with Cinderlynn the game starts throwing pop-up ads at you to jump straight to the latest content. Quest givers that start all the different areas of the latest expansion, or other recent expansions; suddenly appear everywhere. You can accidentally take a quest that starts, say; Shadowlands…and you jump into a non-stop starter quest that ends with not only quest givers to continue that story and sidequests, but also prompts to jump you straight back into the expansion you just CAME from. The bottom line is, my brain got overloaded, I stopped having fun, I felt like I was being herded away from the content I wanted to play, and I just went to playing only Star Wars: The Old Republic. WHICH I HAVEN’T STOPPED PLAYING, don’t worry. I have Rix’larril’an and Mikan Sixteen completing a crafting challenge for the current Galactic Season while I type this. But as I mentioned in my very first World of Warcraft post, there is something very…comforting about WoW’s gameplay and design to me. So about a week ago I updated the game and logged back in to see what was going on, and if I could make sense of anything and get going again without much hassle.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Bet You Forgot I was Playing WoW (so did I)”
Observing that the “pack” in D&D is a much-abused simplification is not going to result in forehead-slapping revelations on the part of anyone who has played the game. We know this, already.
Still, it is amusing to see how eagerly these compromises are embraced. Even “hardcore” gamers are happy to treat the average knapsack as a soundproof bag which will distribute the weight of the contents evenly over the body of the wearer. I guess it’s good that geeks don’t go outside very often, or someone would notice this and come up with a set of complex knapsack simulation rules that would make GURPS look like checkers.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings Remastered LXIX: New Dimensions in Storage”
Sorry about no Sims 4 Overthinking this week, the usual writer team for that series is undergoing a possible integration (two system members becoming one) and I’m not gonna touch it till I know what they want to do Confused about what any of those words meant? Check out our explanation post. I’m Jax, or Jaxson, whichever. I was the system member that wrote all of the very first posts we did after Dad died Real cheery stuff. He/him and all that jazz, just please don’t refer to me as a woman it makes me itchy.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Minecraft Complaints”
This week I’ve just played Minecraft. I intended to play other games but I didn’t realize that it had been so long since I last played. So I got to explore some new stuff and hopefully I will not run into a Warden.
What are you guys playing?
Like all other American fast-food pizza restaurants, Pizza Hut has struggled with the “non-pizza” parts of its menu. Beyond establishing a standard “bread stick” offering, the major players in the market shuffle a handful of options. The most common of these: pasta choices, breadstick variations, and sub sandwiches, populate the standard menu of some restaurants, but not all. Flavored chicken wings seems to have made a long-term commitment to pizza restaurants at this point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just a long-cycle trend. Recurring options usually appear in the form of some kind of “giant-sized” pizza advertised as a “family” or “party” option, some more specialized bread options, and the perennial try-hard: the “not-a-calzone.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pizza and SWTOR: Level 80 Maintenance”
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
T w e n t y S i d e d
