T w e n t y S i d e d
Josh had his computer stop working on him this week. Something about a fan that stopped working, or overheated, or was possessed by demons, or whatever. You know how it is with 64-bit hardware. So now Josh is scrambling to get replacement parts and having them express-shipped to him so he can rebuild his machine. As a result of all this, there might not be Spoiler Warning this week. I know, I know. We just got the new season rolling and were getting into the groove.
While a week with no Spoiler Warning seem grim, I hope you’ll remember who the real victim is here: Me. I have no idea what I’m going to do for blog content this week. I suppose I could write more posts, but I’m way too busy playing World of Warcraft on my fully functional computer for that sort of business.
But thanks for your concern. I’m sure I’ll get through this somehow.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
Post the backlog of Shamus Plays you have. You haven’t posted the links for a bit, and a lot of the people on this blog won’t notice that they are dated differently on the escapist :)
Beware the wrath of Reginald Cuftber -spontaneous KA-BOOM from an explosion in the nether regions-
Oh no! You said you’d kicked the World of Warcraft habit! I hope this is purely for your Let’s Play series, otherwise you’ll relapse!
How dare Josh fall short in his responsibility to reverse pickpocket content onto your blog. ;-)
Here, Here!
run a D&D game. :P
haha, I approve of this comment. See if you can outdo the Desert Bus crew in TPKing in 50 minutes in Tomb of Horrors.
I actually ran Tomb of Horrors for Jibar, BlackFox, and Phase about a week ago. They all survived–a first in all of my ToH experience.
The Tomb ain’t that hard, but you have to be more paranoid than curious.
Wait, what?
I am impressed.
Did they escape to avoid being crushed?Meaning you have three very paranoid people running about.
How dare they survive! (Actually how dare they play. I’m having serious withdrawal after years without RPing now)
Wish I could have been a part of that. ToH sounds awesome.
We should lobby Rutskarn to hold another.
Or force.
Possibly with fire.
But which tomb did you run?The original,or the 4e remake?I heard that the later is way easier.
I ran the Wizards-sanctioned 3.5 remake, compared against my physical copy of the original and modified to ignore the whole Return to Tomb of Horrors boondoggle.
Just say no to 4E, IMO. Back in the days when I played, dont know that I ever knew an entire party to survive ToH.
Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
Did the players beat Demon’s Souls? If you’re not paranoid BEFORE you finish that game, you should be after…
Will you be writing up this little adventure into ToH?
Bah, you just need to perform the proper rituals to appease the 64-bit demons. They demand an excessively large glowing CPU fan.
Seriously, my fan has a larger volume than my dual-slot graphics card. Never given me problems.
I use the stock fan that came with my Core i7 920. I’ve never had heat problems, not even when I overclocked to 4GHz…
Then again, my case itself has five fans.
Or you can go totally overcautious and opt for insane levels of CPU fan and heat sink PLUS multiple large, glowing case fans. You would laugh if I told you how many fans are on my computer. Plus heat sinks for the CPU, and the memory, and the video card processors. It’s a little crazy but I’ve never come close to overheating even though I overclock my processors.
But if you think mine’s bad, you should see my husband’s dual quad-core CPU server board setup. I’m waiting for him to just give up all pretense and install an overamped ceiling fan on the sucker.
On my old computer, “someone” did me a “favor” and overclocked the cpu. I did not know about it until I discovered it when I had some failures. Opened the box up and found a blown capacitor or two due to overheating.
I replaced the motherboard to keep the AGP graphics card, and turned off the overclocking. Also upgraded the fans.
Then I upgraded computers and moved to a pure PCI approach. Fewer fans, quiet computer.
There are a total of four or five fans in my computer. Stock case fan, stock processor fan, one or two stock power supply fans, video card fan.
At full load, it does 40 degrees celcius.
Gotta love the VaporX model of graphics cards.
Oh, and the open (and easily closed) window (in -20 to -40 degree celcius weather) with a weird duct-tape-and-cardboard construction and a tube leading to the side panel (where another fan would go) of the case. That helps too.
Computer hardware is such a finicky beast. Desktops aren’t so bad usually, but laptops can be a real nightmare.. mostly because they are so hard to work on unless you’re really familiar with the model.
Hope he gets his new system set up without any hitches, and I’m sure you’ll think of something to talk about.
Just rant about DRM or talk about how awesome procedurally generated content is. :)
Or perhaps an update on project hex? I’m admittedly curious as to what we’ll be doing on this fantastic-looking hex grid.
This Wednesday. :)
Good to hear! I recently went back and read through your Terrain thing from here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=141 and I found it an absolutely fascinating read.
I’m just kind of starting to experiment with Open GL myself (Or at least I intend to soon. Right before exams isn’t a good time to start playing with an entirely new thing.) I hope someday I will understand it well enough to work on this kind of stuff, procedural content is such a neat topic.
Look forward to what Project Hex has to offer. :)
Here’s a n+1 step plan for success AND a way to generate blog content:
1. Design a few t-shirts (Spoiler warning, Stolen Pixels, 20-sided – for example)
2. Post them over a couple days
3. Have a voting poll
4. print the one that gets the most votes
5 – n. …
n+1. Profit?!?
Bah,that takes too long.Theres a much more simpler way:
1) Create a blog
2) ?
3) Profit!
1) Have Rutskarn sing
2) Profit!
3) Global thermonuclear war
4) Nuclear winter.
5) Nuclear snowmen!
6) Nuclear snow-people conquer earth, build snow-people utopia.
7) Double profit!
Then release Snowcraft, a survival-horror game where you mine “heats” from “snow”, to keep “hypothermia” at bay. Plus, crafting system! Turn “snow” into “ice”!
Sounds like the plot of Lost Planet
8) Global warming hits about 4 centuries later than expected
9) Snow people die out, radioactive mole people emerge and take over the earth
10) TRIPLE PROFIT!
More of the Hex game stuff. (Assuming you’re still working on it.)
How’s the debugging going on the downward slope issue?
How about Minecraft stuff?
Why?
Because you’re all crack addicts thats why!
Now read that in Lewis Blacks voice
This is why my case is quite open and I have many fans!
Although it does to gather up dust rather quickly…
Still, I’ll play through Mass Effect 2 and yell at it/argue with myself in 4 different voices to try and make the wait easier.
Thats not insane, is it?
Do it, film it , get Shamus to post it. I’d watch that.
i would totally watch that
Just came across this and it made me think of Mumbles.
http://cdn.fd.uproxx.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Oprahs-Bees.gif
You guys just keep making excuses this season. Pick another game already. Oh no I didn’t!
I second this…your Dudeness
I color my words with the hues of my madness…
A week for a busted fan?Huh,I guess there are many perks in knowing someone who sells hardware.I was without a computer for a week only once,and that was when my water cooling went to pieces and one of the hard disks and my motherboard short circuited because of it.
You could read more random ads and mock them? I still have that delightful lawyer ad rant of yours bookmarked and more would be fun :)
Well, I hope you’re wrong. I miss me my Spoiler Warning, there was only one last week anyway!
On other news, I managed to get a Champion to level 20 in Lord of the Rings Online in 2 or 3 days. It was funny, seeing some of the quests from your Let’s Play… ANYWAY, it’s a pretty awesome game, and it’s incredible that there is no grinding to speak of, at least not yet. Only 1 chapter of 8 done…
P.S. I bought a HORSE!!! Expensive, too, 500 silver.
Visit the auction house, then you will know what expensive REALLY is. 50 gold for a few friggen schematics. *grumble*
300 silver for like 20 tin >.> For some reason, even though you need identical amounts of tin and copper to do anything, copper is about 3 times as common…
wait, 50 gold? That’s ridiculous! That’s like 50k silver… Make me feel poor. I think non-subscribers can only HAVE 2 gold!
It was becoming all-spoiler-warning, all-the-time, anyway. So I’m glad.
Postcards from Minecraft, Shamus. I’m betting you could do one Postcards update a day for the week and still not run out of cool things to see on the Twentymine.
They should do funny videos of people in the Minecraft server.
The giant NES at least
Giant NES?
How long have I been out?
Half a month? :p
The NES is only one day old though.
I would love to see more stuff from the Twentymine server because I don’t have Minecraft.
Or postcards from Wow, since you are actually playing that now.
It is obvious that Josh is selfish. I mean all this is OBVIOUSLY his fault.
I don’t want to say that this is the Blood God’s way of punishment for the lack of violence in a certain Werewolves game I know of, but there you have it.
khorne must be apeased with skulls!
A broken fan? mmm, sounds like it’s a bad case of gremlins…
I was going to say write a Hex project update, but you have already said it’s scheduled. So i’m going to suggest writing about the D&D topics that you were asked about on Desert Bus but couldn’t answer because of time.