T w e n t y S i d e d
So this morning I was talking with Twenty Sided regular Varewulf about The Elder Scrolls Online and how there’s a beta event going on this weekend. And I decided, “Hey, everyone else is checking this out, I guess I should too.”
Josh is writing this post by the way, in case you were momentarily confused by the idea of Shamus suggesting he should check out a game he already posted his impressions about a month ago. I should bug him to bring back the author portraits again.
Anyway, long story short, I found a key and I’ll be playing this weekend. And since we haven’t done the whole hangout stream in a while, I figured, why not invite everyone to watch?
So we’ll be doing a hangout on Sunday, March 16th, starting at about 2 PM Pacific/5 PM Eastern. And I think (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) that since the continuing bad practice known as daylight savings time has already occurred in the US but is still weeks away in Europe (because why would we try to make this easy?) that translates to 9 PM Britain/10 PM France/Netherlands/Scandanavia/Mordor/etc.
As with the past few hangouts, we’ll be doing it on the usual Twitch channel.
It’ll be great. Shamus might be there. Jarenth might be there. Other people might be there. Hell, I might even be there.
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.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
I’ll admit, I was slightly confused until the authorship disclaimer.
It is highly likely that there will, in fact, be Jarenth. Someone has to buffer poor Varewulf from your constant ALL-CAPS VERBAL ABUSE.
For anyone wanting access, found this via reddit, just got a key myself:
http://www.mmorpg.com/giveaways.cfm/offer/502/Elder-Scrolls-Online-Beta-Weekend-Key-Giveaway.html
Forces you to register at their site AND with eso’s site, so if someone has a less cumbersome method they should post it.
This is where I got my key.
Well I’m not going to be playing along… I’ve got well over 2 Gigs to patch! I have a stupidly slow connection :(
Oh. Apparently I had an IP address conflict! I’ll be playing in a few hours. Do you know what Server and Alliance you will be joining?
Well, scratch that. After the 2 Gig patch was yet another 20 Gig download. Jeeze! Guess I won’t be playing this weekend
It uh, might not be the fault of your internet, either. The game patches RIDICULOUSLY slowly (or at least it did last beta weekend) and I average 40Mb down with other stuff.
I find it funny. The most laggy/slow part of the stress test was the initial download.
Well, one day later and I’ve only got 8.5 Gigs remaining, but my progress bar only shows 1%
I’ve got a bad feeling about this
So, 23:00 here. Good thing I’m unemployed at the moment.
Mordor switches to daylight savings and back every few weeks. They’re just that eeevil.
Oceania skips time forward every night and then pushes it back again during working hours.
8am Monday morning in AEDT (Australian Eastern Daylight Time) for what it’s worth. Rules me out from playing, but hopefully can sneak in some of it at work.
You gain an hour every Tuesday morning just before lunchtime and lose it Saturday night.
I’ve gotten sooo many mixed messages about this game from across the web. One more couldn’t hurt! It seems, overall, fairly interesting, I simply can’t justify paying box price PLUS monthly subscriptions. Hopefully it works out though. Zenimax at least seems to be trying something relatively new, mechanically, and by the nine, we all know we could use to move away from the WoW standard.
Not to mention that you need to get Xbox Live Gold if you play it on the Xbox…
Trying out something new. Can other people put this event in their calendar?
Google Calendar of the Above Event
Figured that All Knowing Google might have figured out how to properly synchronize time-zones, DST, Leap Years, etc.
Not working for me. Just gives me a template to add an event to my calendar, starting on the half-hour coming up next.
Ditto.
You set the permissions correctly?
Ahh, no, it was set to “private”. I changed it to “public” now. Any better?
Fraid not – still trying to get me to add a new event today. You may need to give us a new link now that you’ve made it public.
You kids and your technology these days! Yeah it is a new link now.
Try this?
Nope, still the same thing. I assume you’re getting the link from the “Publish Event” button at the bottom? If so, I don’t think it’s your event – it does the same thing to an event I created in my calendar and tried on a totally different browser and Google username. I even tried on my phone to rule out my computer.
So at this point, I blame Google Calendar for giving us a Publish Event option that flat out doesn’t work.
File a bug report! :)
Sweet. I’m in the beta too. Maybe I can jump in.
Ah man I hope you guys record this, I’m incredibly busy this weekend so I won’t be able to watch it live.
Yeah, don’t do a Rutskarn and forget to tick the checkbox. :P
I’m still blaming Clockwork for that one.
I don’t know if it was actually his fault in any way, he just seems like a good scapegoat to me.
I think Rutskarn blames Troy, actually. Or maybe just everyone who is not Rutskarn.
It is Rutskarns fault however,because everything is Rutskarns fault.
So, I know that I’m an oddball when it comes to DST, since where I live doesn’t use it.
I’m curious to know other peoples’ thoughts.
Do people actually like DST, or does everyone hate it but they just go along because it’s already deeply etched into their central bureaucracy?
Other opinions?
The time change is a pain in the ass, but I really like having the sun go down later during the months when DST is in effect. Basically I wish we would leave DST on all year.
Yeah, and where I’m from the standard response of “but if you did that then THE CHILDREN would have to wait for their bus in the dark in the winter!” doesn’t hold any water either. Because even with the current flipping back and forth, it’s *still* dark at bus pickup times for most of the winter.
So I’m in complete agreement there. Daylight-saving all year around! No more confusing hard-to-adjust-to-as-I-keep-aging transitions!
I remember hearing it was originally to help farmers tend crops by getting children back from school while it was still light out. No idea if that still applies or not.
I’m not a farmer so I hate it. Especially the fact that it now lasts longer than Standard Time, which is backward and stupid.
(I’m also in southern Alaska, where DST means the sun is still up at midnight.)
better than northern alaska where it’s just always up for months and then always down?
I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.
The dark period can affect people negatively. Depression being the most common issue.
Yeah I know. I’m just so used to it by now I can’t imagine seeing the sun during winter, that’s just wrong!
I don’t think even farmers like it. I’ve asked a few about it, and they basically said, “You wake up when there’s work to do, and quit when it’s done.”
Also: cows can’t read a clock.
When first implemented, farmers hated it, actually. Farmers are now neutral to approving, a century later.
DST exists as a supposed energy-saving scheme. In reality, it appears to be energy-neutral at best and a slight (1-2%) energy increase at worst.
It is good for retail businesses, however.
It is good for retail businesses, however.
How?
I’d guess people are less likely to go out after dark, so there’s more shopping time after work.
Precisely. Daylight hours after work hours allows businesses to make more late-day sales.
But that would work just as well with a permanent move an hour. How does changing twice a year benefit them?
It gets dark fast in winter, so by moving the clocks back they still get more light and more late sales.
But that moving back is only needed because you moved them forward in the first place.
I’m a programmer. Daylight Savings is a stupid idea.
Among the 8 go-jillion other special cases, which need to be in libraries specifically made to deal with time/dates. :S
I just go along with it because nothing I say or do will change it. “the time” is a cultural construct to aid in coordinating tasks, so if the culture wants to assign it arbitrarily, it’s fine with me.
If I was in charge I’d make local noon defined off of local solar noon. There wouldn’t be time “zones” so much as a continuous spread of local time. Plus it would swing back and forth as the sun librates in the sky. Then if people want to get up at six in the summer and ten in the winter, fine with me.
It’s the time of year when we fry everyone’s brains with a case of jetlag (in the name of productivity), increase energy usage (in the name of saving energy), and kill people in traffic collisions (in the name of safety).
We need to pick one and stick with it. I don’t much care how it relates to solar time, but the changing needs to be abolished. It’s stupid, it works against its stated energy-saving aims, and it literally kills people.
Hear, hear.
What we should do is adopt a single global time.What does it matter if someone goes to work at 7,15 or 23 if the sun is just rising at that moment in their country?True,it would take some getting used to,but not really that much.
This has nothing to do with this post,but since I dont have twitter Ill post it here:
“Tried to reset password. Waited 2 hours. Gave up. Went to bed. This morning I have 5 password reset emails. HOW CAN ANYTHING BE THAT SLOW?!?”
You see Shamoose,internet is not a dump truck,its a series of tubes.And when many people dump all their junk into the tubes,they get clogged.
Get Twitter, man. It’s the coolest thing!
But that would clog my tubes!
Better question: Which reset password of the five do you actually try to use now? :-P
(If I was feeling charitable, I’d maybe blame it on having actual humans look at the password-reset requests and … uh, I don’t know; do something … before actually triggering the emails, to try to cut down on account takeovers via the password reset form. But it’s not like there’s anything in the password reset request that a human could use to judge how genuine the request is, anyway, and that’d be a huge waste of human effort, so it’s unlikely to be the problem here I think. And I can’t think of any other good reason it would take that long, either. :-/ )
None because they all timed out before arrival.
…And when they timed out, the account locked itself, presumably. What was I thinking? Of course.
My internet provider sometimes shuts down entirely, for maintenance or something. That could have been it, if you caught them when their system was down.