I'm back. Well, that was a stupid waste of five days.
Somehow, the designers of the Minecraft mod Technic PackThese days I'm playing a ton of the Technic “MoonQuest” mod collection. made it so that if you launch the game in offline mode, then it has no sound. I have no idea why, but I'll be sure to ask them right after I hunt them down and right before I kill them.
I couldn't play vanilla Minecraft, either. Once I was off the net and I discovered Technic wasn't working, I remembered that my Minecraft launcher was set to run in Oculus Rift mode. I tried to turn that off, which meant changing profilesNot change users, just profiles. It's complicated., which forced me to log in, which I couldn't do. I'd hunt down the person responsible for this stupidity but I'm not sure who to blame in this case. I always saw the Minecraft launcher as a convenience thing, but after fighting with it for an hour or so I'll say it feels very DRM-ish. It doesn't stop any pirates but it did prevent this customer from using the software when he really, really needed it. That sounds like DRM to me.
So my #1 time-killing game was unavailable. Instead, I composed a song. I spent my time waiting for the internet writing a song about waiting for the internet entitled, “Waiting for the Internet”:
You say it's repetitive? Yes, yes it is. I was trying to capture the tedium and frustration in musical form. The upbeat stuff at the end can be interpreted as the return of the internet, or the sweet release of insanity. The line between half-assed and avant-garde sometimes gets pretty blurry, but I know which side this song is on. And it's not the side with the fancy French words.
We will resume our regular posting schedule shortly. Right after I play some Minecraft. And catch up on my webcomics. And some YouTube videos. And blogs. And gaming news. And Steam sales. And email. And comments. And Facebook. And…
Footnotes:
[1] These days I'm playing a ton of the Technic “MoonQuest” mod collection.
[2] Not change users, just profiles. It's complicated.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
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?
But shamus,there already is the “waiting for the internet” sound out there.Here,take a listen.
(the comments on that one are hilarious by the way)
Welcome back!
Hey Shamus, any webcomics you’d recommend? There’s about a hundred I’m following now.
For other’s sake, I’d say http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/ is the best comic on the internet right now.
XKCD or http://www.wastedtalent.ca/ are hard to top for the engineering crowd though. ;)
Always looking for more to add to my list, RSS FTW.
I’m so happy to see the Unsounded recommendation. Unsounded is the only webcomic I’ve wanted to physically own.
Ava’s Demon is another one I’m digging at the moment
http://www.avasdemon.com/pages.php#0001
It’s utterly gorgeous and it’s interesting because it’s designed to be read multiple pages at a time (each update often has 3-5 pages). It’s got an almost animation/flipbook quality
Unsounded is fantastic. Seconding that recommendation.
I would also recommend Stand Still, Stay Silent. http://www.sssscomic.com/
If you want to binge, Casey and Andy is a good (complete) story (from memory, I’d rate it PG13).
I loved Casey and Andy (and the GURPS book). Andy’s novel The Martian was also amazing.
“For other's sake, I'd say http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/ is the best comic on the internet right now.”
After order of the stick,of course.
Anyway,you can always read the other movie screen cap comic,inspired by dm of the rings.Or the one inspired by that one.
Then there is concerned,for every half life fan.
And another thumbs up for casey and andy,a comic where the devil is a girlfriend of one of the main characters.
Yeah, I have a ton of webcomics I follow as well. My current top three favorites are (in no particular order):
Grrl Power, a super hero comic with a lot of humor and clever use of powers.
Girl Genius, Victorian-esque steampunk adventure with numerous “mad” genius inventors.
El Goonish Shive, teen-aged hijinks in a town where magic is a lot less rare than most of the rest of the world. Includes magical clones, gender swapping, and a squirrel girl. (This is a looong running comic, so the early (2002) art isn’t as good as the current art, however the artist is currently adding “DVD-style commentary” to the older comics, so it’s still quite enjoyable.)
I apologize in advance for any lost days spent getting caught up reading these. ;-)
Most of the engineering crowd I know (myself included) loves the Freefall sci-fi comic. Not related to the videogame at all.
http://www.darthsanddroids.net/ is good. Inspired by, similar to and yet new and distinct from Mr Young’s own DM of the Rings.
Of course, there is http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/
Even though it’s finished, rereading its over 3000 strips can be enough webcomic for months.
http://buttersafe.com/ is delightfully absurd, as is http://www.smbc-comics.com/
The latter also goes scientific on occasion, similar to xkcd
I tried making a webcomic once http://darth-obvious.blogspot.com.au/
But ran out of steam :( So I respect anyone who can keep going.
how can this have gone on so long and noone mentioned this
http://www.mspaintadventures.com
homestuck is the best webcomic/videogame/mediathingie/story on the internet
its got comedy, videogame refrences, overcomplicated systems, time travel, aliens, parallel worlds, multiple dimentions, and meta-physics
not to mention the awesome music, and massive fanbase
I’m a big fan of Schlock Mercenary.
It’s a science fiction story about a band of mercenaries in the future, and it’s really, really good. The plotting seems a bit silly at first, but it settles down pretty quickly. The early art is pretty awful, but it gets better as it goes, up to the point where I now think it’s pretty good.
It started back in June of 2000, and it’s been updated daily ever since, and when I say daily, I mean daily; it has never missed an update. There are no “Happy Holidays, real comics tomorrow!” strips or anything of that type. So there’s a lot of archives to go through(14 years at ~365 strips per year).
Here are the ones in my RSS feed (well, most of them; in alphabetical order). Many of them are so well-known I feel stupid listing them, and I’m probably botching the theme/premises on some.
Basic Instructions
Type: Single-strip
Theme: General
Cardboard Crack
Type: Single-strip
Theme: Magic the Gathering humor/parody
Ctrl+Alt+Del
Type: Mix of single-strip and plot-driven
Theme: Video games & gamers
d20 Monkey
Type: Plot-driven
Theme: RPG player themed story-based
Darth & Droids
Type: Plot-driven screen capture
Theme: Meta-RPG/Star Wars, inspired by Shamus’s DMotR
Dork Tower
Type: Single-strip
Theme: Gamers
Dumbing of Age
Type: Plot-driven
Premise: College freshmen situational comedy/coming of age
El Goonish Shive
Type: Plot-driven
Premise: Magic is real and hidden by government, but more common in this town. Can also be simulated with technology. Modern day teenagers get powers. Lots of (non-exploitive) gender transformation.
Full Frontal Nerdity
Type: Single-strip
Theme: Gamers
LARPTrek [irregular updates]
Type: Single-strip
Premise: Star Trek DS9 is just an RPG played by the TNG crew
Misfile
Type: Plot-driven
Premise: A mistake in heaven switches a high-school road racer’s gender and causes another to lose three years. Plot moves glacially, but good exploration of gender identity.
The Oatmeal
Type: Single-strip
Theme: General
Order of the Stick
Type: Plot-driven
Premise: Bumbling but genre-savvy D&D characters get caught up in an adventure to save the world. Lots of third-wall breaking and RPG/Story trope lapshading.
PHD Comics
Type: Single-strip
Theme: Musings and observations about graduate school
PvP Online
Type: Single-strip with overarching plot
Theme: Office of game journalists, now turned game creators
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Type: Single-strip
Theme: Esoteric/nerd humor, along the lines of xkcd
Table Titans
Type: Plot-driven
Premise: Tells story of both RPG Campaign and the players playing it
Tiny Wooden Pieces
Type: Single-strip
Theme: Tabletop gaming
Use Sword on Monster
Type: Plot-driven
Premise: There are seven versions of the world with increasing levels of magic. The barrier between the worlds is damaged and magic begins leaking into the first-sphere (our magic-free world), changing history in the process.
Weregeek
Type: Plot-driven
Premise: A group of gamers ensnares a new gamer and introduces him to RPG, board games, and LARPing.
xkcd
Type: Single-panel
Theme: Esoteric/nerd humor
Woooo, BI!
“How to Discuss Your Feelings” (…mostly just panel 4 on that one) was *awesome* last week…
Commit Strip is a fun comic based around web developers.
Then check out our thread on forums about them. Down there we list a LOT of them, and describe them.
That’s an extremely clutter-free desk. I’m jealous! You don’t even have an audio switcher!
It always STARTS like this… Remember, he just moved.
Give it two days. He’ll be back to spaghetti-octopus-city. :P
I quite like the song. Reminds me of old C&C and Warzone 2100 soundtracks. I’d totally do some boring base building to that song. Except for that end bit, I don’t like that.
I’d say it isn’t, but then again, clearly all anyone remembers first of the original Command & Conquer is Act on Instinct, well, I do anyway.
It actually had quite a range.
Damn, might have to boot up some of it now…
They even had music players in-game!
Nothing does that anymore!
Can you still get it to work? I have the anniversary-thing-edition, but it has a bug that crashes the game if any unit goes too close to the edge of the screen… and then I got to where all my mission choices start with units there :(
Tbh, all I remember about the soundtrack is that it’s awesome.
Good to see you back, Shamus! Hope your move went well…
Mr.Young, I know your pain. I had to deal with Comcast this past August. A “glitch” in their system left us without internet and when we finally got a tech around to futz about with it – after already waiting a week – he informed us there was nothing he could do as the cable lines in our place were decades old, Comcast had changed practices and switched to new lines, and we’d have to play a hellish game of phone tag to wrangle a surveyor, contractor, and finally another technician just to fix service that had otherwise been working fine(ish) for nearly twenty years. We reluctantly worked through the mess, the whole process taking nearly 2 1/2 additional weeks to complete, then when the new tech showed up (same as the old tech) he and his assistant went through a half dozen cable boxes over the course of nearly six hours before they found ones that “worked,” by which I mean left us without anything for another day before they finally synched up and reset.
We were without internet for the better part of August.
It isn’t that it happened, or that we had to wait so long – it was actually kind of a nice family bonding experience – it’s that we didn’t have a choice. It would’ve been prohibitively expensive to go with anyone else and we’d only manage to get an even more inferior service as a result.
Damned if you do, damned even more if you don’t.
Hm, I didn’t know that “half-assed” is a fancy French word.
Well, it’s missing a few accents: on the first A and on the E. I mean, duh. ;)
I had the same impression about the new Minecraft‘s launcher, after I tried to come back to after several month break.
In the older versions, if you failed to log in for any reason, the launcher would immediately just offer to start the game in off-line mode. Now? It will require logging in even if there is no connection at all.
Yay.
While I am glad you’re back, I can’t help feeling like the others missed a serious opportunity for some “Shamus is away the kids will play” site shenanigans.
I’m looking at you here Josh.
Yeah, what the H E double hockey sticks guys? Also Mumbles. Especially Mumbles. :D
I don’t know about USA, but in Europe mobile internet is commonplace. I have a 1GB/month data plan so I’d use that to unlock minecraft.
I’ve got a 10 GB / month plan, but it’s the more expensive one I needed for (and was reimbursed for) work…then I just kept paying for it when I switched jobs. ^^;
But I live in Canada, where internet/phone/etc is about as good as the rest of the world. I’d like to hear how horrible the plans are in Shamus’ area of the USA. :)
Internet outages remind me how many of my hobbies are tied to the internet. It’s frustrating to have some of them, like single-player games, artificially tied to it.
Yup. Sad state of affairs where you don’t really own your games anymore. Makes you think about: if the company ever goes out of business, or switches servers, or just decides nobody needs to play the old games, or…
…or simply makes a sequel they want you to out and buy instead of playing the perfectly fine older game and so reallocate server resources…
Once again I must question your choice not to create electronic music for a living.
See, I tend to dislike electronic music, but your’s is quite excellent.
Oh, hang on, I think I see the flaw…
Whenever I have to go without the Internet I first unplug my router to see if I can overcome all the DRM. This way I can see which DRM will just refuse to let me play offline at all (Starcraft 2) which will be fine (for all it’s many many other faults uPlay) and which will pretend to work for a couple days but then randomly fail (Steam).
I’ve also made sure I have a few wholly offline games installed, just in case.
I’ve been there.
It never ceases to amaze me that I didn’t have to put up with this crap when I was young and rebellious and all my games sailed around under little jolly rogers.
I “don’t have to put up with any of this crap” by just buying basically everything from GoG. :-P
On the other hand, that does require that either (a) you never lose the downloaded setup program that you used to install the game, or (b) their site never goes down or otherwise decides you don’t need the game for some other reason, or (c) you never forget your login credentials.
At least you can drop the setup program onto a flash drive of some sort and then never overwite anything on the drive again (to stave off the eventual write-cycle death that flash has). Or put it on a couple of flash drives and periodically move it to newer ones I guess.
And that’s why I’ll cherish my collection of pre-steam games for as long as their data integrity remains. Well, that and the fact that I really like them.
The CDs/DVDs/images might not be around forever, but at least I have some control in the matter.
Ideally, you’d be able to get an official copy of your purchased games on a USB drive type device, or have a way of transferring it at your leasure, or something else. I like having a physical copy*, but I don’t like the huge size and delicate-ness of optical discs. :S
* Which, in most countries, means you definitely own that copy of the game, no matter what. Not so, with digital downloads. :C
I really like that song! Honestly, it’s one of your best, in my opinion.
All these people who design around the assumption of an always-on internet need to have their heads examined.
Yaaaay the internet has returned to Shamus.
Translation: Shamus will be done going through all the stuff he missed about 5 minutes before the next Diecast
I think you would enjoy Perturbator. Some of your earlier music seemed to be similar to it. In any case it’s a good example of how to make dark 80s-ish without going overboard and your music seems to be a bit uh… too busy? Like the intro to the podcast, felt like too much.
The entire album Dangerous Days is a love-letter to 80s sci-fi. It’s pretty great.
So, I immediately tried searching TV Tropes and Wikipedia for this amazing-looking TV show “Perturbator”, which has an awesome theme song and intro video…before realizing it was the artist’s name/theme song. ^^;
Oh, nice! [… and while writing some more I listened to some more so let me edit this here on the spot:]
Man, thanks so much! I was poking around Shamus’ soundcloud the other day, following links here and there when I came across a remake of the Airwolf theme – and I’ve been wanting moar! of that stuff ever since. Childhood memories of TV shows gave some clues on what to dig out but it hasn’t been much so far. And then I’m here again for unrelated reasons and am given Perturbator. Perfection. I love those circles :)
Shamus, have you tried Factorio? It has a lot of similarities with the Minecraft + Technic (Also no DRM).
This is why you need a smartphone Shamus. Times like this when I’m cut off, nothing feels better than slow speed smartphone browsing.
Welcome back, good sir! Rejoice, for the dark times of no internet are behind you.
Did you get the sniffles and the jitters from withdrawal? I recall lots of pacing around the basement trying to figure out what to do from my internetless experience.
How to make professional quality music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-oHYTQyTEk&feature=youtu.be
That song is pretty good to listen to while I’m doing other stuff, if that’s any consolation.