T w e n t y S i d e d
Man, I think I was sick when the comic’s original post date lapped us. He posted twice a week, we post once, so I knew it was bound to happen, but I missed it. Dang.
From The Archives:
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
First of all, nice to see you back at the wheel, Bay. Hope the new year is being kind to you.
I’m surprised there was difficulty fitting a Liv Tyler reference into episode LIV, considering the films all have cutaways and flashbacks to Arwen; even Galadriel squeaks in a long-distance cameo to each of the second and third films. To borrow a Terry Pratchett joke, the main characters seem to see Elvish from time to time, sometimes unprompted.
On another note, as this remastering is my first time through the strip, I can literally only imagine the reaction to getting their NPC wizard back with a re-skin/ level up…
I think the difficulty springs from the fact that in this game Aragorn doesn’t have a pre-existing relationship with Arwen, so there’s no reason to show a flashback to her.
And Gimli’s player, despite his veterancy, seems to have forgotten that if the DM’s plot says they’ll find the hobbits, it won’t matter if all of them are invisible and sneaking spread out across an area the size of Madagascar – they will find the hobbits. :)
The players don’t necessarily know if the DM plans to have their characters find the hobbits but it is one of the amusing things with ttrpgs that unless the players completely go off the rails (for example earlier with Legolas killing Gollum) a competent (or railroading) DM is going to guide the players to the next part of the story regardless of what the players do or don’t do.
This is kind of the last echo for me. Its like for me he isn’t quite gone yet. I can still watch his Spoiler Warning episodes, his “This Dumb Industry” episodes, listen to the Diecast, and hear his voice and hear him say a lot of things I’ve yet to hear him say because I stopped following this site for quite a while. I have a lot of his words to read that I’ve never read before.
For me, that’s about 95 percent of how I experienced him in my life. The other five percent was him responding to comments.
I don’t know why this blogger means enough to me to want to feel that way. I just felt like there were a lot of ways I connected with him.
Hearing some of the stuff you all have said about him since his passing, I shouldn’t be surprised that even after reading some of his personal accounts, I never had a complete picture of who he was.
I always considered him an authority on the topics he spoke on. I considered his arguments stronger than those who disagreed with him. Especially the rest of the Spoiler Warning crew. They never deserved him. They revealed in the end that they were part of the problem and he was part of the solution.
The world, especially the our world, the world of geeks and gaming, needs more voices like his.,
At least we still have Yahtzee. And others, who are less famous, and I can’t think of, off the top of my head. For all the necromancy in some games, I don’t think we could return him, or any part of his mind :(