In the comments of yesterday’s post on the China Firewall, dishuiguanyin left a detailed comment here that gives some perspective from how thins work from within China. I thought this was so interesting that I’m quoting it here:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “More on the Great Firewall”
Can your website be read in China? Turns out mine can:
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Great. Nice to know the people of China are protected from the dangers of Wikipedia yet have the freedom to spam the ever-loving crap out of me. Grumblegrumble.
Steven is available as well, which is interesting. He used to write about politics, and I’d expect political sites to get blocked across the board. You can give the Great Firewall of China a try and see if your site is available.
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It’s not actually the 1,000th post, for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere. I’ve published 835 posts so far, so that means I’ve thrown away 16% of the stuff I’ve started.
That’s pretty much all I have to say. Hm. Not very interesting, now that I think about it.
(Now you see why I throw some away.)
The other day:
I’m surfing around and suddenly I see a bit about Painkiller. Hey, I remember that game. Sort of. Well, I remember hearing about it. I don’t know what it’s about, who made it, or what the setting is. It’s nearly three years old now. I do remember I wanted to check it out at the time, but I sort of forgot about it. I’ll bet I can pick it up for just a couple of bucks on Amazon.
Hmmmm. Before I go tossing money around, maybe I should play the demo?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Painkiller: How to mess up a demo”
The post on Friday about making DM of the Rings only garnered a few comments, but it seems to have generated a number of emails. I guess a few people are thinking of using other shows and movies as an art source, and have asked for my advice or help in getting started. I’m going to try to address this stuff here.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings: Behind the Scenes”
Last night I had insomnia. Bad. The hammer didn’t fall until 9am, and even when I surrendered to the sweet release of sleep, it was fleeting. I woke up, unaided, less than three hours later. I’m now milling around feeling disoriented and confused. It’s noon. I don’t drink coffee after noon, but I just woke up. Erm? Am I going to crash again here in a few hours? Just what is going on here?
I’m not sure why this happens. Many people associate insomnia with stress, but that doesn’t seem to be my problem. I wasn’t awake all night, obsessing over some real-life worry. I wasn’t up playing a game. I wasn’t pacing around, wired from an accidental dose of caffeene. I just failed to get sleeply at the proper time. I was just awake. And bored.
This brings to mind this very old post of mine about sleep patterns. Now that I’ve thought about this some more, I want to revisit the cold starter / warm starter idea. If I was more motivated I might create some sort of internet test for this, but I don’t have time to puzzle those things out. So, I’m going to just throw this up here and see if anyone cares. Maybe this is so much gibberish to you. That’s fine. I’m not even sure I’m thinking clearly right now.
| Warm Starter | Cold Starter | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | I shiver under the blankets at night, and by morning I’ve thrown them off. | I generally feel hot when going to bed, but by morning I’m cold and wrapped in blankets. |
| 2. | When fighting an illness, the symptoms grow during the day and peak in the evening. When I wake up in the morning I usually feel better than when I went to sleep. Sleep time tends to be when I recover. | When fighting an illness, I wake up feeling horrible and then the symptoms subside as the day wears on. If I go to sleep, I’ll feel worse again when I wake up. It’s like I get worse when I sleep. |
| 3. | I prefer to do my social stuff (meetings, phone calls, talking to customers) in the morning. I’m generally more quiet as the day goes on. | Ugh. When I wake up I need a few hours before I’m ready to talk to people. |
| 4. | I wake up hungry. | I’m not interested in food until I’ve been awake for a few hours. |
| 5. | I’m most creative in the hours just after waking up. | I’m most creative in the hours before bedtime. |
| 6. | I bounce out of bed in the morning, but by evening I’m starting to drag. | I drag myself out of bed in the morning, but by evening I feel energetic. |
| 7. | I find direct sunlight invigorating. | I find direct sunlight exhausting. |
| 8. | Music more in the morning than in the evening. | Music more in the evening than in the morning. |
| 9. | I like to laugh and joke around in the mornings. | I don’t generally find things funny until I’ve been awake a while. |
| 10. | I’m glad to be up once I’m out of bed. I’m glad to hit the sack in the evening. | I’m reluctant to wake up in the morning, and reluctant to go to bed in the evening. |
I realize this is exceedingly unscientific, but humor me here. I predict that most people will fall firmly into one column or the other. This gets a little difficult though, because some people have jobs which require them to be social in the mornings, or where they naturally hear music at the start of the day. Still, I’m most interested in how someone behaves when left to their own devices. Weekends and vacations are probably a better indicator of true behavior as opposed to the workday grind.
My thinking – with no evidence to back it up – is that most people are going to be almost all cold or all warm. I’m going to take an additional guess and predict more warm starters than cold ones. Everyone else always seems too dang cheerful in the mornings. I explain to people how sleeping when sick makes me feel worse, and they look at me like I’m some sort of freak. Very few people understand how sunlight can be “tiring”, but that’s exactly how it feels to me.
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
T w e n t y S i d e d
