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.
In yesterday’s post I had some fun at the expense of XML coding standards. I linked Eric Meyer in that post. Upon later reflection, I thought this might be seen as a little rude – akin to linking Steven in a post lampooning anime as trivial cartoons and a waste of time. He was a good sport about it, and if I irritated him he didn’t let on.
I admit that my post was mostly just me mocking what I do not understand. A few people pointed out some perfectly good reasons for coding standards and what they have to offer a web developer. I know coding standards are very important in C++ (my day job, as it were) and and I would balk if someone suggested that coding style was just needless fussing. If you mean to maintain a couple of millions of lines of code, you had better have some sort of clearly-defined standards or those lines of code will very quickly devour you. You will be a lion tamer who just showed up without his whip and covered in barbecue sauce. You’re screwed.
I’m sort of getting my head around the concept of keeping the information seperate from formatting, and while I would never try that myself I admit that I’m not exactly dealing with a huge collection of pages here. (I coded this theme pretty much from scratch, and when I did so I thought of it as writing PHP, not HTML.) The need for this thing probably emerges as the job gets larger. Following strict standards for a site like mine would probably be like hiring an architect and a contractor to build a wooden crate.
Anyway, I pretty much get it up to a point, although there is one thig I don’t get, which is replacing TABLEs with DIVs. Maybe a CSS Jedi can explain this one to me. Most WordPress themes – as in, 99% of the themes I’ve seen – use DIVs for layout. The problem is that divs and tables have different failure modes. The typical theme is something like a page with a 500 pixel column and a 200 pixel sidebar. With divs, if the unwitting user posts an image that is 501 pixels wide, the sidebar gets bumped all the way to the bottom of the page. Or shift to the opposite side. Or suddenly go underneath the main column. This can be maddening for the user to figure out. Worse, this is really where browsers diverge in behavior. It might work just fine in Firefox, but in IE the sidebar will go missing. If that sidebar is used to help put other stuff into position, then very quickly the entire theme collapses like a house of cards and you’ve got content all over the place. But only in some browsers. This is very common, and the reason I abandoned public themes for something I made myself. I got tired of capricious puzzle themes that would spew content when they broke.
With tables, the wide image will just force the cell to go a little wider. Maybe this will introduce a seam elsewhere. Maybe it will bring about a few pixels of horizontal scrolling. Maybe it will work just fine. In any event, the cause of the problem is much easier to spot. I couldn’t figure out how you could reproduce this more graceful behavior using CSS. Maybe CSS isn’t robust enough to do this, or maybe there are attributes theme authors don’t know how to use properly. Keep in mind that when you’re designing a theme, you’re writing code to be used by people with a lot less expertise than yourself, who may not know the “rules” of your theme. Graceful failure with a clear cause becomes an important issue.
Maybe this isn’t so much a problem with standards as it it people adhering to standards when they shouldn’t.
 |
 |
This is exactly the sort of behavior you get when players stop role-playing. Metagame thinking is poison. I played this for a joke, but from my own experiences and from comments others have made I know this isn’t that far-fetched. I’m beating up on the players here, but you could make the case that stuff like this is the result of a DM who is strict about rules and lax about role-playing, which is about the surest form of self-sabotage a DM can do. If you adhere to the rules with meticulous authority and fill the world with generic NPCs, then soon enough you’ll have players treating your world like a place to mine treasure and farm experience, and not like a place where an epic story is taking place. The last thing you want is to end up DM’ing a game of Diablo.
Today marks the 70th comic (!!!!) in the series. Not bad for something I thought was going to run for a couple of dozen strips as the most, if I didn’t chicken out sooner.
I just realized today that I don’t have a copy of Return of the King. I’ll have to correct this soon, as we’re getting really close to the end of Two Towers. This is kind of frightening to me. I sort of thought I had more movie left than this. But of course I was thinking of the books, where Gandalf has his reckoning with Saruman, and the party joins up with the Hobbits. In the movies, all of this is moved to RotK. Dang. This means I’m closer to the end of the tale than I anticipated. I really covet all of that territory that I skimmed over at the beginning. The trip to Weathertop took one strip? Weathertop itself took one more? Then, poof! We’re in Rivendell. The way I work now, I’d squeeze a half-dozen strips out of that material, easy.
I plan to pick up the extended version of RotK. I had the extended version of Fellowship, and the added scenes were a rich source of screencaps. I don’t know that I actually used any shots from the added scenes, but that’s not the point. For Two Towers I had just the vanilla version, and all this time I’ve been wondering what I was missing. I have a strip coming up later where I couldn’t get needed shots of Aragorn facing Legolas on the parapet at Helm’s Deep, while the sun was still up. This frustrated the conversation I was trying to build, unless I wanted them to converse while Aragorn’s back was turned and he made excited faces at nobody. That wasn’t really an option, so I had to cut some stuff. While this was going on, I had this nagging anxiety that maybe the extended version would have those needed shots. Probably not. But maybe.
LATER: Okay, I ordered the extended RotK. Should be here in a week. I’m excited.
This comic on web standards perfectly captures how I feel about the subject. (Via.)
I’m pretty old-school when it comes to my HTML, and the chattering about XHTML has begun to rub me raw. You can use this page to “validate” web pages, and list all the ways in which your code does not meet these “standards”. (Are they still called standards if most people ignore them? I’m not trying to be a jerk here. I’m just askin’.) It tried it. The program is an automated nit-picking machine. It was like having someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder proofread my writing. Run just about any webpage through the validator and you’ll get a list of errors like:
Error:
I see you use <table>s. I wish you wouldn't. Yeah, I know people have been using them for years, and that they are an easy way to arrange things on a page without needing nine miles of CSS code, but you can't get a gold star until you replace all of your tables with <div> tags.Error:
Some of your HTML is expressed in uppercase. This seems rude.Warning:
You know how some people use the <br/> tag but omit the slash? I hate that.Info:
Sometimes you have more than two spaces in a row. I don't see a need for that.Warning:
Did I mention how much I hate it when people use the <br/> tag without the slash? I did? Well, it really bugs me.Error:
Sometimes you don't close your tags. This makes me feel anxious.Error:
You mis-spelled "monomaniacle". Incorrectly spelled words should be placed within a(n) <misspell> tag.Error:
The image tag linking to "hawt_boobiez.jpg" does not have the "alt" attribute specified. This means that visually-impaired visitors will not be able to make use of this image.Plus, she isn't even that hot if you ask me.
"Error":
Sometimes the "attributes" in your "webpage" are not properly encased in "quotation marks".Pissed Off:
You left another slash out of a <br/> tag. You KNOW how much I hate that. Don't make me tell you again.Warning:
The <i> tag has been depreciated and replaced with the <em> tag. No real reason. We did this just to mess with you.Warning:
The <b> tag has been depreciated and replaced with the <strong> tag. In turn, the <strong> tag has been depreciated and replaced with the <shouty> tag.Incredulous:
The phrase "obsessive-compulsive assclowns" should not link to the w3.org website.
I’m still not convinced the whole web standards thing isn’t a practical joke.
(Here is what it going to happen with this post: 2% of the readers will nod in agreement, 2% will be irritated or outraged, 92% will have no idea what I’m talking about, and 3% will point out that I can’t add.)
Jay Barnson has a long and thoughtful post on procedural content in games. I had a post on this a while back, where I pointed out that the rising cost of content creation (the cost of making gamespace was on a near-exponential growth curve for a while in the 90’s) is making it so that procedural content in one form or another is probably inevitable.
Also, 79Soul has a great post on Videogames and morality. I want to point back to a related post, where I talked about adding some moral flexibility to the GTA formula, and how that would improve the game. Both posts express similar themes, which is a desire on the part of the player to interact with a game without having moral choices imposed on them. Emergent consequences are fine (and even desirable) but railroad morality is often frustrating even if the player agrees with the imposed choices.
Note that in the hypothetical game I outline in that post, the player’s moral choices is one of the input values for a procedurally-generated city.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
T w e n t y S i d e d
