T w e n t y S i d e d
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DM of the Rings XXXV:
A Dubious Victory
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The players are there to overcome challenges and earn rewards. If you are foolish enough to deny them the desired supply of challenges and rewards they will instead amuse themselves by frustrating the goals of your campaign and thwarting your emerging plot. In this way you can view loot and XP as the candy with which you bribe your wayward players into behaving themselves.
Christmas Shopping Haikus
haikus are common
most of them are just awful
but these ones are great
Brigands-R-Us
Via Haibane.info I find this article, which simply belabors the fact that the Wii is a great idea, albeit with a dumb name. I’ve already done my own cheerleading for the thing, so I’m not going to get into that now.
What I find interesting here is what Toys-R-Us did:
In my opinion, Toys R Us is using underhanded sales tactics to push their extended warranty. I did not preorder, and I did not wait in line. My local Toys R Us claimed that they had units in stock when I called. I drove the seven miles and got in line, which was short – only two people in front of me, and neither of them were buying a Wii. Lucky me.
When I asked for a unit, I was told by the “R Zone” clerk that they were out of individual Wii units. They were now only stocking “bundles”. This “bundle” is not officially-sanctioned. It does not come in a bigger box with factory-packed extras. No, the Toys R Us “bundle” consists of simply a standard off-the-shelf Wii, upon which you are forced to add a game, two accessories (which don’t even have to be official Nintendo accessories), and the extended protection plan from Toys R Us.
You can read all the gory details for yourself. He’s certainly a lot more forgiving than I am. Those people would never have gotten my money. They may have squeezed this guy for an extra $100, but they will never, ever see a penny from me. I’m not talking about this Christmas season. I’m talking about from now on. This sort of thing is disgusting, and I would never reward this sort of behavior by shopping there and taking part in it.
People look down on those Grinch-like “scalpers” who buy units and then turn around and put them on EBay for a $50 markup. I draw no distinction between those scalpers and Toy-R-Us, except that TRU has an even higher markup and are doing it on a much bigger scale.
A compliment is more easily forgotten than a slap in the face. I’m going to remember this for a long time.
Evil has a bendy new ally
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Adaptive filtering worked pretty well for a while, but the alternate spelling stuff has been running circles around my filter in Thunderbird. Arg.
UPDATE: Looking more closely, it’s not so much the alternate spelling ones that are the problem, but the ones which are 10 mispelled words and 200 correct but unrelated words at the end. They have their ad on line 1, which is then followed by a couple of paragraphs of English gibberish. Flagging these as spam just teaches the adaptive filter to treat normal, valid words as spam words, which in turn leads to lots of false positives.
I think we need a more drastic solution.
Wil Power
A few people have put up comments over the past few days saying they found this site (and DM of the Rings in particular) via Wil Wheaton. This seemed odd to me, since I didn’t see any posts linking here over at his site. If it was just one person I’d assume a misunderstanding, but several people have said this now and I’m getting curious. There’s nothing linking me on his Typepad blog. There isn’t even anything coming from his old site.
My ego has a ravenous appetite, and its great hungry maw can only be sated by a constant supply of self-esteem affirming links. The thought that I may have missed one will soon begin eating away at me. From the inside.
More seriously: Can anyone shed some light on this? What did I miss?
DM of the Rings XXXIV:
Let’s Make A Deal
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I’ve had my players try to barter for items I was trying to give them for free. This is not a bad thing, but it always throws me off-script. It’s like little Timmy coming downstairs on Christmas morning and crying out, “Sweet! Okay mom and dad, how much for the big box with ‘timmy’ on it? Huh? How much?” It doesn’t matter what you say now, the moment is ruined.
From The Archives:
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?