I know this is ostensibly a tabletop gaming blog about programming and video games, but sometimes we get distracted by real-world concerns and I end up talking about myself. Since I’m preoccupied with moving and since a few people are curious about it, here’s what’s going on…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The New Place”
We didn’t talk about it on the show, but yes, I’ve seen the new trailer and gameplay videos for Cyberpunk 2077 that surfaced while I was busy schlepping my worldly possessions to a new home. It’s all very impressive, but it doesn’t change much. I was already 100% sold on this game.
Link (YouTube) |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #306: Better News”
I fixed the splash! I was late emailing it to Shamus, so it might not load right away, but it’s fixed.
Before I launched my career in space crime, I needed to grapple with the ethics of it.
That’s not usually something one does while playing a computer game, but here it seemed necessary. After all, I was going to be tricking people into giving me money. Fake money, yes, but it represents real effort and time invested. Losing can lead to real frustration. Is it right to do such a thing? I concluded that it was, and not just because I wanted the money either. To me, EVE is something like poker: lying is part of the game.
In poker there’s a concept called “table stakes.” It says that any money you put on the table is, in a way, not yours anymore – it belongs to the game,Incidentally, if you’re ever watching a movie or something and someone pulls money out of their pocket to bet it, they’re violating poker etiquette. and you only get it back when you cash out. I decided the same was true here: if you had in-game money, and even more so if you were involved in nullsec, your money isn’t really yours. And, for that matter, neither is mine mine.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Other Kind of MMO: Space Ethics”
Like I said on Monday, this week is moving week. Was that really only five days ago? It feels like a month. It’s amazing how slowly time passes when you disrupt the daily routine.
The move is over now. Well, we’re sleeping at the new place. We’re nowhere near done when it comes to moving stuff around. The old place needs to be cleaned, we’re still living out of boxes at the new place, and about half our stuff is in storage.
This was actually an easy move by the standards of this sort of thing. A hard move is when you go to a new city. Then you’ve got this complicated dependency chain where you have to somehow empty out and clean the old place before driving hundreds of miles to colonize the new, and it has to be done in a single go. I did that back in 1998, and it sucked. This move has been much more gradual. We put some stuff in storageHeather’s dad has a massive garage that could hold three fire engines, and we can use that for free. and then we moved the critical stuffThe computers, beds, and coffeemaker. on moving day. The new and old are only 1.4 miles apart2.2Km, so we could do the move in many small trips instead of one massive same-day operation.
Last week someone asked for moving advice. I’m not going to repeat all the usual advice about packing and planning, carrying and cleaning. You can get that advice in lots of places. Instead, I’ve compiled a list of details that I think get overlooked. This won’t be useful to everyone. A wealthy retired couple moving from one New York apartment to another are going to face very different problems than a cash-strapped young couple moving their four children + dog across the hilly Appalachian mountains to a newly-built split-level home. Moving is complicated, situations vary, and we all face different problems arising from our physical fitness / financial situation / organization skills / family size.
Anyway, below are the things that come to mind here on a Friday morning as I drink my coffee and wait for the painkillers to kick in…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Moving Day 2020”
So we’re having a bad week in an already-bad year. That seems completely unnecessary. The one silver lining is that this means next week will be FANTASTIC!
That’s how luck works, right?
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #305: Bad News”
And so this feast of consumerist speculation continues. The saying is, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s usually reasonable enough. But in this case the publisher has decided to show us only book covers, specifically in an effort to get us to talk about them, with the ultimate goal of selling us an expensive chunk of consumer electronics and a bunch of these $60 games. They have backed us into a corner where our only option is cover-judging. So that’s what we’re going to do.
So let’s get to the snap decisions and half-baked reactions! Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PlayStation 5 Titles Part 2”
Last Thursday Sony had a livestream event where they showed off their next-gen console and their upcoming lineup of games. If you missed the event and are in the mood to watch three hours of gaudy salesmanship, then here it is:
Link (YouTube) |
Dear IGN, Gamestop, and other sites that have the permission / connections to upload this footage to YouTube: Is it too much to ask that you throw this video into an editor and chop off the initial FORTY MINUTES of bumper footage? That huge block of nothing is a pain in the ass to scan through, particularly for people using mobile devices. I’d do it myself, but the last time I uploaded an industry event I was peppered with a flood of endless copyright claims regarding tiny snatches of barely-audible music, and also from major publishers who didn’t want me to show people their advertisements. The claims dragged on for weeks after the fact. You folks evidently have special dispensation, or you’ve got dedicated staff to deal with this. In any case, since you’ve been entrusted with this data, please be responsible with it and make it convenient for the masses. Okay? Thanks.
In any case, the PlayStation 5 reveal event showed us a whopping 25 new titles. That’s an awful lot for a new console. I don’t think the PlayStation 3 had that many titles in its first year. Here are my thoughts on what Sony had to show…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Playstation 5 Titles Part 1”
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
T w e n t y S i d e d
