Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dragon Age: Twitter Review Pt. 5”
Several people have asked when the Champions Online series will end, if I’ll do anything next, and what that might be:
1) The Champions Online series will end with part 15. This should go up the last week of December or the first week of January, depending on how much time I take off for the holidays.
2) Yes, I’ll be doing another Let’s Play series after this.
3) I can’t tell you any more than that right now.
Now, those of you following my Twitter feed know that I’ve been voting for The Escapist in the latest Web 2.0 popularity contest at Mashable.
Despite my mocking, this sort of thing is actually really important to web companies. Nobody ever talks about it because it would be unseemly, but scoring awards like this can give a publication a lot of clout when attracting advertisers and also in dictating what they can charge those advertisers. Winning stuff like this can help improve the fortunes of a company, particularly younger ones. Since I’ve hitched my wagon to the Escapist, I’d love for them to reap those rewards.
I’d also love for them to win because of the nice counterbalance they provide to the review-score hype mills that usually get all the attention*. I think a lot of us here like thoughtful articles as opposed to fanboy-driven ego-stroking, and so it would be nice if we could lift up the stuff we value.
Which is all a really roundabout way of me begging for votes for my friends at The Escapist, which is a thing you could do by clicking on this link. It’s all done through Twitter, so you have to have a Twitter account to vote. I’m sorry. It’s a web 2.0 thing. Didn’t you know? Web 2.0 is about connecting every social media site to every other one in a giant clusterfarg of account names and logins until the whole network collapses in on itself and forms a CSS-compliant singularity.
I’ll make a deal with you: If the Escapist wins, I’ll post a burning, hate-filled screed on everything that totally bugs me about the Mashable awards.
But not yet. Don’t want to tip our hand just yet.
But if you dig what I do over there, or over here, then please consider voting.
* And by “attention” I mean “money”.
Despite my better judgment, I return to Socrates for my reward and for another job.
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| It’s actually not a good idea to read these. |
So… our creepy 1984-style big-brother cybermind just saw an explosion that mutated a bunch of scientists. He has no idea what caused it or why, or if it mutation is contagious, but he’s got the antidote worked out and he wants me to go over there and whip up a batch of the stuff for the eggheads. Well, it’s rotten nonsense, but I have to say it’s a lot less crazy and shame-inducing than fighting Foxbat. (Of course, the same could be said of using baby seals as a melee weapon to beat up crippled orphans on Christmas Eve.)
I arrive at the scene of the disaster to have a look at the damage.
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There are the refrigerator-sized containers strewn around the parking lot amongst the burning cars, mutated scientists, and terrorist soldiers. The containers ostensibly contain the resources I need. The terrorists contain a deep hatred for the establishment. The cars contain fire.
The scientists do not look well:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Star is Born:
Let’s Play Champions Online Pt. 12″
Morrigan disapproves of this comic.
I’ve been playing #DragonAge a week. Suddenly new EULA pops up when I launch it, and I have to agree to play? Pfft.
The discussion as to whether or not it’s enforceable or not is beside the point: This is simply no way to do business.
The whole thing has a sick, Kafkaesque flavor to it. Clumsy bureaucratic shackles are added to a simple economic transaction, presented in a way that most people can’t even understand. The company knows nobody reads the EULA, but they pay the lawyers to make one anyway. The lawyers know the thing is gibberish to the intended audience, but they write it anyway. The user knows it’s all a joke and it has no meaning to them, but they agree to it anyway. And the company knows that the user knows it’s all a joke.
Paying lawyers to draft unenforceable contracts for people who can’t understand them to perpetuate a system nobody takes seriously.
What a stupid waste of everyone’s time and money.
Except for the lawyers. I think they’re happy with the system.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dragon Age: Twitter Review Pt. 4”
Starting yesterday I started getting spam comments on this site that would just be these lists (sometimes long, sometimes short) of random English words. A sample:
I guess it’s an effort to get past heuristic filters. (Spammers don’t care about the comment, they only want the link that goes on their name.)
I see all the comments on this site in a single admin feed that shows them in the order in which they were posted, regardless of what post they come from. (My old posts still see a good bit of hit & run traffic.)
I did not think of this when I made the earlier post asking people for silly words.
I just now sorted through a pile of endless unrelated words, reading them through and thinking, “Man, what’s wrong with these people? These words aren’t very funny at all.” I was looking at the lists of words, searching for meaning or patterns that would explain why people had chosen these mundane and un-funny words. Are these people thinking of skits I’ve never seen? Are they non-native English speakers with different ideas about what sounds funny?
And then I realized I was reading spam.
So, maybe that wasn’t the best use of the last twenty minutes. The only thing that would be more pointless than reading all my spam in detail would be to write a 250 word post about my experience reading spam.
Over at Chainmail Bikini we’ve been having a running conversation about “funny words”. Words which are kind of funny in and of themselves.
The examples given in the comic include the word “pants” and “weasel”. The innate humor of the word pants is demonstrated here.
Now, almost any word can be funny if it’s just incongruous enough.
1) Sword
2) Battleaxe
3) Spear
4) Lemon
See?
But some words go above and beyond this. They feel funny or odd or silly, even before they’re integrated with a proper joke. Some of my favorites:
1) The aforementioned “Pants” and “Weasel”.
2) Too many foods to mention. I suppose some of the funniest ones would be “pudding” and “bacon”.
3) Animal sounds are always silly, but I think “Moo” is the king of them.
4) Swear words are a double-edged sword. They will make the joke funnier for some, and kill the joke for others. We all have a level of profanity we’re familiar and comfortable with. If you exceed that by just a bit, it can intensify the joke. But if you go too far past that point, it just seems like you’re trying to hard, or overcompensating. It’s like over-salting food.
5) Lots of body parts are funny: Butt, nose, gizzard, spleen, elbow. Shoulder? Not so much.
Exercise: What word just really strikes you as funny? (Other than the ones I’ve already listed.) Try to come up with one and enter it into the comments below without reading the others. I’m curious what we’ll get, and what patterns will emerge. If any.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
T w e n t y S i d e d
