I managed to forget to put up a link to my own comic amidst the chaos of yesterday’s ruination. This is a shame, since the first three comics were leading up to this one, the well-earned killing blow. I even stooped to a little flagrant console-baiting, but I didn’t get any takers yet.
I apologize for filling this space with my highly pedestrian tribulations. I know just about everyone has endured a severe harddrive borkening at some point, so I don’t pretend I’m suffering in any particularly novel fashion. Having said that, I will make a few observations about what’s been going on for the benefit of those following along at home:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Back From the Brink”
In the past 24 hours I have lived an XKCD strip:
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Yesterday I complained about my keyboard dying on me. Possibly as a result of moving the computer around, my secondary drive died in the middle of the afternoon. By evening, my primary drive had failed and the entire computer was useless. I’ve spent the following n hours (where n is an irrational and very cranky number) trying to rescue my files.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Actually, it CAN get worse”
I really miss Firefly. Well, I don’t actually miss it. I mean, I have the complete series boxed set right here and I can watch it whenever, so it’s not like the series is gone or anything. I actually just miss the show being on. Not that I watched it when it was on. I didn’t really watch the show until it wasn’t on anymore. Er. I mean, I rented it through Netflix after they stopped making them. So I guess I miss… the episodes they didn’t make? Or something.
Look, it was a good show is all I’m saying.
What I really wish is that Joss Whedon would make another show. And that Nathan Fillion would be in it. And I wish it would be about something cool. Like superheroes. No! Supervillains! Like, a comedy. A musical comedy maybe. With Neil Patrick Harris. And since I don’t have cable TV, it would be cool if they made the show and then just put it up online. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Yes. It would be fully and unwaveringly awesome.
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I’m going to blather on about it for a few paragraphs, but you should probably watch it yourself first. I don’t know that I’m going to be doing spoilers per se, but endlessly wanking commentary is more interesting when you’re familiar with the subject. Go ahead. Watch both parts.This blog isn’t going anywhere.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Something Horrible”
The other night my beloved wireless keyboard died, mid-sentence. Bricked. I have a cache of cheapo sub-$10 keyboards I picked up at some point in preparation for something like this. I pulled one out, plugged it in, and then recoiled in horror.
Behold:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Devil’s Keyboard”
Sometime during the run of DMotR, my main hard drive filled up, mostly with movie stills. While tearing apart one of the many busted old computers that’s been donated to me, I found a 40GB hard drive. Vague portents had been scrawled on the top in magic marker, indicating that the drive was possibly operational, but not to be trusted.
I tested and found it to be functional. 40GB isn’t exactly spacious, but if I moved my games over then I’d have my important work on the trusted Western Digital and the frivolous stuff on the tenuous Maxtor. If it failed, the only thing I’d lose would be my save games. Bah.
As the months wore on my main HD continued to stretch at the seams, and the Maxtor was entrusted with more sensitive duties. Inevitably I started trusting the drive, more or less out of habit.
While moving the machine around dealing with my keyboard problem, that secondary drive at last failed.
Pfft. Big deal. I’ll swap in another drive and re-install my games. I mean, the only thing on it was my games. Oh wait. I also had all my game screenshots for… Nooooooo!
A majority of my Screenshots for Stolen Pixels was on that drive.
I’ve just abruptly gone from having about three weeks of lead time – perhaps four – to having nothing. I’ve already submitted the one set to go live on Friday, which means I have just a couple of days to come up with a new hard drive so I can install a game so I can take screenshots so I can make a comic.
The worst of the loss is my collection of World of Warcraft screenshots, which were tough to acquire. Some of the jokes were very complicated and required up to four people to pull off. Four people, all in the right zone, as the right characters, at the right time of day. All together they represented several hours of work. The people in my guild were nice enough to donate some of their playtime to help me out, and now those shots are gone. (Actually I might still have a couple that were moved to the main HD for editing. I might be able to make one comic out of them. Maybe.)
The only thing I have available at the moment is Guild Wars, which I inexplicably installed on the main drive. I’ve tried before and found it’s tricky to make comics in that game for a variety of petty reasons.
The worst thing is that I have nobody to blame but myself. I put valuable data on an untrustworthy source and it failed at a bad moment. I regularly back up the data on my main drive, but I never bothered with the capricious Maxtor.
The drive technically works. It’s recognized by the BIOS during boot. It’s recognized by Windows. But Windows claims it’s “unformatted”, and helpfully offers to format it for me. (NO!) A HD recovery service isn’t feasible. (Way too expensive, particularly given that I’d need a very large number of files.)
I get really edgy when I’m rubbing up against a publishing deadline, and I’m really up against a deadline now.
Since we’re using cute names to pigeonhole various types of players online, I thought I’d note that yesterday Derek K said:
This is true. There are actually two very different types of PvP players. The good kind – who I respect even though I’m not interested in their particular flavor of gameplay – is the classic competitor. They want a “fair” fight, inasmuch as such a thing is possible in an MMO with looting, leveling, and lagging. They want to compete, to overcome, to see how far they can go. They have a certain code of sportsmanship, which varies but which generally promotes healthy and vigorous competition. They respect the rules of the gameworld and are there to enjoy the game.
The other kind of PvP player – the more notorious sort – are just the classic online brats. The basement-dwelling Donnys of the world. They fight weaker players, on purpose, as often as they can. They corpse-camp, grief, taunt, hassle and generally promote an atmosphere of angst and frustration. Donny ganks a kid twenty levels below him, who gets angry and kills someone twenty levels below him, who gets angry and hassles other players in some stupid but infuriating way. It’s a great circle of petty feuds, hurt feelings, and terrible English. Their unspoken motto is probably, “if you can stop the other guy from having fun, you’re winning.” They’re just bullies.
I gather that some servers have a different feel to them. I suspect the two types of PvP players avoid each other, and perhaps this leads to some servers having more of one type than another. I’d love to hear about life on other servers if anyone has the inclination to share. Just mention your server, the population level, and what you think of the natives.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “World Of Warcraft:
Server Culture”
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.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
T w e n t y S i d e d
