T w e n t y S i d e d

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve noticed a few of my old posts are attracting trolls and morons. Some of my movie posts have a tendancy to pick up people who want to engage in tiresome nitpickery over the plot or the degree of suckage manifested by the film. But by far the big draw to the posts of yesteryear is my old post on Oblivion and the way the graphics engine fails at simple tasks. It took me a while to figure out why this was. That post has a steady stream of people who jump in and insult me for having the audacity to use an old graphics card and then expect games to work, even if the card meets the stated system requirements. Some of these people are downright combative. I’ve deleted the worst ones, but there are still a few there that think I’m being unreasonable for expecting something as exotic as lighting to work in the game. These people do not appear elsewhere on the site. That post is seven months old now, but still there are people who come in, drop a few insults, and move on.

Looking at my referrers, I see a lot of traffic coming from the Elder Scrolls forums. The site is actually my #3 referrer, right after Stumbleupon and (recently) Bloglines. There must be some long-standing debate there about this problem and someone probably cited me in the thread. Great.

What is the rationale for this? Is the forum just not filling their need for fruitless debate? Are they so starved for contention that they have to come here and supplement the vast bounty of tireless foes one normally finds in forums? At any rate, coming to my site is a terrible waste of time because I don’t really care to spar with these kids. In fact:

Bethesda should have raised the system requirements or fixed their engine, because the game does not work as promised. As a customer, I feel taken advantage of. To date they have never met the initial promise made on the box, even though user-made patches have emerged to fix the problems they wouldn’t. Shame on Bethesda.

End of story, pixel-humpers.

And I get to say “end of story”, because I’m busy and I have all the bully powers here. If you want a fair debate, then return to the place whence you came, forum-spawn!

(Of course, I could close the comments on that post, but aside from my feigned outrage above I actually find this to be sort of interesting. It’s funny that one of the major sources of newcomers to the site is to a minor post from seven months ago about a game I no longer play. Although I really do wonder about what drives them to comment.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

On Tuesday my kids were outside in swimsuits, spraying each other with the hose. By Friday morning we were knee-deep in new snow.

It’s like taking a beating in the playground. The pummeling stops, and you uncurl from the fetal position and start to wipe the snotty tears off your face when suddenly the kicking begins anew. He was just waiting for you to uncurl.

March is such a bastard.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Daylight savings time is an absurd prank, and after 35 years I think I’ve had my fill of this. Steven recently said he wasn’t doing it. Admirable. I wish I could take that route. Right now my phone, my computer, and this server all disagree on what time it is. The server is an hour behind. My phone is an hour ahead. All three were in harmony until this goofy clock-changing business.

Here is the latest version of the Microsoft Timeserver.

Making things worse is the fact that Microsoft’s “time” server is on drugs. I was on the phone with a friend in Boston, and both of us hit “synchronize” at about the same time. Except, the time it reported to me here in Pittsburgh was about three and a half minutes slower than the time it gave to my friend in Boston. What is the rationale for a service to keep your clock correct if it reports different times to various people in the same time zone? Even more odd is the fact that it takes the server almost 30 seconds to respond. 30 seconds!

My friend and I tried to imagine how the time server could be so useless. We eventually concluded that the time “server” must be some sad, middle-aged guy sitting in a windowless room with no clock somewhere in the bowels of the Microsoft offices. When someone queires the server, he gets a popup dialog asking the time. Then he has to run upstairs to the break room, look at the clock, and then run back and type it in. The accuracy of the system varies depending on whether or not he’s in the middle of a game of minesweeper.

Recently several people have linked to me or left comments that were directly or indirectly insulting or irritating, and instead of letting it roll off I’ve been tempted to respond with a salvo of excoriation. That’s no way to live. If you get mad every time you see someone being rude or idiotic on the net, you’ll spend your life in a state of perpetual Defcon 1 rage. At first I thought that perhaps the number of ankle-biting nitpickers had somehow multiplied, but then I realized I was just getting riled up more easily. I’ve been in a horrible mood and I’m taking things more personally than I should. Looking back, I can see I’ve been this way since the clocks changed.

Each evening I sit down to write one of the posts for the following day, and lately all I can come up with are rants. Not my usual semi-humorous rants, but bitter, angry rants that wouldn’t amuse anyone. Thankfully, so far I’ve had the wisdom and self-control to toss most of them. I’m glad I have a few DM of the Rings already written, because I don’t think I can make any funny in this condition. I’m thinking that “D&D is stupid, players are all idiots, DMs are all jerks, Peter Jackson is a hack, and I HATE THEM ALLLLLLLLL” isn’t really the right frame of mind for writing comics. It isn’t likely to lead to anything that will make people smile, at any rate.

I can’t blame the mood on DST for sure, but it seems a likely culprit. I’ve had some other problems this week that could also be the root of the problem, (trips to the hospital) but I’ve weathered much worse with a good deal more grace in the past. Whatever the reason for my foul temper, this week would have been a little less miserable if I wasn’t getting up an hour earlier every morning.

Harumph!

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.