Link (YouTube) |
We talked about running a tabletop game in this episode, which means I’ve paid the topic my annual lip service and can therefore go on calling this site “Twenty Sided” with a straight face. So that’s our obligation to tabletop coverage for this year. Tune in next year when, in a moment of distraction, I mention that I’m using my D&D 3.5 manual to prop up a crooked table leg.
In which we spend about two-thirds of an episode lost, stuck, going the wrong way, or unsure of what the game wants from us. On the upside, we spend some of the time passive-aggressively insulting the Bethesda art design by praising this DLC.
Link (YouTube) |
Just two episodes left. If you’re following the drinking game, then you’ll remember that we’re keeping track of how many people the drinking game would have killed. (Every time the drink count is high enough to produce fatal alcohol poisoning, a fresh player is introduced.) As of the start of this episode, victim #6 is just reaching the point of severe motor impairment. I’m really hoping we can kill them quickly and perhaps kill one more before this season ends. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I’m pretty sure the final episode is an extra-long one.
My hope is that through perseverance and virtuous industry, Josh’s potty mouth can end the life of that sad seventh bastard.
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Yes, not much content this week. I’m writing a book, Josh is sick, things are busy, and I’m dealing with a lot of technical site performance issues. Also I might have snuck in a few minutes of videogaming. Like, I beat BioShock Infinite, which is NOT a short game by modern standards.
I installed W3 Total Cache about a month ago. At first it was a miracle, but over the month the site seemed to slow down again. Very confusion-making for my brain.
Last night I began mucking around, trying to figure out what was going on. I messed with some W3TC settings and suddenly I couldn’t administrate the blog. The machine on my web host slowed to a crawl and I couldn’t do anything. I eventually gave up and went to bed. When I got up this morning, the problem had resolved itself and my site was fast(ish) again. It STILL doesn’t pop the way it did a couple of years ago, but it was a huge step in the right direction.
While investigating all this other stuff, I came across CloudFlare. Looks like it’s a content delivery network for small-fry sites. In the past, if you wanted to distribute you content to servers all over the world to balance your traffic load, it would cost huge money. You basically needed to pay for top-shelf hosting in a lot of different places and then pay (or develop) some software to spread the content around. (This is how YouTube handles their ridiculous traffic load. Obviously there no machine fast enough or pipe wide enough to serve all of YouTube from a single source.) CloudFlare looks like it can give small-to-medium size sites the same kind of deal.
According to the site, this can be done for free. I’m still reading the fine print and looking for the catch, but if you’ve got any experience or knowledge in dealing with this sort of stuff I’d love to hear your take on it. I considering signing up, but I don’t want to do anything I’ll regret tomorrow. Or now. Or at some other point in time. I’m trying to avoid regret in an absolute sense, is what I’m saying.
I’ve never known what to do with the front page of this site: www.shamusyoung.com. For a while it was a splash page, but that seemed sort of pointless and self-aggrandizing. Then I replaced it with a simple redirect to the blog. HOWEVER, some people reported that it led to a redirect loop. Somehow, a page at / redirecting to /twentysidedtale/ was a “loop” in the mind of some web browsers. (With no evidence, I’ve chosen to blame IE. Because, you know, IE does have an established history of stupid-making.) But rather than deal with these error reports I just replaced the front page with a stupid, 1999-style “click here to go to the thing” type deal.
Some people are asking for an RSS feed for the podcast. It’s pretty easy to give you a feed for the podcast POSTS. That would be this. But I get the sense that’s not what people are looking for. The problem is, I don’t really use RSS, and I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts. So I’m not sure what this feed needs to have or how I can automate it. Can someone give me an example of the kind of feed you’re looking for?
Anyway. The point of all this is that whatever your complaint is, I’m working on it very, very slowly.
Link (YouTube) |
How do you feel about meandering? Is this something you like to do? Are you down for a good meander now and again? If so, then this episode has been lovingly crafted with your particular needs in mind. Both our character and our conversation are rudderless. Adrift. Directionless.
This episode does provide a nice showcase for Bethesda's questing system, which the design team nicknamed, “Screw You For Trying To Play Your Character, Fanboy.”
Rock climbing, Josh. Rock climbing.
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Yes, we’re putting up a Diecast on Tuesday. Not sure if this is a permanent move or not, we’ll see. We record on Sundays. Given the transient nature of news and the fact that we’re already discussing things that have aged a few days, I figure the less time between recording and posting the better. Also: The browser-specific auto-play issue should now be fixed. Let me know if it isn’t.
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Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #6:
Not-PAX, IGN, and the Rocketeer”
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I admit I’m preaching to the choir, but sometimes it’s just important to say things so that you can say you said them. Now I’m on record saying that EA needs someone who is an active part of gaming culture in order to make meaningful and productive decisions.
I suspect a few people will mis-read this or take my thoughts to some sort of extreme and argue that (say) Richard Garriott would make a horrible CEO of EA. Of course, I’m not suggesting they just find someone with no other qualifications other than “really enjoys playing and producing videogames”. The person also needs to be smart, well-spoken, have solid business acumen, and a concrete understanding of what’s wrong with the company. Is that asking too much? No, not for ~$1 million in take-home salary and a few million more in options and bonuses. I’m not against ludicrous executive salaries, but I am against offering ludicrous salaries to ordinary people.
My fear is that EA is just going to find another fifty-ish money-man to run the place. They’ve consistently made that same bad decision for the past decade, and doing something radically different from that would require a change in culture or powerful external forces. Yes, EA isn’t nearly living up to their potential, but they aren’t in severe enough trouble for the leadership to do something wild or unexpected. You can’t overcome that sort of organizational inertia without a good old-fashioned panic. EA is struggling enough to know they’re in trouble, but not nearly enough to take the sort of extreme corrective action they need.
As always, I would love to be proven wrong about this.
There's an episode of MST3K that covers the movie Lost Continent. The target movie features about ten thousand hours of rock climbing and nine seconds of stop-motion dinosaurs. (Horribly, this grueling bit of cinema is “generally considered to be one of the best in the 40-year-plus career of director Sam Newfield.” So that’s terrifying. What were his other films? Slow-motion footage featuring waterfalls of raw sewage?) You could tell it was almost an endurance test for the MST3K crew, and as the episode went on they would just say “rock climbing” to describe how they were feeling.
Among my gaming group we adopted this saying for times when something really boring â€" a story, movie, game, me talking â€" would go on for far too long and become a test of will. I’m also fond of saying, “From the people who brought you that last stuff, it's… more of the same!”. But only on special occasions.
I wanted to say “rock climbing” all during this episode. This really is starting to feel like rock climbing in the “Caesar Romero climbing Styrofoam rocks for an hour ten” sense of the word. The nonsense plot. Our endless bitching. The relentless brownness. Our whining. The glitches. Our bellyaching. The railroading. Our nitpicking.
So anyway. Slip on your wing-tipped climbing shoes and enjoy this punishing desecration of the Fallout name:
Link (YouTube) |
Rock climbing, Josh. Rock climbing.
EDIT: Today’s amusing bit of dramatic irony appears in the original posting of this episode (drink!) where I claimed that, “If it's of any comfort, we'll have nicer things to say about the next game.” Ha. Haha. Oh, Shamus-of-2010, your optimism sickens me.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
T w e n t y S i d e d
