The Spoiler Warning crew will be doing another hangout on Monday, July 16th at 6pm Eastern Time in the USA. For other time zones, check this page. Josh has told me that he’s definitely going to be playing Civilization V, or Shogun 2, The Secret World, or Crusader Kings. Which means he’ll probably play Angry Birds.
I’ll post the related stream when the event goes live.
The site overhaul continues. I apologize for the upheaval. I think we’re nearly done. I want to thank everyone for their patience, bug reports, screen shots, CSS advice, layout advice, and general suggestions.
The changes so far:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dang Website III: Dang Harder”
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We recorded this game a couple of weeks ago. Now here is the final product of that endeavor. The Spoiler Warning all-stars in an eight-player pre-recorded live broadcast of Left 4 Dead 2, versus mode, using Left 4 Dead 1 levels. Here is the final footage, edited together to give you the viewpoints of both teams.
Link (YouTube) |
I think we’ve agreed that we’re not doing this again anytime soon. While it makes for hilarious footage, it actually requires a major investment of time to cut together two separate feeds, plus two audio tracks, plus the audio track from the Livestream to fix patches where people were cut off or muted. Also, I don’t know if our friendships can withstand this level of sadistic curb-stomping of team Pro Strat vs. Team Newbie.
This weekend we MAY actually begin our Mass Effect 3 season. The time is right. However, I have it on good authority that certain members of the cast have been saying they will, “Start [my] play-through, probably tomorrow,” for almost a month now. Credulity being in finite supply, I am beginning to doubt this will actually happen. We’ll see.
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Okay, so apparently SWTOR is now free to play up to level 15. Now, I’ve tried to play this game before, an ordeal that wasted a lot of my time and did not result in me playing the game, mostly due to the complete ineptitude of the policy makers.
But I’m willing to give it another go. I already have an account created. I already have the client downloaded. It should be fairly painless this time around. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Trial”
Sorry for the lack of content. I’m making small changes to the site here and there, based on feedback. There’s more work to be done. I’m taking cues from a few suggestions, and from the approach James Lileks uses to wrangle his content. (Seriously. He was doing his thing for about six years before I got started, and he’s even more prolific than I am. (Although he’s somewhat held in check by his need to go back and fuss & reformat old stuff. (Not that I have any room to talk.)) There is a huge mountain of content there, and if nostalgia artifacts, retro-curiosities, and loving mockery of the past is your thing, there’s enough there to keep you entertained for months.)
I seem to have ruined the preceding paragraph with parenthetical shenanigans. Let me start again: I’m working on the website. It’s boring. So no content. Sorry. Almost done.
As some have suggested, Spoiler Warning, Comics, and Programming posts will be getting their own index. The Spoiler Warning one is done already. I’ll be adding some kinda promotion for the book, somewhere. We’ll see.
More feedback is welcome. The previous feedback made for some dang fine improvements.
I’ve been thinking about what I need from this website, what it needs to do, and how I’ve been running it. As I’ve sketched things out, I’ve come to realize why I haven’t been able to make a design that really works. The problem is that this thing is incredibly complicated. It didn’t start out that way. This blog began life as a simple little thing with a minuscule audience, no content, and a very narrow focus. As it expanded, the site design has failed to keep up.
For years I’ve been underestimating the problem because, hey, it’s a WordPress blog, right? How hard can it be? As it turns out, wrangling seven years of mixed-media content into a convenient, readable, and intuitive interface that works on desktops and mobiles, is useful to everyone (newcomers, regulars, and archive surfers) doesn’t overwhelm the reader with too much data, and doesn’t look like complete ass is difficult bordering on the impossible.
Reader Strangeite pointed out that a good website needs these skills, in this order: Good interface design, good graphic design, and good coding. My skillset is the reverse of that, with most of my skill points dumped into “coding”.
In the past, I’ve solicited feedback on this, but I was frustrated because each person told me how to make the site more useful for them, which would almost always result in making it less useful for someone else. This was my fault, because I hadn’t properly defined the problem. So let me try to draw a picture of all the stuff the site needs to do.
For the curious, I’ve outlined everything the site needs to do or show.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dang Website”
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This will unavoidably have some act-three spoilers from The Witch Watch. I don’t know how much sense it will make if you haven’t read the book.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witch Watch: The Lost Paragraphs”
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
T w e n t y S i d e d
