T w e n t y S i d e d
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Characters come and go, but the relative success of a campaign story can be judged by the number of players who are willing to see it through to the end.
DM of the Rings XLII:
Yew Tock and it Types Four Hue!
One of the ads in the sidebar right now is for “Dragon Naturally Speaking”, a program which allows you to “type by talking”. You know: speech recognition and whatnot. The ad boasts “99% accuracy, can your staff do as well?”
Actually, unless they are just learning English the average person is bound to do a lot better than a mere 99%. Words are lost all the time due to background noise or differing pronounciation, be we are nearly always able to auto-correct for this on the fly, usually before the other person even finishes speaking. If we really couldn’t figure out one out of every hundred words, conversation would be maddening. We would be misunderstanding each other, or asking the other person to repeat things more or less constantly. The average Joe can do better than 99% talking on a cell phone in a noisy room.
So yeah, unless you’re the governor of California, your staff probably does a lot better than 99% accuracy.
(Oh, and a slight disclaimer: You need to train the software for a week before you can attain that less-than stellar 99%.)
LATER: I must add: I don’t have a problem with the software itself, my gripe here is that the ad was trying to pit their software against human beings. Computers are unbeatable when it comes to doing calculations, sorting, and storage of data. But when it comes to deciphering language, they can’t hope to keep up with a human. So, the ad was kind of indirectly insulting, which is why I just wasted four paragraphs on it.
Sheesh. I shouldn’t be this grumpy on a Friday.
History of the Internet
The recent spike in traffic to this site (because of DM of the Rings) reminded me of this:
On May 19 2003, both FARK and Slashdot linked to my humorous “History of the Internet” bit. The original site is long gone and replaced by a spam portal, but I do have the thing archived here. Now that was a day of heavy traffic. I give full credit to Hosting Matters, though. Despite the simultaneous FARKing and Slashdotting, the site never went down.
The History of the Internet hasn’t aged well, humor-wise. The jokes about X10 and Instapundit don’t really work. When I wrote it, Instapundit was still a huge monolith of the blogging world (not that the site has gotten smaller, it’s just that everything else has gotten bigger) and X10 is no longer an instantly recognizable name. I bet there are a lot of people reading this who’ve forgotten all about their sleazy, ubiquitous ads.
Still, that was a fun couple of minutes of fame. Everyone gets their 15 minutes I suppose, but I seem to be getting mine in lots of little 2-minute allotments.
Session 11, Part 1
This is done all from memory and a few brief notes. Much detail has been lost. Entire conversations are missing.
Eomer the Rogue, Thordek the Fighter, Enoch the Cleric, Thu’fir the Blade Lord, Endo the Monk(an NPC), and Garret Lorman (another NPC) are all in the small farming and fishing village of Washport.
Beck the (former) first mate of Ocean’s Majesty (and also an NPC) has been left behind in the town of Telwin Port to the west, where he plans to help in the ship construction currently underway.
The party loads up on supplies and then heads east from the town of Washport. The terrain ahead looks uneven and rocky, so they head out on foot, leaving their horses behind.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Session 11, Part 1”
Nerdcore 4 Life
Nerd culture is going to hell in a handbasket: (Warning: Colorful language.)
Dang kids.
I didn’t see Optimus Rhyme in there, which would have been nice.
DM of the Rings FAQ
I’m seeing a lot of the same questions in the comments of DM of the Rings. Rather than answering the same question in the comments of a dozen threads, I’m going to gather it all up here and deal with it in one post so that I can link back to it as the need arises.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings FAQ”
DM of the Rings XLI:
A New Hope
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It would have been pleasing if this extra-large (double, actually) comic had ended up being number “XL”. Missed it by one. (What kind of a dork obsesses over details like that? Sheesh.)
I’m sure this is an unexpected turn of events. Don’t worry, I know where this is going. You don’t. Ha ha.
From The Archives:
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.