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In any large prewritten campaign, the DM is bound to read the wrong bit of dialog sooner or later. Sometimes it’s easier to cover up than others. Sometimes it’s impossible. In these cases it can be a great relief when you realize nobody was listening to you anyway.
WordPress has this annoying “feature” where it lets you choose how many posts to display on one page. If I was a blogger with many short posts several times a day, then I’d probably choose to have a lot of posts on the front page. Since my posts are either long or image-heavy, I usually limit the front page to 6 posts.
The problem is that WordPress uses this value for how many posts to display on archive pages as well. Viewing the archives (categorical or monthly) six posts at a time is just annoying. Archive pages just show titles and an excerpt of the text with all of the images stripped out, so there is no reason not to lists lots and lots of them. No reason except that WordPress won’t let me do it.
Grrr.
I’ve fiddled with the archive pages so that category archives now show all of the posts on one page. This was harder than it should have been.
The upshot of all of this is that the DM of the Rings posts are all gathered together on one page, which is something I notice a lot of people have been asking for.
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Oh look. Another secluded place of secret enchantment and arcane mystery.
Yawn.
No, this isn’t another rant about Blender. This is a bit of very clever marketing from a company selling some sort of uber-blenders. This is brilliant. I’ve often wondered what marketing on YouTube would look like. Would a company just post their (hopefully entertaining) ads on YouTube for people to watch? Would they show more “edgy” ads that they couldn’t get away with on network TV? Maybe that will happen, but this company is tapping into the natural tendancy of people to share crazy movies (of real things) that they find online.
This is very powerful, from a marketing standpoint. I would never search for a blender online. I don’t need one. Amazon.com couldn’t get me to look at one with their ridiculous “you may also like…” sales pitches. There is nothing a banner ad could say about this blender that would entice me to click it. But here I found a funny movie, watched it, and when it was over I thought, “Wow. It would be cool to own one of those.” I wasn’t looking for one, but they made me want it anyway. This is viral marketing at its best.
Check it out, a coke can smoothie:
See also: The movie where they turn a handful of Golf Balls into crumbs.
A quick glance around this website will reveal a lot of unrelated projects that I’ve tackled over the years. There’s the book, the political satire site*, the terrain project, a D&D campaign, the movie, some Unreal levels, some game mods, a few WordPress plugins, a half-finished coding project, and now my webcomic. This place is very much the product of an unfocused mind. It’s like I’ve got ADD on a macro scale.
I keep telling myself that one of these days I’m going to settle down, pick one thing, and try to hone that particular skill. That day hasn’t come yet. There is just too much interesting stuff to do and too few days in which to do it. I do seem to be able to hold my focus longer now than when I was younger. Maybe that means I have more dicipline, or maybe it means I’m just slower.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Lack of Focus”
I wanted to link this a couple of days ago but it slipped my mind: Jay Barnson has another great post up about role-playing games on the computer. Of particular interest is the bit about scope & scale, and the contrast between Oblivion and Final Fantasy.
I’m betting what most gamers want is a game with both huge scope and massive scale. I would add that I’d like this, plus dynamic content. I’m greedy that way. (Actually, you could argue the Nethack has all of this, so let me add graphics and accessible gameplay to the wishlist.) While we’re at it, let’s make sure the game has emergent self-balancing properties too. (This is as opposed to the %mechanical forced-balancing we see in Oblivion.)
This is in no way easy to pull off, which is why we don’t see games like this very often. (Heck, we don’t see RPG’s in general as often as I’d like.) Still, this only fuels my interest in the subject. Sure, the perfect game is impossible to make, but that does not diminish my desire to play it.
In the comments of the most recent DM of the Rings, I found this webcomic, which has this great strip about roleplaying dice.
Look at them! So colorful. I must have them all!
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
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