Is "pak chooie unf" supposed to be one of the lines in that song? If so, I think I know the line you're talking about, and I always thought it was "actually us" with a pause in the middle of actually because of the robot voice. One of us has a very vivid imagination.
I also thought that the pusher robot wanted to shove, and the shover robot wanted to push, but I'm too lazy to verify.
If someone is smart and really creative, there's a decent chance their IQ is keeping them from becoming schizophrenic? There's a decent chance my mom, my brother and I all fall into that category, and that's both a little weird to imagine and a little spooky.
This should stand as proof that graphics should not be in the forefront of the entire gaming industry, they had graphics then and did much better giving a fully descriptive story as was needed. I really want to see some level of text based gaming come back.
Text-based gaming isn't completely dead. There are niche markets, particularly with browser-based games.
One of my favorites, and one I've been playing for more than three years, is Kingdom of Loathing (http://www.kingdomofloathing.com). Yes, they do have images, but they're stick figures, static GIFs, so it's essentially text-based with a little accent. Humorous writing, complicated puzzles... all that stuff is alive and well in this fantasy RPG. They're maybe halfway between pure text and an RPG like Bard's Tale - more interface than the former, much more writing than the latter. Heck, they even have a grue familiar as an homage to some of the classic games. (It's free to play, too. There's a donation model, but non-donators don't miss out on anything.)
I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to plug my own game (also free to play, no penalty for non-donators, I assume it's okay to mention here), which is was inspired by Kingdom of Loathing but is a superhero-themed RPG. Twilight Heroes, at http://www.twilightheroes.com./
Back in the old days, before I'd heard about the "they want to verify your email address is valid" I reacted pretty strongly to the first few phishing attempts that landed in my inbox. I'd see a "verify your bank email" and I'd go there and fill in the blanks with a veritable stream of cursing. At the time I assumed someone would actually see that message at some point and maybe feel a little insulted or ashamed.
Later, as I caught on that clicking the link might be validating my address, I stopped that behavior and just started deleting everything.
spammers do all kinds of guessing. I used to use a catchall on my domain. Then I'd get hit with a wave of a thousand messages, all to a different name at the same domain. aaron@x.com, adam@x.com, bob@x.com, and so on. Eventually turned the catchall off because it was driving me crazy.
I've also had people accuse me of spamming, because they used a custom email address in my game, and that address started getting spam. I was surprised and confused, because I don't personally look at those addresses unless I have a reason to, and I hate the spam as much as anyone. So I checked out their custom address: it consisted of two letters at a domain -- th@x.com. Seemed pretty obvious to me that this was the same thing, probably the spammer just picking every instance (or the most common instances) of two letters at that domain.
I've probably gotten close to a million spam email messages in my lifetime, and I'd like to say that I'm pretty smart, but once, years ago, I clicked on one, so that makes me part of the 12% of all people who have responded to spam. Fell for one of those "complete 5 offers and get a free iPod." It was a moment of weakness, and darn it, I wanted an iPod really bad then.
Thankfully that one turned out to be more of a scam in the "you'll never complete this task, but it'll get you to sign up for other junk" sense than in the "we'll take your credit card and run" sense.
It's still not always easy to tell if the email is fake spam or spam that's genuinely from the company. For instance, once a month or so I get some email claiming to be from Sears. Of course I don't load the images, the email is a mess, I don't really know what's on it. And I do recall that once, two years ago, I submitted a rebate coupon to Sears, which may have involved including my email address. So I know there's a chance that it might actually be Sears emailing me, but there's also a chance that it's a scammer trying to trick me into believing it's a reputable company. Given the choice between unsubscribing and stopping a once-a-month email, or unsubscribing and validating my email address and getting more spam, I've decided I can't trust the unsubscribe method.
HoMM IV never had any problems for me. A little slow calculating opponent moves, maybe, but seemed okay. I played the heck out of III and IV, but when I got V I got so frustrated by the slow and unusable 3-D maps I only made it through a few scenarios before getting tired. Definitely a case where adding fancy graphics didn't add anything at all to the game, but certainly subtracted. I would have been much happier without them.
I use a twitter account to provide updates about the game I run. It's superhero themed, but because it has the word "Twilight" in the name (with the implication you've got a day job and go out at dusk to fight crime), I get a couple of people a day with accounts that are named "Cullen." No amount of saying "this is a superhero game" or "there are no vampires here" seems to dissuade them.
That's funny. Funny AND true. I remember when the episode came out. For some reason my mom had to miss that episode, and when I started to describe it to her she stopped me and said, "He uses water and then fire and then water, right? I've read that!"
Being a preteen of course I said, "Not just fire! It was a flamethrower!" or something to that effect, but she was right. I was pretty impressed that she knew what McGyver would do without seeing the episode.
Who pays $35 for a domain? Mine are all in the $10 or $12 range. When I worked with an online retailer, we got down to $8/year with a bulk discount. If you're paying $35, you're getting ripped off.
And that's what I like about booting my computer up when I start work. If you manage to do the impossible as your very fist act in the office, the rest of the day is a piece of cake.
Why should someone be given preference on the basis of how much money / power they have?
What the heck is money for, if not to get you things that people with less money can't get? Perhaps you meant it solely in the context of organs, but in general the entire point of money is to be able to use it to get things that you can't without it.
No kidding. We invented numbers so that we could use them to mean things. A "Toyota" is a wildly vague number that might mean 10k or 50k. That's just plain weird as a way to explain the cost of things.
Bah, I just stick to browser/text based. Without the need for fancy animation, I'm the writer, programmer, AND creative developer. It's a niche market, as I rely on players who enjoy good writing and a witty joke more than eye candy, and who can appreciate the rewards of a classic RPG over action, but then you don't need to know much more than HTML, a little programming, and enough to tie some stuff to a database.
This is exactly the wrong reason to teach any programming language. You teach a language to teach programming concepts and methodologies, and so you use languages that emphasize the concepts you want to teach.
You don't teach a language so someone will know it later. That makes no sense at all.
Silly analogy time: The only reason to learn Spanish is to better understand how sentence structure and verb conjugation work. You wouldn't pick up Spanish to actually communicate with someone. That makes no sense at all.
Being less silly, I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think you can both learn a language for the practical purpose of knowing and using it, and ALSO learn a language to become better at using other languages in the future. That's true of both programming and verbal communication.
Yes, that's fifty cents per active account. People who don't log in or play generally don't donate.
Server costs are about half of my income for two dedicated servers (one file server, one database server). Doesn't leave a lot of profit (especially if I want to do any advertising or hire out any services), so at this point it's still more of a minimum-wage hobby. On the other hand, that beats the hell out of hobbies that *cost* money and it's still fantastically fun, educational, and rewarding.
Some of us are browser based. I play www.KingdomofLoathing.com all the time, and it's platform independent. I also run my own game at www.Twilightheroes.com.
With just under 30k accounts, maybe 2,000 of them active in a given month, I'm not really quite "massive" yet but my own experience is that I pull in on average less than $0.50 per account per month, with some fair bit of fluctuation. I'd be jumping for joy at an average of $2/player.
Subject says it all. If you don't have anything good to put up there, it's better to leave it blank than put something bad up. I'm a fan of the "this space intentionally left blank" lines you see in tests and other documents.
Alternately, if you use the profile bit and not the main domain, maybe you should just put your profile stuff up front?
To answer your question, what I did with my own domain was put up a collection of things I wanted to show off (writing, artwork, also a little spoonerism search script that I'd put together) to share my creative efforts and interests with others. Later, when I started a personal business, I sort of co-opted the existing site and turned it into a business site, keeping but burying and cleaning up some of the creative work.
Uh, don't forget 5. technical people who can invent stuff, but can't for the life of them present it in a fashion that's usable or intelligible to the average person.
I'm a techie, but sometimes I have to work really hard just to get past incomprehensible instructions and functionality to do things I want. If people were better at translating the tech into something friendly, more people would adopt it.
I have never seen factory workers stereotyped as beer guzzling, bowling addicted rubes.
Hey, wait a minute! *I* guzzle beer and bowl weekly! I should be working in a factory! And all this time I've been pretending to be in IT and wondering why I didn't hang out in comic book shops like my friends. Apparently my hobbies have revealed what my true career should be. Thank goodness I discovered this while I have enough working years to get a good pension. They still do those, right?
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I also thought that the pusher robot wanted to shove, and the shover robot wanted to push, but I'm too lazy to verify.
If someone is smart and really creative, there's a decent chance their IQ is keeping them from becoming schizophrenic? There's a decent chance my mom, my brother and I all fall into that category, and that's both a little weird to imagine and a little spooky.
This should stand as proof that graphics should not be in the forefront of the entire gaming industry, they had graphics then and did much better giving a fully descriptive story as was needed. I really want to see some level of text based gaming come back.
Text-based gaming isn't completely dead. There are niche markets, particularly with browser-based games.
... all that stuff is alive and well in this fantasy RPG. They're maybe halfway between pure text and an RPG like Bard's Tale - more interface than the former, much more writing than the latter. Heck, they even have a grue familiar as an homage to some of the classic games. (It's free to play, too. There's a donation model, but non-donators don't miss out on anything.)
One of my favorites, and one I've been playing for more than three years, is Kingdom of Loathing (http://www.kingdomofloathing.com). Yes, they do have images, but they're stick figures, static GIFs, so it's essentially text-based with a little accent. Humorous writing, complicated puzzles
I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to plug my own game (also free to play, no penalty for non-donators, I assume it's okay to mention here), which is was inspired by Kingdom of Loathing but is a superhero-themed RPG. Twilight Heroes, at http://www.twilightheroes.com./
Later, as I caught on that clicking the link might be validating my address, I stopped that behavior and just started deleting everything.
I like those letters. Not being Christian, I know the message can't be for me, and thus it must be spam.
spammers do all kinds of guessing. I used to use a catchall on my domain. Then I'd get hit with a wave of a thousand messages, all to a different name at the same domain. aaron@x.com, adam@x.com, bob@x.com, and so on. Eventually turned the catchall off because it was driving me crazy.
I've also had people accuse me of spamming, because they used a custom email address in my game, and that address started getting spam. I was surprised and confused, because I don't personally look at those addresses unless I have a reason to, and I hate the spam as much as anyone. So I checked out their custom address: it consisted of two letters at a domain -- th@x.com. Seemed pretty obvious to me that this was the same thing, probably the spammer just picking every instance (or the most common instances) of two letters at that domain.
I've probably gotten close to a million spam email messages in my lifetime, and I'd like to say that I'm pretty smart, but once, years ago, I clicked on one, so that makes me part of the 12% of all people who have responded to spam. Fell for one of those "complete 5 offers and get a free iPod." It was a moment of weakness, and darn it, I wanted an iPod really bad then.
Thankfully that one turned out to be more of a scam in the "you'll never complete this task, but it'll get you to sign up for other junk" sense than in the "we'll take your credit card and run" sense.
It's still not always easy to tell if the email is fake spam or spam that's genuinely from the company. For instance, once a month or so I get some email claiming to be from Sears. Of course I don't load the images, the email is a mess, I don't really know what's on it. And I do recall that once, two years ago, I submitted a rebate coupon to Sears, which may have involved including my email address. So I know there's a chance that it might actually be Sears emailing me, but there's also a chance that it's a scammer trying to trick me into believing it's a reputable company. Given the choice between unsubscribing and stopping a once-a-month email, or unsubscribing and validating my email address and getting more spam, I've decided I can't trust the unsubscribe method.
HoMM IV never had any problems for me. A little slow calculating opponent moves, maybe, but seemed okay. I played the heck out of III and IV, but when I got V I got so frustrated by the slow and unusable 3-D maps I only made it through a few scenarios before getting tired. Definitely a case where adding fancy graphics didn't add anything at all to the game, but certainly subtracted. I would have been much happier without them.
I use a twitter account to provide updates about the game I run. It's superhero themed, but because it has the word "Twilight" in the name (with the implication you've got a day job and go out at dusk to fight crime), I get a couple of people a day with accounts that are named "Cullen." No amount of saying "this is a superhero game" or "there are no vampires here" seems to dissuade them.
That's funny. Funny AND true. I remember when the episode came out. For some reason my mom had to miss that episode, and when I started to describe it to her she stopped me and said, "He uses water and then fire and then water, right? I've read that!"
Being a preteen of course I said, "Not just fire! It was a flamethrower!" or something to that effect, but she was right. I was pretty impressed that she knew what McGyver would do without seeing the episode.
Who pays $35 for a domain? Mine are all in the $10 or $12 range. When I worked with an online retailer, we got down to $8/year with a bulk discount. If you're paying $35, you're getting ripped off.
And that's what I like about booting my computer up when I start work. If you manage to do the impossible as your very fist act in the office, the rest of the day is a piece of cake.
Why should someone be given preference on the basis of how much money / power they have?
What the heck is money for, if not to get you things that people with less money can't get? Perhaps you meant it solely in the context of organs, but in general the entire point of money is to be able to use it to get things that you can't without it.
No kidding. We invented numbers so that we could use them to mean things. A "Toyota" is a wildly vague number that might mean 10k or 50k. That's just plain weird as a way to explain the cost of things.
Bah, I just stick to browser/text based. Without the need for fancy animation, I'm the writer, programmer, AND creative developer. It's a niche market, as I rely on players who enjoy good writing and a witty joke more than eye candy, and who can appreciate the rewards of a classic RPG over action, but then you don't need to know much more than HTML, a little programming, and enough to tie some stuff to a database.
This is exactly the wrong reason to teach any programming language. You teach a language to teach programming concepts and methodologies, and so you use languages that emphasize the concepts you want to teach.
You don't teach a language so someone will know it later. That makes no sense at all.
Silly analogy time: The only reason to learn Spanish is to better understand how sentence structure and verb conjugation work. You wouldn't pick up Spanish to actually communicate with someone. That makes no sense at all.
Being less silly, I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think you can both learn a language for the practical purpose of knowing and using it, and ALSO learn a language to become better at using other languages in the future. That's true of both programming and verbal communication.
Yes, that's fifty cents per active account. People who don't log in or play generally don't donate.
Server costs are about half of my income for two dedicated servers (one file server, one database server). Doesn't leave a lot of profit (especially if I want to do any advertising or hire out any services), so at this point it's still more of a minimum-wage hobby. On the other hand, that beats the hell out of hobbies that *cost* money and it's still fantastically fun, educational, and rewarding.
Some of us are browser based. I play www.KingdomofLoathing.com all the time, and it's platform independent. I also run my own game at www.Twilightheroes.com.
With just under 30k accounts, maybe 2,000 of them active in a given month, I'm not really quite "massive" yet but my own experience is that I pull in on average less than $0.50 per account per month, with some fair bit of fluctuation. I'd be jumping for joy at an average of $2/player.
Most breakfasts, on the other hand, actually are finished. Strange but true.
What rights would he have? He just picked out a name and somebody else owns it. What rights of his are they violating?
Subject says it all. If you don't have anything good to put up there, it's better to leave it blank than put something bad up. I'm a fan of the "this space intentionally left blank" lines you see in tests and other documents.
Alternately, if you use the profile bit and not the main domain, maybe you should just put your profile stuff up front?
To answer your question, what I did with my own domain was put up a collection of things I wanted to show off (writing, artwork, also a little spoonerism search script that I'd put together) to share my creative efforts and interests with others. Later, when I started a personal business, I sort of co-opted the existing site and turned it into a business site, keeping but burying and cleaning up some of the creative work.
I'm a techie, but sometimes I have to work really hard just to get past incomprehensible instructions and functionality to do things I want. If people were better at translating the tech into something friendly, more people would adopt it.
I have never seen factory workers stereotyped as beer guzzling, bowling addicted rubes.
Hey, wait a minute! *I* guzzle beer and bowl weekly! I should be working in a factory! And all this time I've been pretending to be in IT and wondering why I didn't hang out in comic book shops like my friends. Apparently my hobbies have revealed what my true career should be. Thank goodness I discovered this while I have enough working years to get a good pension. They still do those, right?
I think the answer is to outlaw blends. All or nothing. None of this "take the best of one thing and combine it with the best of the other" stuff.