I shall admit to reading, but not writing to alt.destroy.the.earth who ended up subdividing into six groups:
1.Destruction of all civilization.
2.Destruction of all humans.
3.Destruction of all surface-dwelling animals.
4.Destruction of all animals.
5.Destruction of all life.
6.Destruction of the entire planet.
I seem to recall poison being the best cost effective means for death, such as dropping something into the great lakes. I vaguely recall a few different types of poison being suggested as capable of taking out several million people, and this being rejected as unsuitable on a global scale. There was also the idea of a virus, but I don't think any consensus was reached on how to properly calculate the overall cost of putting together a killer virus.
The original Amiga 1000 had the Kickstart ROM chips, which allowed them to boot nigh-instantly. This included the important parts of the OS, and later even drivers and the kitchen sink. You would literally have a splash screen for a second, and then having a functioning computer complete with GUI. Of course, this means surgery was required to swap in a new Kickstart ROM. And as later software required different versions of Kickstart to run, we started playing with different software kickers which allowed you to load different versions via floppy disks.
The later versions (or, at least, the A500 and A2000 I used) stopped hard coding Kickstart on a chip, and you then needed to load the entire OS from a single 1.5MB floppy. Or, for the more affluent, a hard disk.
NIN signed with TVT Records originally, and Reznor certainly hated that contract and the control the label had on him. The aggressive sound of Halo 5 "Broken" is a direct result of his angst over the label. He eventually managed to escape from that deal to form Nothing Records. Nothing Records was still under the umbrella of Interscope, but Trent was basically given control to do what he wanted.
Nothing Records eventually falls apart after Reznor has a falling out with his partner John Malm.
Shortly after the fall, "With Teeth" still goes out under the Nothing label, but his next album "Year Zero" goes out directly under Interscope. And again, Trent hates the label control.
What I don't know is if Trent went back to Interscope after Nothing fell apart, or if he was still stuck with them after the lawsuits finally ended?
Second Life is really 3D IRC, with a much poorer frame rate than the old-skool IRC.
And the various MMORPGs are just IRC with Auto-Attack. I agree with you, but you're missing the longer term pictures our Internet Overlords are looking upon. Most of us already 'go online' every day, and this manifests though various and unconnected internet clients which each do their own things, with some degree of overlap. The Brave New Future would be one in which an Internet Overlord can create a single client to rule them all.
Of course, those of us in the UNIX camp of 'do one thing and do it well' would fail to see why you would want to bundle a mail client and a web browser, and IRC+various IM clients together into one bloated application that doesn't do any individual task well. (Wait, I've heard of that before, haven't I?) And while a 3D everything browser might seem foolish to those of us who use a command line, the unwashed masses might not agree. "I know this, this is UNIX."
We've already reached the point where we have PCs with massively more processing power than they need. (Yeah, yeah. Those of you doing real work quiet down.) Grandma's email machine doesn't need that extra GPU or dual cores, or phat Bus so she can view pictures of her grand kids. But... what if those pictures were placed inside an easy to navigate virtual world! Where she could sit in the same virtual nursing home as her peers, and ogle each others grand children? Think of the new virtual real estate we could place advertising on?!
And, of course, if you think cleaning up her compromised PC was bad... wait until our virtual havens are struck with flying.penis.worm.F7!
The basic unit of measure for any good admin is, of course, slack.
You never notice when an admin is doing a good job. You only notice when they're not.
I highly doubt it was a casting from the original. A few different Hollywood replicate companies put out prop replicas. A local hobby shop carried one back in the day with (I think) a $400 sticker on it. A friend on mine eventually picked it up, added LED blinkenlights, and turned it into a coffee table.
I'm from a largely Atari (400, 800XL, 520ST, 1040ST) family and was eventually converted to Amiga (A500) by my friends.
The Amiga blew the pants off the ST in almost every metric, except maybe sound. The Gem desktop on the Atari was crap, and just Directory Opus and ARexx by themselves almost justified the switch. The Video Toaster was years ahead of its time for consumer video/graphics and doing Anime subtitles on the Amiga was a snap. ProWrite and then PageStream for editing documents, Cygnus Editor for everything else. Much better graphics, better thread handling, better memory handling... and let's face it: Guru Meditation Errors beat the hell out of any number of bombs. Fred Fish Forever!
I only switched kicking and screaming to using a PC when the last shop in my area stopped supporting Amigas. Windows3.1 was a no contest comparison, and even 95 didn't measure up that well. I will concede that I never found a good spread sheet on the Amiga, and having never used one I didn't know what I was missing. Just like most PC users today.
Missing from your list of taboo word subjects is discrimination, such as the N-word or bitch.
Words are bad not because they are 'inherently' bad, or have an etymology that relates to them being bad. Words are bad because you believe they are bad.
Consider any of the vulgar words in different languages. You might consider them completely vile and reprehensible, but as long as they're not translated for you, they're just words. And once you learn the meaning of the word, it's your perception that changes, not the word.
Consider the campaign to create a vulgar word from Senator Santorum's name.
If this was about a slot machine that just had a faulty hold and was giving out more money than it should, I would consider it utter bullshit. It can't possibly be the responsibility of a gambler to be aware when they're winning too much. However, that doesn't appear to be the case:
The machine at Caesars Indiana credited gamblers $10 for each dollar they inserted because the software wasn't designed for U.S. currency, state police said.
I accept that fact that knowingly using an exploit to 'win' money might be considered fraud, but you're going to have a hell of a time trying to convince me that getting extra tokens on a slot machine represents an intent on the part of the user to defraud the casino. How the heck is a user suppose to know if there isn't some kind of promotion going on, and more importantly, why would we possibly want to push the onus on the gamblers to verify that the slot machines are working correctly? If you're running a casino, it seems perfectly resonable to suggest it's your responsibility to police your own machines.
And, of course, we have this to consider too:
Kathryn Ford of Louisville, Ky., the gambler who alerted the casino, said going after the other patrons was unfair. When a slot machine jams and gamblers lose money, they don't get it back, she said. "It doesn't work in the reverse," Ford said. "They need to forget it and move on."
You left out the most important difference of OSS, which is that the current code base remains open. Even if Apple decides to close the project, a new fork could begin under the last release of the GPL2 codebase.
I'm a fan of Warhammer 40k not so much for the game system for but for the game content. They're created an incredibly interesting game universe which lends itself well to telling stories about the massive conflicts between their various factions. I've been a fan for years, and have witnessed the terrible debacle as Games Workshop tries to define itself. Though out the years, they have been painfully protected of their 'content' and have been 'unusually' picky about who and where they license it. If you compare the vast litany of licensed fan fiction nobles created for the various FASA universes, you can see the relatively sparse offerings available.
At first they were completely against the idea of creating any computer games, as they were terrified that players would be able to enjoy their content without buying their over-priced miniatures. The few games that have been attempted in the past were largely crap. Starcraft was originally going to be set in the 40k universe, but, again, they pulled out at the last minute and Blizzard was forced to rename their units and rewrite their story. Partly based on the success of Starcraft, they finally agreed to try again with Relic and Dawn of War was the first game they actually allowed to continue to completion that wasn't total crap.
Strangely, their over-priced miniatures are their major source of revenue. I say it's strange because over the years their models have largely become high priced crap. The exception being for their Forge World miniatures which are much more expensive, but are typically of exceptional quality. They 'control' their miniatures market by being the sole provider of 'official' miniatures for their products, which they enforce by only suppling game shops that agree to their questionable control practices. This is even more strange because the only reason to actually buy and use their miniatures is so that you can compete in licensed tournaments. You could just as easily use pennies and bottle caps to represent your forces to play at home. Of course, as anyone who actually plays and enjoys miniatures knows, that's not the point.
So I'm not terribly surprised to see them dragging their feet on this again. They've been playing around with movie deals for years, and in typical Games Workshop style they still have nothing to show for it. And now when their fans who decide to put together their own movie... they still have nothing to show for it.
Paying money is the first thing that comes to mind? What about just brazenly dropping hotels on their property without playing for them? Pummeling the other players for their cash? Or stealthily picking up some extra cash from the bank? Or fudging your dice rolls so you make it past Park Place?
Sometimes the structure of the universe is there for us to enjoy. And sometimes it's the other way around.
Are they not both games? To which the point is to 'have fun'? Does having more monopoly money or WoW gold allow players to have more fun? At what cost?
Or, if the competitive nature of monopoly makes it too strained an analogy, compare a group of sculptors who all sit at a table together to make art from clay. Would it be wrong for one sculptor to offer another money for the bit of clay they were working on? Does that transaction change if one is a professional artist, and the other an amateur? What about after they've finished the pieces and fired them in the kiln?
Consider the same transaction when done between two D&D players. Consider the transaction between a player and the DM. What sort of game are they then playing?
When I go skiing or hunting or hiking, I pay good money so I can spend more time doing the parts of those activities I enjoy. I outfit myself in gear that will increase my enjoyment. Are those dumb transactions?
For those of you who haven't figured out why this is dumb yet, consider playing a board game with friends, and having one of your more affluent friends pulling out his wallet and offering other players real money for their monopoly money.
Until someone determines a half-way reliable method of calculating how many people did not pay for the product directly as a result of it being available for pirating, then the "losses" remain as some unknown value
That is one way to look at things. This is, in fact, probably the right way to look at things if you are the CEO of a content cartel looking to maximize the profits of your shareholders.
Here's another way to look at things. Who cares how many copies they didn't sell? It's a virtual number. That's make believe. Let's focus on the same metric by which every other business is judged. The money they did make. A business can always point to a host of reasons why they didn't make money... our question as a society should then be, if we pass laws to help those businesses make money, do we make the world better for it?
There are a host of anti-counterfeit measures on currency. And for the most part the average consumer will neither know nor care, and just keep passing the stuff off as genuine. Yet the Fed certainly cares, and they are certainly looking for the stuff. Adding tiny anti-counterfeit designs doesn't make it harder to print fake currency, it makes it easier to identify the stuff as fake. So they can locate fake currency floating in the wild and hopefully trace it back to its source.
Watermarks such as this are designed to prevent counterfeits, not piracy. There are large scale counterfeit operations designed to pass themselves off as legitimate software resellers. Considering the type of disc presses these organizations have access to these days, they can stamp some very authentic looking discs.
The BSA and other such agents look out for these tiny missing features, so they know when and where to release the hounds.
A mom and pop shop with a few extra installs than licenses is small potatoes. They group stamping 100s of thousands of discs in China and selling them as genuine in Europe are the big daddy potatoes.
A friend of mine works at a place that handles WU money orders. The various cash limit (for picking up without ID, maximum allowed withdrawal, etc.) depends on a number of things and tend to vary depending on which WU franchise you're at. This specific chain of locations does allow pickups without an ID, instead you need the sending party to provide you with merely the transaction ID and the Test Question which will net you a WU Check for the transfer amount. The friend in question recalls providing at least one check in this faction for $5k. The location in question will even cash such checks without ID if they are $500 or less for the typically exorbitant cash-checking fee.
I'm guessing that other pictures show underage drinkers at the party.
That's what I though too, and since I figured at least one of us needed to actually RTFA I did. Strangely, that archive doesn't mention any other pictures:
So what, you're probably asking yourself, could have been in this picture that was so abhorrent as to make Stacy Snyder unworthy of teaching children? Was she force-feeding a 6-year-old bourbon from a bottle or spiking a middle school dance's punch? Not even close. The picture in question turned out to be of her at a Halloween party in 2005 dressed as a pirate and drinking an indeterminate liquid "from a plastic 'Mr. Goodbar' cup." But underneath was a caption which read "Drunken Pirate" and that caption apparently lead faculty to assume she was too "unprofessional" to educate young minds. Word was sent to the Millersville administration, and Snyder's "lifelong dream" of being a teacher ended less than a day before being achieved.
I went kicking and screaming from an Atari ST and Commodore Amiga user to a PC user. As such I was in the unique position to know the many things I was leaving behind in the transition. To those users moving from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 everything seemed to be a massive improvement. For me... not so much.
Now Microsoft might not be to blame for the mismanagement of Atari and Commodore, but they are certainly to blame for the massive efforts they have expended on controlling the expectations of their key markets. For more than a decade computer users thought it was perfectly acceptably to use buggy software that crashed often because they didn't know any better. To accuse the end users of not being better educated is a sad excuse that seems short sighted in the extreme. What are they suppose to expect when software that crashes frequently is all they have ever known? Are they suppose to all run off and study the history of computers so they can more critically examine the market and cast better informed economic votes?
I'm certainly not against the idea of having better educated consumers. I can't help but see education doing anything but helping most situations. Yet in most cases people view a computer as an appliance like a toaster or a refrigerator. They don't want to know how it works, they don't want to hear about regular maintenance plans or upkeep schedules. They just want it to work. And I really don't see that as being a horribly unreasonable expectation.
Why do we hate U-Haul again? I think I know for the rest, but not that one.
The traditional method to discover such information is to Google the company name + 'sucks' which reveals the sort of websites you would expect. The typical complaints are about putting in a reservation for a truck and then not getting one (you don't actually 'reserve' a truck, you 'request' one, and they get to call you back the day of the 'reservation' telling you where to pick it up... or even telling you one is not available... or not calling you at all), or getting a truck and finding it defective. And then finding the usual run-around when attempting to get the issue resolved.
I agree that Wolfenstein 3D was probably the first of the many FPS games that would follow, but coming from a Commodore/Atari background I recall playing 16 player MIDI Maze a full five years earlier.
By that same token I would also consider Dungeon Master for the list, although then you have to start competing with the likes of Alternate Reality, Bard's Tale, Ultima, and Wizardry... which might all be traced back to Rogue.
We all play RPGs for different reasons. Some of us like the tactical aspects of using the skills of your party to best effect. Some enjoy the interactive story elements. Some like the progressive feeling of accomplishment as their players grow more powerful. Some actually enjoy role-playing! (I put on my wizard robe and hat....)
Of course, there are also those who think they enjoy the Quest for Numerical Superiority. So they grind their gamer nubbins to reach an unattainable goal. In most cases the 'grind' IS the game and the concept that you need to suffer though the newbie levels to get to the good stuff makes Jack a dull boy. Before we had tubes, such 'gamers' would shuffle about for awhile, whine until they found the cheat codes, enjoyed their 15 minutes of fun, and then moved on. Yet now that they can unlock their super powers in an online world, they would rather we be the mouse to their cat games. An attempt to try and milk more than a mere 15 minutes of fun by basically shouting "I am GOD here!" to anyone who will listen.
Fun is where you find it. Accomplishment is a subjective and personal quest. Etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall poison being the best cost effective means for death, such as dropping something into the great lakes. I vaguely recall a few different types of poison being suggested as capable of taking out several million people, and this being rejected as unsuitable on a global scale. There was also the idea of a virus, but I don't think any consensus was reached on how to properly calculate the overall cost of putting together a killer virus.
The later versions (or, at least, the A500 and A2000 I used) stopped hard coding Kickstart on a chip, and you then needed to load the entire OS from a single 1.5MB floppy. Or, for the more affluent, a hard disk.
Nothing Records eventually falls apart after Reznor has a falling out with his partner John Malm.
Shortly after the fall, "With Teeth" still goes out under the Nothing label, but his next album "Year Zero" goes out directly under Interscope. And again, Trent hates the label control.
What I don't know is if Trent went back to Interscope after Nothing fell apart, or if he was still stuck with them after the lawsuits finally ended?
The Klingon word for what is 'nuq' and 'nuqjatlh' would be the closest translation I can think of, which would be closer to "Huh?"
And the various MMORPGs are just IRC with Auto-Attack. I agree with you, but you're missing the longer term pictures our Internet Overlords are looking upon. Most of us already 'go online' every day, and this manifests though various and unconnected internet clients which each do their own things, with some degree of overlap. The Brave New Future would be one in which an Internet Overlord can create a single client to rule them all.
Of course, those of us in the UNIX camp of 'do one thing and do it well' would fail to see why you would want to bundle a mail client and a web browser, and IRC+various IM clients together into one bloated application that doesn't do any individual task well. (Wait, I've heard of that before, haven't I?) And while a 3D everything browser might seem foolish to those of us who use a command line, the unwashed masses might not agree. "I know this, this is UNIX."
We've already reached the point where we have PCs with massively more processing power than they need. (Yeah, yeah. Those of you doing real work quiet down.) Grandma's email machine doesn't need that extra GPU or dual cores, or phat Bus so she can view pictures of her grand kids. But... what if those pictures were placed inside an easy to navigate virtual world! Where she could sit in the same virtual nursing home as her peers, and ogle each others grand children? Think of the new virtual real estate we could place advertising on?!
And, of course, if you think cleaning up her compromised PC was bad... wait until our virtual havens are struck with flying.penis.worm.F7!
The basic unit of measure for any good admin is, of course, slack. You never notice when an admin is doing a good job. You only notice when they're not.
I highly doubt it was a casting from the original. A few different Hollywood replicate companies put out prop replicas. A local hobby shop carried one back in the day with (I think) a $400 sticker on it. A friend on mine eventually picked it up, added LED blinkenlights, and turned it into a coffee table.
I'm from a largely Atari (400, 800XL, 520ST, 1040ST) family and was eventually converted to Amiga (A500) by my friends.
The Amiga blew the pants off the ST in almost every metric, except maybe sound. The Gem desktop on the Atari was crap, and just Directory Opus and ARexx by themselves almost justified the switch. The Video Toaster was years ahead of its time for consumer video/graphics and doing Anime subtitles on the Amiga was a snap. ProWrite and then PageStream for editing documents, Cygnus Editor for everything else. Much better graphics, better thread handling, better memory handling... and let's face it: Guru Meditation Errors beat the hell out of any number of bombs. Fred Fish Forever!
I only switched kicking and screaming to using a PC when the last shop in my area stopped supporting Amigas. Windows3.1 was a no contest comparison, and even 95 didn't measure up that well. I will concede that I never found a good spread sheet on the Amiga, and having never used one I didn't know what I was missing. Just like most PC users today.
Words are bad not because they are 'inherently' bad, or have an etymology that relates to them being bad. Words are bad because you believe they are bad.
Consider any of the vulgar words in different languages. You might consider them completely vile and reprehensible, but as long as they're not translated for you, they're just words. And once you learn the meaning of the word, it's your perception that changes, not the word.
Consider the campaign to create a vulgar word from Senator Santorum's name.
Meaning is where you find it.
I accept that fact that knowingly using an exploit to 'win' money might be considered fraud, but you're going to have a hell of a time trying to convince me that getting extra tokens on a slot machine represents an intent on the part of the user to defraud the casino. How the heck is a user suppose to know if there isn't some kind of promotion going on, and more importantly, why would we possibly want to push the onus on the gamblers to verify that the slot machines are working correctly? If you're running a casino, it seems perfectly resonable to suggest it's your responsibility to police your own machines.
And, of course, we have this to consider too:
You left out the most important difference of OSS, which is that the current code base remains open. Even if Apple decides to close the project, a new fork could begin under the last release of the GPL2 codebase.
At first they were completely against the idea of creating any computer games, as they were terrified that players would be able to enjoy their content without buying their over-priced miniatures. The few games that have been attempted in the past were largely crap. Starcraft was originally going to be set in the 40k universe, but, again, they pulled out at the last minute and Blizzard was forced to rename their units and rewrite their story. Partly based on the success of Starcraft, they finally agreed to try again with Relic and Dawn of War was the first game they actually allowed to continue to completion that wasn't total crap.
Strangely, their over-priced miniatures are their major source of revenue. I say it's strange because over the years their models have largely become high priced crap. The exception being for their Forge World miniatures which are much more expensive, but are typically of exceptional quality. They 'control' their miniatures market by being the sole provider of 'official' miniatures for their products, which they enforce by only suppling game shops that agree to their questionable control practices. This is even more strange because the only reason to actually buy and use their miniatures is so that you can compete in licensed tournaments. You could just as easily use pennies and bottle caps to represent your forces to play at home. Of course, as anyone who actually plays and enjoys miniatures knows, that's not the point.
So I'm not terribly surprised to see them dragging their feet on this again. They've been playing around with movie deals for years, and in typical Games Workshop style they still have nothing to show for it. And now when their fans who decide to put together their own movie... they still have nothing to show for it.
Paying money is the first thing that comes to mind? What about just brazenly dropping hotels on their property without playing for them? Pummeling the other players for their cash? Or stealthily picking up some extra cash from the bank? Or fudging your dice rolls so you make it past Park Place?
Sometimes the structure of the universe is there for us to enjoy. And sometimes it's the other way around.
Are they not both games? To which the point is to 'have fun'? Does having more monopoly money or WoW gold allow players to have more fun? At what cost?
Or, if the competitive nature of monopoly makes it too strained an analogy, compare a group of sculptors who all sit at a table together to make art from clay. Would it be wrong for one sculptor to offer another money for the bit of clay they were working on? Does that transaction change if one is a professional artist, and the other an amateur? What about after they've finished the pieces and fired them in the kiln?
Consider the same transaction when done between two D&D players. Consider the transaction between a player and the DM. What sort of game are they then playing?
When I go skiing or hunting or hiking, I pay good money so I can spend more time doing the parts of those activities I enjoy. I outfit myself in gear that will increase my enjoyment. Are those dumb transactions?
Where do you find fun, and how much does it cost?
For those of you who haven't figured out why this is dumb yet, consider playing a board game with friends, and having one of your more affluent friends pulling out his wallet and offering other players real money for their monopoly money.
Here's another way to look at things. Who cares how many copies they didn't sell? It's a virtual number. That's make believe. Let's focus on the same metric by which every other business is judged. The money they did make. A business can always point to a host of reasons why they didn't make money... our question as a society should then be, if we pass laws to help those businesses make money, do we make the world better for it?
There are a host of anti-counterfeit measures on currency. And for the most part the average consumer will neither know nor care, and just keep passing the stuff off as genuine. Yet the Fed certainly cares, and they are certainly looking for the stuff. Adding tiny anti-counterfeit designs doesn't make it harder to print fake currency, it makes it easier to identify the stuff as fake. So they can locate fake currency floating in the wild and hopefully trace it back to its source.
Watermarks such as this are designed to prevent counterfeits, not piracy. There are large scale counterfeit operations designed to pass themselves off as legitimate software resellers. Considering the type of disc presses these organizations have access to these days, they can stamp some very authentic looking discs.
The BSA and other such agents look out for these tiny missing features, so they know when and where to release the hounds.
A mom and pop shop with a few extra installs than licenses is small potatoes. They group stamping 100s of thousands of discs in China and selling them as genuine in Europe are the big daddy potatoes.
A friend of mine works at a place that handles WU money orders. The various cash limit (for picking up without ID, maximum allowed withdrawal, etc.) depends on a number of things and tend to vary depending on which WU franchise you're at. This specific chain of locations does allow pickups without an ID, instead you need the sending party to provide you with merely the transaction ID and the Test Question which will net you a WU Check for the transfer amount. The friend in question recalls providing at least one check in this faction for $5k. The location in question will even cash such checks without ID if they are $500 or less for the typically exorbitant cash-checking fee.
I think the real question on everyone's mind is: Do Balrogs have wings?
That's what I though too, and since I figured at least one of us needed to actually RTFA I did. Strangely, that archive doesn't mention any other pictures:
Now Microsoft might not be to blame for the mismanagement of Atari and Commodore, but they are certainly to blame for the massive efforts they have expended on controlling the expectations of their key markets. For more than a decade computer users thought it was perfectly acceptably to use buggy software that crashed often because they didn't know any better. To accuse the end users of not being better educated is a sad excuse that seems short sighted in the extreme. What are they suppose to expect when software that crashes frequently is all they have ever known? Are they suppose to all run off and study the history of computers so they can more critically examine the market and cast better informed economic votes?
I'm certainly not against the idea of having better educated consumers. I can't help but see education doing anything but helping most situations. Yet in most cases people view a computer as an appliance like a toaster or a refrigerator. They don't want to know how it works, they don't want to hear about regular maintenance plans or upkeep schedules. They just want it to work. And I really don't see that as being a horribly unreasonable expectation.
The traditional method to discover such information is to Google the company name + 'sucks' which reveals the sort of websites you would expect. The typical complaints are about putting in a reservation for a truck and then not getting one (you don't actually 'reserve' a truck, you 'request' one, and they get to call you back the day of the 'reservation' telling you where to pick it up... or even telling you one is not available... or not calling you at all), or getting a truck and finding it defective. And then finding the usual run-around when attempting to get the issue resolved.
By that same token I would also consider Dungeon Master for the list, although then you have to start competing with the likes of Alternate Reality, Bard's Tale, Ultima, and Wizardry... which might all be traced back to Rogue.
We all play RPGs for different reasons. Some of us like the tactical aspects of using the skills of your party to best effect. Some enjoy the interactive story elements. Some like the progressive feeling of accomplishment as their players grow more powerful. Some actually enjoy role-playing! (I put on my wizard robe and hat....)
Of course, there are also those who think they enjoy the Quest for Numerical Superiority. So they grind their gamer nubbins to reach an unattainable goal. In most cases the 'grind' IS the game and the concept that you need to suffer though the newbie levels to get to the good stuff makes Jack a dull boy. Before we had tubes, such 'gamers' would shuffle about for awhile, whine until they found the cheat codes, enjoyed their 15 minutes of fun, and then moved on. Yet now that they can unlock their super powers in an online world, they would rather we be the mouse to their cat games. An attempt to try and milk more than a mere 15 minutes of fun by basically shouting "I am GOD here!" to anyone who will listen.
Fun is where you find it. Accomplishment is a subjective and personal quest. Etc, etc.