Add me to the ranks of people who played Tetris waaaaay too much. Any time I'd close my eyes for an extended period of time I'd see the shapes falling. After Tetris came MUDs, where I'd play so much that I'd visualize myself typing whatever I was saying during normal conversations. A few times I actually caught myself attempting to type when I was nowhere near a keyboard.
Last Thursday I spent the entire day playing FFXI. When I finally went to sleep, my dreams all involved my normal party activities in the game.
My -biggest- complaint, tho, is that other NA players don't seem to want to level outside of the "standard" areas. Battalia and Sauromugue Champain can be decent alternatives to Qufim and the Jungles, for example:)
I'm one of those NA players who actually wants to level outside of the "standard" overcamped areas that everyone else is in because I can't stand trying to play in a party where a powerleveller seems to be standard equipment and no one has any idea how to do their jobs. Unfortunately, getting a party to actually go to these areas is near impossible; when 3 of us tried to find people to fill the remaining slots for a party in one of the non-standard zones, everyone we talked to either told us that the areas weren't places you went if you wanted to level, called us noobs or flat out ignored us.
Like some of the other posters have stated, the game can become a job and easily suck up huge amounts of time. The only thing that I don't particularly enjoy is the monotony of crafting and farming, and some of the quests take an insane amount of time to complete. For instance, last night I unlocked the ninja and samurai jobs. Even with help from two higher level friends who knew exactly where to go and what to do, it easily took a total of about 6 hours. This includes the 3 hours I spent doing absolutely nothing in Norg while waiting for my katana to be completed because if I left the area I'd be dead and couldn't start my ninja scroll quests yet.
We stumbled on MXC one night after several bottles of beer - I don't think I've laughed as hard since I was stoned and watching "Evolution"
Re:Sierra's Space Quest
on
Humor in Games?
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· Score: 3, Funny
My favorite game response for the the Space Quest series was in SQ2 (I think), when you change out of your space suit. My friend and I tried to wear the normal set of clothes by typing "get naked" and the game responded "I'll get naked if you get naked. You go first."
I've been playing muds since '97. While this doesn't make me a newbie at them, I'm by no means qualified to call myself an "oldbie". Playing both muds and FFXI I can say that there doesn't seem to be much difference to me in terms of getting into the games. Most muds have very easy to learn commands that are more common sense than anything else, but it's not unusual for players have have problems typing "wear" to wear an item. However, I do think that it might be difficult for someone who's started off playing a graphical game with point and click interfaces and pretty sounds to switch to something purely text. Many muds now allow players with compatible clients to click and perform various actions as well as soundpacks available for download.
As for what the popular ones are, it seems like every week another mud pops up. Some 14 year old plays a game, thinks "This is easy!" and decides to start his own. Server space is easy to get, mud code is generally free, and most hosts will install and configure your your codebase of choice. Most of these games are played by the owner and 3 or 4 of his/her friends who takes turns slaughtering each other and spamming mud discussion lists with "we're the best DBZ mud around!" Players may visit the game, play for an hour or so, and leave. Players who stay run the chance of either being victims of immortal characters testing out super-equipment on them or just getting tired of playing a game that's going nowhere. Eventually they leave, and there's one more dead mud on a list.
The popular games are the ones who shell out the big money for ads in gaming magazines. Are they the best? I've never played on them since I've run my own for 5 years now, but several of my regular players have played at the bigger places and still return to my much smaller and less popular game.
Check out either Mudconnector or MudMagic. Both have lists of muds and faqs on how to get started with a game, as well as forums discussing all sorts of game stuff.
Then I must be one of those hard-core fetishists then, because I have a blast working during these times. About 7 years ago I worked tech support with about 4-5 other folks for a small local ISP that had a habit of buying out other smaller ISPs across the country, expanding our customer base by 20k in the course of an afternoon. Nothing would amuse us more than coming into work at 8am, getting an email at 11am saying we just aquired a mess of new customers from Arkansas, and spending the next 2 days fielding "my internet is broken!" calls from people who would believe us when we told them rebooting their computer would literally reboot the entire internet.
Soon after that I started working tech support for Fleet Bank, and got plunged headfirst into their merger with Bank Boston - fun times. Hold times typically lasted 2-3 hours, and at least one or two techs each night would take a call from someone who had been on hold so long they'd fallen asleep and was snoring. Those who didn't wait on hold emailed us; the backlog of emails lasted 8 months after the merge. Within a week after the merge, half of the reps I'd trained with had quit. Of course, to help us poor reps keep up our spirits, we were given cookies and sodas and goodie bags featuring things like Silly Putty (in blue and green eggs), Lego blocks emblazoned with the Fleet logo, and stress balls, which we threw at each other.
Three years of the quiet life must have bored me, since I'm currently working for Cingular and actually looking forward to getting some life in this place. Not that I'll get all that much since I'm in a kiosk, but it'll keep me on my toes.
I once worked with a guy who loved to try to make himself sound more professional during tech support calls, and would constantly use the same phrases and questions over and over every single night. Our favorite was "Are you eligible to access the internet at this time?"
It wasn't a matter of forgetting my keys so much as just losing them. Through middle and high school, if my father wasn't home when I got there, I'd borrow a fork from a neighbor and pop the lock to my front door like you'd do with a credit card. And once when I was in a rush and locked my keys in the house, I used a chisel to unscrew the hinges on the door leading into the basement to get in.
Being almost militantly childfree, I've got a couple of reasons for not having kids. I spent most of my childhood raising my kid sister. I can barely remember to buy food for myself, and my husband and I have been known to buy new clothes just to allow us to put off doing laundry for an extra day. Neither of us has any sort of patience, and I have issues controlling my temper. We make enough money to cover our bills and have a bit left over for buying our assoted toys and obsessions, but we know that it wouldn't be enough to cover the costs of childcare.
I like kids, and have done my fair share of babysitting for neighborhood families and working in kid-centric jobs like portrait studios and as the Easter Bunny at the mall, but I'm happiest when I can hand the kid back to its parant. I know that any child that I brought into the world would end up a prime candidate for protective services while hubby and I played MUDs and FFXI and various PS2 football games, yet it's these same game-loving attributes that have had people saying "Oh, but you two would make great parents!" ever since we got married two years ago and made it abundantly clear we were not breeding.
I'll own up to having several X10s that I've bought between late 2000 and 2003.
In low light, they're awful, but in natural light, they are a bit better. The ones that were in my living room and bedroom for a while were only good during the day, but were terrible with your typical overhead lights and table lamps. In rooms with only 1 light source (kitchen, bathroom, etc), the quality goes from "terrible" to "I paid $200 for this?!?"
They can be a bit blurry; mine never had an image as crisp and clear as those you could get with some of the cheap webcams you can find on ebay for $10. I was never able get any of them to focus very well.
IP logging on LJ is turned off by default, if I remember correctly, not to mention that it's only visible by the journal owner. Plus, even if this person somehow managed to turn it on, or more likely, turned it on in a manic checkbox-clicking-frenzy, what are the chances that she even knows what it's for and what she could do with it? At most, you'd get a harsh "omg networkBoy is soooooo mean!!!111one1!" as a reply.
Sometimes I wish LJ still had 4000 users and was run on a computer in Brad's dorm. Those were the days... you could actually find journals where people said something more than "i totally flunked teh math test today" or quiz results.
-- Crystal, LJ account #3500 or so, and met her husband there back in those good ol' days.
I can't verify it from here at work, but that could be my fault.
Back in '01, when I was fired from a very large bank due to some of my website's content, upper management was fond of frequently hitting my homepage's archives to make sure that I was behaving myself and that I wasn't posting any sort of confidential bank crap. After about a week of them doing this 50-100 times a day, I changed the page to simply say something like "Don't you suits have something better to do than surf for porn?" right under the goatse.cx guy (which I'd named "hello.jpg"). The hits stopped that day:)
"When you say things over the Internet, it feels like you are spewing into your diary,"
Um, not really. I've never felt like anything posted online has been secret in any way at all; even your average Barnes & Noble journal/diary isn't safe from prying eyes if someone has any idea that it exists. It's more like you think that if you believe it's hidden well enough, no one will find it. I've made the mistake of believing that my family wasn't tech-savvy enough to google me and that my boss didn't read my site and as a consequence, I've lost a job, a cousin browsing webcam sites found pictures of me back in my camwhoring days, and my father hasn't spoken to me in over two years.
I would gladly stop joking about my husband's Canadian citizenship just to have some real Canadian poutine. He'll, I'd even eat it while watching Men With Brooms and The Red Green Show - the poutine a local place sells just isn't the same...
Because the people attempting to shutdown the p2p apps are the same ones who are buying viagra, cialis, and memberships to barely-legal-incest-facial websites.
Re:basic... very basic.
on
You've Got PC
·
· Score: 1
Nice, but I'm holding off until they give me a "kthxbye" key.
Honestly why would you want to take the time to write a KB driver for something which was never designed to be a kb?
Why? For the same reasons people will install linux onto anything possible, or build a bong out of household objects and fruit - simply because they can.
Slashdot Mirror
And for the real fun, go into some of the server-specific FFXI forums. That's where the real backstabbing begins.
Add me to the ranks of people who played Tetris waaaaay too much. Any time I'd close my eyes for an extended period of time I'd see the shapes falling. After Tetris came MUDs, where I'd play so much that I'd visualize myself typing whatever I was saying during normal conversations. A few times I actually caught myself attempting to type when I was nowhere near a keyboard.
Last Thursday I spent the entire day playing FFXI. When I finally went to sleep, my dreams all involved my normal party activities in the game.
My -biggest- complaint, tho, is that other NA players don't seem to want to level outside of the "standard" areas. Battalia and Sauromugue Champain can be decent alternatives to Qufim and the Jungles, for example :)
I'm one of those NA players who actually wants to level outside of the "standard" overcamped areas that everyone else is in because I can't stand trying to play in a party where a powerleveller seems to be standard equipment and no one has any idea how to do their jobs. Unfortunately, getting a party to actually go to these areas is near impossible; when 3 of us tried to find people to fill the remaining slots for a party in one of the non-standard zones, everyone we talked to either told us that the areas weren't places you went if you wanted to level, called us noobs or flat out ignored us.
Like some of the other posters have stated, the game can become a job and easily suck up huge amounts of time. The only thing that I don't particularly enjoy is the monotony of crafting and farming, and some of the quests take an insane amount of time to complete. For instance, last night I unlocked the ninja and samurai jobs. Even with help from two higher level friends who knew exactly where to go and what to do, it easily took a total of about 6 hours. This includes the 3 hours I spent doing absolutely nothing in Norg while waiting for my katana to be completed because if I left the area I'd be dead and couldn't start my ninja scroll quests yet.
Tastes like chicken, right?
Exactly what is it he's holding in his claw? A small child? A turtle? One of Santa's elves?
Several of the demo phones in my kiosk will do this to my computer, most notably the Motorola V400. At home it'll just mess with my speakers.
Contra for the NES
We stumbled on MXC one night after several bottles of beer - I don't think I've laughed as hard since I was stoned and watching "Evolution"
My favorite game response for the the Space Quest series was in SQ2 (I think), when you change out of your space suit. My friend and I tried to wear the normal set of clothes by typing "get naked" and the game responded "I'll get naked if you get naked. You go first."
I've been playing muds since '97. While this doesn't make me a newbie at them, I'm by no means qualified to call myself an "oldbie". Playing both muds and FFXI I can say that there doesn't seem to be much difference to me in terms of getting into the games. Most muds have very easy to learn commands that are more common sense than anything else, but it's not unusual for players have have problems typing "wear" to wear an item. However, I do think that it might be difficult for someone who's started off playing a graphical game with point and click interfaces and pretty sounds to switch to something purely text. Many muds now allow players with compatible clients to click and perform various actions as well as soundpacks available for download.
As for what the popular ones are, it seems like every week another mud pops up. Some 14 year old plays a game, thinks "This is easy!" and decides to start his own. Server space is easy to get, mud code is generally free, and most hosts will install and configure your your codebase of choice. Most of these games are played by the owner and 3 or 4 of his/her friends who takes turns slaughtering each other and spamming mud discussion lists with "we're the best DBZ mud around!" Players may visit the game, play for an hour or so, and leave. Players who stay run the chance of either being victims of immortal characters testing out super-equipment on them or just getting tired of playing a game that's going nowhere. Eventually they leave, and there's one more dead mud on a list.
The popular games are the ones who shell out the big money for ads in gaming magazines. Are they the best? I've never played on them since I've run my own for 5 years now, but several of my regular players have played at the bigger places and still return to my much smaller and less popular game.
Check out either Mudconnector or MudMagic. Both have lists of muds and faqs on how to get started with a game, as well as forums discussing all sorts of game stuff.
It is almost like a S&M fetish.
Then I must be one of those hard-core fetishists then, because I have a blast working during these times. About 7 years ago I worked tech support with about 4-5 other folks for a small local ISP that had a habit of buying out other smaller ISPs across the country, expanding our customer base by 20k in the course of an afternoon. Nothing would amuse us more than coming into work at 8am, getting an email at 11am saying we just aquired a mess of new customers from Arkansas, and spending the next 2 days fielding "my internet is broken!" calls from people who would believe us when we told them rebooting their computer would literally reboot the entire internet.
Soon after that I started working tech support for Fleet Bank, and got plunged headfirst into their merger with Bank Boston - fun times. Hold times typically lasted 2-3 hours, and at least one or two techs each night would take a call from someone who had been on hold so long they'd fallen asleep and was snoring. Those who didn't wait on hold emailed us; the backlog of emails lasted 8 months after the merge. Within a week after the merge, half of the reps I'd trained with had quit. Of course, to help us poor reps keep up our spirits, we were given cookies and sodas and goodie bags featuring things like Silly Putty (in blue and green eggs), Lego blocks emblazoned with the Fleet logo, and stress balls, which we threw at each other.
Three years of the quiet life must have bored me, since I'm currently working for Cingular and actually looking forward to getting some life in this place. Not that I'll get all that much since I'm in a kiosk, but it'll keep me on my toes.
I once worked with a guy who loved to try to make himself sound more professional during tech support calls, and would constantly use the same phrases and questions over and over every single night. Our favorite was "Are you eligible to access the internet at this time?"
I don't have tires, you insensitive clod!
Oh, wait, wrong poll....
It wasn't a matter of forgetting my keys so much as just losing them. Through middle and high school, if my father wasn't home when I got there, I'd borrow a fork from a neighbor and pop the lock to my front door like you'd do with a credit card. And once when I was in a rush and locked my keys in the house, I used a chisel to unscrew the hinges on the door leading into the basement to get in.
Being almost militantly childfree, I've got a couple of reasons for not having kids. I spent most of my childhood raising my kid sister. I can barely remember to buy food for myself, and my husband and I have been known to buy new clothes just to allow us to put off doing laundry for an extra day. Neither of us has any sort of patience, and I have issues controlling my temper. We make enough money to cover our bills and have a bit left over for buying our assoted toys and obsessions, but we know that it wouldn't be enough to cover the costs of childcare.
I like kids, and have done my fair share of babysitting for neighborhood families and working in kid-centric jobs like portrait studios and as the Easter Bunny at the mall, but I'm happiest when I can hand the kid back to its parant. I know that any child that I brought into the world would end up a prime candidate for protective services while hubby and I played MUDs and FFXI and various PS2 football games, yet it's these same game-loving attributes that have had people saying "Oh, but you two would make great parents!" ever since we got married two years ago and made it abundantly clear we were not breeding.
I'll own up to having several X10s that I've bought between late 2000 and 2003.
In low light, they're awful, but in natural light, they are a bit better. The ones that were in my living room and bedroom for a while were only good during the day, but were terrible with your typical overhead lights and table lamps. In rooms with only 1 light source (kitchen, bathroom, etc), the quality goes from "terrible" to "I paid $200 for this?!?"
They can be a bit blurry; mine never had an image as crisp and clear as those you could get with some of the cheap webcams you can find on ebay for $10. I was never able get any of them to focus very well.
IP logging on LJ is turned off by default, if I remember correctly, not to mention that it's only visible by the journal owner. Plus, even if this person somehow managed to turn it on, or more likely, turned it on in a manic checkbox-clicking-frenzy, what are the chances that she even knows what it's for and what she could do with it? At most, you'd get a harsh "omg networkBoy is soooooo mean!!!111one1!" as a reply.
Sometimes I wish LJ still had 4000 users and was run on a computer in Brad's dorm. Those were the days... you could actually find journals where people said something more than "i totally flunked teh math test today" or quiz results.
-- Crystal, LJ account #3500 or so, and met her husband there back in those good ol' days.
I can't verify it from here at work, but that could be my fault.
:)
Back in '01, when I was fired from a very large bank due to some of my website's content, upper management was fond of frequently hitting my homepage's archives to make sure that I was behaving myself and that I wasn't posting any sort of confidential bank crap. After about a week of them doing this 50-100 times a day, I changed the page to simply say something like "Don't you suits have something better to do than surf for porn?" right under the goatse.cx guy (which I'd named "hello.jpg"). The hits stopped that day
I'm using pmachine right now. It seems to handle 4 years of entries pretty well.
"When you say things over the Internet, it feels like you are spewing into your diary,"
Um, not really. I've never felt like anything posted online has been secret in any way at all; even your average Barnes & Noble journal/diary isn't safe from prying eyes if someone has any idea that it exists. It's more like you think that if you believe it's hidden well enough, no one will find it. I've made the mistake of believing that my family wasn't tech-savvy enough to google me and that my boss didn't read my site and as a consequence, I've lost a job, a cousin browsing webcam sites found pictures of me back in my camwhoring days, and my father hasn't spoken to me in over two years.
I would gladly stop joking about my husband's Canadian citizenship just to have some real Canadian poutine. He'll, I'd even eat it while watching Men With Brooms and The Red Green Show - the poutine a local place sells just isn't the same...
Because the people attempting to shutdown the p2p apps are the same ones who are buying viagra, cialis, and memberships to barely-legal-incest-facial websites.
Nice, but I'm holding off until they give me a "kthxbye" key.
Wonderful. Now I'm imagining Voltron with a maple leaf instead of the "crest" on the chest.