I see Verbal Kint (aka Keyser Soze) nailed to a cross which is sinking to the bottom of the ocean and about to become a dead person?
Re:Like the Unbeliever series?
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The Magicians
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· Score: 1
Donaldson's series is probably the only series I've read where on almost every page I was hoping the main character would get hit by a truck and choke on his own blood.
I've always wanted a version of X-Com where you could slip into first person mode for movement. Being able to explore the map in first person mode for each guy has always intrigued me. Combat would probably still be the old school method since it would still have to be turn based, i suppose.
Oh, horseshit. You're a real Thoreau. I pirate music. I pirate music. I do it because its easier than purchasing. If its on iTunes, I'll probably buy it...because its easier. I pirate media as well, but I don't try to make myself believe that I'm actually in the right to be doing so.
In a bored evening I watched the movie The Devil's Rejects. In the DVD special features Rob Zombie said one of the main reasons that he set the movie in the 70's is that so many of the standard horror movie tropes don't work in the age of cell phones. Cars breaking down in the middle of nowhere, teens trapped at isolated summer camps, etc...all fixed by a mobile phone.
I had a hard time with The Difference Engine at first. After a few re-readings I've come to really love it. My roommate hates it. He hates it so bad that he still hasn't read any Neil Stephenson who he always confuses with Bruce Sterling. Despite repeated reminders from me that Stephenson != Sterling.;}
I think there are two kinds of readers in regards to this. I'm also a big fan of Glen Cook's _Black Company_ series of fantasy/sword and sorcery books. One of the things I love about his books, like I do about Gibson's, are the lack of explanations about various things in the world. They use evocative names which might give an inkling of meaning and you have to pick the rest up from context. I'm rereading the Cook books right now and spent some time reading the Amazon reviews. 2 groups of people. Those who hated the books because they felt lost and those who liked the books for the very same reason.
I buy Windows. I use an iMac and linux via vmware for most of my computing needs, but I do build a new gaming PC every 3-4 years. I'm no longer a poor college student and I no longer pirate my games or OS. I, and most of my friends, stopped pirating software once we got real jobs and could afford to buy the software we use. I simply prefer to have a completely legal and clean PC.
That said, I'm still using XP. I'll probably buy Windows 7 at some point. I'd like to try the 64 bit version and have heard decent things about DX10 from gaming friends. I saw zero point in giving Microsoft money for Vista but will probably make the jump to 7.
So. Some of us actually do go out and buy Windows.
Thats the annoying thing for me. I DO want to be on a server where I have to be cautious, know who is nearby, and am ready to defend myself at any time. I love that. It makes the game for me.
I don't want to spend a half an hour rezzing at my corpse at low health/mana/energy/whatever and be attacked again and again and again by the same asshat.
I have no problems with being killed. Hell, I don't even have a problem with being ganked. If you got the drop on me and killed me, great. If you're just a better player than me and killed me, also great. If you're 30 levels higher than me and killed me, great. If you then sit around waiting for me to come back so you can do it again, you're just being an asshole. Do the rules allow it? Sure. Do I hope you get a power surge and receive a painful but non-lethal shock that causes your hair to fall out and your penis to shrink to half its size. Yep.
Just because the rules allow something doesn't mean you're not a prick for doing it.
I was working in Iowa a few years ago and drove through a tiny town after dark in late December. Driving down Main Street all the houses were decorated with Christmas lights and candles in the window. It was gorgeous. Near the end of Main Street was one house that was conspicuously dark. No decorations. A large piece of plywood was leaning against a tree in the front yard. Painted in black spraypaint: "Bah, Humbug!".
This never worked well because the "zero" horses would always arrive first and the order was unknown.
They tried a range of solutions reaching a pinnacle at having the "zero" horses be "one" horses on the return trip, and vice versa, with the hopes that over time the horses would all achieve about the same pace regardless of cannonball status due to equal damage having been done and the horses having achieved a certain acceptance of the indignity.
I wish the same applied to vegiterians who are vegitarians because they don't want to hurt animals.
What about the plants? Have they seen the hell that a plant goes through before it gets turned into that nasty ass humus shit? The beans are viable organisms right up until they get turned into paste, but no one cares about planets rights.
I played on Nanvaent a bit when I just wanted to play. The great thing about developing the mudlib and having access to the code was the creativity. The bad part was knowing the secrets, seeing Oz behind the curtain, and losing all the mystery.
The reason MUDs were more 'imaginative' was the level of detail that area creators could use. Text allows you to describe things to the limit of your writing abilities. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but not if the picture is designed to be rendered on legacy hardware and your selection of items to place in areas is limited by whats in the toolbox or what you can get the art department to design and add.
MMO games are also limited by what kind of actions can be presented to the player in an intuitive, graphical fashion. When I first started writing areas for muds, creators could add new types of actions (in my flavor of muds, literally add_action("blah", function()); to add a "blah" verb. If you wanted a player to have to belch the Flintstones theme song in order to open a secret door, you could do so. This was great for creativity but ended up making a pretty bad game interface for the players because it wasn't a standardized system and the if 5 different creators added 'belch' it was likely a different syntax or usage in each area.
This was changed in later versions of the codebase and we restricted the ability to add actions on the fly and the admin/developer types would add verbs and verb rules which were standardized across the MUD...the interface improved for players, but the creators were limited in what they could do...if you really wanted a new action type, you had to convince an admin type to implement the verb for you.
On graphical MMO type games, your actions are limited by what you can see on the screen and what you can click on. Some games allow you to enter commands as text, but these are usually pretty limited in scope (e.g.,/dance) and usually have only a cosmetic impact on the game. They could certainly design the game to use more text input but I'm pretty sure they've done some research on that and figured out most players wouldn't like it and they are trying to get the largest subscriber base. On MUDs, we were mostly just playing around with the code, making stuff we liked, and if the players liked it..hey, that was just great.
The rogue-like games were in a middle zone. The actions were limited, but there were still a hell of a lot of them and the combination of actions and items added a lot of complexity that we're a long way from seeing in MMO type games.
The problem is depending on the airwaves to find new music. That worked (sort of) in the past if your tastes happened to include the few genres of music that commercial radio catered to.
If what YOU like isn't represented by commercial radio today you have to do a bit more work to discover the artists that are making the sorts of music you enjoy.
It isn't all that much work, though. iTunes, MusicIP, Pandora, Last.fm and countless other services will recommend music based on what you DO like. In my experience they have gotten quite good at this.
There are also a mind-bogglingly large number of music blogs that you can follow (or use a blog aggregator like Hype Machine) that cater to certain styles of music. Most have mp3s you can download or stream to see if you like the band/song.
There is still a ton of great music being made today. Just don't count on commercial radio to spoon-feed you something you like.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty sure that is not what he's been tugging on.
I see Verbal Kint (aka Keyser Soze) nailed to a cross which is sinking to the bottom of the ocean and about to become a dead person?
Donaldson's series is probably the only series I've read where on almost every page I was hoping the main character would get hit by a truck and choke on his own blood.
That and Watership Down. Freaking rabbits.
I've always wanted a version of X-Com where you could slip into first person mode for movement. Being able to explore the map in first person mode for each guy has always intrigued me. Combat would probably still be the old school method since it would still have to be turn based, i suppose.
How flexible _are_ you?
At least that is what Wil Wheaton says. And I agree.
Bought up by all the guys hoping Natalie Portman will confuse reality with movies.
Posting anonymously so people won't know what a douche you are.
There, fixed.
Vonnegut, too.
Oh, horseshit. You're a real Thoreau. I pirate music. I pirate music. I do it because its easier than purchasing. If its on iTunes, I'll probably buy it...because its easier. I pirate media as well, but I don't try to make myself believe that I'm actually in the right to be doing so.
In a bored evening I watched the movie The Devil's Rejects. In the DVD special features Rob Zombie said one of the main reasons that he set the movie in the 70's is that so many of the standard horror movie tropes don't work in the age of cell phones. Cars breaking down in the middle of nowhere, teens trapped at isolated summer camps, etc...all fixed by a mobile phone.
uhm, what?
I had a hard time with The Difference Engine at first. After a few re-readings I've come to really love it. My roommate hates it. He hates it so bad that he still hasn't read any Neil Stephenson who he always confuses with Bruce Sterling. Despite repeated reminders from me that Stephenson != Sterling. ;}
I think there are two kinds of readers in regards to this. I'm also a big fan of Glen Cook's _Black Company_ series of fantasy/sword and sorcery books. One of the things I love about his books, like I do about Gibson's, are the lack of explanations about various things in the world. They use evocative names which might give an inkling of meaning and you have to pick the rest up from context. I'm rereading the Cook books right now and spent some time reading the Amazon reviews. 2 groups of people. Those who hated the books because they felt lost and those who liked the books for the very same reason.
Manbearchicken?
I buy Windows. I use an iMac and linux via vmware for most of my computing needs, but I do build a new gaming PC every 3-4 years. I'm no longer a poor college student and I no longer pirate my games or OS. I, and most of my friends, stopped pirating software once we got real jobs and could afford to buy the software we use. I simply prefer to have a completely legal and clean PC.
That said, I'm still using XP. I'll probably buy Windows 7 at some point. I'd like to try the 64 bit version and have heard decent things about DX10 from gaming friends. I saw zero point in giving Microsoft money for Vista but will probably make the jump to 7.
So. Some of us actually do go out and buy Windows.
Thats the annoying thing for me. I DO want to be on a server where I have to be cautious, know who is nearby, and am ready to defend myself at any time. I love that. It makes the game for me.
I don't want to spend a half an hour rezzing at my corpse at low health/mana/energy/whatever and be attacked again and again and again by the same asshat.
I have no problems with being killed. Hell, I don't even have a problem with being ganked. If you got the drop on me and killed me, great. If you're just a better player than me and killed me, also great. If you're 30 levels higher than me and killed me, great. If you then sit around waiting for me to come back so you can do it again, you're just being an asshole. Do the rules allow it? Sure. Do I hope you get a power surge and receive a painful but non-lethal shock that causes your hair to fall out and your penis to shrink to half its size. Yep.
Just because the rules allow something doesn't mean you're not a prick for doing it.
I was working in Iowa a few years ago and drove through a tiny town after dark in late December. Driving down Main Street all the houses were decorated with Christmas lights and candles in the window. It was gorgeous. Near the end of Main Street was one house that was conspicuously dark. No decorations. A large piece of plywood was leaning against a tree in the front yard. Painted in black spraypaint: "Bah, Humbug!".
That guy is my hero.
Slashdot users?
Is that it? I mean, did I win? Oh, no prize! You smug, condescending bastard!
This never worked well because the "zero" horses would always arrive first and the order was unknown.
They tried a range of solutions reaching a pinnacle at having the "zero" horses be "one" horses on the return trip, and vice versa, with the hopes that over time the horses would all achieve about the same pace regardless of cannonball status due to equal damage having been done and the horses having achieved a certain acceptance of the indignity.
Eventually they just had riders.
I wish the same applied to vegiterians who are vegitarians because they don't want to hurt animals.
What about the plants? Have they seen the hell that a plant goes through before it gets turned into that nasty ass humus shit? The beans are viable organisms right up until they get turned into paste, but no one cares about planets rights.
Pythagoras?
Yeah, it was a LPMud. Nightmare, to be exact. ;)
I played on Nanvaent a bit when I just wanted to play. The great thing about developing the mudlib and having access to the code was the creativity. The bad part was knowing the secrets, seeing Oz behind the curtain, and losing all the mystery.
The reason MUDs were more 'imaginative' was the level of detail that area creators could use. Text allows you to describe things to the limit of your writing abilities. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but not if the picture is designed to be rendered on legacy hardware and your selection of items to place in areas is limited by whats in the toolbox or what you can get the art department to design and add.
MMO games are also limited by what kind of actions can be presented to the player in an intuitive, graphical fashion. When I first started writing areas for muds, creators could add new types of actions (in my flavor of muds, literally add_action("blah", function()); to add a "blah" verb. If you wanted a player to have to belch the Flintstones theme song in order to open a secret door, you could do so. This was great for creativity but ended up making a pretty bad game interface for the players because it wasn't a standardized system and the if 5 different creators added 'belch' it was likely a different syntax or usage in each area.
This was changed in later versions of the codebase and we restricted the ability to add actions on the fly and the admin/developer types would add verbs and verb rules which were standardized across the MUD...the interface improved for players, but the creators were limited in what they could do...if you really wanted a new action type, you had to convince an admin type to implement the verb for you.
On graphical MMO type games, your actions are limited by what you can see on the screen and what you can click on. Some games allow you to enter commands as text, but these are usually pretty limited in scope (e.g., /dance) and usually have only a cosmetic impact on the game. They could certainly design the game to use more text input but I'm pretty sure they've done some research on that and figured out most players wouldn't like it and they are trying to get the largest subscriber base. On MUDs, we were mostly just playing around with the code, making stuff we liked, and if the players liked it..hey, that was just great.
The rogue-like games were in a middle zone. The actions were limited, but there were still a hell of a lot of them and the combination of actions and items added a lot of complexity that we're a long way from seeing in MMO type games.
The problem is depending on the airwaves to find new music. That worked (sort of) in the past if your tastes happened to include the few genres of music that commercial radio catered to.
If what YOU like isn't represented by commercial radio today you have to do a bit more work to discover the artists that are making the sorts of music you enjoy.
It isn't all that much work, though. iTunes, MusicIP, Pandora, Last.fm and countless other services will recommend music based on what you DO like. In my experience they have gotten quite good at this.
There are also a mind-bogglingly large number of music blogs that you can follow (or use a blog aggregator like Hype Machine) that cater to certain styles of music. Most have mp3s you can download or stream to see if you like the band/song.
There is still a ton of great music being made today. Just don't count on commercial radio to spoon-feed you something you like.
I dunno. I used it tonight and the speeds were fine even when fast fowarding through slow parts of my selected movie.
I'll try later tonight. The streaming is the only reason I use netflix. I haven't actually returned the one DVD I have in the last few months.