Games are for people who want to be spectators of someone else's creation.
Umm... no. Movies and TV are for people who want to be spectators of someone else's creation. Games are for people who want to interact with someone else's creation.
I had a character in a convention game a few years back called Bubbles ("'coz you can't have a bath without Bubbles" was her character defining quote - oh along with "this may sound stupid, but..."), her IQ was probably a fraction of her bust size and in the first session of the game no one was prepared to allow her a firearm - so they gave her a torch.
During the first few missions she conducted herself with courage, and noticed that anything she shone her tourch at died horribly.
At the start of the second session allt he PCs were allowed to rearm, and they told Bubbles she could have any weapon she asked for - so she got a spot light, all the better to light up more bad guys with:)
In Australia we have a strong tradition of 'Freeforming', which is kinda like LARPing - although we define LARPing as using rubber swords (as per the current PvP strip). Freeforms will generally have 10+ PCs at any given time, costuming is encouraged, challenge resolution is often determined by a referee as opposed to a rules challenge (as with MET or similar systems) and are generally considered 'systemless'.
The largest freeform I'm aware of having been run at an Australian convention was an Egyptian freeform run over a decade ago which was approximately 200 players. My husband and I have run several games of 30-40 players at conventions, though prefer the 12-20 size group.
We also have a style of play at conventions known as 'multiform' which tends to be a cross between tabletop and freeform gaming - a small (4-6 players) group with structured character sheets, probably a system, but the players get up and walk around rather than playing sat at a table.
Other varients include 'theatreform', where the tournament organisers have complex sets & props and AV arrays for running games in an 'immersive environment', then you have systemless which are tabletop games which have no formal system.
Of course we als o run/play all types of standard dice based RPGs as well. There is something magical about your PCs fates being in the hands of the dice gods.
For a modern twist on the Cthulhu mythos - check out Delta Green, I believe the d20 varient is on the way shortly (it may already be out in the states) and is by John Tynes. If you enjoy Cthulhu - check out pretty much anything written by John Tynes, he is a roleplaying god.
The problem that some Christians have with D&D is that a portion of the game involves Pagan Gods and Goddesses. In the case of some classes (ex. Cleric) it involves *praying* to the God/Goddess for spells.
Now, this isn't a big deal to people who are not believers or even to people who are used to jumping in and out of make believe worlds.
So what's a miracle then? You know, when people go and pray to their god for their spouse/child/self to be healed? When they go to visit Lourdes or any other non-rational solution?
I understand that the first commandment of the Jewish/Christian faith is "Thou shalt worship no other god before me", but really.
The world would be a much happier place if panentheism was much readily accepted.
I used to work for a digital imaging specialist reseller, we had a 1st Generation Kodak SLR digital camera to demo to customers, it had a RRP of around A$25,000.
One day before a demo, it was sitting on a table, switched off and not connected to anything when it subbenly burst into flames. The battery had shorted out and melted the entire back of the camera body into slag. It was quite spectacular. The unit got sent over to Rochester for Kodak to disect to try and work out what went wrong.
I can't actually remember if the potential customer ever bought one or not.
Oddly enough, my cat is on two prednisone tablets per day for lymphoma - the major side effect we were warned to watch out for was possible incontinence.
Down here in Australia, we don't currently have access to the iTunes store - well unless we pull some dodgy to get a US credit card account and billing address. iPods are still selling well, and the default format for files on my iPod is AAC.
From down here, the DRM restraints mean nothing as we don't have access to a DRM source anyway. Distance can give perspective sometimes.
I will admit to being an Apple advocate, so my opinion in this is likely to be significantly biased, but as I understand it, the situation is something along the following lines:
Steve et al. spent a lot of time and effort wooing the record labels negotiating a way of selling downloadable music online legally.
It was a requirement of the Record Labels that the downloads have some form of DRM or they would not permit Apple to make the files available.
For the DRM to be meaningful in any way, it has to remain at least partially secure, which probably means closed. While it will be broken inevitably, keeping it closed source gives at least an appearance of trying to keep the code out of prirates hands - something Apple needs to do to keep the Record Labels on side.
Realone is feeling petulant that it's been left out of this great deal. It didn't negotiate with the Record Labels, it didn't create and test the DRM that would meet their requirements to allow the service to start up - it's success being the spur for other companies to enter the legal music download business. Having whined to be given a seat at the table and been refused, Realone have decided to force their way in by riding on the back of the format Apple built for the Record Labels.
I accept and understand that under US copyright law, Realone have the right to reverse engineer the Fairplay DRM, provided they are not using it to decode someone else's DRM protected content. But that's not the problem.
The problem is if Realone's reverse engineering of FairPlay leads to the Record Labels renegotiating thier contract with the iTunes Store and either forcing Apple to change the FairPlay DRM so that it doesn't allow you to play files unless you player is connected to the internet to validate the file onuse every single time OR they restrict it so that you can't burn an audio copy OR they prevent you from playing the file on another computer OR any other restriction which would reduce what you can do now. Apple would likely have no choice but to comply or lose the iTunes Store altogether.
Apple HAS to protest this, if they aren't seen by the Record Labels to defend FairPlay, they could very well lose it all.
Unfortunately, if you end up with poeple who don't use the 5 senses they were born with and don't use their brains to think things though, you end up with people who can only follow scripts.
The Apple Service Guides for repairing hardware used to work through a process of if you get symptom A, replace part B, if that doesn't work, replace part C, if that doesn't work, replace part D... and so forth, where the parts typically get more expensive as you go down the alphabet.
I've seen techs insist that they have to replace the hard drive and the power supply before they can replace the logic board - because that's what the Service Guide says - even though you could see the blown capacitor on the logic board. These sort of practices used to drive up the cost of equipment as the cost of spares have to be calculated when assesssing the probable cost of warranting a device. These type of mentality was the main argument made by Apple as to why they centralised the repairs on their PowerBook family for so long (I was a tech in Australia, and PowerBooks were serviced at a reseller level, but they kept threatening to bring us inline with the rest of the world).
The are good people and bad people in every profession and trade.
A lot of times reinstalling from scratch is somewhere between a false economy and a disaster waiting to happen
Admittedly I used to mostly repair Macs under OS 9 (it's been a few years since this was my daily bread), but I used to find that the most efficient way of dealing with a truly FSCKed machine was to boot from an external device, virus scan, copy the data off, low level format the drive, clean install of the OS, reload the apps from original media if available, hand restore client data from backup.
The advantages of doing this in a Mac environment were that you always had SCSI or FireWire to boot from. I used to have an external drive especially configured for doing rescues. A disc copy would get everything, including invisible files. If the drive is really stuffed, something like DiskWarrior could probably recover the data from the machine.
While you could spend the time looking around for what was wrong, if you can't identify it in a short period of time, the chances are that you will spend an hour or so messing around trying to identify the fault and then have to reinstall anyway. In a well set up workshop, you can have the backup, formatting and reinstalling happening while you are working on other tasks - it's only the sort/restore tasks that really require full attention. Frequently you end up with a working box faster than trial and error fixing, and as a general rule you end up with a more stable system.
Sadly, all the plot was in the deleted scenes which weren't finished as they ran out of budget to complete the special effects shots. If you ever do decide to give it another go, watch the movie then watch the delete scenes - and it wil suddenly start to shape up as an OK fantasy flick.
Besides, watching it in a cinema with a bunch of DND geeks was excellent entertainment value, as people called out what skill checks the characters had just failed, or what spell had just been cast...
Ok, I'll just go off and nerd in the corner over here shall I?
CS wasn't my hobby - girls weren't supposed to 'do' computers when I was at high school. Even my Yr 12 Physics teacher used to give me grief for being the only girl in the class.
Half my friends at Uni were into computers, they 'made' me do my assignments on the college computers rather than hand write them like most of my course peers.
I got into CS as a 'career' via DTP and then corporate training. From there I moved into support including hardware repairs. I know work for a global IT consultancy.
There is more to CS than just programming, and there are other ways of finding a career than it being your hobby (my hobbies are writing RPGs and needlecraft, so far I've only been paid for the RPGs) - but that doesn't make it any less of a valid choice. There are plenty of guys who got into CS because it is light physical highly paid work.
One of my big problems was always that I had to have something written down because then I could look at it again and again, but speech only comes as input once, so I'd have to ask to have things repeated. I knew I'd heard them right the first time, I just couldn't remember what was said, since my mind would randomly wander in the middle of a sentence.
I thought this was normal - I do this all the time...
Surely it's has to be Kikki, the tube-rat from Sluggy Freelance. Afterall, Kikki has the desperate urge to press any buttons she encounters and it always causes trouble...
well... I did kill a remote control by trowing at a brick wall - but that had nothing to do with gaming. My husband did however manage to kill the reset switch on our GameCube recently playing Mario Golf.
Hmm... I'd also have to give the Wavebird controllers props for the way they keep performing after they've been thrown around the room quite so much as they have recently. Fortunately he's now unlocked all the courses, so the conrollers are now safe untilhe gets to the tricky part of the next game...
In addition to planting deciduous trees and vines (on trellises), other options include: orientation on the site to optimise solar exposure for different times of the day/night; clever use of ventilation and insulation - consider how heat will move through the building as air currents and accomodate those to stop the building from storing heat in the summer or losing heat in the winter; the use of eaves and awnings designed to keep summer sun from directly hitting windows, but allowing winter sun to reach them.
There are dozens of options, most of them derived from indigenous design from differing geographic locations and climates - adobe construction is one example
Personally, I think big employers should start looking at enforcing their employees go home at a reasonable hour, and quite possibly kick them out of the office for an hour at lunchtime.
The longer you sit at your desk the less productive you become. Given the current panic over the obesity epidemic, employers should be thinking ahead at how their corporate culture has contributed to their employees health. The current trends in population weight gain has less to do with the number of calories we are consuming, and far more to do with the number of calories we are not buring because of our sedentary jobs.
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Games are for people who want to be spectators of someone else's creation.
Umm... no. Movies and TV are for people who want to be spectators of someone else's creation. Games are for people who want to interact with someone else's creation.
stealing from one person is plagerism
stealling from many is research
--once the rockets go up - who cares where they come down, that's not my department says Werner Von Brown
I had a character in a convention game a few years back called Bubbles ("'coz you can't have a bath without Bubbles" was her character defining quote - oh along with "this may sound stupid, but..."), her IQ was probably a fraction of her bust size and in the first session of the game no one was prepared to allow her a firearm - so they gave her a torch.
During the first few missions she conducted herself with courage, and noticed that anything she shone her tourch at died horribly.
At the start of the second session allt he PCs were allowed to rearm, and they told Bubbles she could have any weapon she asked for - so she got a spot light, all the better to light up more bad guys with :)
In Australia we have a strong tradition of 'Freeforming', which is kinda like LARPing - although we define LARPing as using rubber swords (as per the current PvP strip). Freeforms will generally have 10+ PCs at any given time, costuming is encouraged, challenge resolution is often determined by a referee as opposed to a rules challenge (as with MET or similar systems) and are generally considered 'systemless'.
The largest freeform I'm aware of having been run at an Australian convention was an Egyptian freeform run over a decade ago which was approximately 200 players. My husband and I have run several games of 30-40 players at conventions, though prefer the 12-20 size group.
We also have a style of play at conventions known as 'multiform' which tends to be a cross between tabletop and freeform gaming - a small (4-6 players) group with structured character sheets, probably a system, but the players get up and walk around rather than playing sat at a table.
Other varients include 'theatreform', where the tournament organisers have complex sets & props and AV arrays for running games in an 'immersive environment', then you have systemless which are tabletop games which have no formal system.
Of course we als o run/play all types of standard dice based RPGs as well. There is something magical about your PCs fates being in the hands of the dice gods.
For a modern twist on the Cthulhu mythos - check out Delta Green, I believe the d20 varient is on the way shortly (it may already be out in the states) and is by John Tynes. If you enjoy Cthulhu - check out pretty much anything written by John Tynes, he is a roleplaying god.
If you don't like fantasy - how about a dose of reality gaming with Macho Women with Guns?
Batwing Bimbo's rock... :)
The problem that some Christians have with D&D is that a portion of the game involves Pagan Gods and Goddesses. In the case of some classes (ex. Cleric) it involves *praying* to the God/Goddess for spells.
Now, this isn't a big deal to people who are not believers or even to people who are used to jumping in and out of make believe worlds.
So what's a miracle then? You know, when people go and pray to their god for their spouse/child/self to be healed? When they go to visit Lourdes or any other non-rational solution?I understand that the first commandment of the Jewish/Christian faith is "Thou shalt worship no other god before me", but really.
The world would be a much happier place if panentheism was much readily accepted.
The problem is that most girls are lamers and the ones who aren't are already taken or wouldn't go out with me anyways.
Issues much
I met my husband at a gaming con and I"m probably a bigger geek than he is...
You need to meet a better class of geek. :)
I used to work for a digital imaging specialist reseller, we had a 1st Generation Kodak SLR digital camera to demo to customers, it had a RRP of around A$25,000.
One day before a demo, it was sitting on a table, switched off and not connected to anything when it subbenly burst into flames. The battery had shorted out and melted the entire back of the camera body into slag. It was quite spectacular. The unit got sent over to Rochester for Kodak to disect to try and work out what went wrong.
I can't actually remember if the potential customer ever bought one or not.
Oddly enough, my cat is on two prednisone tablets per day for lymphoma - the major side effect we were warned to watch out for was possible incontinence.
Now a game that REALLY bites...
Down here in Australia, we don't currently have access to the iTunes store - well unless we pull some dodgy to get a US credit card account and billing address. iPods are still selling well, and the default format for files on my iPod is AAC.
From down here, the DRM restraints mean nothing as we don't have access to a DRM source anyway. Distance can give perspective sometimes.
I will admit to being an Apple advocate, so my opinion in this is likely to be significantly biased, but as I understand it, the situation is something along the following lines:
Steve et al. spent a lot of time and effort wooing the record labels negotiating a way of selling downloadable music online legally.
It was a requirement of the Record Labels that the downloads have some form of DRM or they would not permit Apple to make the files available.
For the DRM to be meaningful in any way, it has to remain at least partially secure, which probably means closed. While it will be broken inevitably, keeping it closed source gives at least an appearance of trying to keep the code out of prirates hands - something Apple needs to do to keep the Record Labels on side.
Realone is feeling petulant that it's been left out of this great deal. It didn't negotiate with the Record Labels, it didn't create and test the DRM that would meet their requirements to allow the service to start up - it's success being the spur for other companies to enter the legal music download business. Having whined to be given a seat at the table and been refused, Realone have decided to force their way in by riding on the back of the format Apple built for the Record Labels.
I accept and understand that under US copyright law, Realone have the right to reverse engineer the Fairplay DRM, provided they are not using it to decode someone else's DRM protected content. But that's not the problem.
The problem is if Realone's reverse engineering of FairPlay leads to the Record Labels renegotiating thier contract with the iTunes Store and either forcing Apple to change the FairPlay DRM so that it doesn't allow you to play files unless you player is connected to the internet to validate the file onuse every single time OR they restrict it so that you can't burn an audio copy OR they prevent you from playing the file on another computer OR any other restriction which would reduce what you can do now. Apple would likely have no choice but to comply or lose the iTunes Store altogether.
Apple HAS to protest this, if they aren't seen by the Record Labels to defend FairPlay, they could very well lose it all.
Unfortunately, if you end up with poeple who don't use the 5 senses they were born with and don't use their brains to think things though, you end up with people who can only follow scripts.
The Apple Service Guides for repairing hardware used to work through a process of if you get symptom A, replace part B, if that doesn't work, replace part C, if that doesn't work, replace part D... and so forth, where the parts typically get more expensive as you go down the alphabet.
I've seen techs insist that they have to replace the hard drive and the power supply before they can replace the logic board - because that's what the Service Guide says - even though you could see the blown capacitor on the logic board. These sort of practices used to drive up the cost of equipment as the cost of spares have to be calculated when assesssing the probable cost of warranting a device. These type of mentality was the main argument made by Apple as to why they centralised the repairs on their PowerBook family for so long (I was a tech in Australia, and PowerBooks were serviced at a reseller level, but they kept threatening to bring us inline with the rest of the world).
The are good people and bad people in every profession and trade.
...and suddenly the obscure English/Australian saying of "Use your LOAF[1]" takes on a whole new meaning...
[1]Loaf = head (as in thinking), e.g. that was a particularly stupid thing to do and you really should have thought about it first you nong.
A lot of times reinstalling from scratch is somewhere between a false economy and a disaster waiting to happen
Admittedly I used to mostly repair Macs under OS 9 (it's been a few years since this was my daily bread), but I used to find that the most efficient way of dealing with a truly FSCKed machine was to boot from an external device, virus scan, copy the data off, low level format the drive, clean install of the OS, reload the apps from original media if available, hand restore client data from backup.
The advantages of doing this in a Mac environment were that you always had SCSI or FireWire to boot from. I used to have an external drive especially configured for doing rescues. A disc copy would get everything, including invisible files. If the drive is really stuffed, something like DiskWarrior could probably recover the data from the machine.
While you could spend the time looking around for what was wrong, if you can't identify it in a short period of time, the chances are that you will spend an hour or so messing around trying to identify the fault and then have to reinstall anyway. In a well set up workshop, you can have the backup, formatting and reinstalling happening while you are working on other tasks - it's only the sort/restore tasks that really require full attention. Frequently you end up with a working box faster than trial and error fixing, and as a general rule you end up with a more stable system.
Sadly, all the plot was in the deleted scenes which weren't finished as they ran out of budget to complete the special effects shots. If you ever do decide to give it another go, watch the movie then watch the delete scenes - and it wil suddenly start to shape up as an OK fantasy flick.
Besides, watching it in a cinema with a bunch of DND geeks was excellent entertainment value, as people called out what skill checks the characters had just failed, or what spell had just been cast...
Ok, I'll just go off and nerd in the corner over here shall I?
As someone who used to fix Apple and NEC laptops - a small hint to other repairers out there...
Rule 1: no screw is optional
I have friends out here (Australia) with their own Catan server for when we can't get to gether to play in RL.
If you like Settlers, try and find yourself a copy of Cascasonne, also excellent.
CS wasn't my hobby - girls weren't supposed to 'do' computers when I was at high school. Even my Yr 12 Physics teacher used to give me grief for being the only girl in the class.
Half my friends at Uni were into computers, they 'made' me do my assignments on the college computers rather than hand write them like most of my course peers.
I got into CS as a 'career' via DTP and then corporate training. From there I moved into support including hardware repairs. I know work for a global IT consultancy.
There is more to CS than just programming, and there are other ways of finding a career than it being your hobby (my hobbies are writing RPGs and needlecraft, so far I've only been paid for the RPGs) - but that doesn't make it any less of a valid choice. There are plenty of guys who got into CS because it is light physical highly paid work.
One of my big problems was always that I had to have something written down because then I could look at it again and again, but speech only comes as input once, so I'd have to ask to have things repeated. I knew I'd heard them right the first time, I just couldn't remember what was said, since my mind would randomly wander in the middle of a sentence.
I thought this was normal - I do this all the time...
Surely it's has to be Kikki, the tube-rat from Sluggy Freelance. Afterall, Kikki has the desperate urge to press any buttons she encounters and it always causes trouble...
well... I did kill a remote control by trowing at a brick wall - but that had nothing to do with gaming. My husband did however manage to kill the reset switch on our GameCube recently playing Mario Golf.
Hmm... I'd also have to give the Wavebird controllers props for the way they keep performing after they've been thrown around the room quite so much as they have recently. Fortunately he's now unlocked all the courses, so the conrollers are now safe untilhe gets to the tricky part of the next game...
In addition to planting deciduous trees and vines (on trellises), other options include: orientation on the site to optimise solar exposure for different times of the day/night; clever use of ventilation and insulation - consider how heat will move through the building as air currents and accomodate those to stop the building from storing heat in the summer or losing heat in the winter; the use of eaves and awnings designed to keep summer sun from directly hitting windows, but allowing winter sun to reach them.
There are dozens of options, most of them derived from indigenous design from differing geographic locations and climates - adobe construction is one example
Personally, I think big employers should start looking at enforcing their employees go home at a reasonable hour, and quite possibly kick them out of the office for an hour at lunchtime.
The longer you sit at your desk the less productive you become. Given the current panic over the obesity epidemic, employers should be thinking ahead at how their corporate culture has contributed to their employees health. The current trends in population weight gain has less to do with the number of calories we are consuming, and far more to do with the number of calories we are not buring because of our sedentary jobs.