A Wander Through Skyrim, part one of too many

Rather than try to rehash my half-formed and half-forgotten thoughts after the fact, I'm going to do what I did with my WoW starter posts, that is, constantly interrupt myself to write down what I'm thinking of the action at the time. I suppose if someone read deeply enough into these posts they'd be like a walkthrough of a sort. A really useless walkthrough.

I don't like "action" at the start of games. I'm in a new world with a new game and having to run around at the start tends to disorient me. Oblivion had a much better first start, sticking me in a small cage for a while while Captain Picard talked about stars. And I couldn't quite hear the dialogue early on ad had to put my system volume much higher, with the game already maxed out. I expect to be deafened if I play anything else (take note of the use of if vs. when and consider it part of the review). It feels a bit like Oblivion with prettier graphics and an inexplicably worse interface. That's an impressive feat, given that Oblivion already had a pretty bad interface, particularly for spells. At least now it seems to break them up better into restoration vs. destruction (Are there no other types? Don't answer) whereas Oblivion seemed to have "all powers" "active effects" and "random assortment of some of the powers".

The continuous casting is pretty nice so far. I can't explain why, but I like the feel up of it more than the magical quanta of Oblivion. On the other hand, holding up my glowing hands constantly makes me wonder when I'm going to hear a crackling voice over the radio, "Hit em with the combo! Zap em and whack em!"

My first death came early on, when I was picking up a cabbage. I couldn't quite get the other, so I tried to jump onto the cart for a better angle. Then the physics engine woke up on the wrong side of the bed, stuck me through the cart, and threw us both against the wall until I was dead. Thankfully, I quicksave compulsively after even the most minor of events (excluding death by cart), so I wasn't set back very far.

So stuff happens and I kill a bear with an arrow in the knee and next thing I'm being told we should split up but meet him at such as such place where his father works or something and I'm thinking:
1) We just met and you think we need to break up?
2) Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm not into men.
3) We just met and you want me to meet your father? Woah, slow down there!

So I did the logical thing and wandered off aimlessly. I caught some flowers and killed a couple bandits. Then I met some hit woman living in the mountains where I was searching for a dragon. She taught me to shoot a bow and I didn't kill her. Then I wandered some more and died a few times to a Sprig monster that seemed to kill me with magical floating bugs. But eventually I wandered into a town and did my first alchemy and got annoyed that it gives the option to randomly combine ingredients when none have known effects, failing to carefully explain to the noob that you're supposed to eat the ingredients raw and if they don't kill you, use them for potions. So I ate a bunch of stuff and then needed some healing. Then I went off to kill a great beast and wandered into a cave that I should have guessed was a bad place to be, based on the large quantities of blood. Shriekwind Bastion isn't exactly an inviting name either.

Things were going quite well until I found myself incapable of seeing the chain to opena door. Eventually I googled it and got through, but this annoyed me, to be searching outside for information. Then I ran into a master vampire who demonstrated a remarkable ability to kill me in three hits on the middle difficulty while also being faster. I searched again and didn't find anything special beside him supposedly being vulnerable to fire, and yet he was still taking a long while to die to my double-casted fire, or at least a long while relative to the three seconds needed to kill me. Even after putting the difficulty at the lowest I found myself chugging potions to get him down. I guess that's a boss? Maybe I'm not supposed to be here at level 3.

More later, but that's enough of this round of rambling.

Limbo

I'd heard good things about this game, so I finally gave it a try. Hm.

Let's start from the beginning. So, a screen is here with some grey and some black and maybe it is trees. Right. Is this a loading screen? Some sort of credits? An intro? Nothing seems to be going on. I did have to press any key to continue, so I'll do that again. Nothing. A? No. D! Nope. Space bar must do it.

Oh, arrow keys, gotcha. Neat. So let's run along now. Let's run along as demonstrate one problem with puzzle-solving games.

I don't think the same way you do. Sometimes I think this is because I am smarter than everyone else. Other times I think this is because of some undiagnosed mental illness. Usually I figured everyone has their brain wired a little bit differently (but mine is still wired better :P).

So what do we do when we see a giant spider? Well let's see, I saw a trap in that tree back there. That must be significant. The spider seems to be pretty tall, so maybe I can lure it back to the trap. Huh. It doesn't move. Well, maybe I can climb it! Nope, can't climb it. Maybe there was something else back there that I missed, like that previous puzzle that I tried to do the wrong way (we'll get to that one). Oh. Yes, of course, the trap fell on the ground. Well let's just drag that right back here and okay, problem solved.

Rewinding a little bit, let's see right here we have some water and a box. Hm. Well let's see, my swimming isn't so great. So I drown. Maybe I can float on the box. Nope. Maybe I can hang on to the box and sort of have-swim, half-float, then climb up at the end. Nope. Uh... shove box out farther and do a jump-jump maneuver. Also nope. Oh well of course! This time the usually background nothing trees are in fact the solution, I just need to climb a bit and push over the conveniently rotten one and walk across.

It's not all bad. There were at least two occasions where I was running or rolling right along and saw something come on the screen and instantly understood: "yep, that is going to crush me" or "yep, I gotta keep hopping and keep this rolling before a spider eats me" or "yep, I say yep a lot in my fake dialogue, despite it rarely being a word I use while gaming." So that was good. I liked that. It felt like it had some of the flow going like in Mirror's Edge.

But I'd guess I only played for 10 or 15 minutes (or I have no sense of time and Steam says 23 minutes). That's not very long for me when I'm on break from anything remotely like work or school for at least a couple weeks. I ended up quitting, frustrated, thinking "this stupid game." Maybe I'll come back to it later, possibly with a better impression. In the meantime, I can watch Firefly and wonder why I only get around 200-500kb/s at home.

Passive Patricide

If Luke had just learned to heal Vader might have lived.
That's what happens when you don't learn to heal: your dad dies

-Iapetes

I'm stealing that.

-Klepsacovic

Is it plugged in? Idiot.

If you're the sort of person who remembers this sort of thing, you might remember that a bit back I had some random crashing issues related to Civilization V. Fun stuff. I decided it was due to the RAM. So I did the logical thing:

No of course I didn't run a RAM test. That takes too long! Instead I pulled one one of the sticks and replaced it with two older ones. Yea, wrap your head around that. I'm just that good. At first things seemed better. And then not. This suggested that it was either the other stick or something entirely different.

I went with the third option: ignore it and just start playing Civ IV again.

Then one day I went poking around again and noticed something odd: one of my replacement RAM chip wasn't fully seated. Huh. So I gave it a good shove back in, checked all the others, and for good measure, stuck back in the "bad" stick.

No more crashes.

So no, it was not plugged in.

At least that's not quite as dumb as my headset with the non-functional microphone. I mean, duh, of course I want "mute" set to off. Months later I flipped that switch and have not stopped talking since.

Apparently there was a Christmas yesterday, which would explain why people kept giving my boxes wrapped in strangely flimsy paper and why I had a strange compulsion to put perfectly usable items in similarly oddly-wrapped boxes. Short version: I have Firefly and Serenity DVDs, a lot of tea, and some nice dress shirts, as if I were not classy enough already. Next to me, Trump looks like a barbaric pig, and not just because that's because what he is.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have ten thousand cookies to eat.

I Hate Christmas

I used to enjoy Christmas. I'd eat cookies and get legos and it was a lot of fun.

These days Christmas isn't any fun at all. In terms of school it means a major crunch as everyone stuffs finals and projects into the last week. That week is, of course, right before Christmas, leaving me little time to shop. Oh sure, in magical fantasy land I could do my shopping before then. But no one writes lists until around then anyway. Maybe other people can get by without lists, but that requires a level of social connection that I do not achieve. I pride myself on remembering the names of family.

Of course it doesn't help that people mostly just talk about work. Why not hobbies? Anyone can work any job (take this in context), but hobbies actually tell you about who a person is. Without them, I am left wondering without the slightest clue. It's on par with St. Valentine's Day for holidays dedicated to making introverts feel bad.

It's also just plain too much socializing. A gathering now and then is nice. I wrote this on Thursday after spending too much time trying in vain to find gifts, wondering why stores exist if they don't sell anything worth buying. Then the evening was spent watching Christmas movies. The next day (today) will be occupied with a trip downtown to the German market, which was a lot of fun in high school when I went with my German class, but now it's likely to involve a lot of walking in the cold and making fun of stuff for no good reason, before heading back home. That night my brothers and I will go to dinner with my uncle, a Christmas tradition that bucks the trend by always being a lot of fun.

The next day is of course Christmas Eve, a name which makes no sense if you actually break it down. The day will be spent rushing around to make food to take to my brother's house where I will spend far too many hours being bored by talking to people with whom I share no common interests. One of these days I should retaliate and subject them to a mob by mob description of grinding for Insane in the Membrane.

But hey, next day is Christmas, when I can cringe when I see that I have, as usual, given relatively few gifts, and am not certain whether anyone will want them. Then I can, rather than enjoying the gifts I've received, spend even more time in excessively large groups. For context, I don't much like any more than five people, and even then, it has to be of a composition that doesn't cause two pairs and an extra sitting around awkwardly (me).

None of this results in me getting enough sleep either.

Merry Christmas, from all of us (just me) here at Troll Racials are Overpowered.

Did Trion get hacked or is this a marketing scheme?

I got this legitimate-appearing email regarding Rift, which says scary things backed up by their own website, among them,

We recently discovered that unauthorized intruders gained access to a Trion Worlds account database. The database in question contained information including user names, encrypted passwords, dates of birth, email addresses, billing addresses, and the first and last four digits and expiration dates of customer credit cards.

You should have continued, uninterrupted access to RIFT, and we do not anticipate any disruptions to your playing time.

Nevertheless, if you own the RIFT game, you will be granted three (3) days of complimentary RIFT game time once you update your password and security questions.

I don't own it, so nothing for me here just yet.

Additionally, once you update your account and set a new password, your account will be granted a Moneybags’ Purse, which increases your looted coin by 10%, even if you have not yet purchased RIFT.

Wait, what?

I can see giving some gift to subscribers for all their mental anguish (ma epics might possibly be gone!), but "even if you have not yet purchased RIFT"...

"Hey guys, we got hacked and your information might or might not have been compromised, but you know what? Here's some free gold if you start playing!"

Weird.

In defense of insanity

Blizzard's writers have a standard way of making new bad guys: take some good guys and make them go insane. Violin: bad guys. This method is criticized for being lazy and formulaic. I disagree. The nature of the Warcraft universe requires that any true enemies be either innately evil or have been corrupted/gone insane.

Look at it in context. Within the real world greed is a powerful driver. It pushes people to do stupid or evil things. But how powerful can greed really be, in the Warcraft universe? In the real world, greed can get you killed. That's nothing in Warcraft. In that universe, greed can get you tortured for all eternity, and I don't mean "I read in a book that if I am greedy I'll get tortured for all eternity", I mean that you have literally seen demons and magic and know quite well that eternal torture is a strong possibility.

When there are forces that seek to unmake reality itself, everyone is on the same side. This idea first came to me from the Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card, my number one writer for veiled homophobic writing. In the series the hero is in a fight against the Unmaker, a being who seeks to unmake everything, somewhat reminiscent of the Burning Legion. A wise old man tells Alvin that even Satan, the obvious enemy of God, would on his side in this, because Satan wants to rule something. Even evil hates chaos.

From this perspective, we can see how it makes no sense at all to ally with the Burning Legion. There is no reason to trust the demons. Given their propensity for cruelty, it is not hard to imagine them turning on all their allies and destroying them as well. Any alliance is merely putting off the day of personal horribleness while increasing the chances of it coming. It would be like guaranteeing you won't get cancer today by taking a drug that doubles you risk of cancer tomorrow.

One cannot ally with chaos, one can only join chaos. Think of when you see a protest. The protestors are thinking of a cause, a reason. You may disagree with them, but odds are, they are sane. Now contrast that with a riot, of broken windows and arson and police being attacked. Are those people thinking or considering the costs and benefits of throwing a rock through a window? No. They are chaotic. They are, temporarily, uncontrolled, inhuman, and insane.

Think of Kael'thas, who had once sacrificed everything to protect his people, and who then joined the Legion. It could be nothing less than corruption of his very nature, insanity. There is no future for his people in the Legion. Similarly, the Lich King could not be just an angry prince who went a bit too far. He had to be corrupted because only that would allow him to turn against his father, kingdom, and the very world. Merely being a little less empathetic and a little more fanatical would not do the trick. The Scarlet Crusade is another group which is not merely extremist, but entirely out-of-touch with reality. They would not otherwise attack anyone on sight as Scourge (note that I did not say "possible" or "suspected").

Beside the enemies, think of our own actions. When the world is at risk of ceasing to exist, are we going to quibble over small matters? We may argue strategy or tactics, but when there is a demonic army coming, it's not so important whether there is a troll standing over there. We're not going to go raid Stormwind just because Varian talked some smack while Deathwing is cataclysmizing the world.

On the other hand, there is also the "really stupid, short-minded idiot" method, of making someone a threat to the world not because they are evil or in league with evil, but because their sheer stupidity is threatening survival: for example, Garrosh and other orcs who kept picking fights during the campaign in Icecrown. I wouldn't call them evil, but we'd definitely have been better off killing them before they could do any more damage.

Either way, we're not likely to be flying off to a raid against a reasonable person with whom we have a legitimate disagreement.

A philospher walked into a bar

And said "Which sort of bar are you refering to? The ambiguity makes it impossible to offer anything close to an accurate prediction, particularly given the impossibility of prediction unless we assume cause and effect, but maybe that's just me assuming the assuming cause and effect allows us to make predictions and oh god I've gone cross-eyed."

The theist and atheist look at him, puzzled. Then they went back to shouting.

"How can you possibly have anything to look forward to without knowing the wonderful things behind this door? The room is filled with possibilities!"

"So is the rest of the house. It's filled with the possibility of all the stuff I bought when I moved in. What's the big deal about this one room?"

"You inherited this house from your grandfather and clearly this room was important. Thing of all he means to you, all you owe to him, and you cannot even accept that he gave you this wonderful room?"

"He gave me a house, that's pretty wonderful enough."

"Aha, so you acknowledge the existence of your grandfather!"

"Uh, yes."

At this point the philosopher chimes in.

"We cannot actually prove his existence, as he is no longer capable of direct interaction with this world, existing only as a memory, a memory which could be false, making any actions based on it illogical."

"What the fuck?"

"In fact, I'm not sure either of you exist."

By now the scientist has returned and overheard much of the conversation. He pondered the mysteries of the universe, such as why he only brought two bullets.

A voice drifts in...

"Hi! I'm a psychologist and I can explain to you why people often fail to anticipate future problems. Furthermore, you are referred to as a generic scientist, which given that psychology is a science, means that I should be redundant. However I understand why this oversight occurred and have developed a series of exercises we can use to work on this social issue..."

*bang*

*bang*

The scientist was found innocent of killing the philosopher because we cannot prove that the philosopher ever existed and he'd have wanted it that way.