Dear Bloggers with Captchas

Please have the captcha in the same form as the comment, so that when I write a comment I can also see that I have a captcha to do along with it. Otherwise I often assume there isn't one, hit post, and come back hours later to see what happened since then, only to find a captcha request.

Thanks.

The Liberal Left-Wing Media Fundraising Hypocrisy Conspiracy Plot

The other day I was doing my usual viewing of The Rachel Maddow Show as part of my intelligence-gathering operation. She is the definitive source on liberal lesbian leftist plots, what with being a liberal lesbian leftist plotter. As is typical, she ended her show with an outrageous attack on the patriot Newt Gingrich, suggesting that he never actually runs for anything to avoid campaign fund-raising laws. I say outrageous because what she considers a bad thing is actually a principled stand against government interference in elections for public office.

Absurd, right? Well of course, she is after all, a liberal lesbian leftist plotter, out to destroy the American Way. Earlier in the show she even tried to pretend that the American Way includes taxing the wealthy by using 'math' to show that 81% of Americans are in favor of taxing millionaires. Of course in her absurd misuse of statistics she leaves out the fact that the 19% of people polled were possibly millionaires and failed to proportionally increase the weight of their opinions. Hasn't she ever heard of voting with your wallet?

But hypocrisy is in the title and hypocrisy I must show you: commenting on the mugs they have at the show, the apparently perfectly normal mugs exept for the liberal branding, quote: "we should sell them." Now who's ripping off mindless followers for blatant financial gain while pretending to be political? Rachel Maddow: hypocrite. Also Newsweek reports that she has "17 mostly female staffers", which in context means that most of the 17 are female, not that there are staffers who are best described as "mostly female". My point is that that is rather suspicious.

The Omniscient AI

I don't like it when the AI knows everything, especially when that everything includes my exact location.

WoW has perhaps the most extreme example of this, with mobs able to know your exact location, no matter how many corners you go around, no matter how far you run, up until the leash distance at which point that run very very fast back to exactly where they started, regardless of how far or how confusing the route they took. Just to top it off, some don't even care about vanish, such as many undead, and more than a few bosses. Or that's just the perpetual AoE which seems to exist for the sole purpose of unifying two groups who would otherwise share nothing: healers and rogues.

Oblivion takes a more moderate route. If you're sneaky enough, enemies will have an idea that you're out there and possibly have the general area, but won't perfectly zoom in. There are, of course, exceptions. And by exceptions I mean every single pet/companion in the game, whether always there or summoned, which will make a beeline for the player, no matter how well hidden. Oh, and often times the summoning NPC will still be entirely clueless.

Stalker NPCs are not so informed, but much smarter. They don't know exactly where you are, but they will be able to figure out your general location, which is when cover becomes important. Then they start searching. They don't take a straight route. They might take different routes, making groups dangerous not just for their higher total health and damage output, but for their ability to attack from two directions. But in keeping with their ignorance, missed bullets, even without a silencer, cause no reaction at all. Maybe they think they are heroes in action movies who can never be hit by bullets, and so if they are flying past, it only confirms their theory.

I'm probably being too hard on WoW. It does seem harder to make an AI not know everything. It's simply a lot easier, and less error-prone, to allow a NPC to know your location than give it the intelligence to guess. Come to think of it, as far as I can recall, except for specific stealth/invisibility mechanics, it's only recently that I've run into many games with ignorant-but-smart AI. Though that comes with two qualifiers: my idea of recent is the past 5 years or so and I was in the gaming closet for a long time, meaning that I had a pretty small library until the past few years.

In an old classic, Escape Velocity, the ship AI not only followed your exact location, it would aim by this method, which unless it was using a beam attack, almost guaranteed a miss. On a side note, ship turning was almost perfectly linked to the graphics (technically no, but let's pretend), which were based on square grids of the ships pointing in the different directions, given a typical grid of 6x6 or 8x8, there were quite a lot of desired firing angles which were impossible. On the other hand there was Starcraft with it's ignorant-but-stupid AI which seemed to love nothing more than chasing lone, fast enemies into fun places like siege tank emplacements or fields of lurkers. Clear foreshadowing for the eventual development of World of Warcraft and tanks dragging mobs into a bunch of AoE-happy mages. And a decent bit of countering evidence for my theory that ignorant-but-smart AIs are a newish development. Still, they do seem to have spread. A welcome change. I definitely prefer an AI that has to figure things out. It's so hard to trick God.

I'm doing it wrong

I miss WoW. But I refuse to go back to it. The reason is that I can't play it correctly, by which I mean in whatever way is the most fun for me.

I would love to go back to explore a bit, run an instance here and there, maybe do a raid or two. But I've learned my lesson. I can't do that. I've tried. It doesn't work. I can't not get sucked into the rep grinds and loot grinds and the horrible spot between caring about my gems and not caring enough to fix them. I know it wouldn't be long before I'd be pissed off at some utterly insignificant shit like someone playing marginally less than ideally and oh my god how can he be so stupid!? I hate those people. Not the bad player. He's irritating, but it is just a game after all. No, it's the elitist raging douchebags that piss me off the most. The preachy "you're doing it wrong" ones.

But really, I would be doing it wrong. I'd want to raid, despite knowing that I no longer have the patience required. Maybe LK spoiled me, maybe raiding just doesn't do it for me anymore, maybe I stopped believing so much in the importance of repetitive failure for virtual rewards which serve only to trivialize the next round of repetitive failure. I'd want to PvP, despite knowing that I despise the gear grind, and it makes me swear an unusually high amount, an amount which ironically, makes me angry.

I know I'd sooner or later find myself sitting, staring at a Wildhammer dwarf, wondering if I really want to do the daily, but knowing for certain that I definitely do not want to do Theramore dailies, because for no apparent reason I don't like Deepholme much. So I stare, as if to ask him, "Why don't you just get the gnomes to nuke the Wildhammer base? It's right there? And for the love of god, if you didn't drink so much you'd be sober enough to get your own damn kegs!" Asking a dwarf to drink less. The utter futility is symbolic.

There is some ideal amount of time to play. I'm not good at that. It's stupid. But even stupider is failing to recognize and compensate for that. This is something I've learned, to recognize the selectively stupid aspects of myself or others and compensate. Too many people stop at the "you're stupid" part, failing to move ahead to the part where they figure out a fix or a second-best. For example, I am terrible at doing work at this computer. It has all the required software and hardware, but my mind considers it a gaming device. If I want to do work, I acknowledge this problem and go to a different computer. As stupid as stupid is, it would be more stupid to not practically deal with stupid.

As of yet I have found no good fix for my inability to write good closing paragraphs. My attempts at writing forever have not worked, resulting instead in long, tangent-strewn posts, which ultimately reach some sort of ill-conceived end.

So let's pretend this is a bad movie and at this point The Gods of Blogging intervene to save me.

End scene.

A small STALKER problem

The game likes to clean up the world at some times, I think during zone changes or some travel. By clean up I mean remove corpses and dropped items, basically anything that isn't in a box or inventory. Well, I need the canister of poison gas from the locked box in the car on the ruined bridge between the ranger station and the waste treatment plant. Slight problem: I found it long before I needed it, thanks to my tendency to explore, but I lacked the capacity to carry it (I needed space for my worthless broken weapons), so I dropped it. Somehow I didn't get around to going back for it until the world had been wiped a few times.

At this point I only see a few options.

I could use the console to spawn it, but none of the commands I've found seem to work.

I could edit the inventory of traders to cause them to sell it. This I don't know how to do, but of course with what I could scrape together from searching, I did managed to make the game crash on startup. Fortunately I had the good sense to have a backup copy of the file I changed. I'm not even sure it was the right one.

I could edit a save file, but they are a completely unintelligible mess that no one seems to know how to work with.

The second option has the added problem that of the advice I've found, it all seems geared toward people who install it normally, rather than it being from Steam, which seems to alter the file structure slightly, and maybe more than that, making it much harder to find what I need.

It's a long shot, but if anyone has any suggestions, beside skipping the mission, I'd be very grateful.

Stalking outside, inside, and in a frighteningly worldly world

I have a minor habit of buying games during Steam sales in anticipation of when I get a new computer that can run them. Then I noticed that surprisingly, Stalker (I am not going to bother with all caps and periods, they irritate me), runs on my computer. And pretty well. Settings are turned down of course, but it still looks good.

I only started recently, but already I am very jumpy and frightened. I learned to get inside by 1800 and not come out until at least 4, when the sun starts coming up. After a brief foray into a giant hole in the group to get a box, I actually had to load a save from before I jumped in, because I was too damn jumpy to keep going further through the narrow, narrow caves filled with the not-especially-deadly but startling snorks. What is a snork? It's a Russian soldier in a gas mask who was driven insane by a massive dose of radiation and who now enjoys hiding in holes and jumping out at me. At least they're not invisible and able to sneak up literally unseen and grab my head and drain all my blood, killing me while I struggle helplessly like the aptly-named bloodsucker can.

*shiver*

Earlier I talked about how Oblivion handles location, using teleports to discovered map areas, but within dungeons being essentially trapped, with limited bag space, consumables, and even item durability. Stalker follows this in a similar fashion, with the closest thing to teleports being the ability to hire a fellow Stalker to guide you to a location, without needing discovery, and getting you there with no running needed, though I haven't checked on whether time passes.

The world itself is 'bigger' than Oblivion, not due to land area (I think they're on the same scale of magnitude, but Oblivion is slighter larger), but because of non-instant travel and non-trivial travel. You can't sprint the whole way, needing rest, especially with over-full bags, and there are scattered packs of mutated dogs, pigs, and fully human but still not very nice hostile bandits. This leads to a strange behavior: planning. I fix up my bags as best I can, I check the clock, and then I pick a route, making my way along and watching carefully for enemies. Even at the lowest difficulty running into a few bad guys with guns will lead to a quick death.

To add to it, there is a tactical level to exploration: nearly invisible 'anomalies' which in short form: are small spots which can kill or injure you if you get too close. These are a minefield to navigate even once you reach a general location. They are usually fixed/move in a set pattern, but emissions can change their location, so good luck looking up a map online! Oh emissions? Those are the infrequent events which very quickly kill you if you are outside, with some warning, but not enough that you can loiter. This makes location pretty important, with some profitable areas being far away from decent shelter, you're going to have to keep your bags light to be able to run fast enough.

As with some many other things I like, I'm not sure this would work well in WoW. With the high value placed on goals, whether xp, loot, or reputation, anything which gets in the way, however interesting it is, will inevitably be perceived as irritation rather than challenge or immersion. I like a bit of "oh shit oh shit oh shit run run run shit shit shit run" when the world is meant to be explored rather than looted, but I don't think I'd like my random heroics or dailies being interrupted by the equivalent of random Sapphiron ice block-style mechanics. After all, those aren't meant to be fun an exciting; they're meant to give sweet epics. Alas, I am again left to sadly suggest that a loot-oriented game must sacrifice fun and immersion if they conflict, or even appear to conflict, with the acquisition of more loot.

P.S. The misuse of worldly is intentional.

Why did WoW PvP make me swear so much?

I really can't explain it. In PvE I would of course swear constantly, but it was of a frustrated muttering sort. I would get annoyed but rarely truly angry. Somehow PvP always made me mad. Well, unless I won, then it was nice, but even then I'd find something to swear about.

I can't say it's the PvP aspect, since TF2 doesn't make me swear quite so much. Or when I'd play Mt:G against friends, almost no swearing at all.

I can't blame it on people being stupid either, since a stupid PUG can be just as stupid and probably more of a waste of time; at least when BG dummies zerg the farm-BS bridge I can get honor.

Based on analysis of my profanity, finding patterns in it, I can only conclude that most PvP is, quote, "fucking bullshit I mean what the fuck is this shit?" Let's break that down: I claim that it is fucking bullshit but then I question what the shit is. This leads me to conclude that I actually understand PvP perfectly and have nearly unlimited potential in it, but that some sort of mental barrier is holding me back and I am expressing frustration at this limit.

There are only two possible explanations.
1) The CIA knew that I would be dangerously dominant in PvP and used advanced brainwashing techniques to block my skills, but then to cover it up made me a softy leftist liberal, which also provides a convenient cover for them to kidnap and kill me.
2) I'm actually just really bad at PvP.

Obviously the second one is a useless oversimplification, leading to the only logical explanation: I am a chained PvP god.

P.S. Burn this post after reading it and oh my god they're right behind you.

Woo, Stupid Fight!

As we all know, Tamarind is really dumb, so dumb in fact, that he pretends to be two people one of whom sounds like a girl but claims to not be, leading me to conclude that Tamarind/Chastity is in fact a hermaphrodite with dissociative personality disorder. But that's beside the point.

Adam, you don't expect to call someone out and not see your own post picked apart, do you? Of course not, that would be stupid, and as one of Gevlon's acolytes you cannot possibly be stupid.

Let's begin.

"I was a bit upset when Righteous Orbs shut up shop a while back. I mean, who would I be able to make fun of now?"

I'm always available.

"But then I remembered Tobold was still around, so I felt better."

Can't argue with this: those Europeans are just so ridiculous.

"that elicited his legion of delirious followers to dance around clapping their hands with joy and begging him to come back and start writing wall of texts again, which is funny as he is already doing that"

Hey that's cool, there's nothing wrong with blanket attacks on people for enjoying certain bloggers. Ten points if you can spot my hypocrisy here. Also, the sentiment would be better expressed as "continue to write walls of texts", since yes, obviously he just wrote one.

"His post consists of thousands of words of random thoughts and ideas that seem to follow the theme that bullying is bad but bigger bloggers are no different to smaller bloggers because they have no control over the actions of their dedicated frothing at the mouth readership, which then finishes with a nice summing up announcing that if you can’t take the heat then don’t step into the ring."

Randomly following a theme?

"He also slipped a bit in there calling out people who need to learn to write, not necessarily learn to read, which is supremely disingenuous when you consider his and Chastity’s own epic failure of learning to read on this very blog a little while ago."

Or perhaps in following his argument, you failed epically at learning to write. We've got something of an argument clinic scenario going on here, which should be, but is not, anything more than simple contradiction.

"I’ve always found it very strange, this soul searching hand wringing with regards to bullying when taken with some of the measures that Tam and Chastity take to get their own point across. Can you have a lofty moral ground and still think that the ends justify the means? They seem to think so. Particularly as the two of them always had a smug little conceit to hide behind, in that they are supposedly two separate writers who sometimes have wildly different viewpoints and approaches that happen to write on the same blog. Which means that they can play good cop/bad cop and then innocently claim that the others viewpoint is not their own when called out on it."

Yes you can, in fact it's often an excessive sense of moral high ground, or any other sort of superiority, which drives "ends justify the means" behavior.
Supposedly? Oh come on, now you're just making up paranoid shit. Is it so hard to believe that two bloggers might share a space, even if they disagree? To follow this conspiracy all the way, it would mean that TamaChas ran two blogs for a while, then staged a merger as cover for his duel* personalities.

"who really is going to go back and check if this is true or not?"

I suppose if people are too lazy to be informed that is his fault.
But for the record: Publicity, Responsibility and Petitio Principii – Chas’ Take on Frostgate
But it's an easy mistake to make, after all, my response post included the phrase "Tamarind, this was stupid and you know it."

"'It was a frivolous aside – I just thought it was a funny comment.'

Now that’s what I call standing behind what you write."

I agree, people should defend jokes to their deaths.

Let's go out on a low note.

The part that is weird is the subject pronoun he uses for Chastity. Because I was under the distinct impression that Tam had publicly stated that Chastity was a girl. There are only three possible explanations that can work here:

1. Tam is deliberately mixing up the pronouns so we are never sure what we are dealing with. It’s a tactic designed to keep people off balance and afraid of making a mistake.

2. Chastity is in fact a boy and I am mistaken.

3. Tam forgot that Chastity is supposed to be a girl because Chastity is in fact an imaginary person that Tam has made up so he can revert to being a frothing at the mouth maniac in public whenever it suits him.

I wonder which one it is.

It's number 2. But on the plus side, this does add some evidence to your "learn to read" side of the argument. So you win! By losing. Might I suggest shorting yourself?

*not a typo