![[icon]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/109549951/441887) |
Rowyn
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| So, while I was in Seattle, I bought ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) shatterstripes's Tarot of the Silicon Dawn, because it was very shiny.
I have no discernable psychic or precognitive abilities*, but the deck is very shiny, and I rather want to, you know. Do something with it. Other than leaf through the pretty pictures. And offering card readings is something people seem to do on LJ fairly often, so hey, why not?
So leave a question on this entry if you like, and I will draw a card or three from the deck and reference the short descriptions helpfully written by queenofstripes and provided in the deck's accompanying book. Based on these, I will give you a most-likely-not-very-useful response to your question. I will even link to the image of your card from shatterstripes's website. It'll be fun!
Edit: If you would like to ask for a question on behalf of a fictional character (like a character from a book you're writing, or a game you're playing), feel free! My fictitious psychic powers* will work just as well if not better on fictitious people, after all. :)
Edit the second: I should mention that this Tarot deck is NSFW: it has quite a bit of nudity, as well as kink and gender genderqueer. You are warned!
* No slight is intended here to people who take tarot readings seriously or find spiritual import in them! I am only making fun of myself, I promise. I do think that tarot cards can be interesting problem-solving or meditation tool, in terms of making one think about different angles or approaches, even absent any divinatory abilities. But I'm not even sure I do a good job at that, hence the disclaimers. | comments: 39 comments or Leave a comment   |
| A week and a half ago, I went to Seattle to visit terrycloth and various other friends. This weekend, I went to ConQuesT, and am now in danger of forgetting the Seattle trip if I don't write at least some of it down. Trip report time!
( Oooh, Trippy )
And we'll see if I get around to writing part two or not. :) | | comments: 17 comments or Leave a comment |
| On Monday evening, I noticed a gurgling sound from my shower, after running the sink. I have unfortunate associations with this gurgling sound: it seems every couple of years, the main line between my house and septic tank clogs up. The last three times, I've called Snake 'n Rooter -- my first experience with them was not optimal, but they've gotten it fixed every time since. This time, the technician they sent out late Monday night did not have the proper equipment to resolve the problem. Fortunately, since I had jumped at the first sign of a problem instead of waiting until every drain in the house was backed up, the plumbing is still draining (slowly). It doesn't back up into the basement unless we run the water for an extra long time. So it wasn't a disaster. Yet. Tuesday morning, the technician they sent out decided to check the septic tank. The septic tank has apparently been eaten by a tree. I haven't looked at it myself, but Lut described that, when they removed the cover, they found it led into a solid layer of dirt and tree roots instead of a septic tank. ... So early Tuesday morning, I called the company that pumped the tank in 2004, Alton Septic, and asked them to send someone out. The receptionist said they were very busy this week, but someone would call me back to let me know if they could get there after their morning job. At noon, I called again to ask if they'd figured out if they could get there or not. She said I'd get a call by 1PM. At 2PM, I gave up waiting for Alton Septic to call and tried A-1 Sewer & Septic. They referred me to Genesis Plumbing. Genesis Plumbing sent someone out that afternoon. He confirmed that the septic tank needs to be replaced, not pumped. There was nothing he could do to make it work properly, even temporarily. He said that his boss would come by first thing Wednesday morning to give us an estimate on the replacement cost. He also suggested we get a competing bid or two, which was awfully decent of him.
Around 3:30PM on Tuesday, Alton Septic called back. "We'll send someone by tonight to give you an estimate." As of about 2PM today, Wednesday, no one had (a) showed up or (b) called to reschedule. I decided this was a Sign that I probably did not want to pay either of these companies several thousand dollars to do this work. I understand that jobs run into overtime and sometimes workmen can't show up promptly, or even at all. But if I'm going to pay you, it shouldn't be my responsibility to keep calling you and find out why you're not doing what you told me you would. So I started calling every septic company in the area that Google could find. Somewhere, somehow, I would find someone who (a) replaced septic tanks (b) in my area, (c) would answer the phone or return a message and (d) would show up. I've contacted nine companies total now, I think. Three did not do (a), two did not do (b), one is failing at (c) (but I left , and two have failed at (d). One, Michael with Piping Solutions, has accomplished (a) through (c), and has agreed to (d) at 9AM on Friday. If Michael manages (d), he may win the bid by default. I have a couple more numbers I'll try tomorrow: one of the companies that doesn't do (a) referred them to me. To make all this even more fun, I'm flying to Seattle now. I don't know that this will be a whole lot different from me calling contractors from work while Lut deals with them when they come to the house anyway, but still. One of the other annoying parts of all this is that I've known, since 2004, that there were problems with tree roots and the septic tank. The reason I never tried to get it fixed before now is that in 2003, when I bought the house, the city was planning to run sewer lines to my neighborhood. There was a lien on the house for $4000 from the city, to be paid off in $400 installments over 10 years, starting when the sewer was installed. In the nine years since then, the city has periodically done surveys and sent out maps of easements and other such things to make me think that, hey, maybe they really will. There's a waterpark across the street from me, which has to be on sewer lines (albeit possibly a private one that they paid for, who knows?). The bank I work at, less than a mile away, has gone to sewer lines from septic since then. But my neighborhood? Still no sewer system. So now I get to spend several thousand dollars on a new septic tank. At which point, no doubt sewer service will abruptly materialize three months later. :P | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| My father has some checklists that he tracks in Excel. Parts, but not all, of the different lists overlap. He wants to be able to set up the lists so that if he deletes an item from a specific section of one list, it'll delete the item from all lists. Conversely, if he adds an item to a list, he wants it to be added automatically to all lists. Obviously, he can set up big sections of each sub-list to point to a big section of the main list, and just have a lot of blank lines on each list. But a more elegant solution would be nice, because the lists area already very long and he'd rather keep it tidy.
Anybody know of a way to do this? I know that if I have charts that read data from cells A1-C4, and I add a row between lines 2 and 3, or delete line 3, Excel will automatically update my chart, correctly incorporating or removing the date. So it's not a wholly alien concept to Excel. But I don't know if there's a way to adapt this to make an attractive checklist.
Edit: My father worked for 25 years as a programmer at IBM, and is much more technically savvy than I am, as a general rule. So there's no need to be concerned that any existing solution would be too complicated for him to implement. :D | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Security: | | | Subject: | Obesity | | Time: | 01:55 pm |
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| From this article on an anti-obesity report by the Institute of Medicine:
The panel identifies taxing sugar-sweetened beverages as a "potential action," noting that "their link to obesity is stronger than that observed for any other food or beverage." A 2011 study estimated that a penny-per-ounce tax could reduce per capita consumption by 24 percent. .... The committee did not endorse the call by food activist Michael Pollan and others to eliminate farm subsidies that make high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and other obesity-promoting foods very cheap. "There is no evidence subsidies contribute to obesity," said Glickman. ... So taxing obesity-promoting soda in order to make it more expensive will reduce obesity, but ending subsidies to obesity-promoting foods in order to make it more expensive will not have an effect? How's that work? Coke makes you fat but potato chips don't? Soda drinkers are price-sensitive but tortilla chip consumers aren't? Taxes directly affect price while subsidies do so indirectly so their impact doesn't matter? What? Maybe I need to find the original report and read it, because this article about it seems to be missing some details. c.c | | comments: 12 comments or Leave a comment |
| Early this morning, Lut and I were getting ready to go out to see The Avengers.
Lut: "I'm really looking forward to this movie."
Me: "It should be good. I don't want to get my hopes too high."
Lut: "Yeah. The Hulk was not that great a movie, and neither was Thor."
Me: "Right. I don't want to assume it'll be as good as Iron Man. I'll settle for 'better than Thor'."
Lut: "That's not a high bar to clear."
Me: "Exactly." I paused, thinking about it. "You know what would be a high bar to clear? As good as The Incredibles."
*
We both enjoyed the movie a great deal. It's a strikingly well-done ensemble piece, with a large cast of minor and major characters, all of whom have the opportunity to shine. Probably its greatest strength is its wit: there are a lot of snappy retorts and funny lines. Joss Whedon does a superlative job of capturing the characters: they feel like themselves*, and they feel fully-realized. Making five films that are essentially prequels for this one helped tremendously in this regard.
'As good as The Incredibles' would be pushing it. The plot felt like set dressing to me: serving its purposes in getting all these great characters on stage and giving them opportunities to be great. Which I enjoyed! But the story itself could not have stood on its on. A plot summary would not make you go 'Oh wow!'
Watching the movie will, though. Well worth it. I'd see it again, which I do not say about many movies.
* With the possible of exception of Nick Fury, who really feels like Samuel L. Jackson. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- I love Samuel L. Jackson and never read the Nick Fury comics -- but Lut, who is a fan of Nick Fury, found it jarring.
[ETA: comments may have spoilers.] | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| This is nothing about the actual movie, which I'm planing to watch in about ten minutes.
It's about the DVD experience. Netflix sent me this DVD: it's the "rental edition", without whatever special features the normal edition comes with.
It does, however, come with at least 14 minutes of advertising that disables the root menu and the fast-forward buttons on the player.
What amazes me about this, other than the sheer chutzpah of dumping 14 mintues of consecutive ads at the beginning of a movie, is that they apparently think that just because I can't skip the ads, I am going to sit here and watch the ads. And think fondly of whatever product is being advertised, presumably.
I don't mind skippable previews at the beginning of rental DVDs; I often watch them anyway, because I don't hear a whole lot about movies. But the first one wasn't even a preview: it was a commercial for Blu-Ray. I don't know what the others are, because I stopped watching after I determined that (a) it wasn't skippable and (b) it didin't even have the virtue of being over quickly. The DVD player is minimized and muted currently. And will stay that way for another, um, three minutes now? Or however long it takes to get through the commercials. One DVD that did this nonsense would get to the end of one commercial and segue to a new one, just to make it extra-hard to tell how long it would take them to get to the actual product that I wanted to see.
The company credits are Warner Bros. Pictures, De Lines Pictures, and DC Entertainment. The distributor is Warner Home Video. I'm guessing Warner Home Video is responsible for the unskippable ads. I think I'll watch for the pattern the next time this happens. Because I may want to just stop renting or watching anything put out by Warner Home Video. | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| From: Voiddancer
Subject: Quinn too
I forgot, Quinn needs upgrades too. He uses Cunning, just like you, Mom. He's a clever man but I don't know if you'd like him. Very by-the-book. I appreciate having him on my team, to be frank. You'd get on better with Vette, I imagine ... most of the time, so do I.
Anyway, his armor. Right.
His earpiece is from level 30; I don't know if you've got better. I hope so.
He can use a 37 blue mod if you've got it. I have him in green gear, unfortunately. Do you have any custom he can wear?
*
From: Rowyn
Subject: You never write unless you want something
So I've included the mods in this package, but they come with a price! You must tell me more about this Vette girl. Is she pretty?
*
From: Voiddancer
Subject: Vette
Thank you, mom. I know your crew works hard keeping mine in one piece; I do appreciate it. Truly.
Vette ...
I don't know. She's a blue Twi'lek, tall and very slender -- sometimes I wonder if she doesn't like the food in the Empire -- with a narrow face and sharp features. I should just send you a picture. Not that I think for a moment that "what does she look like?" is what you actually want to know. But here's a picture anyway.
*
From: Rowyn
Subject: ( You're going to make me ask again? ) | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Lut glanced over at my screen as I was dealing with crafting in Star Wars. "'Hey mom'?" he said, quoting the subject line of an email in her inbox.
"Yeah, Rowyn is Voiddancer and Kittyann's mother." I opened the Legacy tab to show him the family tree. It's a little weird -- I don't usually think of my characters as related. But the game seemed to want some kind of relationship in order to send mail from Republic characters to Empire and vice versa. I think I could've finagled it so Rowyn was his ally instead of mother, but they are all human and look a little alike, and it amused me to think of Rowyn having a couple of kids at a very young age, who somehow ended up working in the Empire. She is a smuggler, after all. Why wouldn't she smuggle stuff into the Empire? And Kittyann and Voiddancer are mostly light-side characters, like Rowyn. So it kind of makes sense.
"I know," Lut said. "But 'hey mom'? Why are you having one of your characters send email to another?"
"It's a shopping list." I opened the email:From: Voiddancer
Subject: Hey mom
Jaesa's coming with me on a mission, and her gear needs an upgrade. Can you outfit her with:
1 Willpower earring
6 armoring
6 mods
Really appreciate it.
Lut stared. He put a hand over mine. "May? Seek professional help."
"What? It's a shopping list!"
"You're writing a conversation between two of your own characters."
"I had to write down what he wanted somewhere."
"That is not a scratchpad. That is dialogue. The only way it could be scarier is if you acted it out with handpuppets."
"I've written hundreds of thousands of words of fiction and only now do you realize it's weird?" I said. "You don't think I was writing those books for other people to read, do you? If I was, I'd've tried to publish them by now."
...
And yeah, that's not the first time my characters have written email to each other. Eventide is always telling them to spend less money when she distributes it. c.c | | comments: 17 comments or Leave a comment |
| So I click on this link because the headline makes me curious: "Madonna Sets Humiliating Record". And the humiliation? Her newest release sold a measely 46,000 copies last week. After selling 337,000 the previous week. This makes it a 'commercial failure'. See, she goosed her album sales by pairing the album with ticket sales. And the 'problem' is that all her shows are sold-out or nearly sold-out now. ... I am not a particular Madonna fan (I generally like the songs I've heard by her, but I don't own any of her work), but I would just like to note that if I ever have 46,000 people pay money for something I've made, I'll count that as a success. Also, if an almost completely sold-out tour is a sign of commercial failure, you may need to reconsider your touring costs. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | If I got a copy of this RPG (h/t djinni, does anyone else think they'd be interested in playing it with me sometime? Keep in mind I have no idea how well the system actually works -- I'm just wondering who else thinks the concept of an RPG about shared world-building is cool enough to try. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| Using only biological drives to understand human nature is like using only the fact that computers ultimately run on binary to understand Microsoft Office.
Yes, that fact is true, and yet somehow it does not actually tell you "use Ctrl-C to copy". | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| "What women want" is one of those perenial topics that always make me cringe inside. So does "what men want", for that matter. It's not that the answers to the questions tend to be particularly stupid, or that gender differences are nonexistant. Sometimes people write things on the topic that are insightful and reasonable, or at least, not ridiculous. But the question itself seems so profoundly misguided. It's existance implies that you can make useful generalizations about three and a half billion people, generalizations that you can or should use to guide your behavior in interacting with them. Worse than that, it sets women and men up as alien species, as if we had fundamentally different desires and that the gender differences -- the stereotypical gender differences -- were crucially important. "Women want respect" -- as if men don't! I don't think I've ever seen a "what (gender) wants" article that was both (a) reasonable and (b) not equally reasonable if applied to the other gender. What people want is to be treated as individuals, and not the current representative of their gender. Does it really matter if 75% of women like chocolate as a Valentine's Day present, if your girlfriend doesn't? Does it matter that most men don't care about anniveraries, if your husband does? We are not cultivating a relationship with half the human race, but with particular individual members of it. Just treat them like people. Whatever tendencies they share or don't share with their gender are things we need to determine on a person-by-person basis, just like everything else about them. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| I am on the exercise bike tonight, although I really don't want to be. I almost convinced myself not to, but finally talked myself into it by telling myself "I can quit any time". So I can stop now at nine minutes, or keep going. I might as well keep going another minute. Some days, that all I do. Just one more minute after another, until it's been thirty and I finally let myself slow down. The problem is, I don't feel like writing. Writing and exercise have become bound together in my mind. Writing is the only thing so engaging it can make me forget I'm exercising. Exercise is the only thing so tedious it forces me to write. If I could play games on my desktop while exercising, my writing might be in trouble. My writing is in trouble anyway, as witnessed by the fact that I am writing about (a) exercise and (b) writing, which are the two dullest topics I ever voluntarily converse about. Yes, even I think this is boring. Why am I doing it? It's better than staring at the exercise bike timer and thinking "16 minutes to go". Just baely better. But I can't keep this entry going. I need to write about something less boring or stop exercising. A person of less entrenched habits would stop exercising. Me, I'm going to work on Sign and Sacrifice.. Even if I don't know how to write what comes next. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've not seen the film adaptation, but mrw42 bought me the trilogy for Christmas, and I've been meaning to write about it for months.
First: this trilogy was pretty much the Perfect Gift for me, by which I mean:- It was a series that I'd heard good things about.
- But I had already decided that I wouldn't like the subject matter and therefore wasn't going to read it on my own.
- However, once I got it as a gift I figured I should try it.
- I found the first book okay but would not have read the sequels if I didn't have them on hand.
- I really enjoyed the second and third books, and found them very well done.
Hence, 'Perfect Gift', not in the sense of 'exactly what I knew I wanted' (that would be the two Pratchett novels she also got me :) ), but in the sense of 'something I had already decided not to get for myself, but turned out to enjoy greatly'.
They're well-written, engaging books: I got them for Christmas and finished all three by December 28th, which should say something. :)
( Not very spoilery discussion, cut for those who hate to hear any details about something they haven't read ) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
|
Whoa.
The US Justice department is threatening suit against Apple and five major publishers, alleging collusion to raise book prices. This is a fascinating situation to me. I do find it hard to see the whole agency-model thing as anything other than collusion to force Amazon to stop discounting e-books. OTOH, it's not exactly clear that letting Amazon discount their way into the position of sole retail outlet for ebooks is the path to less monopoly power. I don't know much about the law in this case, or what outcome I am rooting for. But I'll be interested to see how it goes. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| I didn't make "post updates" part of my new year's resolutions this year, but I'll do an update anyway.
I've been reasonably good about keeping my activity log updated, although I did have to reconstruct a few weeks from February by memory.
This year's resolve that 'everything counts' has, unsurprisingly, led to me doing a lot more game preparation than usual. So far, this has been mostly in the form of preparing for the +terrible butterflies+ game I started running in January: I spent about 14 hours editing and modifying the rules and putting together the setting backstory and basic plot points.
This contrasts with around 6 hours of prep time for the weekly World Tree game, 5.5 hours writing ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=92.2) delight_in_wt entries, 4 hours on Sign & Sacrifice, 7 hours on art, 5 hours blogging, and 1.5 hours on a couple of other projects.
I've not been counting the time spent actually playing +tb+, any more than I count the time spent playing the World Tree game. The play time is officially "the fun part", so if I need to incentivize myself to do that part, I am Doing It Wrong.
My productivity on everything but +tb+ took a nose dive in mid-January, when I started prepwork for the game. Pre-game, I was mostly sketching and working on Delight. Since I finished the game prep, mostly I've been working on S&S and the World Tree game, though on Wednesday I started writing Delight again. I've got about four S&S entries and two Delight entries unposted. I haven't been very motivated to post stuff; I'm not thrillled with what I've got for S&S, and I didn't want to post one entry for Delight and have that be it for the next three months. I do rather like one of the Delight entries, though, so I'll probably start posting what I've got for her again on Monday.
While what I'm working on has been variable, since the +tb+ game started I've been sticking to much the same schedule that I used for the last half of 2011: I write whenever I exercise, and I do the occasional bit of game prep at my computer that can't be easily managed on my phone. The result is that I do almost no writing -- or anything else that isn't goofing off -- on the weekend. As a result, I've falled behind on my daily quota, although not a lot behind because I had a huge backlog of points from all the prep time on +tb+. I caught up again this week, by spending some time writing Delight. So I'm currently very slightly up on my official goals.
Overall, ambivalent about how this is working out. I want to have written more original fiction, and that's not happening. On the other hand, I also want to enjoy my life, and I've been pretty happy doing my gaming and fanfic. So it's hardly all bad.
I do think that my conversion of "12 words = 1 minute" is off -- my average words-per-minute is probably closer to 14 or 15. I think I'll bump it up to 13, which will make hitting my targets somewhat harder. Or convince me to spend more time on writing. Or both. Something like that.
Otherwise, I'll leave things as they are and see how it goes. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| So I have data that looks like this:
| Date | Balance |
| 1/1/11 | 0.00 |
| 6/6/11 | 5,000.00 |
| 6/10/11 | 0.00 |
| 7/1/11 | 50.00 |
| 7/12/11 | 0.00 |
| 8/14/11 | 15,000.00 |
| 9/15/11 | 0.00 |
| 12/5/11 | 5,200.00 |
The date column is the day that the balance changed. That balance is the account balance until the next date appears.
I want to have Excel do a chart that reflects this: eg, shows the balance is zero from 1/1/11 to 6/6/11, then that it’s $5,000 for four days from 6/6/11 to 6/10/11, then zero again, etc. Now, if I manually add every single day in the year to my data and manually include the balance for each date, I can get Excel to do this. But I would really like to do it without having to make 365 rows of data. x.x
By default, bar graphs will treat my points as if they represent only that day’s data, and that all other days have a value of zero. Line graphs will by default draw a gradual rise and decline over time, which is also wrong.
It seems like this is an obvious sort of problem and there should be an obvious sort of solution to it, but I am just not figuring it out. Anyone know how to do this? | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
|
One of the things that’s been kind of driving me nuts about the whole “mandatory insurance coverage for contraception” thing is that, of dozens of tweets and articles I’ve seen complaining about it or complaining about people complaining about it, only one actually addressed what I don’t like about it. Here, have a link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577210730406555906.html Allow me to pull out the key point:
Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill. There are certainly good arguments for subsidizing contraception. If the federal government wanted to up food stamp allowances and let people use them to buy condoms/birth control pills/etc., I could see that as reasonable. In fact, the federal government already does subsidize birth control, in the form of grants to Planned Parenthood, which provides inexpensive birth control pills and annual check-ups to women across the country. They may even still be handing out free condoms. I don’t know if this is the highest and best use for taxpayer dollars, but it is at least (a) pretty cheap on the scale of the federal budget and (b) reasonably efficient. Insurance is not efficient. No doubt we could come up with a less efficient way to subsidize birth control than to: (a) Create a government mandate that every company offer employees insurance that covers contraception from private insurers, necessitating that:
(b) Private companies purchase insurance from those private insurers
(c) Private companies report their insurance to the government
(d) Private insurers report who’s bought insurance to the government
(e) Individuals report whether they have insurance or not to the government
(f) The government track what companies aren’t providing insurance
(g) The government offer subsidies for those who aren’t getting insurance through an employer
(h) The government penalize individuals who don’t get insurance and companies who refuse to provide it
(i) Individuals who did get insurance get a prescription for birth control pills from a doctor
(j) The doctor files a claim with the insurance company for $100 for the office visit
(k) The insurance company spends $15 processing the $100 claim
(l) Individuals get their birth control pills from a pharmacy
(m) The pharmacy files a $30 claim for the pills
(n) The insurance company spends $15 processing the $30 claim
(o) Insurance company reports all this back to the government to show they’re complying with the law. I mean, I could think of a worse way of doing it. Perhaps we could get the TSA into the act? They already do full-body scans, why not add prescription drugs? Oh wait, I was trying for LESS efficiency. I’m sorry, my imagination is failing me at the moment. My point is that insurance is a HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD way of covering routine expenses. It adds a whole extra layer of bureaucracy to every transaction, for no reason at all. If you add $200 worth of annual routine expenses to what insurers are required to cover, then insurers are going to charge an extra $300-$400 of annual premium to your bill. You don’t get “free” or even “cheaper” services this way. You get more expensive services because now you have to pay for all the extra bureaucracy and paperwork and insurance company profit. If you can afford insurance for a routine expense, you can afford the expense. If you need a subsidy in order to get insurance for a routine expense, you could just get a subsidy for the expense itself and it’d be cheaper. But NO. This is freaking America, and we have to do everything in the most insane and ridiculous way, and then call it 'compromise'. Where 'compromise' means 'worse than what anyone on any side actually wanted'. x.x | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| From an article on the New Mexico school system
The [education] department evaluated the schools in a number of areas, including academic growth, attendance rates and graduation rates, then graded them on a curve.
In other words, while a total of 100 points was possible, the department gave “As” to the top 10 percent of schools in the state.
...
“Our bar is the top 10 percent,” Skandera said. “That’s how we’re measuring success. I think that’s an excellent starting point for asking, ‘How are we doing?’ And let’s benchmark against that and go forward and aspire that every single one of our schools is in the top 10 percent [emphasis mine].” | | comments: 15 comments or Leave a comment |
| To start:
(A) I like Planned Parenthood. During my college-student years, I obtained birth control pills through them, and because they had a policy that required annual exams to get birth control pills, I actually had regular health screenings and tests for . It was pretty much the only medical care I received during my years uninsured. Their services were cheap and professional.
(B) I like Susan G. Komen for the Cure. I do not have fond personal memories of them as I do PP, and I think they spend too much money on "education" (as opposed to screening, treatment or research programs). But a large part of breast cancer prevention is convincing women to do self-exams and get mammograms, and breast cancer is a big killer of women that is mostly preventable if caught in a timely fashion. So I can't say the education is wasted.
Given that I like both charities and think they do good work, you'd think I might have mixed feelings about Komen's recent de-funding and re-funding of grants to Planned Parenthood.
As it happens, though, all I can think is that this is one darn silly inconsequential kerfluffle.
Susan G. Komen for the Cure has total assets of almost $500,000,000. Its total expenses, including grants, were over $400,000,000.
I can't readily find current financial information for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, but their 2008 balance sheet showed $1,078,000,000 in total assets.
Komen's last grant to PP was $680,000. That figure represents about:
- 0.14% of Komen's total assets 2011 *
- 0.06% of Planned Parenthoods total assets 2008
* Yes, I'd rather compare this to expenses and revenue for a more apples-and-apples effect, but I can't find expenses for PPFA at all, so assets it is.
The point is, the amount of money at stake here is tiny for either charity. PPFA is not going to shut down without money from Komen. Komen is not going to be providing Funds for Abortions if they grant money to PPFA for breast-care services**. Komen can still do plenty of good whether or not it grants less than half a percent of its revenues to PP. It is Just Not That Big a Deal. It is not proof that one side or the other is Losing the Abortion Debate. It is such a tiny amount that it doesn't even get a footnote on either's financial statement.
** Yes, PP provides breast exams and related services. Most of their services are health-care related, and not connected to either contraception (about a third of their services) or abortion (3%). For a lot of low-income, uninsured women -- just like me sixteen years ago -- PP is their main health care provider, sad as that is.
The only good thing that came out of any of this is that a bunch of people who are passionately for or against abortion gave a lot of money that they probably wouldn't've thought to donate otherwise to two perfectly good causes. -.- | | comments: 29 comments or Leave a comment |
| A random site I wound up at yesterday (while trying to research the origins of some phrases) said that "cleave" is the only word in the English language that is synonymous with two words that are antonym of each other: "adhere" and "separate". The "adhere" meaning doesn't get as much use any more -- the main instance of it that came to my mind is the archaic wedding-vow usage: "Cleave unto one another". But it's there.
I was wondering if there really aren't any other words that mean both one thing and the opposite of that thing, though. "Literally" comes to mind, because there's a colloquial use where "literally" is used emphasis and actually means "figuratively": "I made one little comment and she literally bit my head off!" Although dictionaries don't seem to be acknowledging this use of 'literally' yet. Which is okay with me; I don't want to encourage it anyway. >:)
Inflammable comes to mind too, except that inflammable really doesn't mean "cannot be burned" even though it sounds like it should.
Anyway, can anyone else think of any instances? | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Security: | | | Subject: | Jogging | | Time: | 05:07 pm |
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| (All times very approximate -- I didn't time anything, not even how long I was at it.) 0:00: I think I'll go for a walk.
0:15: *play "Another Way to Die" on iPod*
0:30: This'd be a good song to jog to. Gosh, I haven't jogged in at least, what, a year? Eighteen months?
0:45: What the heck. *starts jogging*.
1:00: Whee!
1:45: I'm not sure riding the exercise bike four-five times a week is keeping me in any kind of shape for jogging.
2:00: This hill near my house is just as horrid for jogging up as I remember.
3:00: Okay, riding the exercise bike four-five times a week is definitely not keeping me in shape to jog. I don't think I'm going to make it to the top of the hill.
4:00: Nope, not gonna make it.
8:00: Wait, what? I not only made it up the hill but I'm halfway around my old loop? I wonder if I can make it the rest of the way?
16:00: Hey, I can. I'm not that tired ... I wonder if I can get up the hill again?
23:00: I can! Woot! I don't think I can make another loop, but let's try.
32:00: This is only technically a jog, in the sense that the pace never has both feet on the ground and sometimes neither. I can walk faster than this. Still! Jogging!
35:00: I made another loop! I bet I can't make three. But maybe I can get up the hill again.
43:00: Made it! That's really the hard part. I might as well try for another circuit.
45:00: I bet it's the butterflies. It always was easier to jog when I was thinking about +terrible butterflies+.
48:00: And I thought I was jogging slowly before.
1:01:00: Okay, that's three circuits. You've made your point. You can stop now.
1:02:00: No, really. That's enough. Let's just cool off now. Good girl. I guess the exercise bike does keep me in shape for jogging. Although I am still going to be really sore tomorrow. Ow.
| | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| In 2007, I played what would become my favorite RPG ever: +Terrible Butterflies+, with bard_bloom, creator of the game, as game master.
Ever since that game ended, I've been wanting to run a game of +terrible butterflies+ myself. The main thing that deterred me was that I didn't want to run the exact same system. Not because of flaws in the existing system, but because one of the joys of the game had been finding all the best ways to exploit, contort, and abuse the array of magical powers our characters possessed. And, as with any puzzle, once you know the solution, there's no need to solve it again. It would still be a great game for new people who hadn't experienced it yet. But for players who had, I felt it'd be much more fun with all the previously-discovered exploits removed -- and new ones uncovered. With Bard's permission, I've occasionally noodled away at ideas for the game: things I could take out, things I could put in. Not to make it better, but to make it different.
Over the past several days, bitten anew by the bug after talking about RPG systems, I decided to do it. I finalized my ideas, added my changes to the rules, and created what amounts to a new version of +terrible butterflies+.
Now, I want to play it.
I can't guarantee that you'll love the game as much as I do -- I don't think anyone else loves this game as much as I do, though I'll note that everyone I polled who'd played this system liked it -- but I hope that if you join me, you'll have fun.
A horrible thing is insidiously invading Truman High School. A psychic predator that devours souls and wears the bodies of its victims. An invisible, intangible monster with mysterious powers and hidden motives. A mystical or technological horror from some unknown astral hell, insinuating itself into mundane society for some unknown purpose.
That's you.
... but you're actually a fairly nice supernatural horror, as these things go.
This story is about testing boundaries, about gaining great power and what you decide to do with it. It's about difficult moral choices and problems that cannot be solved by hitting them repeatedly with a pointy stick.* It is, at its heart, about growing up.
I'll be the game master. I think the campaign will be most fun for people who enjoy roleplaying conversations and character interactions, and who want to use a rich, quirky form of magic in creative and innovative ways that generally have nothing to do with killing monsters and taking their stuff.*
If you're interested in playing, email my gmail.com account, Ladyrowyn, and I'll send you a copy of the rules so you can make a character. (It's fine if you ask for the rules and later decide you don't want to play, for whatever reason.) If you have questions that you think other people might ask as well, leave a comment and I'll answer here.
* No disrespect intended towards games where you blundgeon your conflicts to death and loot the bodies! My weekly World Tree game is based on that model. But +terrible butterflies+ isn't. | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| I thought it'd be fun to compare the number of people who had played each game with the number who liked that game's mechanics. The breakdown for all the games was: +Terrible Butterflies+: 4 / 4 (100%)
Champions: 5 / 10 (50%)
World Tree: 5 / 6 (83%)
Ars Magica: 5 / 8 (63%)
Savage Worlds: 4 / 6 (67%)
D&D 4e: 3 / 7 (43%)
D&D 3.5: 5 / 13 (38%)
GURPS: 6 / 13 (46%)
Legend: 1 / 0 (undefined)
Heroes Unlimited: 1 / 3 (33%)
Marvel Superheroes: 3 / 5 (60%)
Cyberpunk 2020: 3 / 7 (43%)
ElfQuest: 1 / 2 (50%)
Star Wars (West End Games 1st ed.): 3 / 8 (38%)
Vampire: the Masquerade: 5 / 13 (38%) If I narrow down games to just those where the mechanics were liked by more than half those who'd played that game, it's a short list: +Terrible Butterflies+: 4 / 4 (100%)
World Tree: 5 / 6 (83%)
Ars Magica: 5 / 8 (63%)
Savage Worlds: 4 / 6 (67%)
Marvel Superheroes: 3 / 5 (60%)
There wasn't a clear "favorite mechanics": four games got two votes each, three games got three votes each, and the rest got one or no votes. The two and three vote games were: Champions: 2
World Tree: 2
Savage Worlds: 2
D&D 3.5: 2
GURPS: 3
Marvel Superheroes: 3
Vampire: the Masquerade: 3 My conclusion from my totally unscientific poll: gamers' tastes vary wildly, and not just between a few different camps. I don't think this is just about hack&slash vs roleplayer vs problem-solver, or realistic vs game-balanced, or simple vs complex. Maybe about all of those at once, but I suspect there are a number of subtle factors at work which aren't easily quantified. ... the lesson probably isn't "+terrible butterflies+ is a great system and I should run a game of it". Although it might be. c.c | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Howard Tayler tweeted about Hasbro's plans for a 5th edition for D&D. It's only been four years since the 4th edition. It got me thinking about gaming systems in general. Lut and I quit playing Warhammer 40,000 in part because Games Workshop replaced the rules with new incompatible one every 7 years. (They also eliminated rules for one of Lut's armies, which greatly reduced our interest in investing in more miniatures.) The 'frequent new editions' phenomenon feels like a ploy to sell old gamers new books. When was the last time Monopoly or Scrabble changed their rules? And yet. In the 90s, I played a heavily house-modified version of Champions Hero System 4th edition, and loved the rules. Hero System was one of the 'generic' systems, like GURPS, and it was many years before I finally admitted that it was only a really great system for superheroes. And it required a deep understanding of the system on the part of the GM: John Boulton told me about an utter disaster he had playing Champions, where his character had Speed boost/drain powers. The second he said that, I knew why the game was a disaster, but it's not something the rules will stop you from doing. I've played so many RPG systems: D&D, AD&D, Cyberpunk, Champions, Shadowrun, Nightfall, Vampire: the Masquerade, GURPS, World Tree, various simple homebrew systems or non-systems, +Terrible Butterflies+, some d20 games, Savage Worlds, and more that I don't even remember. I used to have strong opinions about what the Best System was: for several years, it was Champions. Then I decided that the best system was no system, or a very minimal one: the Mirari and Just Trust Me games didn't really have a system so much as list of what the characters were good at. Then +Terrible Butterflies+ made me fall in love with RPG systems all over again, or at least with the idea of having one. I tried to make one of my own, and failed. I've been running a World Tree game for over two years on FurryMUCK: I love the setting so much, but the rules mechanics are clunky for an online game. And I still don't know what I want out of an RPG system, really. I want it to be simple, but with enough decisions to make it interesting for the players. I want player choices to matter, and players to feel like they're well-informed about their choices. I want the system to have a feel and a flavor that matches the setting. If there's magic, I want it to be flexible and thematic, or quirky and specialized, but at least intelligible: I want players to understand what is and isn't doable by magic. Same of technology in an sf game. I want the system to settle questions, not raise them. I want it to be fun. And you'd think, in the 34 years I've been playing RPGs, I'd know how to do all that, but I still don't. I'm sure there's not a Platonic ideal of an RPG, an RPG that would fit everyone's needs perfectly, but it feels like there ought to be one that fits one particular game and group perfectly. But even my favorites fall short, sometimes badly so. Apparently, this is really, really hard. Maybe that's why they want a 5th edition for D&D: they're still trying to get it right. What about you? What are your favorite RPGs, and why? What do they do best? | | comments: 61 comments or Leave a comment |
|
Maybe I should blame terrycloth, because he's the one who got me started watching the show, but no. I blame the_gneech for this one. I watched the Gneech Livestreaming the creation of his last ponypic, and watching someone else draw a pony made me realize what freakish little creatures these guys are. Their proportions are bizarre: their eyes take up about a third of the space on their faces, their foreheads are gigantic, they have these teeny button muzzles that are maybe half the size of one eye, and their bodies are only slighlty larger than their heads. No, really, if you take a typical image from the show, the distance from base of neck to top of head is almost as long as the distance from base of neck to bottom of foot. And yet, somehow, they're adorable anyway.
Since it's an animated kid's show, the characters are colored very simply as well as highly stylized, and it made me wonder how hard they are to draw. Finally, I decided to go ahead and try it.
Answer: DAMN HARD. I spent over two hours sketching them by staring at screenshot references and freehanding copies -- all of these sketches are copies of poses from the show. Copying an image, or working from life, is much easier for me than trying to draw from my head. But even with a reference right there, I struggled trying to make the copy look like the original. My sketch of Rainbow Dash looks like Twilight Sparkle to me and I don't even know why. @.@ Even knowing that the bodies are supposed to be tiny, I still drew them a little too large. It's just ... weird.
In theory, I don't think of fan art as the highest and best use of my creative energy. In practice, pretty much all the art I do is fan art, albeit usually for more obscure fandoms. So, I don't know, maybe I'll draw more ponies if the mood strikes me. I'm pretty sure that drawing ponies is what I did instead of playing more Star Wars: the Old Republic, not what I did instead of writing fiction, so what the heck. It's all good. | | comments: 12 comments or Leave a comment |
| I read this article by Kristine Rusch about writers and pay. I like Ms. Rusch's business writing quite a bit: she's generally sensible, knowledgable, and well-researched, although her math and assumptions are sometimes overly simplistic. This particular essay was one of those where her assumptions struck me as especially ... peculiar. Her chief assumption is that the goal for all writers is to maximize revenue from their writing. The implication is 'If you are writing, and you are not maximizing your revenue from writing, you are clearly an idiot.'
And I find myself imagining a World of Warcraft goldseller writing a rant about how these crazy people who are playing WoW and not selling the gold their characters earn! What kind of idiots are they? Don't they know that their efforts are worth money? Don't they realize how many hundreds of hours they're throwing away for nothing? Or a professional actor railing about the foolishness of amateur theatre: how could anyone perform in a production for free? Don't they realize that acting is a business? Do you suppose landscapers marvel at the ridiculousness of people who choose to tend their gardens for free? Or movie critics are astonished that people pay to see movies, and then tell other people what they thought of the film for nothing? I'd guess that the average American devotes more than half his waking hours to activities that he doesn't get paid for and doesn't care about getting paid for. There's nothing inherently foolish about doing something for free, and the fact that other people do get paid for the same activity doesn't mean you're an idiot. Your circumstances and goals may just be different. ETA: lt's a bit unfair of me to single Ms. Rusch out on this -- she is, after all, writing about "writing as a business" and assuming that her audience is interested in making money by writing is fairly sensible -- that's her target audience, really. Still ... it's worth examining assumptions, sometimes.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android. | | comments: 14 comments or Leave a comment |
| This idea has been stuck in my head for a while now. Yesterday, I was reading an article about DC's latest reboot; they now have only two women working on the 52 DC Universe titles (one author writing two titles, and one artist doing one cover). That's out of 209 artists/writers/cover artists. The sole female writer called on DC to hire more women, and one of her fellow creators was unhappy about that. His argument, albeit not in so many words, was 'which of the us do you want to get fired for this?' And this seemed like entirely the wrong question. DC and Marvel's superhero comics are read by, I dunno, maybe a couple million people. Out of the seven billion people in the world, these giants in the field are reaching maybe a thousandth of a percent. And it's not that people don't like superheroes: I'd guess that at least ten times as many people watched Captain America as read even one superhero comic in 2011. So this guy is saying 'I don't want to lose my job to some woman just because she's a woman and there aren't enough jobs for everyone'. Which is totally understandable. Except that it ignores the ability of people to MAKE MORE JOBS. It ignores that maybe if the DC Universe wasn't a No Gurlz Allowed club, maybe it would appeal to more people. Not just women, but men too. Maybe if you weren't so jealously intent on protecting your little bitty pie from anyone else getting a slice, you'd find out that you could make a much bigger pie. But it's not just this one little thing. It's so many things where I feel like we as humans are totally misguided, where we act as if resources were not just finite but narrowly bounded, as if there's a fixed amount of wealth in the world and there can never be any more so we have to grab as much of it as we can and keep anyone else from getting their hands on it. We can't let immigrants into our country and steal OUR JOBS. We can't let people get rich because that should be OUR MONEY. We can't be happy for a friend's successful blog because those should be OUR READERS. One blogger called it 'slottiness', when aspiring writers would get jealous of another being published, as if that author had taken their slot. But we do it with so many things. It seems like common sense to think that if one person gets X, the next person can't. But it's still wrong. There's so much that we can create. Life is not zero-sum. We don't have to make sure someone else loses in order for us to win.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android. | | comments: 30 comments or Leave a comment |
| Fromthe Wall Street Journal:
Ted Kaptchuk, director of Harvard's Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, and colleagues demonstrated that deception isn't necessary for the placebo effect to work. Eighty patients with irritable bowel syndrome, a chronic gastrointestinal disorder, were assigned either a placebo or no treatment. Patients in the placebo group got pills described to them as being made with an inert substance and showing in studies to improve symptoms via "mind-body self-healing processes." Participants were told they didn't have to believe in the placebo effect but should take the pills anyway, Dr. Kaptchuk says. After three weeks, placebo-group patients reported feelings of relief, significant reduction in some symptoms and some improvement in quality of life.
Which makes me go O.o. In some cases noted in the article, the placebo effect is powerful, too. It makes me wonder if some of the people who cope with nasty side effects from drugs might be better off with a placebo. Like, actually better off taking a sugar pill that they know is a sugar pill, rather than (a) doing nothing or (b) taking a drug with bad side effects.
o.OPosted via LiveJournal app for Android. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| My resolutions are really just goals, but calling it a resolution is traditional, so okay.
Keep an Activity Log
I liked having this from last year, and using a spreadsheet makes it relatively easy to maintain. So I'll stick with it.
Keep Score
This is one idea to incorporate a few different factors:
Everything Counts
One of my friends has been wrestling with the last book in the trilogy he's been writing. He comments now and again about having an idea for Thing That Isn't the Trilogy, but doesn't usually act on it because it's not what he Should Be Writing. I found myself thinking: "I like reading what he writes. I just want him to write stuff, and I don't care that much if it continues Existing Story or not."
That's not true for all authors -- some writers have some stuff I like and some stuff I don't, and as a reader I'd rather they worked on the stuff I liked. But it was true for him.
And, to a large degree, it's true for me. There's some stuff I want to finish more than others, but there's nothing that I wish didn't exist.
So really, I want everything to count. Journal entries, fanfic, sketches, roleplay prep, everything I do that takes creative energy -- it all matters.
Some Things Count More than Others
But even though everything counts, there are some projects that I really want to be able to look back on and say "I did that!" So I want an incentive system that reflects that.
Tracking Time
Generally, I prefer tracking time-spent to words-written, or other concrete measures of success. This is because (a) the two are fungible in practice: if I devote time to working on something, I will make progress on it, and (b) psychologically, my brain doesn't believe (a). If I don't feel like writing, I can generally convince myself to try to write for 20 minutes anyway. But convincing myself to keep trying to write until I've written 250 words is excruciating. Even though the results in both cases are nearly identical. This is my brain. YMMV.
Tracking Results
On the other hand, if I do feel like writing, I'll often snatch minutes -- while walking, or at work, or at the grocery store -- to do some writing, and it's not really practical to track minutes in these situations. So tracking words, or progress, is good in those situations.
In general, tracking progress works if the project is something I'm eager to do, and tracking time spent works if it's something I'm eager to have done.
So: score keeping! Points for all creative activities! Scoring as follows:
Standard Points- 1 minute = 1 standard point.
- 12 words = 1 standard point.
Bonus points- Creator's Choice Bonus: Every 30 standard points in a Creator's Choice activity = 10 bonus points.
- Audience's Choice Bonus: Every 30 standard points in an Audience's Choice activity = 10 bonus points.
Completion points (Scored whenever I actually finish something)- Sketch: 10 completion points
- Icon/Art Card: 25 completion points
- Colored image: 100 completion points
- Complex/large finished painting: 1000 completion points
- Journal entry*: 10 completion points
- Original fiction entry: 20 completion points
- Story outline: 100 completion points
- Short Story: 1,000 completion points
- Long Story: 10,000 completion points
* Very short posts / links don't count as an entry.
Subject to Revision
If I realize that my incentives are out of whack, or I have something else I want to add, I'll change this system
Initial Goal
I am really not sure how this is going to work out. So my January goal is 50 total points per day, with the same caveat as last year -- I can get ahead but I can't fall behind.
My score so far today is:
750 words (most of this morning's entry was written yesterday): 62 points
2 journal entries: 20 completion points
I'm already ahead!
...
I'll have to revise either my goal or my scoring system if I consistently blog instead of writing fiction, but what the heck, I'll let myself get a head start for now. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I had two resolutions in 2011:
Keep an Activity Log
I am going to give myself an A- for this. I actually do have an activity log! For the entire year! But I would forget to keep it updated for several weeks in a row, and then go back and stare at a calendar and my journals to try to reconstruct what I'd been up to in those weeks. Several of the columns are of dubious accuracy; I know I've exercised a lot more often than I've actually recorded, for one. The "HS" column is my "happiness scale", and going back to reconstruct that was pretty iffy. And, while I'll grant that I don't write in this LJ regularly, I am still pretty sure I spent more than five hours writing the year's 72 LJ entries.
All this given, I think the data gives a reasonable approximation of most of my creative activities for the year. So, some statistics!
In 2011, I spent about 188 hours on "creative activities that counted", a category which includes:
* Writing original fiction
* Writing World Tree fanfiction (delight_in_wt, to be specific
* Drawing and painting, including 23 hours messing with custom My Little Ponies(tm) (the third custom MLP I attempted broke my spirit when I tried to do clothing. Clothing for an inflexible pony figurine is hard.)
* Preparing for the World Tree sessions
The big winner for the year was Delight: I spent 66 hours writing entries for her community. Another 40+ hours went to game prep. Original fiction received about 30 hours across all categories, most of that on the perenially unfinished Sign and Sacrifice.
Frankly, 188 hours seems rather pitiful, especially compared to the 1500+ hours I spent at my day job. The amount of time spent on original fiction -- in a whole year! -- is even sadder.
On the other hand, 188 hours averages to about 30 minutes a day. That was my original goal back in January ... although my original January goal did not include some of the activities I spent much of my time on this year. When I decided to let the drawing/painting/ponies count, I was supposed to go up to averaging about 40 minutes a day. Oops.
My other resolution was:
Do a significant amount of writing
I was supposed to define what "significant" meant at some later point. I never did. Oops. I guess I'll decide now! This is later, right? telnar always told me that the best way to make sure you achieve your goals is to look back at whatever you did and then decide that was your goal.
The year's word counts were:
Sign and Sacrifice: 20,821
Misc. other original fiction: Around 4,200
Delight: 48,422
World Tree Game Prep: Unsure, probably around 15,000
Misc. other game prep: Around 4,500
So around 92,000 words. Sounds like a significant amount to me!
Interestingly, my estimated conversion of minutes-to-words was that 1 hour = 800 words. Based on word counts and time worked for S&S and Delight, my average word count was 757 per hour.
I was also supposed to figure out goals on a month-by-month basis. In practice, I set a goal in January and made it, then set a goal for February, never changed it, made it for five or six months, acknowledged in September that I was blowing it every month, still didn't change it, and continued to not make it for the rest of the year. So ... nice theory, in practice, not so much difference.
Nominally, I guess I hit my goals, but I am not particularly satisfied with the year's work. On the one hand, I want to write more original fiction. On the other, I like writing Delight and I like running the World Tree game, which is into its third year now. (!) These things take creative energy, and for me, they take much the same creative energy that writing original fiction does.
To be honest, I don't really know why I want to write more original fiction. Because my inner 12-year-old still thinks she will get rich as a writer of original fiction? Because I want more people to read my work, and game prep is only appreciated by the players, while Delight is never going to have more than a small subset of Sythyry's audience? Because fanfiction is cheating? I dunno.
Anyway, that's more a topic for my goals in 2012. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| Playing SWOTR has been pretty fun. Using Origin's website to buy and use the game? Not so much. Setting up my initial account and purchasing the game took about 8 rounds of "You missed a spot! And oh, we randomly* blanked out some spots you didn't miss, see if you can guess which ones! Guess wrong and there's another round!" Which was not as fun a game as it sounds. * Really, it was random -- not even "we always erase the credit card". More like "you left off your phone number so we blanked out your email confirmation" and then "Now we decided to blank your address" followed by "let's just give you a whole new form! Except your name, what the heck, we'll keep that." Last Friday, I got my early-access invitation, which came with a code I had to set up on their website. On Monday, Lut said, "You need to be sure to register your product code. Noooo, not the early-access code that you already registered and couldn't get without ordering the product. This is a different code." So I dug out my original order confirmation, looked for the correct code (helpfullly not labelled the same way as on the site), and plugged it at the website along with all the information I'd provided when I bought the game. I guess having your exclusive ordering page talk to your accounts page was too much trouble to code. But Origin did now confirm that I had a registered product. I still didn't have a subscription. "But that doesn't matter," Lut said. Because every MMO ever gives a month's subscription when you buy the game. Since you can't actually play the game without it. This morning, I tried to login to SWOTR. The engine declined: "You do not have an active subscription. Click here to get one." ... SIGH. I clicked the link. "The website is too full. You have been placed in a queue. This page will auto-refresh when there's room." ... You have a queue. For your website. AWESOME. 10 minutes later, the page refreshed to display my account. I clicked on the button for subscribing. 2 minutes later: "Do you want to subscribe or use a game-time card?" *subscribe* 3 minutes later: "Pick one of these subscription periods." *click 90 days* 2 minutes later: *pick subscription period page finishes loading completely* *click 90 days again* *click "continue"* 2 minutes later: "Sorry, your request has timed out. You can try refreshing?" *refresh* 2 minutes later: "There's been an error! Sorry." *click only button available, for "back to swotr.com"* "The website is too full. You have been placed in a queue. This page will auto-refresh when there's room." 10 minutes later: SWOTR.com main page. *click "my account"* "The website is too full. You have been placed in a queue. This page will auto-refresh when there's room." 2 minutes later: My account page comes up. *click subscribe* 2 minutes later: Subscribe or game time? *subscribe* 3 minutes later: "Pick your subscription period. Ha ha! Just kidding. Not actually done loading yet. Wanna wait another few minutes for the next error code?" 2 minutes later: No, gotta get to work, sorry. It's been no fun at all, Origin! See you later, if I don't decide it'd be easier to contest the charge for buying the game in the first place than to get through your website to subscribe.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I forgot to mention this in my giant post yesterday, so it gets its own post. Another thing I like about SWTOR: The clothing is androgynous. All of it. Everything the women wear looks exactly the same on the men, and vice versa. If it looks like a shirt + vest on a man, it looks like a shirt + vest of the same cut on a woman. If it looks like a floor-length skirt on a woman, it looks like a floor-length skirt on a man. So far, all of the PC clothing I've seen has been modest -- not just "no cleavage", but no skin showing below the neck. (Almost everyone wears gloves, even). The most revealing clothing available is tight pants, and even those look like pants, not spandex. That's pretty much it. There are some NPC dancers and background characters in slave-Princess-Leia-style outfits, but I haven't seen anything like that on the players. The only downside is that the clothes are pretty much all in neutral colors, and the 'skirts' are tailored to look like the jedi robes from the movies. So neither men nor women can really look feminine. Minor quibbles aside, I just love the design choice. The avatars look great and nobody looks like they're running around a battlefield in lingerie.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| About 12 years ago, I was an EverQuest fanatic. EverQuest was one of the first generation of its kind: a big-budget, graphics-intensive, Massively Multiplayer, Online, and (theoretically) Role-playing Game. Its precursors were the text-based Multi-Use Dungeons, which had been around since the 80s with much the same mechanics but no graphics to speak of. I played EQ obsessively for three years. When I finally quit, I was burned out on the leveling-game genre: kill monsters so you can get xp so you can gain levels so you can kill bigger monsters so you can gain more xp so you can gain more levels GOTO 10. Lut has remained a big fan of the genre, and so I've tried a number of MMORPGs since then. City of Heroes grabbed me for several years, mostly in spite of being a levelling game rather than because of it. I burned out on City of Heroes last year, but kept my subscription through this year and have continued to play once or twice a month with terrycloth. I still think CoH is a great game, with features unmatched by any MMO before or since. (It's not you, CoH, it's me.) But most of my friends have stopped playing and the game doesn't engage me anymore. In November, Lut joined the beta for Star War: The Old Republic for a couple of weekends. Largely on the strength of watching him play it, I decided to buy it. terrycloth, Lut and I preordered it a week or two ago, and we started playing in the early-access period on Thursday and Friday. What I Like Conversational options
Typical MMO quests/missions/adventures/whatever start something like this:
* Click on NPC marked as "quest giver"
* Read a block of text describing what the quest involves and why the NPC wants you to do it
* Click on "accept" or "decline" In SWTOR, getting a quest involves an actual conversation. With spoken dialogue (and subtitles). And shifting camera angles. Facial expressions! And choices of what your avatar will say. Granted, your conversational options are limited and sometimes badly described. (Description: "I hope I'm not wasting my time." Actual speech: "If this is a waste of my time, I'LL MAKE YOU PAY!" o.O ) You get at most three options, and the conversations go much the same direction regardless of what you say. The main game-mechanical impact of your choices is getting you light-side or dark-side points. Most choices give you neither, but occasionally you get a moral choice to make -- kill this guy or spare him, help these people or rob them, etc. -- and depending on how you make it, your character moves towards light or dark. Later in the game, this will effect what equipment you can use. Sometimes the moral choices make you go o.O. One quest has a choice between "poison these slaves quickly" (light side) or "poison them slowly and painfully (dark side). Lut and I rather felt this should be "dark side" and "even more dark side". Another quest offered "give this medicine you rescued from the bad guys back to the Republic soldiers who owned and need it (dark side) or to these refugees who stole it and also need it (light side)". Which both seemed like reasonable good-guy options to me. But even so, I find the storylines and the use of machinama scenes and voice acting engaging and entertaining. This is the reason I got the game. It may not be quite up to the quality of, say, Mass Effect 2, but it's pretty impressive given the breadth and scope of the game. Class Story Arcs Each class has its own story arc, of which that character is the star. koogrr once said that the pinnacle of WoW character development was to become one of the elite units in Warcraft 3. "Not one of the heroes. You'll never be a hero. At best, at the very top of your game, you'll be a valuable unit." SWTOR does not make you feel like a walk-on part in the star NPC's story. It puts you on center stage. This is good for player morale, and bad for universe versimilitude. The game feels less like an MMO than like a four-player game to me. My smuggler groups with [Bad username: lt.warhound]'s Republic trooper and terrycloth's Jedi counseler, and we ignore the rest of the players because if you have more than one of each class, the class stories don't make sense. In fact, you can watch and help other players with their class quests -- unless it's the same as your own. "Only one member of this class per instance". Because the conceit is that you're the only one to retrieve this unique artifact, the only one whose starship was stolen by this crook, the only padawan of this jedi master, etc. There's only one Luke Skywalker rescuing only one Princess Leia, and you're him. I think this was a good choice on the developers' part, but it does feel a little like surrender. The difference between an MMO and a four-player game that lets you auction items to the entire userbase is, it turns out, pretty negligible. The dream of a virtual world populated by real humans who will roleplay with each other remains unrealized in the genre. (Go try a MUCK or Second Life for that.) Regardless, the class-based story arcs are pretty interesting and fun. This is the first game where I may play all the classes just to see all of the stories -- although I can see a large fraction of the other stories by grouping with characters of the other classes. The Little Things
Most MMOs these days have an internal email system. You check your mail box and can pick up messages, items, and credits from other PCs. SWTOR has this too. Except that you can also get email from the NPCs. That NPC you helped escape might send you a thank-you note. Or a gift. Or a warning. It's a little thing, but it's another way of giving you the sense that what you did mattered, that the world is different and your life is different because of your choices. Theme The Star Wars theme is captured well, without actually using characters or storylines from the movies. The use of music and the hokey yet beloved scrolling yellow prologue text are good touches. The jedi have that same sense of being the good guys and yet their code isn't as pure and sensible as one might hope. I am not a big SW fan, in fact, but I find it very well done. What I Don't Like Coding problems
You have to set your keybinds and preferences for each character, which is not uncommon to MMOs yet still annoying. More annoying is that the game forgets your preferences occasionally -- if you don't want to use the "cover bar", you need to turn it off every time you log in and occasionally in the middle of a session. I eventually resigned myself to using it. The autofollow command, which is seldom very good in an MMO, is completely useless in SWTOR. It cannot follow a character moving in a straight line on level ground for fifty yards. It's that bad. Game Mechanics
This is very, very subjective. I am at best a mediocre player of MMOs. I am slow at targeting mobs, slow at figuring out which mob everyone else is attacking, or which one is being held and shouldn't be attacked. I have basically no sense of direction and am slow at figuring out the path I'm supposed to take to get to any given location. I pretty much play this game by following Lut and Terry, looting the mobs they've killed, and now and again healing them or tossing fire at something that was tough enough to survive their initial volley. Come to think of it, that's how I played CoH, too. I find myself regretting that the conversational options don't change if you've got a group, because there've been times I'd like to have said to a troublesome NPC, "Oh no, no, kiddo, your problem isn't messing with *me*. Now, messing with the jedi and the boy scout here -- BIG MISTAKE." SWTOR amplifies my incompetence a great deal. My 15th (out of 50) level smuggler has at least 20 powers. There's a bunch of ranged attacks, including a few damage-over-time, a few straight damage, a charged shot, a couple of explosives, a few melee attacks, a power to recharge my powers, two heals, a buff, a stealth power that I don't actually know when I'm supposed to use, and some other stuff I can't even remember much less know what to do with it. I can effectively use about 6 different abilities in a fight. I don't really want more than that. Maybe when I've been playing the game for a few hundred hours I'll feel differently, but to be honest, I was never enthusiastic about having more than ten powers in CoH, and CoH hadn't given me nearly this many by level 15. @.@ I keep getting upgrades to existing powers, too, so I don't think I'm supposed to be just ignoring some. Oh, and the 'cover bar' that I didn't want needs to be re-arranged every time I get a new power, because it doesn't automatically get anything. So I need to periodically comb through my giant list of powers figuring out what does what and needs to be where, and trying to arrange things so there's a chance I will be able to remember which buttons to push in the 1.5 seconds before Lut and Terry have killed whatever mob I had targeted. I am sure for many people, this is great fun, but for me it just reminds me how I have no idea what I'm doing and suck. v.v SWTOR attempts to help with directions by providing a minimap that's too small to be useful when navigating between quests, and a big map that usually needs to be navigated up a level or two before I can find what I'm looking for. If I try to figure out where I'm going without just following Lut and Terry, they'll have arrived before I start moving. Obviously, this is a problem with me and not the navigational system, since it works fine for them. The various maps do helpfully mark where my other group members are, so I can usually manage to stay glued to them. The maps are often twisty, with a lots of walls/mountains that you can't walk through and have to run around, making the minimap's "target thisaway" icons pretty useless. Tl;dr version: * As far as combats go, the game plays a lot like all the other MMOs out there.
* As far as navigation goes, it's more annoying than CoH for me, mostly because there are more nested maps and the zone maps are twistier. A Zillion Simultaneous Quests Generally, you pick up all the quests you can find for an area, then run around that area doing them in geographical order. I find this pretty meh. I lose track of the story threads when there are so many competing ones. In CoH, where you had travel powers and moved quickly across the city, doing one story at a time worked great. I guess this is more in-theme for Star Wars -- "we'll do some extra good deeds while we're down in this cess pit anyway" but meh. Few Instances I'm spoiled by CoH, where most of your missions were instanced. Most of the Star Wars content isn't. They cut down on player competition by having lots of zone instances -- there might be hundreds of people in Black Sun territory right now, but only twenty or thirty in the same version you're in. Still, we've only done one group-specific instance so far. Level-Specific Grouping
Like every other game except CoH, you need to group with people your level. If your friend is 15th and you're 8th, you can't even get to the same planet as him, much less help him with his missions or he with yours. This shouldn't annoy me because it's "every other game but CoH", but it does. Tl;dr
"If City of Heroes could match the conversational scenes for the storylines, I'd rather be playing it." Other Stuff
Crafting works much the way it does in games like WoW and Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. You gather bits and combine them to make stuff and to improve your making-stuff skill. The nice thing about crafting in SWTOR are that it's a crew skill -- you get NPC companions and they do your crafting skills for you. This doesn't make a huge difference -- you still have to give your crew orders and you still have to tie up inventory/bank slots with crafting bits. But it does mean that you don't have to pick out the crafting bits and put them into the special forge or whatever. You don't need to carefully organize your stacks of crafting bits so you can find them later. Your crew will pick out what they need, as long as you've got it somewhere. I kind of like the crafting, but I always have kind of liked crafting in various games, so that's not saying much. Anyway, I've only been playing for one weekend, which is nothing in MMO time. But I'm enjoying it overall, despite my incompetence and laments. It's a good game.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android. | | comments: 12 comments or Leave a comment |
| The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about wealth volatility among the top 1% of income-earners.
The total income of the top 1%—or those earning more than $343,000 in 2009—fell by more than 30% from 2007, according to the most recent Internal Revenue Service data. By contrast, the average income of the bottom 90% fell less than 3% during the same period.
A November Federal Reserve study, meanwhile, found that a third of the people in the top 1% in 2007, as measured by wealth, were no longer in the top 1% in 2009.</blockqoute>
I'm not expecting anyone to have a lot of sympathy for the plight of the folks making only $343,000 a year instead of half a million, but I found two things of particular interest. First, the statistics above don't follow the usual narrative of "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" and they don't conform to perception class immobility: if a third of the top 1% fell out of that group in a two-year span, that also means that a different .33% of the population ascended to it.
Second was the high volatility of that wealth -- most people in the top 1% have most of their eggs in one basket. They are heavily invested in one asset: when that asset -- be it real estate, a single company, a single stock, whatever -- rises, their wealth skyrockets. When it falls, their wealth plummets. They're also frequently highly leveraged, which mean that if the wealth of their main asset plummets, they wind up not just "less rich" but actually bankrupt. (Some of you may recall this nearly happening to Donald Trump in the 90s.)
The author of the article describes this volatility as something to avoid -- it's the typical investment mantra of "diversify, diversify, diversify". If you've got one big asset, sell a lot of it and invest in a variety of other stuff instead.
But the mantra of "diversify, diversify, diversify" is about protecting your existing wealth and increasing it slowly and cautiously. If you were the sort to diversify and be cautious, would you get into the top 1% in the first place? Would you even want to? I mean, obviously if I gave you a choice between $10,000,000 and $100,000,000, you'd take $100,000,000. But if I gave you a choice between a 99% chance of $10,000,000 or a 20% chance of $100,000,000, how many of you would rather go for the $100,000,000? Those are GREAT odds, and if I could play them all day I'd certainly try for the $100,000,000. But if I'm only getting to play once -- $10,000,000 is PLENTY. Another $90,000,000 is overkill. I'm not giving up a shot at $10,000,000 to get it.
My point is -- how much of getting into the top 1% is really just a matter of caring enough about getting richer that you're willing to take huge risks in the hopes of getting there? And if you took huge risks to get there, is it reasonable to expect you to stop taking risks? Are you there because you wanted to reach $X and once you get there, you're done, or are you there because you're addicted to playing the game and you're going to keep taking those risks no matter what? | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| Eight years ago, I took out a mortgage and purchased a house. As of today, that loan is less than half the original balance. I still have five or six years left to go before it's paid off, but still. Yay!Posted via LiveJournal app for Android. | | comments: 23 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Whoa. I had no idea the US was currently producing anywhere near as much fuel as it consumed, much less actually producing more. All my life I've heard people worrying about our dependence on foreign fuel. Wow. | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| Higher education is in a bubble.
Tuition cost has been increasing faster than general inflation for as long as the FinAid office has existed. The FinAid table puts tuition costs at twice general inflation from 1999-2005. I could not find a handy chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so I looked at their year-end reports for 2006-2010:
| Year | General Inflation
(including eduction) | Education | Ratio |
| 2010 | 1.6 | 4.4 | 2.75 |
| 2009 | -0.4 | 5.3 | *** |
| 2008 | 3.8 | 5.8 | 1.53 |
| 2007 | 2.8 | 5.7 | 2.04 |
| 2006 | 3.2 | 6.2 | 1.94 |
*** Left off because the ratio of a negative number to a positive one is crazy.
The trend is not improving.
Enrollment rates are likewise up. From the National Center for Education Statistics: "Enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions increased by 9 percent between 1989 and 1999. Between 1999 and 2009, enrollment increased 38 percent."
What I really want to know next is how much supply has increased -- how many seats are available for students and how much has that number risen? Are college class sizes growing overall? (Ie, is the growth in enrollment accompanied by a growth in infrastructure, or are more students being placed in the same number of classes?) My Google-fu has failed me here; I can't figure that out.
But the demand-side numbers suggest that supply is unable to keep up: prices keep rising, but that doesn't deter more people from wanting the product.
The government response to rising prices has been to increase student aid, in the form of grants and loan guarantees and low interest rates.
If rising prices are the problem, this is exactly backwards for solving it.
Making more money available more people to purchase a resource doesn't make that resource cheaper. It makes it more expensive, as the pool of people able to purchase it and the amount of money they have increases. Yes, eventually supply should increase, but it's easier to increase prices than to increase supply, so which is going to happen first?
Assuming the goal is to increase the supply of skilled labor, and that the government should play a role in doing so*, it would make more sense to increase the education supply. For example:
* Build more public universities
* Add more capacity -- classrooms and staff -- to existing public universities
* Offer incentives (subsidies or tax breaks) to private colleges for increasing their capacity
* Tie the above to performance & cost (you want to incentivize inexpensive high-quality schools, not costly low-quality ones).
* Improve career counseling to high schoolers (not everyone benefits from a 4-year degree and different majors effect your economic prospects differently)**.
* Offer incentives (subsidies or tax breaks) to businesses to do their own training instead of looking only for applicants with 4-year degrees.
I'm pretty sure we do some if not all of this already, but given the comparative lack of attention the supply-side of education gets, it feels like government efforts are badly lopsided on the subject.
* Big assumptions! I am not sure I agree with them, even.
** As a holder of an MA in English literature, I want to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with getting a degree in a field that is in low demand. But you really need to be aware that (a) your field is in low demand (b) thinking "it's so unfair it's not in high demand" is not going to change that and (c) borrowing money to get a degree in a low-demand field is not going to improve your econmic outlook significantly. | | comments: 15 comments or Leave a comment |
| Several months ago, ladyperegrine asked if I'd write something about the US debt situation. I tried to wrap my mind around it enough to say something coherent. It's very big and complicated and I don't entirely know how I feel about it. So instead, I started this piece about something I understand better: debt in general. I finally decide to finish this up and post it today.
There are a multitude of reasons to borrow money, but I'll break them down into four categories:
Investment
By investment, I mean 'spending money now to increase your wealth in the future'. If you're a legal assistant making $40 an hour and you want to be a lawyer making $200, paying for law school is an investment. If you're paying $1000 rent & utilities now, and a comparable house would cost $900 a month for rent + utilities + maintenance + insurance + real estate taxes, then buying a house is an investment. If you need a car to get to work, buying a car can be an investment. If you run a restaurant, buying cooking equipment for it is an investment.
But it's important to recognize that these things are not necessarily investments, at least not in the economic sense. If the car you get won't let you earn more money than the costs of loan payments and car costs, it's not a good investment. If a fancy new appliance doesn't save/make you more money than it costs in your restaurant, it's not a good investment. I also want to distinguish investment from:
Speculation
It's hard to define 'investment' briefly in a way that excludes 'speculation'. In general, investments are long-term, or you are adding value to whatever you've purchased, or you are gaining a monetary benefit through ownership. In general, with speculation you are not adding value to your purchase and you derive no monetary benefit from ownership. Speculation is often but not always short-term. Day-trading in stocks is speculation. Buying collector's items or art to sell later is speculation. Buying a piece of land to sell it later is speculation. I tend to regard anything with a high likelihood of no return but a high potential upside as speculation as well. For a business person, an MBA can reasonably be viewed as an investment, because most people with MBAs are able to get high wages working in that field. For an actor who wants to be a movie star, a degree in the performing arts is more akin to speculation: most people with degrees in that field do not end up working in it for high wages.
Discretionary
This means 'stuff I want but don't really need and which will not bring me greater wealth in the future'. A vacation, a luxury car, a 2500 sq ft house for you and your spouse, a work of art for you to hang on your wall, are all discretionary spending.
Necessities
Much of what we think of as 'necessities' are not necessary to human survival: electricity, air conditioning, phone service, housing that conforms to American standards, etc. So I will define this as 'things needed to maintain your present level of wealth'. Living in a homeless shelter is not conducive to keeping a job, so a home that conforms to building codes can be considered a necessity. I would still discourage people from confusing 'luxury' with 'necessity'. Needing a place to live does not mean needing an upscale three-bedroom apartment.
On Spending and Borrowing
I want to emphasize that all four categories are perfectly valid ways of spending money. There are lots of reasons other than economic gain for purchasing something. Life is not a contest and money is not how we keep score. There is absolutely no reason that people shouldn't pursue a degrees in the fine arts if doing so will bring them happiness. I have an MA in English literature and I don't for a moment regret the expense or the time I spent getting it. (In my case, scholarships covered most of my college tuition, and my parents and I paid for the rest of tuition and expenses without borrowing).
That said, I would not recommend borrowing money for any purpose other than investment. Because only investment will allow the borrower to make money at the same time that the lender makes money. Only investment can create wealth. Borrowing money for other purposes means owing more money later when no extra money was gained from whatever the borrowed funds were spent on. It's losing proposition that generally leaves the borrower worse off economically.
Of course, sometimes circumstances force suboptimal behavior. It may well be better to borrow $1000 for necessities today and give up $1200 of luxuries to pay it back in a year. But borrowing money for necessities is inevitably a short-term fix.
And sometimes speculation is rewarded. A lot of people who sold houses in early 2007 were rewarded for speculating that housing prices would rise. People buying houses in early 2007, however, were the big losers on that bet. Speculation is at best a zero-sum game: for every person who buys low and sells high, there is another person who has sold low, another person who has bought high.
The Place of Debt
The point I most want to emphasize is this: debt has a valid place in the economy. It can let borrowers and lenders both enrich themselves, by giving borrowers the means to invest in goods and services that will increase the borrower's long term wealth. If you're going into debt for this purpose, that makes sense.
But if you are going into debt for some other purpose, I would encourage you to consider your other options instead.
I cannot recommend that you take on $50,000+ of debt to get a master's degree in English literature. It is not an economic investment. For that matter, I don't recommend that you go into debt getting an engineering degree if you hate engineering. You need to consider your own interests as well as what the labor market is looking for.
If you can rent a house for $1000 / mo, or buy it for $1500 / mo, buying that house is speculation, not investment. I'd recommend renting -- or if you want to speculate, or want to own for other reasons, then put enough money in as a downpayment that you can reduce your monthly cost of ownership to that of renting.
Banking institutions may well be willing to extend you credit for any of the above-mentioned purposes, and I do not favor legislating that away. I would like people to have the option of borrowing for a variety of reasons, even when I think many of them are foolish. I may be wrong. My position to judge your behavior and circumstances is generally not as good as your own.
That also means that we all must judge for ourselve the wisdom of our own choices. I cannot assume that a loan is a good idea for me just because I can get one, because even the best-intentioned lender doesn't know my circumstances as well as I do. So these are my guidelines on when I am willing to borrow money. | | comments: 21 comments or Leave a comment |
| I picked up Magicka a couple of weeks ago, mainly because terrycloth had gotten it, and Lut and I figured it was a game the three of us could play together. The video of the game had reminded me of Gauntlet, but the gameplay is nothing like Gauntlet. It's based around a quirky, freeform magic system which is alternately engaging and frustrating. I kind of like the gameplay, in smal doses.
However, the game design FORBIDS play in small doses, which is REALLY ANNOYING me.
The game has no save function.
Instead, you have "levels" and "checkpoints". If you die, you restart at the last checkpoint. Checkpoints come every few fights, so this is annoying but not intolerable.
But if you QUIT -- or if your game crashes, or if you have to go to work, or any other reason that you might want to play a game for only 30 minutes -- then you restart at the begining of the LEVEL. Levels come ... I don't know how often. I just played level 3 for 90 minutes, going past many checkpoints and dozens of fights, without getting to the end of the level or, indeed, having the slightest clue how many hours of play would be needed to get to the end of the level. There's no progress bar. Nothing.
I understand why the game has checkpoints instead of saves, but I have no CLUE why the game doesn't restore at the last checkpoint reached. Seriously, in what way is this good design? Maaaaaybe I'll decide later that I don't mind repeating the same 90 minutes of play and then however many hours of additional content before I reach level 4, but right now it's looking more like "never play this game again and never get any game by Arrowhead again". I might try it again with Terry and Lut; the game is somewhat easier with multiple players, and they're also a gazillion times better than me at it, so what took me 90 minutes is probably only 20 for them. v.v
Still. WHY? | | comments: 16 comments or Leave a comment |
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Rowyn
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