This book is fucking sick and it’s honestly disappointing to see how little of the machinations and politicking of included in the movies. We’ll see how much that changes in D2 but DUNC felt like the barest smatterings of dialogue and context so we could have some beautiful visuals.
Which is like fine? But it means that all of the characters are flat, cardboard cutouts of their book selves, that’s basically no compelling reason to care what happens to anyone. My wife, who’s never read the books or seen previous adaptions said, “I can’t pick a favorite character because I don’t know any I’d these characters. Even Paul has no personality, no texture. The movie was one long fight that felt like a prologue to the second film.” I couldn’t disagree with that assessment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gjsAA_5Agk
i love when someone spends a year to do something insane.
okay, so i just skimmed the rules book again and there's no GM chapter. i glanced through the realms book and there's no GM chapter there either. There's a chapter with 3 example scenarios, but no thoughts or ideas about how to run a game, no "enemies and adversaries", no "how to build a campaign", no "gm principles", no agenda, no vibes, nothing.
i know it's from a different era (first edition published in 2008), but i'm really surprised that 2e doesn't include anything. even the ampersand game does this! they've got whole books dedicated to it (varying quality, depending on the edition).
i'll be honest, this has tempered my enthusiasm quite a bit.
Continue reading →https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDVDi4avnwk
in case you didn't know, vanessa carlton (of "a thousand miles" fame) has continued to release music. her fifth album "Love Is An Art" contains "Companion Star", this beautiful brooding meditation on growth and staying grounded. in the bridge, she repeats "who i want to become, and to whom i always will belong" set to a deep organ. it's my favorite part of the song, a distillation of the whole. i find it satisfying and contemplative, like being wrapped in a warm blanket in the dead of winter.
i played it for my wife back when it came out, describing these feelings to her, and she said that the whole song and specifically the bridge left her feeling anxious and sad. wild how different people can experience music.
i tried to use the word "immiserate" earlier and firefox's spellchecker yelled at me. this is not a technical or archaic word. and yet it doesn't appear in the "top x words" dictionary that's included by default in firefox.
my iphone knows the word, notion doesn't know the word, google docs knows it, neovim doesn't know it.
why are we reliant on these things to tell us which words are "real"? shit's dumb. there will be people out there who read or hear a word and think "that's a word" and then go to use it in one of these apps, and it will chastise them, saying "that's not a real word". unless they have the temerity to check a real dictionary, they'll just go "i guess i was wrong" and now their chosen speech is worse and the world is less textured than it was before.
Continue reading →I hope I never forget laying in bed after a long day, seeing that jack de quidt had released the theme song for Palisade, putting it on, and feeling swept away overcome completely immersed in the poignancy and delicate tension. I knew then that the season was going to be something special, even after so many bangers, and every single episode has met that high mark.
I got my copy of Reign 2e and Reign: Realms. I read through the core book, will read Realms tomorrow. Gonna copy my thoughts from pms I sent my friend:
Okay, i read it. I skipped the details on the advanced combat and the minutiae of the advantages/powers/magic, but read all the core rules and the company stuff.
It’s the most traditional game I’ve read in a long time. It’s fun! I love the ORE, i don’t like binary dice mechanics, i love love love Greg Stolze’s writing voice, i like that the text spends some time to say “gm, don’t just run players through a plot” and “players, don’t just sit around waiting for plot to fall from heaven”. I like that a whole chapter is a “table of contents” of the various subsystems, explicitly saying “choose only the roles you want to make the kind of game you want, please don’t pick everything”
Continue reading →There's an abandoned freeware game made by James Silva (Ska Studios, The Dishwasher, Salt and Sanctuary) in 2002 called Yuki's Vacation. He made it in Visual Basic 6 after Zombie Smasher X as a way of showing how he made games. I was already obsessed with Zombie Smasher X (just look at this gloriousness), so getting access to the source code was a revelation.
I spent hours playing around with it, editing the bmps, changing the level design, doing really basic programming (I didn't really know what I was doing) back in 2002 and 2003. It was foundational for me seeing programming as something I could do and not just "magic by people smarter than me".
Every so often, I search for the code online and can't find it (because who the hell would keep freeware visual basic code for 20+ years), but I think I've come across it here. The site is in Chinese and even with Google Translate, I can't get the system to allow me to create an account so I can download this. I hope it doesn't cost money to download, but I'm willing to pay $20 if you can help me out here. It's really meaningful to me.
Continue reading →If Daylight Saving Time has million haters, then I'm one of them.
If Daylight Saving Time has one hater, then that’s me.
If Daylight Saving Time has no haters, then I’m dead.
If the world is for Daylight Saving Time, then I am against the world.
Till my last breath, I’ll hate Daylight Saving Time.
i buy almost all of my music through bandcamp, but there are a lot of artists (mostly those signed with big name labels) that don't have their music on it. for the other music i want, i have to use qobuz.
qobuz, for those who don't know, is a streaming service and digital music store that sells FLAC/etc versions of music from big labels. It's quite comprehensive and boasts the best per-track streaming payout for artists ($0.04 per track listened).
Alongside that, it's significantly more expensive than bandcamp. For example, At the Walls by Enforced is $8 on Bandcamp. Kill Grid (released by Century Media) is $15 for mp3, $18 for FLAC. (I know that At the Walls is cheaper on Qobuz, I'm talking about big label releases rn.)
Continue reading →Fidget
Lakeside
Barrier
Conifer
Silicone
Harken
Methodical
Presently
I re-discovered a data structure I used many years ago from a game engine. It’s like a queue but is well built for recursive or nested work. The name I know it as is the Pipeline.
The data structure is { processed: queue, added: queue }. It has the methods enqueue(…args: any[]): pipeline, peek(): any, and pop(): pipeline.
When you call enqueue, you pass in any number of items, which are added to the back of the added internal queue. Like a classic queue, if enqueue is called multiple times in a row, each set of items is added at the end.
You ever start shredding cheese for some small portion and then kind of zone out in the simple pleasure of the movement and watching the block in your hand shrink and then you snap to to see the cheese practically poking out of the top of the shredder?
Me either
I hate that “dad joke” has become a cultural thing, specifically being used to refer to puns. Puns are great, but dad jokes as I understood them are about deliberate misunderstandings for comedic effect. They can use puns to find or create the misunderstanding, but the fun comes from the parallel conversation and the moment of realization.
Did some big cummies!!!!!!!!!!!
https://interarma.bandcamp.com/track/new-heaven
We’re 2 episodes from the end of season 15 of rupaul’s drag race, and May’s paramount + preview ended. We signed in with our friend’s account that does ads, and the very first ad we saw was an MTV commercial “celebrating the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15”
Learned about the takeover of da share z0ne yesterday, like a lot of terminally online folks. Pretty disappointing and disheartening.
I had assumed that, like dril, this was the work of one person who had changed over time. Tastes change, writing voice changes, goals change, so it makes sense that the quality would shift. Not every dril tweet is a banger, not every da share zone is either.
But learning that the quality drop comes from a coup by a money grubbing asshole who is only mimicking the better work of the people he stole the account from really fucking sucks. Can’t escape the clutches of greed or money anywhere.
I forgot to post about the updates back in December, so I'm gonna write about everything from 1.11 through 1.14.
The biggest changes since last summer are a global top-level entry in .splint.edn that applies to all files, supporting the upcoming Clojure 1.12 interop syntax ((^[] String/toUpperCase "noah")), and simplifying the internal logic of the pattern DSL so that the short forms are expanded to their full forms before processing.
Paired with the global entry in .splint.edn, I implemented :excludes, which will skip specified files or directories in global or in specific rules. The paths can be specified with Java's java.nio.file.FileSystem/getPathMatcher globs or regexes, as well as :re-find and :string. Details here.
L, my 4 year old daughter: I know an old lady who actually ACTUALLY swallowed a thumb!
Then she chomped on my thumb.
