Month: May 2016

Quote of the Day, I’m Not Sure If I Buy This About Gamers edition.

I mean, I’d like to. Still, I’m not sure I’m buying this:

More than a decade ago, John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, who now work at the consulting firm Accenture, surveyed 2,500 business professionals and concluded that people who played videogames as teenagers were better at business than people who didn’t. Their 2004 book “Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever” found that videogame players were more likely to consider themselves experts, to want more pay for better performance and to see persistence as the secret to success.

Seeing as I’ve personally racked up an insane amount of time on, say, Skyrim – and I’m not exactly sure how the ability to crouch my way through a dungeon while pre-emptively shooting corpses that just look wrong will translate into a marketable skill.  Although the mummified remains of an office complex would make for a heck of a dungeon. No, wait, that’s Fallout 4. So… yes, yes it does.

I am ready to declare kanly upon Steam.

It’s really, really simple. My kid plays all the LEGO games. I don’t. They’re on my Steam account. All I want to do is transfer them somehow so that my kid can play them without booting me off of the network when I’m trying to play Fallout 4 in peace and quiet. But I can’t set up a kid account, and I apparently can’t transfer the games out of my account, and I don’t want to spend two hundred bucks to put those games on a new Steam account for my child, and the forums are full of people who have been snarling about this for going on half a decade.

So. I guess it’s gonna be kanly, then? I’d much rather that it wasn’t…

So what do people use for running RPG campaigns via video chat, anyway?

Google Hangouts and/or FaceTime, right? …Yeah, I’m thinking about running one of those. I’m pretty sure that I can get some people together and it’d be easier to coordinate a campaign where nobody actually has to drive to the GM’s house. The major issue?  Keeping the kids from interrupting.  Which my kids will do in a heartbeat.

[UPDATE] Interesting.

Book of the Week: The Illustrated Man.

…I miss Ray Bradbury. Then again, who doesn’t? My only qualm about doing The Illustrated Man now is that I’m doing it now: like so many of Bradbury’s work, it’s best appreciated in autumn. Mid-autumn, when the days can still be warm, but the night wind has that delicious chill to it. I’d leave my window open those nights, as much to hear the wind rustle the trees outside as to get that crisp air that rolled in off of the sea.

I miss that air.

And so, adieu to The Crash of Empire (Imperial Stars, Book 3).

So, yeah, I needed new glasses.

This is the strangest thing: I’m sitting at the computer screen while wearing my new glasses, and I can see the words. I don’t have to take them off in order to do work.  I’ve grown so accustomed to taking my glasses off and stashing them somewhere that it feels weird that I’m not doing that right now.

Clearly, I should have gotten this prescription updated about a year ago.

Moe Lane

PS: Well, it’s interesting to me. And, aside from the field trip to the zoo – which went well, and thank God I don’t have four hyper-active six year old kids to chaperone every day – it’s the most interesting thing that’s happened today so far. So I guess that’s the way it is, huh?