Month: February 2017

Deep Concept of the Day, Marcus Was Always My Favorite edition.

So much so I named one of my favorite D&D characters after him. Although this Marcus had roughly 3x the Wisdom score of mine*.

*Not a typo.  I was trying to roll up a Paladin, and then I got a Wisdom of 5.  So I just went with it. We decided that whatever I said, my character would do**.  I suspect that it was expected that I would thus rein in my tendency to go gonzHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA yeah, that was never going to happen.  But we had fun.

**This was the campaign where we made my character’s squire – who was being controlled by the DM – party leader.  Because, really, it was the only sane thing to do.

Quote of the Day, Michael Bay Taunts Us All About Transformers edition.

GeekTyrant thinks that he might mean it, this time: “On the heels of this morning’s clip of the Transformers: The Last KnightSuper Bowl ad, Michael Bay has announced he’s officially leaving the franchise…again.”  But they note that Michael Bay LIES because he is a lying LIAR. …Sorry.  This franchise annoys me, because every time I see a Michael Bay Transformers film I’m left with the feeling that there is a good movie buried in there. Somewhere.  If I squint just the right way.

But the movies rack up the cash, so what do I know? …No, seriously: that’s a potent argument, for me. The last Transformers flick brought in over a billion dollars worldwide while only managing a 18% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes (51% from fans), which argues that it works as entertainment for somebody.  A lot of somebodies. I have to acknowledge that.

This Quick, Draw! thing is surprisingly addictive.

Basically, you get twenty seconds to draw something and see if the computer can guess the answer.  Entertainingly, you can be a webcomic artist like Minna Sundberg and have trouble getting it to recognize pretty obvious drawings. All in all, it’s either a very clever breakthrough in neural networking, or a very clever trick. Either way, it’s kind of fun if you like to doodle.

My Day One Reaction to Conan Exiles.

This ‘die and lose all your stuff’ mechanic is kind of annoying. It would be infinitely less annoying if you could create permanent spawn points instead of one-shot ones. Or do what The Secret World does, which is simply damage all of your stuff whenever you die. Or even let you keep the pick-axe, thus allowing you to quickly gear up again at the lower levels. Or… a bunch of other things, really.  Mind you, this is all Early Access, so hopefully they’ll start adjusting this soon.

Moe Lane

PS: Yeah, I bought it.  It’s FunCom, after all, and I am still a Secret Worlder even if the last original-content update was kind of lame. I can only hope that they’ll go back to updating TSW with stuff in the near future…

Creature seed: Corni.

Blame this.

Corni

 

Most people don’t realize that dryads were only one of many species that were, broadly speaking, a magical combination of animal and tree.  This is probably not too surprising: not to be indelicate about it, but humans tend to notice right off the bat whether a particular supernatural species can be, ah, interacted with without risk of later social ostracism. The ones that are not tend to fall through the taxonomic cracks.

Continue reading Creature seed: Corni.

Need some fast-and-dirty Windows XP to 7/8 advice.

My kids’ computer blew out yesterday, and the spare machine we have floating around is running Windows XP. Is there an easy way to get it up to something functional, like 7 or 8? – Bearing in mind that I’m not a computer dude, I’m not going to be a computer dude before about 3:30 PM, and I’ve already thought of the ‘give my kids my computer so I can get a new one’ wheeze.  I just upgraded this sucker in… huh. 2015.  I could have sworn it was last year.

Two years old, huh?

:pause:

…No! Bad Moe!  Focus!

Anyway, I could use a little feedback on this one.