Alright so I been monkeying around with the module script stuff.
Y'know, redoing the equipment in the troop trees and junk to get rid of all that Pink Armor they put in there, mostly.
Actually I'm sorta trying to make all the different types of troops look more uniforn so that you can tell 'em apart on the battlefield easier, y'know, dividing up the armor and weapons between factions and stuff.
And at the same time I'm narrowing down the randomization-factor in the equipment they'll show up with so that you that can sorta predict how many archers and shit you'll have when you land on the battlefield heh.
Anyways I started redoing the troop trees for the Nords, well, I mean, its not really much of a tree, I guess, 'cause it ain't got any branches, its sorta more like a telephone pole ahaha.
I mean, here's how a tree is supposed to work:
Recruits upgrade to Footmen.
Footmen upgrade to either Archers or Infantry.
See that last part? That's a branch.
Then you would have more branches later, and that would make it look kinda like a tree, y'know?
Instead of just a "V" heh.
I guess that'd pass for a bush.
Anyways the Nords' troop tree works like this:
Recruit->Warrior->Veteran_Warrior->Really_Old_Veteran_Warrior->Retired_Veteran....
Y'know, it just goes on and on in a straight line until you get to the end, sorta like EQ.
I guess that's to make things easier on the folks who like playing Nords, 'cause they're all a bunch of fucking drunks or something.
Anyways, I decided to monkey around with that and add a "Berserker" branch.
Yah, just one branch, so it don't freak out all the drunks too much, I don't wanna force 'em to make too many important decisions AHAHA.
So, here's my problem.
I can come up with:
Recruit upgrades to Raider.
Raider upgrades to either Warrior or Berserker.
Then I go Warrior->Veteran Warriror->Champion.
And Berserker->Veteran Berserker?->Super Berserker??
See, that's my problem right there, I'm not having any trouble monkeying around with the code and shit, but I need some serious help to come up with better names for these damn "berserker" upgrades haha.
The very idea of a "veteran" berserker sorta makes me laugh.
Like, ain't all the berserkers supposed to run and up and get killed in the beginning of a fight?
If they live, it makes me think they must not be doing their berserking right or something, y'know?
Its like they're defective heh.
So that veteran thing sorta goes aganst the very idea of berserking, y'know?
To get all wise with experience and learn how to survive battles and shit?
Who the hell wants some old cowardly ass veteran berserker hanging around yer army telling his stupid war stories and making all the young newb berserkers worry about what might happen to 'em in their next fight if they aren't careful.
So I guess its really no wonder why the guy who programmed this stuff didn't add a "berserker" advancement line to Nords heh.
"Check out my uber high level craven berserker veteran who is afraid to go join his ancestors in valhalla!"
"Crom!"
That shit reminds me of that old backwards-ass AD&D thing where the barbarian characters were supposed to try to destroy everybody's magic items heh.
Y'know, that barbarian loot-destroying thingie would work great with that RMT EQ shit ahaha.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Thursday, September 27, 2007
i812 u812
'Nother new bugfix version of M&B.
And the script stuff for it.
I'm gonna dress my Nords in summer evening wear to make 'em more barbaric-looking in the fall fashion season.
And the script stuff for it.
I'm gonna dress my Nords in summer evening wear to make 'em more barbaric-looking in the fall fashion season.
The Pink Steamroller
Hmm, at first it was just the Rhodoks wearing pink armor, so that was okay, 'cause they suck, aside from having a pretty little hillside village that's located in a nice out-of-the-way spot where it'll hardly ever get burned to the ground and looted.
I mean, all the Rhodoks got is lightly armored crossbow guys and some infantry armed with spears, they ain't got any cavalry, y'know?
They're like the frickin' wood elves from the Lord of the Rings mod heh.
So they can't even crash-and-die in wave after wave against their more heavily armored opponents quickly, like the self-respecting Khergits, they have to run up on foot and die slowly ahaha.
But now my 100 Vaegir Knight strong Vaegir Steamrolller is dressing up in some pink stuff, and I saw some pink Khergits, too, wtf.
Its those new guys, those damn Nords, y'know, they're the ones wearing all my Vaegir's manly-looking crusty old chainmail shit, some game design guy prolly thought the Nords looked too much like Vaegir's on the battlefield or something.
Vaegirs always were sorta half-khergit (y'know, with the cool Mongol Hats) and half-nord heh.
But its the Nords that oughta be wearing the Pink shit, since they're the New Guys, the Vaegir's should be protected from that by their seniority or something, man heh.
And they removed those Dark Knight guys I used to use, what's up with that, taking out all the cool dudes in Black Armor and replacing 'em with Pink guys?
I know the first thing I'm gonna mod.
Edit: Sweet, you can edit module_troops.py to change the gear all the different kinds of troops have and rebuild without messing up your savegame and having to start all over, no more pink armor shit fer me heh.
On a side note, I think its kinda funny how I'm this tough old punk that still seems willing to cave into little kid peer pressure 'cause I've never even tried to play the filthy swadian swine with their fancy over-powered non-pink platemail and shit heh.
I've played everything but them ahaha.
What's that, when you avoid the guys in the game that were designed to be the most appealing by virtue of all their perks and junk?
Think its that Peasant Hero Underdog Syndrome or something.
Or mebbe I just can't get around my hillbilly manly-man hatred for the french heh.
Its kinda weird that I can't get around that french thing, since I tend to rebel against and like everything that the stupid hillbilly parts of my brain tell me I'm supposed to be programmed to hate, y'know, I even took french for two years in high school ahaha.
Well, I woulda taken Arabian or something, y'know, but they didn't have anything cool like that AHAHA.
Oh, and on an almost totally unrelated note, the new siege stuff and the fights where yer actually running up and down the streets with a bunch of farmers to defend a village from raiders are frickin' awesome, so don't skip any of those.
I mean, all the Rhodoks got is lightly armored crossbow guys and some infantry armed with spears, they ain't got any cavalry, y'know?
They're like the frickin' wood elves from the Lord of the Rings mod heh.
So they can't even crash-and-die in wave after wave against their more heavily armored opponents quickly, like the self-respecting Khergits, they have to run up on foot and die slowly ahaha.
But now my 100 Vaegir Knight strong Vaegir Steamrolller is dressing up in some pink stuff, and I saw some pink Khergits, too, wtf.
Its those new guys, those damn Nords, y'know, they're the ones wearing all my Vaegir's manly-looking crusty old chainmail shit, some game design guy prolly thought the Nords looked too much like Vaegir's on the battlefield or something.
Vaegirs always were sorta half-khergit (y'know, with the cool Mongol Hats) and half-nord heh.
But its the Nords that oughta be wearing the Pink shit, since they're the New Guys, the Vaegir's should be protected from that by their seniority or something, man heh.
And they removed those Dark Knight guys I used to use, what's up with that, taking out all the cool dudes in Black Armor and replacing 'em with Pink guys?
I know the first thing I'm gonna mod.
Edit: Sweet, you can edit module_troops.py to change the gear all the different kinds of troops have and rebuild without messing up your savegame and having to start all over, no more pink armor shit fer me heh.
On a side note, I think its kinda funny how I'm this tough old punk that still seems willing to cave into little kid peer pressure 'cause I've never even tried to play the filthy swadian swine with their fancy over-powered non-pink platemail and shit heh.
I've played everything but them ahaha.
What's that, when you avoid the guys in the game that were designed to be the most appealing by virtue of all their perks and junk?
Think its that Peasant Hero Underdog Syndrome or something.
Or mebbe I just can't get around my hillbilly manly-man hatred for the french heh.
Its kinda weird that I can't get around that french thing, since I tend to rebel against and like everything that the stupid hillbilly parts of my brain tell me I'm supposed to be programmed to hate, y'know, I even took french for two years in high school ahaha.
Well, I woulda taken Arabian or something, y'know, but they didn't have anything cool like that AHAHA.
Oh, and on an almost totally unrelated note, the new siege stuff and the fights where yer actually running up and down the streets with a bunch of farmers to defend a village from raiders are frickin' awesome, so don't skip any of those.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The River Pirates
It just doesn't pay to be a River Pirate, y'know?
I mean, they can't be real pirates, or they'd use a little bit of their pirate treasure to dress better, right?
Most of these dummies don't even have shirts and shoes.
The weird thing is they all got these green hats, y'know?
That's why I'm startin' to think they're just a stupid gang of local teenage kids that call themselves "the River Pirates" fer attention or something.
But whatever, they're easy to catch and sell into slavery, and that's all I care about.
Stupid punkass kids, when I was a kid, we had a gang called the Tarantulas.
Yah, its some kinda gigantic hairy spider from the jungle, I guess we were trying to scare everybody and sound tough by naming our club after a tiny little gigantic bug or something, kids're so stupid, man.
Naw, we didn't beat people up or do awesome crimes or anything cool like that, we just went around tellin' everybody we were the Tarantulas.
Yah, I mean, if they asked, y'know.
I dunno, man, we just were a bunch of goddam idiots.
Y'know, capturing slaves ain't easy, you gotta clobber 'em just right so that you don't mess them up too bad, and you can't leave arrows stickin' in 'em and stuff, or the guy won't buy 'em, they need to be able to work the oars or they're worthless.
Yah, that's why you need a horse, y'know, to drag 'em back to town after you break their legs.
Haha I'm just kidding, you don't wanna break their legs, but it ain't gonna be easy dragging six conked-out guys back to town without a horse.
Wouldn't hurt to learn a little first aid or something, too, y'know, to do some minor repairs if ya mess 'em up on accident.
Or better yet, learn some cosmetics stuff, 'cause then you can really smooth out the lumps and make 'em look fresher and shit.
And don't forget to talk to the constable there in town, the Duke put aside some money to be dispensed as bounties fer cleaning up the riffraff in the neighborhood or something.
Yah, ain't nothing compared to how much ya get sellin' 'em into slavery, but it don't hurt to have everybody thinking yer some kinda heroic adventurer guy.
Yah, that's what I call myself, an adventurer ahaha.
Beats the hell out of being the son of a fishmonger, man.
There ain't no money at all in fish, man, its almost as bad as being a "River Pirate," 'cept I guess you get to wear a shirt while you row yer old man around in a boat, and yer related to the guy that owns ya and beats ya and mistreats ya heh.
I mean, they can't be real pirates, or they'd use a little bit of their pirate treasure to dress better, right?
Most of these dummies don't even have shirts and shoes.
The weird thing is they all got these green hats, y'know?
That's why I'm startin' to think they're just a stupid gang of local teenage kids that call themselves "the River Pirates" fer attention or something.
But whatever, they're easy to catch and sell into slavery, and that's all I care about.
Stupid punkass kids, when I was a kid, we had a gang called the Tarantulas.
Yah, its some kinda gigantic hairy spider from the jungle, I guess we were trying to scare everybody and sound tough by naming our club after a tiny little gigantic bug or something, kids're so stupid, man.
Naw, we didn't beat people up or do awesome crimes or anything cool like that, we just went around tellin' everybody we were the Tarantulas.
Yah, I mean, if they asked, y'know.
I dunno, man, we just were a bunch of goddam idiots.
Y'know, capturing slaves ain't easy, you gotta clobber 'em just right so that you don't mess them up too bad, and you can't leave arrows stickin' in 'em and stuff, or the guy won't buy 'em, they need to be able to work the oars or they're worthless.
Yah, that's why you need a horse, y'know, to drag 'em back to town after you break their legs.
Haha I'm just kidding, you don't wanna break their legs, but it ain't gonna be easy dragging six conked-out guys back to town without a horse.
Wouldn't hurt to learn a little first aid or something, too, y'know, to do some minor repairs if ya mess 'em up on accident.
Or better yet, learn some cosmetics stuff, 'cause then you can really smooth out the lumps and make 'em look fresher and shit.
And don't forget to talk to the constable there in town, the Duke put aside some money to be dispensed as bounties fer cleaning up the riffraff in the neighborhood or something.
Yah, ain't nothing compared to how much ya get sellin' 'em into slavery, but it don't hurt to have everybody thinking yer some kinda heroic adventurer guy.
Yah, that's what I call myself, an adventurer ahaha.
Beats the hell out of being the son of a fishmonger, man.
There ain't no money at all in fish, man, its almost as bad as being a "River Pirate," 'cept I guess you get to wear a shirt while you row yer old man around in a boat, and yer related to the guy that owns ya and beats ya and mistreats ya heh.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Lamentations of Da Wimmin
After playing the new 890 version of Mount & Blade for a bit as a Khergit Khanate guy, and seeing all the kickass shit they added like all these different castles you can siege and all the cool looking little villages you can visit and upgrade, and the way its got the beginnings of the Battle for Sicily feudal-economic game mechanics junk, and the five-sided war, or whatver (insteada just two sides), I'm waiting for either the next patch for Mount & Blade, that'll let us go farther, or the source code, that'll really let us go farther heh.
I did the tutorials for how to mod junk in the 808 version, y'know, and I even messed around with that Battle for Sicily code (that guy is so damn awesome), so I feel all over-confident and super powerful about my modding capabilities and shit, even though I don't know anything (and don't really wanna know anything heh) about the graphical side of things for M&B.
Don't get me wrong, I could know all that graphical stuff, if I had to, I used to do all that graphical kinda junk, I just kinda hate it 'cause its tedious, y'know, sorta like I hate country music, and I prefer to keep it all blocked from my mind heh.
And I can program, y'know, in any programming language, pretty much (they're all the same to me, new twists on a tired old titty), I'm not just some kinda superhuman sex machine like all you guys think ahaha.
Anyways I played all these different mods that each had their own great little things in 'em, like the way could pick your own Advisor NPC buddy right from the get-go in BfS, and the Trait thingie and all the cool troop trees and stuff from TLS, so there's this part of me that's tempted, not to really make anything new, but to try to just mash 'em all together so I can play one game that has all the cool stuff I like innit, y'know?
Like, have the southeast corner of the map be Samurai Sunday Land, have the Ghengis Khan guys be in the northeast, have the Arabian dudes be somewhere in the middle with the Greek and Roman junk and all the Knights and crap toward the northwest.
Yah, with the viking guys in the north.
That way you got all sorts of different guys that you can fight with (or fight alongside) with their own strengths and weaknesses and fighting styles and all sorts of little villager economies with their own cultures and political structures and architecture and whatever that a player could explore and wreck the heck out of and stuff.
And it ain't like I'd have to do any graphics crap, aside from stealing stuff from people and trying to mush it all together into a map heh.
But... I'm lazy, y'know, and I ain't really into any kinda suffering for art, so I'd be happy enough with a patch that let me conquer more of the map and stash my extra troops someplace ahaha.
Edit: Woot patch is out hehe.
And the 891 script stuff.
I did the tutorials for how to mod junk in the 808 version, y'know, and I even messed around with that Battle for Sicily code (that guy is so damn awesome), so I feel all over-confident and super powerful about my modding capabilities and shit, even though I don't know anything (and don't really wanna know anything heh) about the graphical side of things for M&B.
Don't get me wrong, I could know all that graphical stuff, if I had to, I used to do all that graphical kinda junk, I just kinda hate it 'cause its tedious, y'know, sorta like I hate country music, and I prefer to keep it all blocked from my mind heh.
And I can program, y'know, in any programming language, pretty much (they're all the same to me, new twists on a tired old titty), I'm not just some kinda superhuman sex machine like all you guys think ahaha.
Anyways I played all these different mods that each had their own great little things in 'em, like the way could pick your own Advisor NPC buddy right from the get-go in BfS, and the Trait thingie and all the cool troop trees and stuff from TLS, so there's this part of me that's tempted, not to really make anything new, but to try to just mash 'em all together so I can play one game that has all the cool stuff I like innit, y'know?
Like, have the southeast corner of the map be Samurai Sunday Land, have the Ghengis Khan guys be in the northeast, have the Arabian dudes be somewhere in the middle with the Greek and Roman junk and all the Knights and crap toward the northwest.
Yah, with the viking guys in the north.
That way you got all sorts of different guys that you can fight with (or fight alongside) with their own strengths and weaknesses and fighting styles and all sorts of little villager economies with their own cultures and political structures and architecture and whatever that a player could explore and wreck the heck out of and stuff.
And it ain't like I'd have to do any graphics crap, aside from stealing stuff from people and trying to mush it all together into a map heh.
But... I'm lazy, y'know, and I ain't really into any kinda suffering for art, so I'd be happy enough with a patch that let me conquer more of the map and stash my extra troops someplace ahaha.
Edit: Woot patch is out hehe.
And the 891 script stuff.
Ozymandias
It isn't easy to be the King.
It seems like every day, there's another son of some minor noble family from back home, beyond the sea, waiting for me in my audience chamber, waiting for me to grant him some of my land, some of the land that you and I and our brothers at arms and so many others bought with our blood and courage, so that he can begin using those lands to raise an army that will fight my enemies in my name, and earn himself a name as a hero.
Which will eventually lead to him waiting in my audience chamber, yet again, to be granted even more of my lands.
And that will go on and on until we have given everything into their hands.
And then they'll probably rise up against me and kill me and take my place, if they don't find a way to manage it before I run dry of land to award their honors with.
It was so much better to be one of them, on the rise to power, than to be the one they come to and whittle away at for their rewards.
Oh, its nice, sometimes, to have them managing my villages and estates and collecting taxes for me.
But I used to like riding around and visiting with my villagers and making sure all their needs were met.
I can still do that, go out there, sample the latest batches of wine, talk with my villagers, but now its sorta like they're someone else's villagers, you know?
I mean, nowadays, if the villagers start complaining, I have to be all hands off, and say that they should take things up with their proper landlord, I can't let them break the chain of command, I'm the King, I have to stand behind my vassals, cruel and unusual and neglectful of their mundane responsibilities as they sometimes seem to be to me.
Yah, it sucks to be the King.
That's why, when we conquer our next enemy, I'm going to move to that country and start over, and leave all this behind.
I'll give this castle, this castle that's done nothing but make me as miserable as it makes me rich, paying me for the privelege of binding my arms so that these noble sons can keep coming in here and picking the flesh from my bones, away to whoever wants it.
Maybe I'll give it over to the common people, you know, establish some kind of democracy in my place, I don't really care, I'm no fool, there's as much room for tyranny in that democracy stuff as there is in anything else, I'd be replacing one set of fools with another heh.
But what do I care?
I'll be leaving this all behind.
To be back at the head of an army, in a faraway land, with the thunder of hooves and the rattle of steel in my ears and the smell of cheap beer on my breath, with the promise of heroic deeds and the appreciation of some farmer's daughter on the horizon, to not be trapped and withering in this dark prison of poisonous audience chambers and greedy families and compromise, aye, that's what I want.
To start over.
Let some other fool be King.
It seems like every day, there's another son of some minor noble family from back home, beyond the sea, waiting for me in my audience chamber, waiting for me to grant him some of my land, some of the land that you and I and our brothers at arms and so many others bought with our blood and courage, so that he can begin using those lands to raise an army that will fight my enemies in my name, and earn himself a name as a hero.
Which will eventually lead to him waiting in my audience chamber, yet again, to be granted even more of my lands.
And that will go on and on until we have given everything into their hands.
And then they'll probably rise up against me and kill me and take my place, if they don't find a way to manage it before I run dry of land to award their honors with.
It was so much better to be one of them, on the rise to power, than to be the one they come to and whittle away at for their rewards.
Oh, its nice, sometimes, to have them managing my villages and estates and collecting taxes for me.
But I used to like riding around and visiting with my villagers and making sure all their needs were met.
I can still do that, go out there, sample the latest batches of wine, talk with my villagers, but now its sorta like they're someone else's villagers, you know?
I mean, nowadays, if the villagers start complaining, I have to be all hands off, and say that they should take things up with their proper landlord, I can't let them break the chain of command, I'm the King, I have to stand behind my vassals, cruel and unusual and neglectful of their mundane responsibilities as they sometimes seem to be to me.
Yah, it sucks to be the King.
That's why, when we conquer our next enemy, I'm going to move to that country and start over, and leave all this behind.
I'll give this castle, this castle that's done nothing but make me as miserable as it makes me rich, paying me for the privelege of binding my arms so that these noble sons can keep coming in here and picking the flesh from my bones, away to whoever wants it.
Maybe I'll give it over to the common people, you know, establish some kind of democracy in my place, I don't really care, I'm no fool, there's as much room for tyranny in that democracy stuff as there is in anything else, I'd be replacing one set of fools with another heh.
But what do I care?
I'll be leaving this all behind.
To be back at the head of an army, in a faraway land, with the thunder of hooves and the rattle of steel in my ears and the smell of cheap beer on my breath, with the promise of heroic deeds and the appreciation of some farmer's daughter on the horizon, to not be trapped and withering in this dark prison of poisonous audience chambers and greedy families and compromise, aye, that's what I want.
To start over.
Let some other fool be King.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Turner Mystery Classics Science Movies Theatre
You know that Turner Classic Movies channel?
Where they got that old guy that tells you all about those old movies and the history of the actors and the directors and interesting facts about production and all that kinda stuff?
And he's on TV, like, twenty four hours a day, man, seven days a week, he must take naps while the movies are running and shit.
Well, he's already seen all the movies, y'know, that guy knows fucking everything about movies, man, even the newer ones, so its not like he's gotta watch 'em with you, but still, man, that's like, totally crazy, man.
I dunno how he stays so fucking cheerful and shit ahaha.
Anyways, I think they oughta add some new dudes to that show, to liven things up, y'know?
Like, some younger dudes in the background, wearing tinfoil hats and playing playstation in that cushy living room he's got there in that Movie Vault Bomb Shelter of his, or whatever its supposed to be.
Y'know, they could be making faces whenever he has to do one of those monologues of his, trying to screw him up and make him lose his cool and shit.
'Cause it'd be awesome if he wigged out and started screaming and yelling at 'em and shit heh.
Or even just cheering for him and offering Hulkamania shouts of encouragement, all super loud and crap, while he's trying to do his thing, to try to make it up to him and make him feel better and stuff ahaha.
Y'know, 'cause everybody loves that guy, really, you wouldn't really wanna keep him being pissed off at you or nothing.
Oh, yah, and some super hot Elvira-type chicks floppin' 'em up and down and bouncing on the couch back there would be good too, oh hellyah, you gotta have that.
Gotta get those kinda women that ask the stupidest questions about movies while yer trying to watch 'em, where they ask you what's gonna happen next every couple of seconds or whatever.
And you know how sometimes they interrupt the movies in the middle, for a commercial, and they wake up that poor old guy and make him do a little more commentary or whatever?
Well, then you can have the guys and elvira chicks give their opinions of the movie, y'know, like, Mystery Science Theatre kinda stuff, where they say a bunch of totally stupid and ignorant crap on purpose, to try to totally piss off the old expert guy heh.
Yah, and then, like, you can see how ragged looking and messed up he gets after a couple weeks of that shit, where he can't remember nothing from doing all those bonghits and his hair is all fucked up and he's always checking his pockets like Columbo for the Visine and stuff ahaha.
"YOU FUCKING PUNKASS IDIOT SHITS TOOK MY GODDAM VISINE AGAIN!"
"Dude, its right here where you left it in your 'Very Own Personal' Funions Bowl, man."
"Dude, I think he's freaking."
"Yah, we gotta do something before he has a grabber or some shit, I mean, look how red his face is getting, his head is like a gigantic fucking blister or something."
Where they got that old guy that tells you all about those old movies and the history of the actors and the directors and interesting facts about production and all that kinda stuff?
And he's on TV, like, twenty four hours a day, man, seven days a week, he must take naps while the movies are running and shit.
Well, he's already seen all the movies, y'know, that guy knows fucking everything about movies, man, even the newer ones, so its not like he's gotta watch 'em with you, but still, man, that's like, totally crazy, man.
I dunno how he stays so fucking cheerful and shit ahaha.
Anyways, I think they oughta add some new dudes to that show, to liven things up, y'know?
Like, some younger dudes in the background, wearing tinfoil hats and playing playstation in that cushy living room he's got there in that Movie Vault Bomb Shelter of his, or whatever its supposed to be.
Y'know, they could be making faces whenever he has to do one of those monologues of his, trying to screw him up and make him lose his cool and shit.
'Cause it'd be awesome if he wigged out and started screaming and yelling at 'em and shit heh.
Or even just cheering for him and offering Hulkamania shouts of encouragement, all super loud and crap, while he's trying to do his thing, to try to make it up to him and make him feel better and stuff ahaha.
Y'know, 'cause everybody loves that guy, really, you wouldn't really wanna keep him being pissed off at you or nothing.
Oh, yah, and some super hot Elvira-type chicks floppin' 'em up and down and bouncing on the couch back there would be good too, oh hellyah, you gotta have that.
Gotta get those kinda women that ask the stupidest questions about movies while yer trying to watch 'em, where they ask you what's gonna happen next every couple of seconds or whatever.
And you know how sometimes they interrupt the movies in the middle, for a commercial, and they wake up that poor old guy and make him do a little more commentary or whatever?
Well, then you can have the guys and elvira chicks give their opinions of the movie, y'know, like, Mystery Science Theatre kinda stuff, where they say a bunch of totally stupid and ignorant crap on purpose, to try to totally piss off the old expert guy heh.
Yah, and then, like, you can see how ragged looking and messed up he gets after a couple weeks of that shit, where he can't remember nothing from doing all those bonghits and his hair is all fucked up and he's always checking his pockets like Columbo for the Visine and stuff ahaha.
"YOU FUCKING PUNKASS IDIOT SHITS TOOK MY GODDAM VISINE AGAIN!"
"Dude, its right here where you left it in your 'Very Own Personal' Funions Bowl, man."
"Dude, I think he's freaking."
"Yah, we gotta do something before he has a grabber or some shit, I mean, look how red his face is getting, his head is like a gigantic fucking blister or something."
Rapid Application Development
Explore the Exciting Land of Zor!
And enter a world of High Adventure where Opportunity Lurks At the Edge of Every Screen!
Solve the Mysteries of the Labrynths of Ung!
Stickamintinnit86 tells you "gtf OUT of here asswipe, this place is camped"
OCTOPUSOVERLORD says "this place is camped... bitch"
HankyPankySpankyFranky says "leave NOW u fucklestick this place is camped no1 needs ur TRAINS"
Enter the Forest Maze... If You Dare!
You shout "CAN NEBODY HERE ME? I AM SOOOOOOO LOST!"
Sergio184 says "i cn hear u lil guy!!!"
Sergio184 says "im commming!"
Sergio184 says "im right behiiiind uuuuu!"
You shout "I CANT C U!!!"
Meet other players like yourself and forge long lasting friendships and alliances!
Ravensoulsword says "wtf all the lag???!!"
Candylady says "stfu u noob"
Hamsammich69 "take it to tells"
IGOPTURBIKE tells you "its all the bots at teh bank"
EZ2Love says "when r they gonna add player houses?"
DRIZZZZZZZZZZT shouts "LF2M HEALERS 4 UNG THRONEROOM pst"
Soulchow shouts "L2B ore"
CapnSniff says "dudes ur just making it worse by talking"
You catch Sergio184 going through your coinpurse!
Sergio184 backstabs you for 413 points of damage!
Sergio184 backstabs you for 413 points of damage!
Sergio184 backstabs you for 413 points of damage!
Friday, September 21, 2007
The War Basket
So I told him, with all due respect to his office and station, that there must be some sort of mistake.
That I simply hadn't been made aware of the fact that we were supposed to supply our own weapons and armor, and be completely prepared for the ravages of all this marching and battle for the Glory of our Illustrious Emperor, from the moment we were called to muster.
And I explained to him, quite calmly and with a great amount of flattery applied to all his military training and accomplishments, my tongue, though it may be sharp as a sword, was of dubious use on the battlefield.
And all I had for battle dress was the shirt I was wearing, with a bit of knotted rope for a belt, which I was often tempted to arrange and fashion into a pair of makeshift sandals for our long marches, shoeless as I was.
And so the officer I was speaking to, in his wisdom, though far from infinite, kindly directed me to the engineering tents, where I would be issued with my first "War Basket," much the same as those which you all hold now.
Aye, at first glance, it purpose is naught but that of a simple tool, meant to ease the labors of those like us, who are assigned to the most important of military tasks, such as the carrying of dirt from the ditch, during the digging of defensive pits, which protect even the best of us in our sleep, and the removal of refuse, and laundry, and severed limbs and the like from the tents of our superiors.
And perhaps you think yourself thus still heavily underequipped and dreadfully defenseless for the task of facing the terrible charges of the enemy's innumerable flaming War Gorillas and the like.
But I believe, as you will come to agree, that it is the failing of your own resourceful nature and imagination that fills you with the fear you feel now, for the War Basket can readily be applied to many other uses, with quick and simple adjustments of its location and position.
From the default, in its normal place of rest, upon your head, which is called the First Position, where it allows you the complete freedom of your arms, and provides all the function and fashion of a helmet, offering the eyes some protection from the unpredictable nature of flames and sparks and the larger bits of whirling airbourne bone particles and such that one will inevitably encounter.
It may then be unsheathed, and held before one's body, like so, and driven thusly into the Second Position, and, when steadied with both of the hands, carefully, such as this, the War Basket makes a sudden transformation, and takes on many of the virtues of a lightweight buckler or shield, allowing one to speedily deflect the harmful oncoming attacks of a mulitude of one's enemies with quick and nimble counter-thrusts, as I shall venture to demonstrate for you now.
And a hail of enemy missiles can cause us no fear, when it is so easy to intercept and entangle said missiles with our War Baskets in the Third Position, slightly raised to the sky and held thusly.
And, when held in reverse, as a result of this quick motion, which is the Fourth Position, it allows one to collect any stones and throwing knives and darts and such that one may find hurled at their person with the intent to cause grievous harm, so that you may then use these weapons yourself, and turn the advantage of your enemy's own superior weaponry against him, in the very heat of battle, or even sell them for some small profit, to the other soldiers who may have an interest in the use of such weapons, if they are of a more standard variety, or the officers, who may want them for souvenirs of the enemy, if they are strange and intriguing objects of an exotic nature.
Simple as a game of catch, you may even find it quite enjoyable, as I do.
Now, the War Basket can also be a devastating weapon, when applied to the enemy from the Fifth Position, so, in an offensive manner, and wielded by one who is accustomed to its use.
Aye, you laugh.
It is alright, I am happy to provide your lot with a bit of good humor, in these dark times.
Step forward, and I shall make an example of you.
Have no fear, soldier, no harm will come to you, aside from that which I will now cause to your doubts in the War Basket's offensive capabilities.
Good man.
Now, as any fool can plainly see, when the War Basket is quickly applied to your enemy's head, in the manner of a helmet, although it does no immediate damage to his person, it obstructs his vision, and the cumbersome weight and shape of the basket itself tends to make his movements slower and more clumsy and awkward.
As you can see, it also has the additional benefit of making his head a much larger target, which in turn can make it easier to land a quck series of devastating blows, like so, in the style we Masters of Basketmenship call "Ringing the Bell," which may do no serious harm to an opponent such as a ferocious and infuriated War Gorilla, but the confusion caused by this process and the crippling effect that the very gift of a War Basket can produce in your enemy can be of great assistance to those around you who are equipped with weapons capable of striking far more meaningful blows.
Aye, he'll be alright, just give him some time for his wits to settle.
Alright, I think we've had enough instruction for today, tomorrow we shall complete your training, teaching you how to quickly weave yourself a new War Basket, in the event you find yourself disarmed and such on the battlefield.
I understand your doubts, lads, but with the steady nerves and discipline necessary for Great Deeds, with naught but the will to rally to the simple wisdom of my words, and with Fortune's good graces, I am sure you will soon find yourself promoted to more rewarding, better equipped, and highly esteemed postions within the Emperor's vast forces, and perhaps even such lofty aspirations as to one day find one's self marching among the elite ranks of the very Shovel Guard itself are not beyond one's reach.
That I simply hadn't been made aware of the fact that we were supposed to supply our own weapons and armor, and be completely prepared for the ravages of all this marching and battle for the Glory of our Illustrious Emperor, from the moment we were called to muster.
And I explained to him, quite calmly and with a great amount of flattery applied to all his military training and accomplishments, my tongue, though it may be sharp as a sword, was of dubious use on the battlefield.
And all I had for battle dress was the shirt I was wearing, with a bit of knotted rope for a belt, which I was often tempted to arrange and fashion into a pair of makeshift sandals for our long marches, shoeless as I was.
And so the officer I was speaking to, in his wisdom, though far from infinite, kindly directed me to the engineering tents, where I would be issued with my first "War Basket," much the same as those which you all hold now.
Aye, at first glance, it purpose is naught but that of a simple tool, meant to ease the labors of those like us, who are assigned to the most important of military tasks, such as the carrying of dirt from the ditch, during the digging of defensive pits, which protect even the best of us in our sleep, and the removal of refuse, and laundry, and severed limbs and the like from the tents of our superiors.
And perhaps you think yourself thus still heavily underequipped and dreadfully defenseless for the task of facing the terrible charges of the enemy's innumerable flaming War Gorillas and the like.
But I believe, as you will come to agree, that it is the failing of your own resourceful nature and imagination that fills you with the fear you feel now, for the War Basket can readily be applied to many other uses, with quick and simple adjustments of its location and position.
From the default, in its normal place of rest, upon your head, which is called the First Position, where it allows you the complete freedom of your arms, and provides all the function and fashion of a helmet, offering the eyes some protection from the unpredictable nature of flames and sparks and the larger bits of whirling airbourne bone particles and such that one will inevitably encounter.
It may then be unsheathed, and held before one's body, like so, and driven thusly into the Second Position, and, when steadied with both of the hands, carefully, such as this, the War Basket makes a sudden transformation, and takes on many of the virtues of a lightweight buckler or shield, allowing one to speedily deflect the harmful oncoming attacks of a mulitude of one's enemies with quick and nimble counter-thrusts, as I shall venture to demonstrate for you now.
And a hail of enemy missiles can cause us no fear, when it is so easy to intercept and entangle said missiles with our War Baskets in the Third Position, slightly raised to the sky and held thusly.
And, when held in reverse, as a result of this quick motion, which is the Fourth Position, it allows one to collect any stones and throwing knives and darts and such that one may find hurled at their person with the intent to cause grievous harm, so that you may then use these weapons yourself, and turn the advantage of your enemy's own superior weaponry against him, in the very heat of battle, or even sell them for some small profit, to the other soldiers who may have an interest in the use of such weapons, if they are of a more standard variety, or the officers, who may want them for souvenirs of the enemy, if they are strange and intriguing objects of an exotic nature.
Simple as a game of catch, you may even find it quite enjoyable, as I do.
Now, the War Basket can also be a devastating weapon, when applied to the enemy from the Fifth Position, so, in an offensive manner, and wielded by one who is accustomed to its use.
Aye, you laugh.
It is alright, I am happy to provide your lot with a bit of good humor, in these dark times.
Step forward, and I shall make an example of you.
Have no fear, soldier, no harm will come to you, aside from that which I will now cause to your doubts in the War Basket's offensive capabilities.
Good man.
Now, as any fool can plainly see, when the War Basket is quickly applied to your enemy's head, in the manner of a helmet, although it does no immediate damage to his person, it obstructs his vision, and the cumbersome weight and shape of the basket itself tends to make his movements slower and more clumsy and awkward.
As you can see, it also has the additional benefit of making his head a much larger target, which in turn can make it easier to land a quck series of devastating blows, like so, in the style we Masters of Basketmenship call "Ringing the Bell," which may do no serious harm to an opponent such as a ferocious and infuriated War Gorilla, but the confusion caused by this process and the crippling effect that the very gift of a War Basket can produce in your enemy can be of great assistance to those around you who are equipped with weapons capable of striking far more meaningful blows.
Aye, he'll be alright, just give him some time for his wits to settle.
Alright, I think we've had enough instruction for today, tomorrow we shall complete your training, teaching you how to quickly weave yourself a new War Basket, in the event you find yourself disarmed and such on the battlefield.
I understand your doubts, lads, but with the steady nerves and discipline necessary for Great Deeds, with naught but the will to rally to the simple wisdom of my words, and with Fortune's good graces, I am sure you will soon find yourself promoted to more rewarding, better equipped, and highly esteemed postions within the Emperor's vast forces, and perhaps even such lofty aspirations as to one day find one's self marching among the elite ranks of the very Shovel Guard itself are not beyond one's reach.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Ancient Ass Kissing
The mixture of ass kissing and disclaimers and excuses and all the reactions he's worried about and all the squirming for survival going on in these kinda things is getting pretty damn creepy, man.
Its hard for me to believe its real and not something that's supposed to be a joke.
That just ain't how we do shit in Chicago heh.
Its like every sentence he writes is supposed to be three of four compliments, but they end up making the guy he's talking about look messed up in every which one of those ways ahaha.
"Oh, you better say he's tall, too, you know, he likes it when people say that he's tall."
Its hard for me to believe its real and not something that's supposed to be a joke.
That just ain't how we do shit in Chicago heh.
Its like every sentence he writes is supposed to be three of four compliments, but they end up making the guy he's talking about look messed up in every which one of those ways ahaha.
"Oh, you better say he's tall, too, you know, he likes it when people say that he's tall."
Rome Needs Women!
So the story of Rome starts with these two brothers.
Not Romulus and Remus, but these two other brothers, named Amulius and Numitor.
Amulius and Numitor were Princes of this place called Alba Longa, which was made up of refuges from Troy, I guess, after they fell for the Trojan Horse Trick and totally blew it.
And Amulius and Numitor could trace their roots back to Venus, the Goddess of Love, who had a kid with this lucky bastard named Anchesis (who apparently mighta been a half-nymph or something, which woulda made Amulius and Numitor part-man, part-god, and part-nymph).
So whatever, eventually, after their dad died, Numitor became the Rightful King, and Amulius got put in charge of the Royal Treasury.
And Amulius didn't like that, y'know, so he overthrew his brother and made himself King.
Amulius didn't kill Numitor, for some reason, maybe he had a change of heart or something before he had a chance (or mebbe it woulda just ruined the story heh), and Numitor went on living his life there in the city of Alba Longa, as if nothing had happened.
Numitor musta been a really mellow dude, yknow?
'Cause Amulius did kill all of Numitor's sons, and he forced Numitor's daughter to become a Vestal Virgin, y'know, like a nun, so there wouldn't be no damn kids that could challenge him (or his kids) for their rightful place on the throne.
But... Numitor's daughter got pregnant anyways.
With the twins, Romulus and Remus.
And she tried to tell everybody their daddy was Mars, y'know, the old "Say Their Daddy Was Mars Trick," but nobody fell for it, 'cause every other guy in town was a Son of Mars heh.
I always imagine the ancient times musta been a lot like livin' in Wisconsin, where there ain't nothing to do but get drunk and screw ahaha.
And so Amulius ordered some of his dudes to have her and her babies killed, 'cause he's the Bad Guy in the Story, y'know, that's what they do.
And of course, although his dudes didn't have much of a problem killing the Bad Nun Who Said She Did It With Mars, they didn't have the heart for the baby bit, and they put the babies in a basket, and the babies floated down the river, and into the forest, where they washed down all those crappy Fig Newton cookies that the Woodpeckers were feeding 'em by suckling at the tits of a She-wolf, 'cause that's just how thirsty those damn dry cookies can make ya, y'know, they're practically crackers.
And eventually this nice Shepherd Guy found 'em, and rescued 'em from the whole Disney Tarzan Cartoon thing, and him and his wife took 'em to their cottage, and raised 'em as their own kids, pretty much.
But eventually, y'know, while they're out doing the shepherd thing, guarding sheep and stuff, the two brothers, Romulus and Remus, get in a fight with these shepherds of Numitor, because Numitor's shepherds had been pulling shit on Amulius's shepherds.
Yah, so they were helping the bad guy on accident!
And Romulus and Remus kick Numitor's shepherds' asses inside out, but then Remus gets captured, and brought to Numitor for punishment, at Numitor's house in the city of Alba Longa.
So then Remus and Numitor figure everything out, y'know, Remus realizes that Numitor is actually his grandfather and all that.
But Romulus don't know any of that, and he gets an army of people that are totally pissed off at Amulius together, and they march off to attack the city of Alba Longa and rescue Remus from Numitor.
And so there's Romulus, banging on the gates of the city of Alba Longa, with his brother and his grandfather inside, who are running around trying to raise all the folks inside the city to overthrow Amulius, too, like some kinda Ancient Three's Company Episode, where its all because of some huge misunderstanding.
So there's a big laugh at the end, when they figure everything out, and they grab Amulius and kill him before can even figure out what the hell everybody is laughing about.
And Numitor gets put back on the throne of Alba Longa, and Romulus and Remus march off to found a new city, with a bunch of the folks who were miserable living in Alba Longa, like runaway slaves and junk, under the premise that there oughta be a place where folks like that can get a Second Chance.
And that's Rome.
Well, it ain't called Rome until Remus gets killed off, after arguing with his brother about where they ought to put the place.
Yah, see, they decided to have a contest, to see which one of 'em was cooler with the gods.
And Remus had a vision, where he saw six birds flying.
And so then Romulus said he had a vision where he saw twelve birds flying (ahaha).
And then they fought over what was more important, how many birds they saw, or who had a vision first, and then somebody, and I'm not naming names, hit Remus over the head with a shovel, and maybe the shovel guy became the head of the Royal Guard for Romulus later on, and maybe he had the Roman Cavalry named after him.
Or maybe it was somebody else.
Or maybe Remus just suddenly fell over dead without getting hit with a shovel.
Y'know how these things work, we ain't never gonna know heh.
Anyways Romulus and all these runaway slaves and junk build Rome.
But... then they realize they don't have enough women.
So they invite these dudes called the Sabines to a big party, and then, in the middle of the party, they pull out swords and chase all the men away, and take all the women for themselves.
And there's a huge ruckuss over it, like another Three's Company Episode, but they all make friends in the end, and in honor of the women they stole, they name all the "noble" families after 'em.
Y'know, I'm talking about the families of the guys that become the Senators, the Patricians, who are supposed to take care of the Plebians like a father takes care of a son and all that.
So Romulus is the First King, and they do a bunch of wars and they're pretty successful and they collect a lotta loot, and then one day, there's a big storm, and Romulus disappears, and some of the Senators say that they saw Romulus Ascend to Heaven, and before he went, he told 'em to worship him as the god Quirinus (who became part of the Capitoline Triad, with Mars and Jupiter, until Q and Mars got voted out of the House in favor of Juno and Minerva).
But all the Regular People are like "uh huh, tell me another one," and they think that the Senators prolly murdered him.
So then another Senator-type village wiseman sorta guy, Julius Proculus, said Romulus came back and told him that it was heaven's will that Rome become the greatest city in the world, and that everybody oughta learn to be soldiers, 'cause no force on earth could stand against the might of their arms.
And that seemed to work.
After that, there was a bunch of other Kings.
King #2: Numa Pompilius (didn't like people worshipping images and idols and stuff of the gods)
King #3: Tullus Hostilius (struck dead with lightning because he fought too much)
King #4: Ancus Marcius (built a bridge and a prison)
King #5: Tarquinius Priscus (built the Circus Maximus, I guess it was a place for horse races, got an axe blow to the head)
King #6: Servius Tullus (instituted the Census, reorganized a bunch of stuff, and got murdered)
King #7: Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (wasn't all that Superbus, driven into exile by an ancestor of the Brutus that took the rap for the murder of Julius Caesar)
And then there was a lot of years where it was just the Roman Republic, when they quit having Kings for a while, and they just had those Co-Consul guys and the Senate and stuff.
And that went away when that Octavian guy, y'know, the Doogie Howser lookin' kid from the Rome TV show, declared that Julius Caesar, the dude who got all stabberized by Brutus and them, was divine, which made him the son of a divine guy (well, the adopted son, but he was related), and he renamed himself Emperor Caesar Augustus, and that was the end of the Republic Period, and the start of the Roman Empire.
Y'know, after Mark Antony and Cleopatra croak.
And now yer only thirty years or so away from when Jesus is supposed to show up, and you start the List of All the Roman Emperors.
Not Romulus and Remus, but these two other brothers, named Amulius and Numitor.
Amulius and Numitor were Princes of this place called Alba Longa, which was made up of refuges from Troy, I guess, after they fell for the Trojan Horse Trick and totally blew it.
And Amulius and Numitor could trace their roots back to Venus, the Goddess of Love, who had a kid with this lucky bastard named Anchesis (who apparently mighta been a half-nymph or something, which woulda made Amulius and Numitor part-man, part-god, and part-nymph).
So whatever, eventually, after their dad died, Numitor became the Rightful King, and Amulius got put in charge of the Royal Treasury.
And Amulius didn't like that, y'know, so he overthrew his brother and made himself King.
Amulius didn't kill Numitor, for some reason, maybe he had a change of heart or something before he had a chance (or mebbe it woulda just ruined the story heh), and Numitor went on living his life there in the city of Alba Longa, as if nothing had happened.
Numitor musta been a really mellow dude, yknow?
'Cause Amulius did kill all of Numitor's sons, and he forced Numitor's daughter to become a Vestal Virgin, y'know, like a nun, so there wouldn't be no damn kids that could challenge him (or his kids) for their rightful place on the throne.
But... Numitor's daughter got pregnant anyways.
With the twins, Romulus and Remus.
And she tried to tell everybody their daddy was Mars, y'know, the old "Say Their Daddy Was Mars Trick," but nobody fell for it, 'cause every other guy in town was a Son of Mars heh.
I always imagine the ancient times musta been a lot like livin' in Wisconsin, where there ain't nothing to do but get drunk and screw ahaha.
And so Amulius ordered some of his dudes to have her and her babies killed, 'cause he's the Bad Guy in the Story, y'know, that's what they do.
And of course, although his dudes didn't have much of a problem killing the Bad Nun Who Said She Did It With Mars, they didn't have the heart for the baby bit, and they put the babies in a basket, and the babies floated down the river, and into the forest, where they washed down all those crappy Fig Newton cookies that the Woodpeckers were feeding 'em by suckling at the tits of a She-wolf, 'cause that's just how thirsty those damn dry cookies can make ya, y'know, they're practically crackers.
And eventually this nice Shepherd Guy found 'em, and rescued 'em from the whole Disney Tarzan Cartoon thing, and him and his wife took 'em to their cottage, and raised 'em as their own kids, pretty much.
But eventually, y'know, while they're out doing the shepherd thing, guarding sheep and stuff, the two brothers, Romulus and Remus, get in a fight with these shepherds of Numitor, because Numitor's shepherds had been pulling shit on Amulius's shepherds.
Yah, so they were helping the bad guy on accident!
And Romulus and Remus kick Numitor's shepherds' asses inside out, but then Remus gets captured, and brought to Numitor for punishment, at Numitor's house in the city of Alba Longa.
So then Remus and Numitor figure everything out, y'know, Remus realizes that Numitor is actually his grandfather and all that.
But Romulus don't know any of that, and he gets an army of people that are totally pissed off at Amulius together, and they march off to attack the city of Alba Longa and rescue Remus from Numitor.
And so there's Romulus, banging on the gates of the city of Alba Longa, with his brother and his grandfather inside, who are running around trying to raise all the folks inside the city to overthrow Amulius, too, like some kinda Ancient Three's Company Episode, where its all because of some huge misunderstanding.
So there's a big laugh at the end, when they figure everything out, and they grab Amulius and kill him before can even figure out what the hell everybody is laughing about.
And Numitor gets put back on the throne of Alba Longa, and Romulus and Remus march off to found a new city, with a bunch of the folks who were miserable living in Alba Longa, like runaway slaves and junk, under the premise that there oughta be a place where folks like that can get a Second Chance.
And that's Rome.
Well, it ain't called Rome until Remus gets killed off, after arguing with his brother about where they ought to put the place.
Yah, see, they decided to have a contest, to see which one of 'em was cooler with the gods.
And Remus had a vision, where he saw six birds flying.
And so then Romulus said he had a vision where he saw twelve birds flying (ahaha).
And then they fought over what was more important, how many birds they saw, or who had a vision first, and then somebody, and I'm not naming names, hit Remus over the head with a shovel, and maybe the shovel guy became the head of the Royal Guard for Romulus later on, and maybe he had the Roman Cavalry named after him.
Or maybe it was somebody else.
Or maybe Remus just suddenly fell over dead without getting hit with a shovel.
Y'know how these things work, we ain't never gonna know heh.
Anyways Romulus and all these runaway slaves and junk build Rome.
But... then they realize they don't have enough women.
So they invite these dudes called the Sabines to a big party, and then, in the middle of the party, they pull out swords and chase all the men away, and take all the women for themselves.
And there's a huge ruckuss over it, like another Three's Company Episode, but they all make friends in the end, and in honor of the women they stole, they name all the "noble" families after 'em.
Y'know, I'm talking about the families of the guys that become the Senators, the Patricians, who are supposed to take care of the Plebians like a father takes care of a son and all that.
So Romulus is the First King, and they do a bunch of wars and they're pretty successful and they collect a lotta loot, and then one day, there's a big storm, and Romulus disappears, and some of the Senators say that they saw Romulus Ascend to Heaven, and before he went, he told 'em to worship him as the god Quirinus (who became part of the Capitoline Triad, with Mars and Jupiter, until Q and Mars got voted out of the House in favor of Juno and Minerva).
But all the Regular People are like "uh huh, tell me another one," and they think that the Senators prolly murdered him.
So then another Senator-type village wiseman sorta guy, Julius Proculus, said Romulus came back and told him that it was heaven's will that Rome become the greatest city in the world, and that everybody oughta learn to be soldiers, 'cause no force on earth could stand against the might of their arms.
And that seemed to work.
After that, there was a bunch of other Kings.
King #2: Numa Pompilius (didn't like people worshipping images and idols and stuff of the gods)
King #3: Tullus Hostilius (struck dead with lightning because he fought too much)
King #4: Ancus Marcius (built a bridge and a prison)
King #5: Tarquinius Priscus (built the Circus Maximus, I guess it was a place for horse races, got an axe blow to the head)
King #6: Servius Tullus (instituted the Census, reorganized a bunch of stuff, and got murdered)
King #7: Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (wasn't all that Superbus, driven into exile by an ancestor of the Brutus that took the rap for the murder of Julius Caesar)
And then there was a lot of years where it was just the Roman Republic, when they quit having Kings for a while, and they just had those Co-Consul guys and the Senate and stuff.
And that went away when that Octavian guy, y'know, the Doogie Howser lookin' kid from the Rome TV show, declared that Julius Caesar, the dude who got all stabberized by Brutus and them, was divine, which made him the son of a divine guy (well, the adopted son, but he was related), and he renamed himself Emperor Caesar Augustus, and that was the end of the Republic Period, and the start of the Roman Empire.
Y'know, after Mark Antony and Cleopatra croak.
And now yer only thirty years or so away from when Jesus is supposed to show up, and you start the List of All the Roman Emperors.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Heavy Meta
So I s'pose I should write what I think about Raph's New Thingie, or make a Hey Kids Kewlio Game Insider Radio Announcer Guy News Flash about it, or something, 'cause I'm s'posed to be one of those Game Blog Guys, or at least a guy who makes fun of Raph at irregular intervals, or something *rolls his one good eye*
But whatever, the truth is, I don't think anything about it, I saw the web page for it, and it was dark green text on a lime green background and I was like, "oh man, forget this Web 2.0 shit" in less than five seconds of squinting.
And what in the nineteen hells is that one eyed tentacle thing in the right hand corner supposed to be doing with that pink pom pom bush anyways?
*rubs eyes*
Not that I should talk, y'know, I do actually know why 90% of the websites out there are blue and white, exactly like Microsoft's and Intel's, I just choose to ignore that knowledge in favor of Ye Olde Fashioned Black & White Terminal Look that scares the children and probably makes me look a little goth or something.
And what the hell do I know about any of that Eyes Wide Shut Second Life Hello Kitty Animal Costume Porn Cartoon shit Raph and all them guys are into anyways?
AHAHA.
Yah, couldn't be helped, sorry.
I'm just a Dick Joke guy, y'know.
At least I erased all the weird Twin Peaks Formica Table Insane Asylum Lazy Daisy Diner Wallpaper stuff that Lime Green reminds me of.
And now I'll retrun to my regularly scheduled program of Oiled Up Gladiator Wrestling Fun and Burning Animal Stories ahaha.
But whatever, the truth is, I don't think anything about it, I saw the web page for it, and it was dark green text on a lime green background and I was like, "oh man, forget this Web 2.0 shit" in less than five seconds of squinting.
And what in the nineteen hells is that one eyed tentacle thing in the right hand corner supposed to be doing with that pink pom pom bush anyways?
*rubs eyes*
Not that I should talk, y'know, I do actually know why 90% of the websites out there are blue and white, exactly like Microsoft's and Intel's, I just choose to ignore that knowledge in favor of Ye Olde Fashioned Black & White Terminal Look that scares the children and probably makes me look a little goth or something.
And what the hell do I know about any of that Eyes Wide Shut Second Life Hello Kitty Animal Costume Porn Cartoon shit Raph and all them guys are into anyways?
AHAHA.
Yah, couldn't be helped, sorry.
I'm just a Dick Joke guy, y'know.
At least I erased all the weird Twin Peaks Formica Table Insane Asylum Lazy Daisy Diner Wallpaper stuff that Lime Green reminds me of.
And now I'll retrun to my regularly scheduled program of Oiled Up Gladiator Wrestling Fun and Burning Animal Stories ahaha.
The Old Flaming Pig Defense
Man I love the Wikipedia.
I was reading about the ancient Romans and all their wars and tactics and equipment and the famous guys they fought and junk, and I ended up with this War Elephant shit, and Crushing By Elephant.
When I was playing that Battle For Sicily thing, it made me realize that the more successful I was as some kinda horrible warmonger, the farther and farther I'd end up from home, in stranger and stranger lands, compared to whatever the hell place I came from.
Y'know, ''cause you start out in an Arabian Palace, and you end up in living in a grim gray stone castle, trying to manage an economic system and a people and a countryside that was totally alien to you.
Or vice versa, y'know, if you started out as a French or Greek guy, or whatever.
Every time you beat somebody, you'd end up fighting the guy behind him, and everything would just keep getting weirder and weirder to you, and more and more exotic.
And you'd get weirder right along with 'em, y'know, adopting some of their culture and sleeping it off in the shadow of some giant octopus statue on the steps of some old temple or something in the jungle and using their weapons and men against their enemies and shit, y'know, afterwards.
If yer lucky enough to get back home to yer dumb little farm where people don't hardly ever talk to each other after having adventures like that, and its no wonder yer all messed up heh.
Its not like people had a wikipedia they could read to figure out what the hell you were talking about ahaha.
Anyways its a cool progression system.
Oh man.
I was reading about the ancient Romans and all their wars and tactics and equipment and the famous guys they fought and junk, and I ended up with this War Elephant shit, and Crushing By Elephant.
When I was playing that Battle For Sicily thing, it made me realize that the more successful I was as some kinda horrible warmonger, the farther and farther I'd end up from home, in stranger and stranger lands, compared to whatever the hell place I came from.
Y'know, ''cause you start out in an Arabian Palace, and you end up in living in a grim gray stone castle, trying to manage an economic system and a people and a countryside that was totally alien to you.
Or vice versa, y'know, if you started out as a French or Greek guy, or whatever.
Every time you beat somebody, you'd end up fighting the guy behind him, and everything would just keep getting weirder and weirder to you, and more and more exotic.
And you'd get weirder right along with 'em, y'know, adopting some of their culture and sleeping it off in the shadow of some giant octopus statue on the steps of some old temple or something in the jungle and using their weapons and men against their enemies and shit, y'know, afterwards.
If yer lucky enough to get back home to yer dumb little farm where people don't hardly ever talk to each other after having adventures like that, and its no wonder yer all messed up heh.
Its not like people had a wikipedia they could read to figure out what the hell you were talking about ahaha.
Anyways its a cool progression system.
Oh man.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Everybody Loves Dick
Wouldn't it be awesome to have a buddy named Dick that could put up with a shitload of Dick jokes?
Dude, there's a reason we don't know anybody named Dick, y'know, they woulda never survived our neverending onslaught of Dick Jokes and laughter, we prolly killed 'em all off or drove 'em away to other planets.
And you know there's no way we'd be able to stop ourselves either, its like we were just born magnetized to that shit or something, it don't matter how smart Dick is or how dumb our jokes were or anything, we'd never know, 'cause he'd never get a chance to talk ahaha.
Anyways, I got a great idea for an invention.
Its a PMS Detector, that you wear like a watch, it detects microchanges in the pheromone content of the atmosphere or something, y'know, so you know yer in danger before you say anything and find out the old fashioned way.
Yah, we can make it work just like the Motion Sensor from Aliens, you just gotta make sure they don't start jumping out of the ceiling tiles on ya and shit ahaha.
Only thing that sucks is that if for some reason, it malfunctioned or it ran out of batteries, and somebody got killed, then their family would probably sue us, y'know, its kinda like selling Shark Cages or something AHAHA.
Dude, there's a reason we don't know anybody named Dick, y'know, they woulda never survived our neverending onslaught of Dick Jokes and laughter, we prolly killed 'em all off or drove 'em away to other planets.
And you know there's no way we'd be able to stop ourselves either, its like we were just born magnetized to that shit or something, it don't matter how smart Dick is or how dumb our jokes were or anything, we'd never know, 'cause he'd never get a chance to talk ahaha.
Anyways, I got a great idea for an invention.
Its a PMS Detector, that you wear like a watch, it detects microchanges in the pheromone content of the atmosphere or something, y'know, so you know yer in danger before you say anything and find out the old fashioned way.
Yah, we can make it work just like the Motion Sensor from Aliens, you just gotta make sure they don't start jumping out of the ceiling tiles on ya and shit ahaha.
Only thing that sucks is that if for some reason, it malfunctioned or it ran out of batteries, and somebody got killed, then their family would probably sue us, y'know, its kinda like selling Shark Cages or something AHAHA.
More Hot Man On Horse Action!
Oooh, new version of M&B is out!
New map and ragdoll physics and stuff!
Thank the gods, man, I was getting really sick of crashing and reloading through all the Same Ole Scary Little Girl Ghost stuff and the Spooky Old Guy Music in Bioshock, and wading through the realistic physics of all the broken furniture and glass and trash on floor, with my screen being all wobbly and fucked up from heat effects and water reflections, when I knew I could be riding around and clotheslining dudes off horses in M&B.
Ah, I'm so simple, really.
Hey you bastards, the least you could do is wait until I'm finished downloading it, get outta there, yer totally cramping my Download Style and shit ahaha.
New map and ragdoll physics and stuff!
Thank the gods, man, I was getting really sick of crashing and reloading through all the Same Ole Scary Little Girl Ghost stuff and the Spooky Old Guy Music in Bioshock, and wading through the realistic physics of all the broken furniture and glass and trash on floor, with my screen being all wobbly and fucked up from heat effects and water reflections, when I knew I could be riding around and clotheslining dudes off horses in M&B.
Ah, I'm so simple, really.
Hey you bastards, the least you could do is wait until I'm finished downloading it, get outta there, yer totally cramping my Download Style and shit ahaha.
Unreality TV
I wonder what the limit is for shit you can make somebody do for a chance to win a million dollars or whatever in a Reality TV show like Big Brother where they get watched all the time and stuff.
Like, obviously its okay to make ten people spend a summer locked up in a house together with no outside contact and no privacy, doing all sorts of dumb contests to avoid dietary punishments and shit, as long as you offer them the chance to win some money.
But is it okay to make them spend a year locked up in a house together like that?
What about ten years?
What about ten years, with nothing to watch on TV except episodes of TJ Hooker?
Think how weird that would get after the first couple years, it'd be like some kinda weird science fiction civilization designed around old episodes of TJ Hooker.
And I mean, its only if folks agreed to it, y'know, I'm not talking about the makings of some dumb slasher movie or something where ya make anybody do anything they don't volunteer do heh.
But there's gotta be a limit to how much torture you can agree to, right?
Something that protects you from being totally stupid?
'Cause once yer locked in there, where yer only contact with the outside world is completely under somebody else's control, you sure as hell ain't gonna get any smarter, y'know?
You wll be bobbing for TJ Hooker Puzzle Clues in a giant litter box just for a chance to eat a pizza and stuff eventually, and that'll be all your life is about after a while.
I mean, a set up like that Big Brother House is basically a giant Brain Washing machine, y'know?
With punishments and rewards, like hamster pellets that come out of a little drawer and shit when you push the correct button with your nose heh.
It reminds me of all the weirder Vaults from Fallout, where they were supposed to be some kinda weird experiment, like having too many people, or not enough people, missing water chips, extra water chips, watching all those kooky mind-melting filmstrips from the 50s and shit.
There's gotta be a limit, y'know, like, you probably can't make 'em all think that there's a terrible world-destroying hurricaine raging outside the studio or something, with the walls shaking and water pouring out of the light fixtures and stuff, and power loss and fake deaths and stuff, just 'cause it'd make fer some good TV.
Now that I think about it, the people who are the first ones to go in for one of those kinda shows, y'know, before anybody has ever heard of the show, must have a lot of balls, or something, man, 'cause you'd really have no idea what you were signing up for and shit heh.
Like, obviously its okay to make ten people spend a summer locked up in a house together with no outside contact and no privacy, doing all sorts of dumb contests to avoid dietary punishments and shit, as long as you offer them the chance to win some money.
But is it okay to make them spend a year locked up in a house together like that?
What about ten years?
What about ten years, with nothing to watch on TV except episodes of TJ Hooker?
Think how weird that would get after the first couple years, it'd be like some kinda weird science fiction civilization designed around old episodes of TJ Hooker.
And I mean, its only if folks agreed to it, y'know, I'm not talking about the makings of some dumb slasher movie or something where ya make anybody do anything they don't volunteer do heh.
But there's gotta be a limit to how much torture you can agree to, right?
Something that protects you from being totally stupid?
'Cause once yer locked in there, where yer only contact with the outside world is completely under somebody else's control, you sure as hell ain't gonna get any smarter, y'know?
You wll be bobbing for TJ Hooker Puzzle Clues in a giant litter box just for a chance to eat a pizza and stuff eventually, and that'll be all your life is about after a while.
I mean, a set up like that Big Brother House is basically a giant Brain Washing machine, y'know?
With punishments and rewards, like hamster pellets that come out of a little drawer and shit when you push the correct button with your nose heh.
It reminds me of all the weirder Vaults from Fallout, where they were supposed to be some kinda weird experiment, like having too many people, or not enough people, missing water chips, extra water chips, watching all those kooky mind-melting filmstrips from the 50s and shit.
There's gotta be a limit, y'know, like, you probably can't make 'em all think that there's a terrible world-destroying hurricaine raging outside the studio or something, with the walls shaking and water pouring out of the light fixtures and stuff, and power loss and fake deaths and stuff, just 'cause it'd make fer some good TV.
Now that I think about it, the people who are the first ones to go in for one of those kinda shows, y'know, before anybody has ever heard of the show, must have a lot of balls, or something, man, 'cause you'd really have no idea what you were signing up for and shit heh.
The Turning of Thumbs
The gladiator-n-ancient rome thing has me thinking about interesting stuff you can do with Multiplayer.
Well, 'cause first off, Gladiators worked together in pairs, usually, and I like that, a pair is pretty much the default for a multiplayer game, and I dunno why people don't design more shit around that.
And I've always thought it would be cool to try a MMO where you just got thrown together with some stranger, with the two of you against the world, I mean, there's a lot of cool shit I could see to that, including the idea that you might win the lotto and get thrown together with somebody who was really cool, insteada just some guy you got chained to that you were gonna have to hack the arm off of 'cause he was gonna die in like three seconds in the ring and be a lot of dead weight after you used him as a Human Shield with your Special Formation Attack Power heh.
And then theres the Gameshow stuff, like having the audience vote on whether or not the guys who lose (and win!) in gladiator fight should live or die.
With the Emperor getting the final vote.
Y'know, should they all be NPCs?
Or mebbe just the Emperor?
Is there some system that allows you to impress them and make 'em cheer louder for you, then?
Will they hate you because you are representing Carthage in a Battle Reinactment, and you won, even though you were supposed to die, or will they like you more, because they hate the Emperor, who is putting the show on, and they like it when you made him look like a fool?
Some kinda complex political thing going on in the background between all the senators that lowly grunts in the gladiator ring ain't aware of.
Or mebbe only players in the audience get to vote.
Or mebbe the players in the audience try to get the crowds to vote in a certain way, like some kinda instigation mini-game.
And that would set things up for where you might be treated unjustly as a player, in the ring.
And then, in your next life, mebbe the gods would try to even things up, by sticking you in a position of authority, where you could get revenge on the people who did you wrong heh.
That's classic mythology there man ahaha.
Or maybe you'd have multiple characters, in all sorts of different positions throughout the game, y'know, like one gladiator, and one Senator, and one legionary, or something, who were all replaced a lot, 'cause they all died so much, Syndicate Wars style, but even then, the time and effort you put into the game could be Observed and Remembered By the Gods, y'know?
Yah, like, your advancement in the game was stored in the cruel and not-so-easy-to-please memories of Mars and Jupitor and shit.
And would those be AI, or players?
Either way its interesting.
And when somebody says, the gods must love you because you make 'em laugh, there might be something more to it than they think heh.
Well, whatever, it makes for some interesting twists on the same ole wonder bread and butter sammiches we keep eating ahaha.
Another thing I was thinking that's sorta unrelated is how cool it would be to actually have all the voice-over shit be in whatever language they really spoke in the Ancient World.
Y'know, so the shit you heard the audience yelling, as a gladiator in the ring, would be our best approximation of whatever those dudes actually had to have their ears filled with.
Then just have it translated in the text box or whatever, if yer dude knew the language.
Or how about two gladiator slaves that get thrown together that can't even speak the same langauge becoming buddies purely because of their actions, y'know, taking care of each other and keeping each other alive?
There's just so much cool stuff to think about there, besides the obvious bits about how it'd be the fucking ultimate in PvP or a good place for Historical Detectives and tourists and social pvp'ers (with the Sentators and all that) or boobs-n-gore guys or wargames folks or folks that wanted to just build pretty dollhouses in the countryside and farm barley or whatever.
Well, 'cause first off, Gladiators worked together in pairs, usually, and I like that, a pair is pretty much the default for a multiplayer game, and I dunno why people don't design more shit around that.
And I've always thought it would be cool to try a MMO where you just got thrown together with some stranger, with the two of you against the world, I mean, there's a lot of cool shit I could see to that, including the idea that you might win the lotto and get thrown together with somebody who was really cool, insteada just some guy you got chained to that you were gonna have to hack the arm off of 'cause he was gonna die in like three seconds in the ring and be a lot of dead weight after you used him as a Human Shield with your Special Formation Attack Power heh.
And then theres the Gameshow stuff, like having the audience vote on whether or not the guys who lose (and win!) in gladiator fight should live or die.
With the Emperor getting the final vote.
Y'know, should they all be NPCs?
Or mebbe just the Emperor?
Is there some system that allows you to impress them and make 'em cheer louder for you, then?
Will they hate you because you are representing Carthage in a Battle Reinactment, and you won, even though you were supposed to die, or will they like you more, because they hate the Emperor, who is putting the show on, and they like it when you made him look like a fool?
Some kinda complex political thing going on in the background between all the senators that lowly grunts in the gladiator ring ain't aware of.
Or mebbe only players in the audience get to vote.
Or mebbe the players in the audience try to get the crowds to vote in a certain way, like some kinda instigation mini-game.
And that would set things up for where you might be treated unjustly as a player, in the ring.
And then, in your next life, mebbe the gods would try to even things up, by sticking you in a position of authority, where you could get revenge on the people who did you wrong heh.
That's classic mythology there man ahaha.
Or maybe you'd have multiple characters, in all sorts of different positions throughout the game, y'know, like one gladiator, and one Senator, and one legionary, or something, who were all replaced a lot, 'cause they all died so much, Syndicate Wars style, but even then, the time and effort you put into the game could be Observed and Remembered By the Gods, y'know?
Yah, like, your advancement in the game was stored in the cruel and not-so-easy-to-please memories of Mars and Jupitor and shit.
And would those be AI, or players?
Either way its interesting.
And when somebody says, the gods must love you because you make 'em laugh, there might be something more to it than they think heh.
Well, whatever, it makes for some interesting twists on the same ole wonder bread and butter sammiches we keep eating ahaha.
Another thing I was thinking that's sorta unrelated is how cool it would be to actually have all the voice-over shit be in whatever language they really spoke in the Ancient World.
Y'know, so the shit you heard the audience yelling, as a gladiator in the ring, would be our best approximation of whatever those dudes actually had to have their ears filled with.
Then just have it translated in the text box or whatever, if yer dude knew the language.
Or how about two gladiator slaves that get thrown together that can't even speak the same langauge becoming buddies purely because of their actions, y'know, taking care of each other and keeping each other alive?
There's just so much cool stuff to think about there, besides the obvious bits about how it'd be the fucking ultimate in PvP or a good place for Historical Detectives and tourists and social pvp'ers (with the Sentators and all that) or boobs-n-gore guys or wargames folks or folks that wanted to just build pretty dollhouses in the countryside and farm barley or whatever.
The Monkey Trick
Human beings like feedback.
All sorts of colorful feedback.
Its how they know they aren't crazy, its how they know their hat holder ain't infected with a virus or something, which is sorta a pre-requisite for making any other kinda decisions about the kinda experiments you oughta do to find new behavior patterns that'd be of benefit to you.
Being able to trust your understanding of Reality is probably the fundametal psychological need, you can't even really do any other kinda experiments until you do the experiments that prove yer Brain's Crack Team of Scientists ain't all messed up.
That's one of the reasons for all the social animal shit, they're driven together by the need to know that their viewmasters and calculators ain't fucked up somehow.
That's what they're really doing when they're comparing notes on baseball cards and their favorite movies and shit, y'know?
That's also the reason folks do mental defrag shit, like playing Solitaire, I mean, it ain't only a social thing, the social bit is only one of the components that make up somebody's internal model of Reality.
That's also the reason some of us can do things that seem like magic tricks.
Like making people run around and act like monkeys.
'Cause if you willfully manipulate the feedback stream, from a position of authority, or with great skill and a knowledge of the buttons you can push, in lieu of authority, 'cause some folks hate authority, and then that authority thing is gonna work against ya, you can make all sorts of crazy shit happen.
You can temporarily alter Reality, bit by bit, in little ways.
It can be good stuff too, it don't just gotta be bad shit, like making people act like monkeys, y'know, don't get me wrong, none of us guys that know how to make people turn into monkeys and shit learned how to do it on purpose, I don't think.
Well, 'cause first off, that monkey thing is only a bit of amusement, its a parlor trick, and it don't work in combat on a battlefield, unless your the guy that has to give the Braveheart speech heh.
And second, everybody I know that knows how to do that monkey trick feels guilty about it.
Well, everybody except the guys who do it through the use of paintings and poems and shit, 'cause those guys can pretend its the object they made that did all the bad stuff, and not them, where you can't pull that kinda bullshit when its some words you said out loud, 'cause, y'know, yer responsible for those ahaha.
So a wilful manipulations of the feedback stream that we call Reality is possible, y'know, with an intent to change someone's mind at the other end, even if its just to do something benevolent, like making 'em laugh, or telling 'em about optional ways that they could look at stuff, to make 'em feel better, or to make 'em smarter or something.
But that same understanding of all the places you can put your hands on the feedback stream to start playing it like a piano is the thing that makes you a good joke and story teller (and everything else that has anything to do with that).
Its the trick that lets you help folks at least escape from all headaches and heartbreaks they've been beaten over the head with, if you ain't good enough to heal 'em outright, y'know, there's always Healing's weak sister you can turn to, Escapism, she's easy heh.
And its also the reason that smart and nerdy folks have a hard time at parties.
'Cause they know shit that threatens the apparent integrity of the Fragile Reality Web everybody has going that makes everybody feel comfortable.
And they think about that shit a lot, and it makes them look uncomfortable in Reality, which is pretty much my definition of a Nerd ahaha.
And nobody likes it when you bring that shit up.
'Cause, y'know, yer hitting a fundamental survival nerve with an axe.
Well, the folks that you can turn into monkeys don't like that shit, and the rest of us were keeping quiet about it, in an effort to get the panties off a cheerleader or something, until you opened your big mouth and set off all the Pyschological Alarm Systems that brought the Metal Gates and all the Andy Griffith Rent-A-Cops down on us ahaha.
All sorts of colorful feedback.
Its how they know they aren't crazy, its how they know their hat holder ain't infected with a virus or something, which is sorta a pre-requisite for making any other kinda decisions about the kinda experiments you oughta do to find new behavior patterns that'd be of benefit to you.
Being able to trust your understanding of Reality is probably the fundametal psychological need, you can't even really do any other kinda experiments until you do the experiments that prove yer Brain's Crack Team of Scientists ain't all messed up.
That's one of the reasons for all the social animal shit, they're driven together by the need to know that their viewmasters and calculators ain't fucked up somehow.
That's what they're really doing when they're comparing notes on baseball cards and their favorite movies and shit, y'know?
That's also the reason folks do mental defrag shit, like playing Solitaire, I mean, it ain't only a social thing, the social bit is only one of the components that make up somebody's internal model of Reality.
That's also the reason some of us can do things that seem like magic tricks.
Like making people run around and act like monkeys.
'Cause if you willfully manipulate the feedback stream, from a position of authority, or with great skill and a knowledge of the buttons you can push, in lieu of authority, 'cause some folks hate authority, and then that authority thing is gonna work against ya, you can make all sorts of crazy shit happen.
You can temporarily alter Reality, bit by bit, in little ways.
It can be good stuff too, it don't just gotta be bad shit, like making people act like monkeys, y'know, don't get me wrong, none of us guys that know how to make people turn into monkeys and shit learned how to do it on purpose, I don't think.
Well, 'cause first off, that monkey thing is only a bit of amusement, its a parlor trick, and it don't work in combat on a battlefield, unless your the guy that has to give the Braveheart speech heh.
And second, everybody I know that knows how to do that monkey trick feels guilty about it.
Well, everybody except the guys who do it through the use of paintings and poems and shit, 'cause those guys can pretend its the object they made that did all the bad stuff, and not them, where you can't pull that kinda bullshit when its some words you said out loud, 'cause, y'know, yer responsible for those ahaha.
So a wilful manipulations of the feedback stream that we call Reality is possible, y'know, with an intent to change someone's mind at the other end, even if its just to do something benevolent, like making 'em laugh, or telling 'em about optional ways that they could look at stuff, to make 'em feel better, or to make 'em smarter or something.
But that same understanding of all the places you can put your hands on the feedback stream to start playing it like a piano is the thing that makes you a good joke and story teller (and everything else that has anything to do with that).
Its the trick that lets you help folks at least escape from all headaches and heartbreaks they've been beaten over the head with, if you ain't good enough to heal 'em outright, y'know, there's always Healing's weak sister you can turn to, Escapism, she's easy heh.
And its also the reason that smart and nerdy folks have a hard time at parties.
'Cause they know shit that threatens the apparent integrity of the Fragile Reality Web everybody has going that makes everybody feel comfortable.
And they think about that shit a lot, and it makes them look uncomfortable in Reality, which is pretty much my definition of a Nerd ahaha.
And nobody likes it when you bring that shit up.
'Cause, y'know, yer hitting a fundamental survival nerve with an axe.
Well, the folks that you can turn into monkeys don't like that shit, and the rest of us were keeping quiet about it, in an effort to get the panties off a cheerleader or something, until you opened your big mouth and set off all the Pyschological Alarm Systems that brought the Metal Gates and all the Andy Griffith Rent-A-Cops down on us ahaha.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Dlunt Bamage
Maces aren't cool.
They're like the red headed stepchild of the blunt weapon world.
They have never been cool, going all the way back to the priests that were forced to use them because otherwise nobody would.
If you woulda told a priest, "hey, you don't have to use a sucky ass mace no more! From now on, you can use a sword!"
He'd say "really? OMG!"
And you'd say "no, you are a priest."
And then he'd cry.
Because really, there's only so much a guy can take of being a priest with a sucky mace, and yer pushing him over the edge.
Hammers are pretty sucky, too, but the sledge hammer ones that look like Thor's hammer, y'know, from the comics, are okay, for beefcake dudes like dwarves, mostly.
So are some of those flail things and morning stars, y'know, 'cause they're kinda like nunchucks and shit, but computer games still cant seem to do stuff like whips and chains and junk right, 'cause that's too hard, so you don't hardly ever see anything like that heh.
And staves are alright, knocking shit around with a Big Stick is always gonna be okay.
But maces?
Nah, no way, never.
Unless they look like a baseball bat, 'cause then they're alright.
But that's sorta like turning 'em into nightsticks and shit, yer getting rid of the bulbous cocknocker bits that make a mace the sucky and embarrassing thing it is, and that's cheating, y'know.
Anyways so much effort goes into foisting these damn maces on us, over all these years, forcing us to use them by adding game mechanics like stuns and classes and shit that require Mace Usage.
And it bleeds over into other weapon groups, y'know, 'cause sometimes you'll be able use other weapons at a penalty, if you choose to ignore the benefits of mace usage, just because you hate maces, like everybody does.
Y'know, so you might be a burglar that uses daggers, instead of maces, but you won't be as good as a mace burglar, or something.
And there's a lot of people that wouldn't even play a burglar, if he could only use maces, y'know?
I wouldn't heh.
So that's a huge amount of content that's just stuffed behind an impenetrable Must Use Maces Barrier.
What a waste, y'know?
Its like, your game has so much replayability, but anything that has to with maces might as well not even exist ahaha.
And I'm not sure if forcing people to use maces is worse than sorta suggesting that they use maces through game mechanic shit that allows them to use something else while punishing them for it with a penalty that makes it hard for them to get a group in the end game, they both seem sorta horrible in different ways.
Anyways its just something to think about.
Oh, and don't even try to tell me that you like maces.
That's like telling me you love being kicked in the nuts after I kick you in the nuts or some shit, y'know, you can brainwash yerself to put up with the shit that you gotta suffer on your own time, there's no need to drag me into it.
You know what's weird?
Those Captain Caveman Clubs.
What the hell part of a tree is that made out of?
Well, y'know, it looks sorta like a chicken leg, or a leg of mutton or ham, or one of those Orange Traffic Cones, made out of wood.
And we always give Cavemen and Barbarians those things, when I'll be damned if I ever saw a stick or anything that fell out of a tree that looked like that, and I grew up in the woods, y'know?
Its not a log, it ain't a branch, I dunno what its supposed to be.
But nobody says anything about it, just like we don't ever speak about how much we hate maces, and it just keeps hanging around forever, getting passed down from one generation to the next, like a fruitcake or something heh.
They're like the red headed stepchild of the blunt weapon world.
They have never been cool, going all the way back to the priests that were forced to use them because otherwise nobody would.
If you woulda told a priest, "hey, you don't have to use a sucky ass mace no more! From now on, you can use a sword!"
He'd say "really? OMG!"
And you'd say "no, you are a priest."
And then he'd cry.
Because really, there's only so much a guy can take of being a priest with a sucky mace, and yer pushing him over the edge.
Hammers are pretty sucky, too, but the sledge hammer ones that look like Thor's hammer, y'know, from the comics, are okay, for beefcake dudes like dwarves, mostly.
So are some of those flail things and morning stars, y'know, 'cause they're kinda like nunchucks and shit, but computer games still cant seem to do stuff like whips and chains and junk right, 'cause that's too hard, so you don't hardly ever see anything like that heh.
And staves are alright, knocking shit around with a Big Stick is always gonna be okay.
But maces?
Nah, no way, never.
Unless they look like a baseball bat, 'cause then they're alright.
But that's sorta like turning 'em into nightsticks and shit, yer getting rid of the bulbous cocknocker bits that make a mace the sucky and embarrassing thing it is, and that's cheating, y'know.
Anyways so much effort goes into foisting these damn maces on us, over all these years, forcing us to use them by adding game mechanics like stuns and classes and shit that require Mace Usage.
And it bleeds over into other weapon groups, y'know, 'cause sometimes you'll be able use other weapons at a penalty, if you choose to ignore the benefits of mace usage, just because you hate maces, like everybody does.
Y'know, so you might be a burglar that uses daggers, instead of maces, but you won't be as good as a mace burglar, or something.
And there's a lot of people that wouldn't even play a burglar, if he could only use maces, y'know?
I wouldn't heh.
So that's a huge amount of content that's just stuffed behind an impenetrable Must Use Maces Barrier.
What a waste, y'know?
Its like, your game has so much replayability, but anything that has to with maces might as well not even exist ahaha.
And I'm not sure if forcing people to use maces is worse than sorta suggesting that they use maces through game mechanic shit that allows them to use something else while punishing them for it with a penalty that makes it hard for them to get a group in the end game, they both seem sorta horrible in different ways.
Anyways its just something to think about.
Oh, and don't even try to tell me that you like maces.
That's like telling me you love being kicked in the nuts after I kick you in the nuts or some shit, y'know, you can brainwash yerself to put up with the shit that you gotta suffer on your own time, there's no need to drag me into it.
You know what's weird?
Those Captain Caveman Clubs.
What the hell part of a tree is that made out of?
Well, y'know, it looks sorta like a chicken leg, or a leg of mutton or ham, or one of those Orange Traffic Cones, made out of wood.
And we always give Cavemen and Barbarians those things, when I'll be damned if I ever saw a stick or anything that fell out of a tree that looked like that, and I grew up in the woods, y'know?
Its not a log, it ain't a branch, I dunno what its supposed to be.
But nobody says anything about it, just like we don't ever speak about how much we hate maces, and it just keeps hanging around forever, getting passed down from one generation to the next, like a fruitcake or something heh.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
A Helmetful of Evil
Dude, a historically accurate game based on Ancient Rome would be kick ass.
Look at this gladiator shit they're saying (on the internet *wink*) now.
They never told us any of that cool shit back when I was a kid.
I mean, I knew gladiators used nets sometimes, and that was about it.
You can't tell me that following all that horrifying shit to the letter wouldn't make a totally kick ass game, even without any of the mythological monster garbage (ain't that monster crap in Gods and Heroes a bunch of Greek stuff, really, anyways?).
And then you got the armies spread around in all those exotic places in the ancient world, and the grim stuff you had to do to appease the gods, and the crazy emperors and stuff.
And the comedy of the junk that mirrors the way we do shit now, with gladiators advertising products and shit before their battles, or with their toothless smiles on billboards, like some kinda Wrestling Federation, and the ticket scalpers, and that Emperor's Newspaper, getting read in public, with his Horoscopes, y'know, you gotta wonder what one of those crazy Emperor bastards would give you for a Horoscope ahaha.
Sure, it'd be rated Adult Only, trying to make it anything else would be like making a disney cartoon with a lot of cutesy R&B songs about Serial Killing or some kinda horrifying fucking disaster.
That's the shit with our ratings systems, y'know, to have the only educational thing out there be rated XXX or whatever the fuck, while all this shit about serial killers and rapists like one-eyed peg-legged pirates and dudes that fed their unruly slaves to animals and put on plays with Live Executions of the actors at lunchtime gets turned into some kinda Rated G Superfriends thing, where you can bloodlessly murder shit for hours and hours for magical powers and treasure and dollhouse furniture in a pleasant, obscenity-filtered environment.
Bah, whatever, its not like I really give a shit, I get that folks think the helmets look cool, I think the helmets look cool too.
I definitely wouldn't mind seeing s'more sorta-historically accurate and somewhat intelligent shit, though, insteada all these rubbery woobwoobwoob three stooges cartoons about murdering shit and looting corpses, but I also know that's where the rating systems puts the money at, right?
Yah, I'm more into smart, high faluting shit, y'know, like Tabula Rasa, where I can make those tough moral choices about whether or not I should kill s'more Flesh Eating Alien Cyborg Demons so I can complete my Magical Robot Symbol Collection, its rough calls like that that really tug at my old heart strings and make me stop and ponder the Big Questions in Life when the tears start to well up ahaha.
I want a game that shows me something from history and makes me say "holy shit this is fucked!" y'know?
Wouldn't it be cool to be the guy that made something like that?
*nudge nudge*
AHAHA.
Look at this gladiator shit they're saying (on the internet *wink*) now.
They never told us any of that cool shit back when I was a kid.
I mean, I knew gladiators used nets sometimes, and that was about it.
You can't tell me that following all that horrifying shit to the letter wouldn't make a totally kick ass game, even without any of the mythological monster garbage (ain't that monster crap in Gods and Heroes a bunch of Greek stuff, really, anyways?).
And then you got the armies spread around in all those exotic places in the ancient world, and the grim stuff you had to do to appease the gods, and the crazy emperors and stuff.
And the comedy of the junk that mirrors the way we do shit now, with gladiators advertising products and shit before their battles, or with their toothless smiles on billboards, like some kinda Wrestling Federation, and the ticket scalpers, and that Emperor's Newspaper, getting read in public, with his Horoscopes, y'know, you gotta wonder what one of those crazy Emperor bastards would give you for a Horoscope ahaha.
Sure, it'd be rated Adult Only, trying to make it anything else would be like making a disney cartoon with a lot of cutesy R&B songs about Serial Killing or some kinda horrifying fucking disaster.
That's the shit with our ratings systems, y'know, to have the only educational thing out there be rated XXX or whatever the fuck, while all this shit about serial killers and rapists like one-eyed peg-legged pirates and dudes that fed their unruly slaves to animals and put on plays with Live Executions of the actors at lunchtime gets turned into some kinda Rated G Superfriends thing, where you can bloodlessly murder shit for hours and hours for magical powers and treasure and dollhouse furniture in a pleasant, obscenity-filtered environment.
Bah, whatever, its not like I really give a shit, I get that folks think the helmets look cool, I think the helmets look cool too.
I definitely wouldn't mind seeing s'more sorta-historically accurate and somewhat intelligent shit, though, insteada all these rubbery woobwoobwoob three stooges cartoons about murdering shit and looting corpses, but I also know that's where the rating systems puts the money at, right?
Yah, I'm more into smart, high faluting shit, y'know, like Tabula Rasa, where I can make those tough moral choices about whether or not I should kill s'more Flesh Eating Alien Cyborg Demons so I can complete my Magical Robot Symbol Collection, its rough calls like that that really tug at my old heart strings and make me stop and ponder the Big Questions in Life when the tears start to well up ahaha.
I want a game that shows me something from history and makes me say "holy shit this is fucked!" y'know?
Wouldn't it be cool to be the guy that made something like that?
*nudge nudge*
AHAHA.
Super Powers
If I could have any super power, I'd want to be able to speak perfectly in every language that there ever was on this planet, not like some bitchy school marm, but as if I was a dude that lived in whatever neighborhood it came from.
When I try to learn other languages now, what happens is that my brain automagically picks and chooses the words it likes best (for whatever reason) from all the different languages I know and they replace whatever it was I used to use in English.
And then I end up taking extra time to translate my thoughts back into english, y'know, I gotta get all the "wakarimasu" and "vite" and "ach du lieber mensch" shit outta there.
It sucks.
And then, even though I can understand a lot of bits and pieces of completely different languages being spoken, (especially the swear words heh) 'cause there's all fifty seven flavors of folks in the neighborhoods around Chicago, I have the hardest time trying to understand anything a dude that's really from Ireland or Australia says, and I hate having to ask them to repeat themselves fifty times, 'cause I know how annoying that is.
I think its just that I'm horrible at filtering accents to catch all the places where the phrases and sayings need to be broken up in order to figure 'em out by context.
But whatever, I really wouldn't pick to be able to lift shit with my mind, or turn invisible, or be able to fly like superman, or shoot lasers out of my eyes, or anything, that junk just doesn't do anything for me.
Well, the invisible thing would be nice, every once in a while, y'know, I'm not gonna lie, sneaking around the girls locker rooms and shit is all good, but the other ones just sound like the beginning of a lot of headaches, what with that Great Power Comes Great Responisbility crap, I mean, who needs that ahaha.
Where being able to understand everybody in their native tongues would help you get all the jokes and shit when yer partying with a bunch of bamboo lumberjacks in China or something.
And I know how hard it is sometimes, to put the really awesome shit you wanna say into words, even when yer using the language yer most comfortable with.
That's why I'd pick the language thing for my super power.
When I try to learn other languages now, what happens is that my brain automagically picks and chooses the words it likes best (for whatever reason) from all the different languages I know and they replace whatever it was I used to use in English.
And then I end up taking extra time to translate my thoughts back into english, y'know, I gotta get all the "wakarimasu" and "vite" and "ach du lieber mensch" shit outta there.
It sucks.
And then, even though I can understand a lot of bits and pieces of completely different languages being spoken, (especially the swear words heh) 'cause there's all fifty seven flavors of folks in the neighborhoods around Chicago, I have the hardest time trying to understand anything a dude that's really from Ireland or Australia says, and I hate having to ask them to repeat themselves fifty times, 'cause I know how annoying that is.
I think its just that I'm horrible at filtering accents to catch all the places where the phrases and sayings need to be broken up in order to figure 'em out by context.
But whatever, I really wouldn't pick to be able to lift shit with my mind, or turn invisible, or be able to fly like superman, or shoot lasers out of my eyes, or anything, that junk just doesn't do anything for me.
Well, the invisible thing would be nice, every once in a while, y'know, I'm not gonna lie, sneaking around the girls locker rooms and shit is all good, but the other ones just sound like the beginning of a lot of headaches, what with that Great Power Comes Great Responisbility crap, I mean, who needs that ahaha.
Where being able to understand everybody in their native tongues would help you get all the jokes and shit when yer partying with a bunch of bamboo lumberjacks in China or something.
And I know how hard it is sometimes, to put the really awesome shit you wanna say into words, even when yer using the language yer most comfortable with.
That's why I'd pick the language thing for my super power.
The Dude Abides
In the Second Age of the Internet, before EQ and UO, the virtual multiverse was conquered by an unimaginably ultrahumongous horde of orcs and savage barbarians from the world of Half Life and Quake, and there were a million websites where Quakeclans talked shit 24/7 and did their best to spread the Foulest Cultural Manure Imaginable, with Stick Figure Cartoons to Illustrate All the Evil Technicalities That Were Easy To Miss in our insults, because it made us laugh.
At the time, the population of people playing Counterstrike (and just Counterstrike) on the internet every night was roughly equivalent to amount of subscriptions EQ had in the first height of its populairty.
And that is where the term "toon," and "owns," and among many other, more horrible things, comes from.
And Lum knows this, and Dundee also knows, because I know they were both there, in the Second Age, with their umbrellas, trying to avoid the splatter of human body fluids.
Hell, Dundee was there in the First Age, where we downloaded pr0n and the shareware versions of Test Drive 1 and Wolfenstein 3d from BBSs and we ended up with cool viruses like Stoned (that actually made your computer run slower and slower every time you booted it up) and Monkey (that did something random everytime you booted your computer up) and stuff.
The Text Based Multi-User Dungeon People were almost entirely invisible in those days, nobody wanted to play text-based anything when we could wander around in Binary Space Partition Trees, pretty much right off the bat, after the 386 came out.
What I'm saying is that while there was a culture on the internet before the Quakewhores showed up, we didn't even notice it, we were totally oblivious to it, and we certainly didn't adopt anything from it, because it was just a couple of Scientists whispering to each other in a corner somewhere, and we were this gigantic Military Operation, marching along, singing songs about what we'd like to do to your momma at the top of our lungs.
And then UO came out, and it wasn't in 3d, so only a wussbag would play that, and all the wussbags who played it, and didn't play Quake, called us d00ds, and dewds, and l33tspeakers and shit.
And then EQ came out, and it was in 3d, and it even used the Quake engine, and every time us Quakewhores hit the spacebar, we heard the familiar "hoot" huff-of-effort noise from Quake, which made us feel right at home, and that's how The Brad managed to finally bring us into the fold.
But its strange that nobody, but me, will tell you this.
And instead, you new guys think we all came from the Invisible Land of MUDs or some shit.
Just because the Scientists tell you that.
You are not the spawn of the Scientists who played games on a mainframe.
You are the offspring of orcs and barbarians who ran up and down virtual corridors and beat each other to shit with grenades and crowbars and bathed in showers of gore and laughter.
And Scientists are not the only ones that played D&D, either.
It was a counter-cultural thing in its day, as well.
You'd be more likely to find Hell's Angels and Hippy Underground Comic Book Collector guys and Punk Rock Chicks smoking pot and eating Doritos and playing D&D than you would to find uptight Mainframe people doing it heh.
Not that they weren't invited, 'cause we got along fine (for the most part) with Nuclear Submarine Scientists and everything too, but they weren't by any means the majority of the people at the table, as a matter of fact, they were the only ones that didn't join in and sing along when everybody would suddenly break out into a rousing rendition of Come On Baby Light My Fire, 'cause they didn't know any of the fucking words ahaha.
So let's just accept the ugly reality of our roots and shit already, y'know, there's really nothing to be embarrassed about, we might be all crass and crude underneath these smooth, stainless steel exteriors, but we were never a bunch of stupid people, even if we weren't a bunch Nuclear Submarine Scientists and Mild Mannered Librarians.
Y'know, I dunno if its still true, but for a while, the two guys who did the best as adults on the IQ test (in the US, at least, heh) were a Bouncer in a Bar (he was, and still might be, the Head of MENSA), and a motorcycle repair guy with a criminal record.
And the Clock Cycle Gods who wrote Wolfenstein and the Quakes (to whom we are all indebted) were a bunch of smelly wannabe Death Metal Guys who wore spandex to work.
And Wolfenstein 3d made over a million in upgrades from shareware, and Doom made over ten million (I still can't believe anybody actually paid them anything when you could just download the wads of the full game from some hive of scum and villainy for free ahaha).
That is really where most of it comes from, y'know, it wasn't all made in some clean-room laboratory where they use probabilty field cameras to take pictures of quantum particles, people like my stepdad, who worked for Intel when they came out with the 80x86, originally put computers together by hammering parts into a piece of plywood in their garage heh.
And before that, he had to ride a bicycle to work at McDonalds, 'cause he was a poor kid with an alchoholic momma and no dad.
So this Everything Comes From the Revenge of the MUD Nerds and shit bothers me a little, not because I hate nerds, y'know, 'cause I've never hated nerds, some of my favorite people are nerds, man, and all of us got a little Nerd in us, I got a lot more Nerd in me than the average guy at the bar does, that's fer sure, and I love nerdy chicks, as long as they ain't too freaky with the Acting Like Spock shit, 'cause I don't think my delicate sensibilities could survive taking a shower with Leonard Nimoy.
Well, yah, mebbe if it was a young Leonard Nimoy, then sure.
It just bothers me 'cause it draws a picture that ain't even remotely accurate, and then nobody but me ever says anything about it.
I know why Lum and Dundee don't say nothing, its 'cause they used to get hassled by the Quakewhores, they fucking hated the d00ds that robbed their houses and generally ruined their gaming experiences in UO, its like some kinda Hatfield and McKoy thingie going on there.
But man, that was a long time ago, y'know?
And I wasn't even there, 'cause UO was too much of a "stupid little icon game" for me and the Real Life Dwarf to be caught playing, at the time.
But we were picking on the guys that were bothering you, in Real Life, for playing such a "stupid little icon game," so we were sorta on your side, if you think about a little.
Heheheheh.
Bah, whatever, now I'm starting to see how pointless it is for me to try to correct shit that's going wrong with gaming history ahaha.
At the time, the population of people playing Counterstrike (and just Counterstrike) on the internet every night was roughly equivalent to amount of subscriptions EQ had in the first height of its populairty.
And that is where the term "toon," and "owns," and among many other, more horrible things, comes from.
And Lum knows this, and Dundee also knows, because I know they were both there, in the Second Age, with their umbrellas, trying to avoid the splatter of human body fluids.
Hell, Dundee was there in the First Age, where we downloaded pr0n and the shareware versions of Test Drive 1 and Wolfenstein 3d from BBSs and we ended up with cool viruses like Stoned (that actually made your computer run slower and slower every time you booted it up) and Monkey (that did something random everytime you booted your computer up) and stuff.
The Text Based Multi-User Dungeon People were almost entirely invisible in those days, nobody wanted to play text-based anything when we could wander around in Binary Space Partition Trees, pretty much right off the bat, after the 386 came out.
What I'm saying is that while there was a culture on the internet before the Quakewhores showed up, we didn't even notice it, we were totally oblivious to it, and we certainly didn't adopt anything from it, because it was just a couple of Scientists whispering to each other in a corner somewhere, and we were this gigantic Military Operation, marching along, singing songs about what we'd like to do to your momma at the top of our lungs.
And then UO came out, and it wasn't in 3d, so only a wussbag would play that, and all the wussbags who played it, and didn't play Quake, called us d00ds, and dewds, and l33tspeakers and shit.
And then EQ came out, and it was in 3d, and it even used the Quake engine, and every time us Quakewhores hit the spacebar, we heard the familiar "hoot" huff-of-effort noise from Quake, which made us feel right at home, and that's how The Brad managed to finally bring us into the fold.
But its strange that nobody, but me, will tell you this.
And instead, you new guys think we all came from the Invisible Land of MUDs or some shit.
Just because the Scientists tell you that.
You are not the spawn of the Scientists who played games on a mainframe.
You are the offspring of orcs and barbarians who ran up and down virtual corridors and beat each other to shit with grenades and crowbars and bathed in showers of gore and laughter.
And Scientists are not the only ones that played D&D, either.
It was a counter-cultural thing in its day, as well.
You'd be more likely to find Hell's Angels and Hippy Underground Comic Book Collector guys and Punk Rock Chicks smoking pot and eating Doritos and playing D&D than you would to find uptight Mainframe people doing it heh.
Not that they weren't invited, 'cause we got along fine (for the most part) with Nuclear Submarine Scientists and everything too, but they weren't by any means the majority of the people at the table, as a matter of fact, they were the only ones that didn't join in and sing along when everybody would suddenly break out into a rousing rendition of Come On Baby Light My Fire, 'cause they didn't know any of the fucking words ahaha.
So let's just accept the ugly reality of our roots and shit already, y'know, there's really nothing to be embarrassed about, we might be all crass and crude underneath these smooth, stainless steel exteriors, but we were never a bunch of stupid people, even if we weren't a bunch Nuclear Submarine Scientists and Mild Mannered Librarians.
Y'know, I dunno if its still true, but for a while, the two guys who did the best as adults on the IQ test (in the US, at least, heh) were a Bouncer in a Bar (he was, and still might be, the Head of MENSA), and a motorcycle repair guy with a criminal record.
And the Clock Cycle Gods who wrote Wolfenstein and the Quakes (to whom we are all indebted) were a bunch of smelly wannabe Death Metal Guys who wore spandex to work.
And Wolfenstein 3d made over a million in upgrades from shareware, and Doom made over ten million (I still can't believe anybody actually paid them anything when you could just download the wads of the full game from some hive of scum and villainy for free ahaha).
That is really where most of it comes from, y'know, it wasn't all made in some clean-room laboratory where they use probabilty field cameras to take pictures of quantum particles, people like my stepdad, who worked for Intel when they came out with the 80x86, originally put computers together by hammering parts into a piece of plywood in their garage heh.
And before that, he had to ride a bicycle to work at McDonalds, 'cause he was a poor kid with an alchoholic momma and no dad.
So this Everything Comes From the Revenge of the MUD Nerds and shit bothers me a little, not because I hate nerds, y'know, 'cause I've never hated nerds, some of my favorite people are nerds, man, and all of us got a little Nerd in us, I got a lot more Nerd in me than the average guy at the bar does, that's fer sure, and I love nerdy chicks, as long as they ain't too freaky with the Acting Like Spock shit, 'cause I don't think my delicate sensibilities could survive taking a shower with Leonard Nimoy.
Well, yah, mebbe if it was a young Leonard Nimoy, then sure.
It just bothers me 'cause it draws a picture that ain't even remotely accurate, and then nobody but me ever says anything about it.
I know why Lum and Dundee don't say nothing, its 'cause they used to get hassled by the Quakewhores, they fucking hated the d00ds that robbed their houses and generally ruined their gaming experiences in UO, its like some kinda Hatfield and McKoy thingie going on there.
But man, that was a long time ago, y'know?
And I wasn't even there, 'cause UO was too much of a "stupid little icon game" for me and the Real Life Dwarf to be caught playing, at the time.
But we were picking on the guys that were bothering you, in Real Life, for playing such a "stupid little icon game," so we were sorta on your side, if you think about a little.
Heheheheh.
Bah, whatever, now I'm starting to see how pointless it is for me to try to correct shit that's going wrong with gaming history ahaha.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Oh Hail Yah
I dunno why I didn't think of this earlier, since it was the fucking shit when I was a kid.
'Till the blood on your sword is the blood of a king.
Y'know, old guys seldom, if ever, sing in a really super high pitched voice, but its fucking hilarious when we do, and we should prolly do it more often.
Now you'll know where I get that Dancing Cowboy Strikeforce screaming shit from, Ex-B.
Here's a couple more of 'em, they're all crazy and awesome in the exact same way ahaha.
The Crown and the Ring.
Heart of Steel.
'Till the blood on your sword is the blood of a king.
Y'know, old guys seldom, if ever, sing in a really super high pitched voice, but its fucking hilarious when we do, and we should prolly do it more often.
Now you'll know where I get that Dancing Cowboy Strikeforce screaming shit from, Ex-B.
Here's a couple more of 'em, they're all crazy and awesome in the exact same way ahaha.
The Crown and the Ring.
Heart of Steel.
Laughs Per Second
Y'know how some movies feel like they're short, and other movies feel like they're ten hours long?
2001 is a great example of a long one, if I have to watch it from the beginning, and I ain't allowed to skip all the monkey parts that I've seen a million times and shit, I usually pass out before I can even make it to the kick ass HAL stuff.
Oh, and Bicentennial Man, with Robin Williams, holy shit, that's another one.
This Will Ferrell thing I just watched where he's an IRS guy with a narrator talking in his head is another one of those, too, I feel like I been awake watching that shit for like three days now.
I laughed about three times during the movie, so that's like, one laugh per day, y'know?
Actually I think it was even worse than that, 'cause one of the times I laughed was just because the movie felt like it was so goddam long already.
I mean, if its gonna take you twenty four hours to tell a joke, it better be a really good joke.
2001 is a great example of a long one, if I have to watch it from the beginning, and I ain't allowed to skip all the monkey parts that I've seen a million times and shit, I usually pass out before I can even make it to the kick ass HAL stuff.
Oh, and Bicentennial Man, with Robin Williams, holy shit, that's another one.
This Will Ferrell thing I just watched where he's an IRS guy with a narrator talking in his head is another one of those, too, I feel like I been awake watching that shit for like three days now.
I laughed about three times during the movie, so that's like, one laugh per day, y'know?
Actually I think it was even worse than that, 'cause one of the times I laughed was just because the movie felt like it was so goddam long already.
I mean, if its gonna take you twenty four hours to tell a joke, it better be a really good joke.
MMO Roundup
Welp, just did my checkup on all the MMO junk and I didn't see anything interesting.
That Gods And Heroes Rome Rising thing, where the dudes do wrestling moves on monsters and stuff looks neat, but watching five minutes of movies with all the special moves gave me all I'll ever need of that, and I ain't into the way everythings looks like a bowl of tropical fruit made out of crayola crayon wax and they got glowing swords and Rainbow Powers and gladiators wearing mascara heh.
Tabula Rasa is getting completely shitted on by its beta testers, now that the NDA is up.
The stuff they're saying reminds me of being trapped in a mission and not being able to zone out in AO heh.
Hellgate London looks like Doom III with Chromed Out Robot Swordsmen Versus Snake Headed Tentacle Armed Cyborg Suction Cup Alien Demons in a Burned Out City Street or something, I mean, I dunno know if I'd even watch that for free even if it was just a five minute long cartoon on TV.
And I'm sorry but just because its the guys that did Diablo don't make the cyborg tentacles any shorter.
Mebbe I'm missing something, or my expectations got messed up 'cause I thought it was gonna be all strange and cool like Hellblazer (not the movie, you asswipe) or at least something sorta like Vampire Bloodlines from the title and Halloween release date.
What else?
Age of Conan, meh, mebbe.
They got balls, and I think the graphics are kinda dark and interesting looking, even if they sorta remind me of that Disney Headless Horseman cartoon, or the Nightmare Before Christmas, but that don't mean its gonna be any fun.
Still, its probably the only one of these suckers that I'm even willing to try at this point heh.
I refuse to even look at Warhammer, even though I love all that Blood for the Blood God Lords of Chaos stuff, 'cause Mark Jacobs has something to do with it, so that's the end of that.
I don't love Warhammer that much, heh.
Man, I like gritty and dirty looking stuff, y'know, like the Millenium Falcon, and the old Conan Comics, and not all this bright and colorful silver spacesuit shit with the lightning bolt on yer chest and pointy ears.
Is that what kids like nowadays?
'Cause its non-threatening and happy like a bright yellow sweater vest made out of cotton candy or something?
I dunno, man, it all looks like something that'd jump out of a birthday cake at Michael Jackson's house to me, y'know?
That Gods And Heroes Rome Rising thing, where the dudes do wrestling moves on monsters and stuff looks neat, but watching five minutes of movies with all the special moves gave me all I'll ever need of that, and I ain't into the way everythings looks like a bowl of tropical fruit made out of crayola crayon wax and they got glowing swords and Rainbow Powers and gladiators wearing mascara heh.
Tabula Rasa is getting completely shitted on by its beta testers, now that the NDA is up.
The stuff they're saying reminds me of being trapped in a mission and not being able to zone out in AO heh.
Hellgate London looks like Doom III with Chromed Out Robot Swordsmen Versus Snake Headed Tentacle Armed Cyborg Suction Cup Alien Demons in a Burned Out City Street or something, I mean, I dunno know if I'd even watch that for free even if it was just a five minute long cartoon on TV.
And I'm sorry but just because its the guys that did Diablo don't make the cyborg tentacles any shorter.
Mebbe I'm missing something, or my expectations got messed up 'cause I thought it was gonna be all strange and cool like Hellblazer (not the movie, you asswipe) or at least something sorta like Vampire Bloodlines from the title and Halloween release date.
What else?
Age of Conan, meh, mebbe.
They got balls, and I think the graphics are kinda dark and interesting looking, even if they sorta remind me of that Disney Headless Horseman cartoon, or the Nightmare Before Christmas, but that don't mean its gonna be any fun.
Still, its probably the only one of these suckers that I'm even willing to try at this point heh.
I refuse to even look at Warhammer, even though I love all that Blood for the Blood God Lords of Chaos stuff, 'cause Mark Jacobs has something to do with it, so that's the end of that.
I don't love Warhammer that much, heh.
Man, I like gritty and dirty looking stuff, y'know, like the Millenium Falcon, and the old Conan Comics, and not all this bright and colorful silver spacesuit shit with the lightning bolt on yer chest and pointy ears.
Is that what kids like nowadays?
'Cause its non-threatening and happy like a bright yellow sweater vest made out of cotton candy or something?
I dunno, man, it all looks like something that'd jump out of a birthday cake at Michael Jackson's house to me, y'know?
Mummification
Man, if only Mount & Blade were minimumly multiplayer, we'd have everything we need to do the 13th Warrior thing where we could ride around and meddle with shit in a fully automated and sorta randomly generated virtual world, fighting necromancers and rescuing waitresses, sieging castles with arrows whistling over our heads, building forts and defending villages, getting into all sorts of intrigue with rival lords and evil baronesses and stuff.
You can even change it over to be zone by zone, EQ-style (which would be "scene by scene" in M&B terms), insteada using that Map View thing, if that map thingie doesn't float yer boat.
And it can even do dungeon crawl stuff, too, although the npc pathing they got is pretty weak, there's some tricks you could do that would soup that up a bit, or at least mask it some, if you were lazy about it.
Its even got all the junk you'd need to do the Estate thing, or run your own virtual farm, or your own medieval village simulation.
And the best thing is that we wouldn't have to do any of that tedious-ass 3d modelling and animation shit either, 'cause these damn kids already did it all for us, and its kick ass.
It sucks that its like yet another Daggerfall with no multiplayer, man.
One of these days, y'know, hopefully before I turn into a mummy and shit.
We're almost there, but I'm almost a mummy, too.
You can even change it over to be zone by zone, EQ-style (which would be "scene by scene" in M&B terms), insteada using that Map View thing, if that map thingie doesn't float yer boat.
And it can even do dungeon crawl stuff, too, although the npc pathing they got is pretty weak, there's some tricks you could do that would soup that up a bit, or at least mask it some, if you were lazy about it.
Its even got all the junk you'd need to do the Estate thing, or run your own virtual farm, or your own medieval village simulation.
And the best thing is that we wouldn't have to do any of that tedious-ass 3d modelling and animation shit either, 'cause these damn kids already did it all for us, and its kick ass.
It sucks that its like yet another Daggerfall with no multiplayer, man.
One of these days, y'know, hopefully before I turn into a mummy and shit.
We're almost there, but I'm almost a mummy, too.
Bad Influence
Dude, Raph is talking like me in this thing.
What's up with that?
He even said fuck and shit and kick ass and whatever the hell and y'know and man (several times!) and stuff!
And I think he called Mark Jacobs a crackhead asswipe or a whore or something, just like I always do!
Sheesh, he used to be such a delicate kid, looking like he just stepped out of a time machine from the 1800s, with the little carnation in his lapel, and the suit-with-the-vest that was three sizes too small, and the bowler hat, and the pocket watch, and the quivering lower lip, y'know?
Man, I hope it wasn't me that taught him how to swear and shit like that.
Well, mebbe somebody just slipped something funny in his drink, and that made him sound like me, y'know, temporarily ahaha.
P.S. Apparently me and Raph both worked at Subway (although I played frizbee in the parking lot and didn't wear a shirt most of the time, 'cause I worked across the street from a waterpark) and I tutored game programming computer nerds AND musical genius autistic kids in college, so there's a bit of a flip-flop there AHAHA.
What's up with that?
He even said fuck and shit and kick ass and whatever the hell and y'know and man (several times!) and stuff!
And I think he called Mark Jacobs a crackhead asswipe or a whore or something, just like I always do!
Sheesh, he used to be such a delicate kid, looking like he just stepped out of a time machine from the 1800s, with the little carnation in his lapel, and the suit-with-the-vest that was three sizes too small, and the bowler hat, and the pocket watch, and the quivering lower lip, y'know?
Man, I hope it wasn't me that taught him how to swear and shit like that.
Well, mebbe somebody just slipped something funny in his drink, and that made him sound like me, y'know, temporarily ahaha.
P.S. Apparently me and Raph both worked at Subway (although I played frizbee in the parking lot and didn't wear a shirt most of the time, 'cause I worked across the street from a waterpark) and I tutored game programming computer nerds AND musical genius autistic kids in college, so there's a bit of a flip-flop there AHAHA.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Dust to Dust
It must suck to be a gravedigger.
'Cause you and your woman can't dress up nice and wear an expensive watch or any jewelery in public.
And if your shoes are too good you gotta get rid of 'em.
And if you work in some village where everybody is a poor hillbilly, you gotta dress even worse than them.
'Cause you and your woman can't dress up nice and wear an expensive watch or any jewelery in public.
And if your shoes are too good you gotta get rid of 'em.
And if you work in some village where everybody is a poor hillbilly, you gotta dress even worse than them.
Moebius
So a long time ago I stole this time machine from this old punk rock time traveller guy who had come back in time to party with me 'cause he said I was famous for something I was gonna do in the future but he didn't say what it was.
And so the first thing I did was go into the future, y'know, to see what the hell he was talking about, to see what it was I did that was so awesome and stuff.
But when I got to the future, I found a world that was totally abandoned, all the lights were out and nobody was home, the streets were empty, there weren't even any newspapers blowing down 'em all dramatic-like, I mean, the place was quiet as hell.
And at first I figured there musta been some kinda horrible disease or radiation or something, y'know?
But there weren't no signs of anything funky, aside from a lot of dust covering everything everywhere, there weren't no bodies or skeletons or anything, there weren't no cars in the streets, all the cars were parked nicely at everybody's house, and all the doors were locked, and there wasn't any signs of looting or nastiness at all, y'know?
Everything was all neat and orderly and put away in its place, it was like everybody just packed up and went on vacation or something and never came back.
Anyways it really started creeping me out, y'know, 'cause it felt like the perfect set-up for some kinda horrible shocking zombie movie or something, and I didn't wanna stick around after it started getting dark just to solve the mystery and stuff, it was just way to creepy and shit to hang around, so I started heading back to the time machine.
And I was just about to fire things up and leave when there was a knock on the window of my time machine that practically gave me a heart attack 'cause I was getting so used to all the peace and quiet and stuff.
And there, peeking in the window at me, and telling me to relax and to shut things down and come out so that he could explain everything to me, was me, or another copy of me.
So I shut everything down, and made sure the parking brake was set and everything, just like that first old punk rock Time Traveller guy had told me to do, when I got him to drink too much, and I stepped out of the time machine.
And that's when this other copy of me explained that nothing had happened in the future.
Nothing.
See, once time travel had been invented, everybody had decided to go back in time and live out their dumb little lives in other, more interesting, ages.
''Cause the future was boring, y'know?
I mean, just look at it.
And there wasn't even nobody to hang out and play playstation with, 'cause everybody was going back in time and hanging out in other places, like King Arthur's Court, and the Civil War estates, and the markets of Babylon, and those little shacks in the prohibition days where they played kickass banjo music and got wasted.
And nobody wanted to go to the future and learn all the new shit all by themselves, like how to work the super complicated remotes for the TVs, because that was a total pain in the ass, they had like two thousand little buttons with weird symbols and letters like AVO and EVDV all over the place.
I mean, why do that, when you could go back in time and have fun and be a genius who could predict the future and win the lotto and stuff?
So everybody was out having fun someplace in the past, and there weren't nobody left in the future.
And that's why the future was totally abandoned.
Well, besides me, and this other copy of me.
And that's when the other copy of me told me I had to use the time machine to go back in time five minutes, and talk to myself, like he was doing right now, y'know, to explain everything that he just explained to me, to the me I was now, or it woulda never happened, and I wouldn't know what I know now.
And I was all like, fuck that, man, why can't you do it.
And he was like, I just did it, just now, in case you didn't notice.
And I was like, well, then it shouldn't be too much trouble for you to just do it again, I mean, I don't think I could even remember everything he said, anyways, y'know, in order to repeat it to the next guy, 'cause I'd been drinking with that old time traveller guy before I came there.
And I couldn't see why it mattered which one of us did it, I mean, we were copies of each other that were only five minutes apart, and who the hell was gonna know if it was me or him that did it, y'know?
And he got all pissed off, and he was saying stuff like how he had to go in the past and do some other stuff that was important, like give everybody the time machine we stole, and he was all pissed at me, saying I was a lazy bastard.
Y'know, its real easy to be a dick to yourself, and that works both ways, when there's two of you.
Anyways I made him do all that shit that he wanted me to help him do heh.
And there's no way I'm going back to the future just to have some younger version of me make me do all the work, like I made him do, y'know?
Anyways, I'm feeling pretty drunk, I can't drink like I used to, I can't keep up with you kids no more, so I'm gonna take a nap, and I don't want you stealing that time machine I got parked out there while I'm passed out or anything, it's dangerous, and you could get into all sorts of trouble.
And don't listen to no time traveller guys that tell you yer gonna be famous, they're all a bunch of liars that'll say anything to get a free drink, I never got famous for jack shit.
And so the first thing I did was go into the future, y'know, to see what the hell he was talking about, to see what it was I did that was so awesome and stuff.
But when I got to the future, I found a world that was totally abandoned, all the lights were out and nobody was home, the streets were empty, there weren't even any newspapers blowing down 'em all dramatic-like, I mean, the place was quiet as hell.
And at first I figured there musta been some kinda horrible disease or radiation or something, y'know?
But there weren't no signs of anything funky, aside from a lot of dust covering everything everywhere, there weren't no bodies or skeletons or anything, there weren't no cars in the streets, all the cars were parked nicely at everybody's house, and all the doors were locked, and there wasn't any signs of looting or nastiness at all, y'know?
Everything was all neat and orderly and put away in its place, it was like everybody just packed up and went on vacation or something and never came back.
Anyways it really started creeping me out, y'know, 'cause it felt like the perfect set-up for some kinda horrible shocking zombie movie or something, and I didn't wanna stick around after it started getting dark just to solve the mystery and stuff, it was just way to creepy and shit to hang around, so I started heading back to the time machine.
And I was just about to fire things up and leave when there was a knock on the window of my time machine that practically gave me a heart attack 'cause I was getting so used to all the peace and quiet and stuff.
And there, peeking in the window at me, and telling me to relax and to shut things down and come out so that he could explain everything to me, was me, or another copy of me.
So I shut everything down, and made sure the parking brake was set and everything, just like that first old punk rock Time Traveller guy had told me to do, when I got him to drink too much, and I stepped out of the time machine.
And that's when this other copy of me explained that nothing had happened in the future.
Nothing.
See, once time travel had been invented, everybody had decided to go back in time and live out their dumb little lives in other, more interesting, ages.
''Cause the future was boring, y'know?
I mean, just look at it.
And there wasn't even nobody to hang out and play playstation with, 'cause everybody was going back in time and hanging out in other places, like King Arthur's Court, and the Civil War estates, and the markets of Babylon, and those little shacks in the prohibition days where they played kickass banjo music and got wasted.
And nobody wanted to go to the future and learn all the new shit all by themselves, like how to work the super complicated remotes for the TVs, because that was a total pain in the ass, they had like two thousand little buttons with weird symbols and letters like AVO and EVDV all over the place.
I mean, why do that, when you could go back in time and have fun and be a genius who could predict the future and win the lotto and stuff?
So everybody was out having fun someplace in the past, and there weren't nobody left in the future.
And that's why the future was totally abandoned.
Well, besides me, and this other copy of me.
And that's when the other copy of me told me I had to use the time machine to go back in time five minutes, and talk to myself, like he was doing right now, y'know, to explain everything that he just explained to me, to the me I was now, or it woulda never happened, and I wouldn't know what I know now.
And I was all like, fuck that, man, why can't you do it.
And he was like, I just did it, just now, in case you didn't notice.
And I was like, well, then it shouldn't be too much trouble for you to just do it again, I mean, I don't think I could even remember everything he said, anyways, y'know, in order to repeat it to the next guy, 'cause I'd been drinking with that old time traveller guy before I came there.
And I couldn't see why it mattered which one of us did it, I mean, we were copies of each other that were only five minutes apart, and who the hell was gonna know if it was me or him that did it, y'know?
And he got all pissed off, and he was saying stuff like how he had to go in the past and do some other stuff that was important, like give everybody the time machine we stole, and he was all pissed at me, saying I was a lazy bastard.
Y'know, its real easy to be a dick to yourself, and that works both ways, when there's two of you.
Anyways I made him do all that shit that he wanted me to help him do heh.
And there's no way I'm going back to the future just to have some younger version of me make me do all the work, like I made him do, y'know?
Anyways, I'm feeling pretty drunk, I can't drink like I used to, I can't keep up with you kids no more, so I'm gonna take a nap, and I don't want you stealing that time machine I got parked out there while I'm passed out or anything, it's dangerous, and you could get into all sorts of trouble.
And don't listen to no time traveller guys that tell you yer gonna be famous, they're all a bunch of liars that'll say anything to get a free drink, I never got famous for jack shit.
The History of the World: Pants Are Optional
Okay, the first thing you need, if you are a caveman in a small tribe of cavemen, is a source of fresh water.
'Cause you can go for a good long while without everything else, but you won't last too long without any water.
Unless you are a caveman that lives in a cold and snowy place, 'cause then the first thing you need to find yourself is some pants, so you don't freeze your nuts off.
On the bright side, there's a lot of water laying around on the ground up there in the snowy places, so you don't really have to worry about water so much.
So for the caveman from the warm place, pants are optional, but water is an issue.
And for the caveman from the cold place, water is easy to find, but pants are a serious issue.
After that, you need food, but the search for fresh water and a good pair of pants tends to move you toward an area where food sources are gonna be concentrating naturally, y'know, 'cause all the other plants and animals need water, too, and in a place where they can eat snow, animals are the things that you are gonna make into pants, with food as waste product.
And the animals that are gonna wanna eat you (and turn you into a pair of furry nut-coverers, through digestion, which is nature's Pants Factory) are gonna be there, too, y'know?
And maybe the animals don't really wanna eat you, but they sure as hell don't wanna share their berries and coconuts and pants-providing animals and shit.
So the fights for food start at the river, or they start over a good pair of pants in an area where pants-worthy animals are plentiful, depending on where you come from, and that's how you learn not to be such a newb at fighting.
Anyways once the optional pants and water issues are taken care of, then you can start looking for places where you can get better food.
Like berry patches and places where animals that are easy to catch hang out and shit.
Y'know, hunting and gathering.
And once you find those places, you make a map of them in your head.
And you walk between 'em.
And you won't wanna share 'em with all the other animals, like the birds that wanna eat all yer raspberries, and the wolves that wanna eat those easy-to-catch dodo birds and shit, y'know?
And so you start driving the animals away, by waving your arms and making crazy noises and shit, which is a total pain in the ass, 'cause you have to do it in person.
And that's basically the beginning of farming.
Y'know, yer tending to those areas where plants and animals you want can be found.
If yer smart, you might realize that weeding and fertilizing the berry bushes help more berry bushes grow.
And that feeding the dodo birds and protecting them from wolves makes for more tasty dodo birds to eat.
So that's the beginning of domesticating plants and animals, and military defense systems that protect your berry bushes from birds and shit, starting with fences and scarecrows and stuff.
Of course, the better your area for hunting and gathering, the more its gonna attract other hungry cavemen.
And so you are gonna have to fight with them to protect your area, 'cause now that you ain't a wandering nomad, now that you got yerself a good berry patch, now that you put all that work into it, making a map of the berry patches in the area, and protecting it from birds and weeding it and shit, you don't wanna just leave it and start all over some place else so you can avoid dangerous confrontations and let these other stupid cavemen have it.
Same thing with hunting grounds, if yer a caveman from a cold place, y'know, you don't wanna just let these guys take all the pants-n-meat-providing animals that you spent all that time protecting from wolf attacks in the middle of the night.
Unless the new cavemen that show up are sexy cavewomen, who are better looking than the women in your tribe, 'cause then you'll share, although it'll probably break your heart a little bit to give them a pair of pants if yer one of those cavemen from the cold place heh.
Or, y'know, if yer a cavewoman from a warm place, you'll prolly share your berries with a sexy looking caveman with a nice butt.
But once again, the caveman from the snowy place is sorta screwed, 'cause his furry pants might make his butt look fat, even though it isn't, and he won't be getting any berries.
But maybe you can make up for it with a sexy voice like Sean Connery or something.
'Cause you can go for a good long while without everything else, but you won't last too long without any water.
Unless you are a caveman that lives in a cold and snowy place, 'cause then the first thing you need to find yourself is some pants, so you don't freeze your nuts off.
On the bright side, there's a lot of water laying around on the ground up there in the snowy places, so you don't really have to worry about water so much.
So for the caveman from the warm place, pants are optional, but water is an issue.
And for the caveman from the cold place, water is easy to find, but pants are a serious issue.
After that, you need food, but the search for fresh water and a good pair of pants tends to move you toward an area where food sources are gonna be concentrating naturally, y'know, 'cause all the other plants and animals need water, too, and in a place where they can eat snow, animals are the things that you are gonna make into pants, with food as waste product.
And the animals that are gonna wanna eat you (and turn you into a pair of furry nut-coverers, through digestion, which is nature's Pants Factory) are gonna be there, too, y'know?
And maybe the animals don't really wanna eat you, but they sure as hell don't wanna share their berries and coconuts and pants-providing animals and shit.
So the fights for food start at the river, or they start over a good pair of pants in an area where pants-worthy animals are plentiful, depending on where you come from, and that's how you learn not to be such a newb at fighting.
Anyways once the optional pants and water issues are taken care of, then you can start looking for places where you can get better food.
Like berry patches and places where animals that are easy to catch hang out and shit.
Y'know, hunting and gathering.
And once you find those places, you make a map of them in your head.
And you walk between 'em.
And you won't wanna share 'em with all the other animals, like the birds that wanna eat all yer raspberries, and the wolves that wanna eat those easy-to-catch dodo birds and shit, y'know?
And so you start driving the animals away, by waving your arms and making crazy noises and shit, which is a total pain in the ass, 'cause you have to do it in person.
And that's basically the beginning of farming.
Y'know, yer tending to those areas where plants and animals you want can be found.
If yer smart, you might realize that weeding and fertilizing the berry bushes help more berry bushes grow.
And that feeding the dodo birds and protecting them from wolves makes for more tasty dodo birds to eat.
So that's the beginning of domesticating plants and animals, and military defense systems that protect your berry bushes from birds and shit, starting with fences and scarecrows and stuff.
Of course, the better your area for hunting and gathering, the more its gonna attract other hungry cavemen.
And so you are gonna have to fight with them to protect your area, 'cause now that you ain't a wandering nomad, now that you got yerself a good berry patch, now that you put all that work into it, making a map of the berry patches in the area, and protecting it from birds and weeding it and shit, you don't wanna just leave it and start all over some place else so you can avoid dangerous confrontations and let these other stupid cavemen have it.
Same thing with hunting grounds, if yer a caveman from a cold place, y'know, you don't wanna just let these guys take all the pants-n-meat-providing animals that you spent all that time protecting from wolf attacks in the middle of the night.
Unless the new cavemen that show up are sexy cavewomen, who are better looking than the women in your tribe, 'cause then you'll share, although it'll probably break your heart a little bit to give them a pair of pants if yer one of those cavemen from the cold place heh.
Or, y'know, if yer a cavewoman from a warm place, you'll prolly share your berries with a sexy looking caveman with a nice butt.
But once again, the caveman from the snowy place is sorta screwed, 'cause his furry pants might make his butt look fat, even though it isn't, and he won't be getting any berries.
But maybe you can make up for it with a sexy voice like Sean Connery or something.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
The Whirlwind
So there's these two villages, that are on the opposite sides of a mountain from each other, but even with all the extra effort it takes to climb the mountain, they're still closer to each other than any other towns.
And even though they're both from separate kingdoms that are divided by that mountain range, and even though they are very different from each other, as far as culture goes, with different religions and all that, the folks in these two towns are buddies, even though they argue a lot and make fun of each other, its harmless, 'cause to them, there ain't nobody else in the world that really matters, and so the two towns are all intermarried and stuff (which doesn't help the arguing heh).
And one town makes a lot of grain, and the other town grows a lot of fruit, and so they trade fruit and grain back and forth between each other, and it all works out, even though they argue over whats more important, grain or fruit heh.
So anyways, one day, the two kingdoms that these two towns have to pay taxes to every once in a while, for Police Protection from Bandits and stuff, y'know, wink wink nudge nudge, go to war, and this Prince shows up at the town that grows fruit, and he looks things over without talking to anybody, 'cause he's in a hurry, and he sees that they need grain, so he goes and sacks the neighboring "enemy" village, and kills everyone on a religious crusade, and he brings all their stores of grain back to the first village, and he makes them eat it.
And he wonders a little, why aren't these damn villagers happy, they needed grain, and I got 'em grain, so wtf, chuck?
What's with all the long faces?
But they're afraid to answer him, in front of all his heavily armed and armored men, and so he figures mebbe the grain is a little off or something, y'know, but whatever, stupid villagers, ungrateful bastards, they should be glad that they have anything to eat.
And it isn't long before he's gotta move on to bigger and better things, anyways, like building his harem and smoking out of his humongous hookah and laughing and eating spicy foods from faraway lands with a bunch of his noble buddies in his father's Golden Palace of Seven and a Half Delights.
And even though they're both from separate kingdoms that are divided by that mountain range, and even though they are very different from each other, as far as culture goes, with different religions and all that, the folks in these two towns are buddies, even though they argue a lot and make fun of each other, its harmless, 'cause to them, there ain't nobody else in the world that really matters, and so the two towns are all intermarried and stuff (which doesn't help the arguing heh).
And one town makes a lot of grain, and the other town grows a lot of fruit, and so they trade fruit and grain back and forth between each other, and it all works out, even though they argue over whats more important, grain or fruit heh.
So anyways, one day, the two kingdoms that these two towns have to pay taxes to every once in a while, for Police Protection from Bandits and stuff, y'know, wink wink nudge nudge, go to war, and this Prince shows up at the town that grows fruit, and he looks things over without talking to anybody, 'cause he's in a hurry, and he sees that they need grain, so he goes and sacks the neighboring "enemy" village, and kills everyone on a religious crusade, and he brings all their stores of grain back to the first village, and he makes them eat it.
And he wonders a little, why aren't these damn villagers happy, they needed grain, and I got 'em grain, so wtf, chuck?
What's with all the long faces?
But they're afraid to answer him, in front of all his heavily armed and armored men, and so he figures mebbe the grain is a little off or something, y'know, but whatever, stupid villagers, ungrateful bastards, they should be glad that they have anything to eat.
And it isn't long before he's gotta move on to bigger and better things, anyways, like building his harem and smoking out of his humongous hookah and laughing and eating spicy foods from faraway lands with a bunch of his noble buddies in his father's Golden Palace of Seven and a Half Delights.
Chainmail
So I been playing this Battle For Sicily mod for Mount and Blade now.
At first I thought it was crappy 'cause it ain't real intuitive in the beginning and it don't throw any cool junk in yer face and razzle dazzle you right off the bat with dog-riding orcs and samurais and all that.
But once I just sat down and gave it a half hour I got totally sucked into it and now I love it and I'm thinking about screwing around with the source code for it, 'cause the dude who made it is definitely a genius.
And it actually has a lot of cool and fluffy stuff, like models for all different sorts of italian villages and several different types of seige fights (which can get pretty laggy laggy, but nothing a guy who had a guild of two hundred people in EQ can't handle heh).
And it also has an awesome little village-to-seaport ecomonic engine, and although you start out as a shmuck, running a village for your liege lord and collecting taxes, raiding caravans and hunting bandits, eventually you'll end up running yer own province and sacking enemy villages and campaigning against neighboring provinces and you'll have your own minions that'll collect your taxes for you.
So give it a try.
The easiest way to play it is to be a Norman Knight from an Aristocratic background, hook up with Messina ('cause its a seaport, and seaport towns are healthier and wealthier, seaports tend to stabilize your economy), and get a bunch of Norman Knights to go riding around and crushing everybody.
Once you get to Catania you'll have a decent seaport province that you can use to crush the rest of the map with.
Or, you can play it like I do, where you make yourself an Evil Arabian Prince and ride around with a bunch of maniacs in Turbans and a West African Dude from Zanj (who never seems to cheer with the rest of the men when we win a battle), selling french guys into slavery and saying Peace Be Upon You, Brother heh.
They suck compared to the heavy Chainmail armies of the Normans and the Greeks but I like bloody battles where I lose a lot of my guys ahaha.
Trust me, you should try this one.
At first I thought it was crappy 'cause it ain't real intuitive in the beginning and it don't throw any cool junk in yer face and razzle dazzle you right off the bat with dog-riding orcs and samurais and all that.
But once I just sat down and gave it a half hour I got totally sucked into it and now I love it and I'm thinking about screwing around with the source code for it, 'cause the dude who made it is definitely a genius.
And it actually has a lot of cool and fluffy stuff, like models for all different sorts of italian villages and several different types of seige fights (which can get pretty laggy laggy, but nothing a guy who had a guild of two hundred people in EQ can't handle heh).
And it also has an awesome little village-to-seaport ecomonic engine, and although you start out as a shmuck, running a village for your liege lord and collecting taxes, raiding caravans and hunting bandits, eventually you'll end up running yer own province and sacking enemy villages and campaigning against neighboring provinces and you'll have your own minions that'll collect your taxes for you.
So give it a try.
The easiest way to play it is to be a Norman Knight from an Aristocratic background, hook up with Messina ('cause its a seaport, and seaport towns are healthier and wealthier, seaports tend to stabilize your economy), and get a bunch of Norman Knights to go riding around and crushing everybody.
Once you get to Catania you'll have a decent seaport province that you can use to crush the rest of the map with.
Or, you can play it like I do, where you make yourself an Evil Arabian Prince and ride around with a bunch of maniacs in Turbans and a West African Dude from Zanj (who never seems to cheer with the rest of the men when we win a battle), selling french guys into slavery and saying Peace Be Upon You, Brother heh.
They suck compared to the heavy Chainmail armies of the Normans and the Greeks but I like bloody battles where I lose a lot of my guys ahaha.
Trust me, you should try this one.
I Guess You Best Investigate
Y'know how we sing sitcom themesongs like doing the beatbox thing for Sanford and Son, or the way I play Green Acres on my throat like that dude from Animal House who did the Lone Ranger Themesong (which is way too hard fer me) or the way every single soul on this planet will sing Moving On Up from the Jeffersons and we all think we're all so cool and shit?
Nobody is cool enough to sing the Facts of Life themesong and keep their cool.
That didn't stop 'em from trying, though.
More than once, and I guess even adding some killer 1980s Saturday Morning Cartoon Guitar riffs couldn't save them heh.
Start practicing Ex-B.
The ending is an earth-destroying meteor made out of pure comedy gold with all that wailing and shit ahaha.
Nobody is cool enough to sing the Facts of Life themesong and keep their cool.
That didn't stop 'em from trying, though.
More than once, and I guess even adding some killer 1980s Saturday Morning Cartoon Guitar riffs couldn't save them heh.
Start practicing Ex-B.
The ending is an earth-destroying meteor made out of pure comedy gold with all that wailing and shit ahaha.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Khan
Around 1200 AD, this guy called Temujin came out of nowhere, united a bunch of Mongolian Tribes to the north of China, and adopted the name Ghengis Khan, or "Supreme Emperor."
And he was pretty Supreme, man, what with his incredibly fast travelling army of dudes who basically lived on horseback, with metal stirrups that held their feet in place and allowed them to drive spears into people with the combined weight of the horse and the rider behind it, insteada just shooting arrows and throwing spears at people, like all the other mounted folks (like Attila the Hun heh) did before that.
They never lost a fight, y'know, it wasn't until long after Ghengis Khan was dead that some folks in Egypt discovered that the Mongols weren't completely invincible.
And Ghengis Khan, with the help of Sabutai, his trusty general, pretty much ruled over three fourths of the Earth, and they're the reason that the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley is a desert, among a lot of other things.
Actually, the only reason that we aren't all Mongolians right now is that the Mongol army had to ride all the way back home in order to elect a new leader when Ogodai (son of Ghengis) croaked.
That's the only reason they stopped taking over the world at 75%, closing in on Vienna and Venice (and talking about the speed of his army, it took two days for his army to travel a hundred miles and kick somebody's ass in previous battles).
Speaking of Venice, it was founded by a bunch of folks running from Attila the Hun, hiding in the "swamps" heh.
So Ghengis had an extensive spy network, and all sorts of interesting military tricks, like breaking his army into separate groups with runners going between 'em to keep it all coordinated, so that he could bring 'em all together and surround his enemies from weird angles at a certain time and cut off their ability to retreat.
And he'd divert rivers and turn your country into a desert, too.
Anyways, at the time, China was the most technologically advanced country in the world, their elected "officials" and stuff had to take proficiency test to prove they weren't idiots (imagine that going on nowadays! ahaha).
So these guys, who had conquered China first thing, weren't just a bunch of barbarians who killed everybody in their path (although they did do that too, to such a degree, early on, that they got famous for it, and a lot of places basically just surrendered to them, without a fight, later on).
You've heard of Marco Polo, and probably don't know that he was a Venetian Trader guy that spent twenty years (along with his dad and uncle) as a guest in the court of Kublai Khan (a third generation great grandson of Ghengis), and he wrote a book about it, and nobody believed it was real, 'cause it described a civilization that was basically more advanced than everything in Europe, sorta like science fiction or something.
As a matter of fact, the Mongol Rule sorta dissolved into the generic chain of Chinese Emperors and stuff, and Kublai is generally credited with uniting China, y'know, 'cause Chinese Culture over there is a lot like Greek and Roman culture over here, it tended to convert everybody that came into contact with it.
Speaking of which, the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty (you know, that's where those Ming Vases come from), really was a peasant who got famous for his efforts in driving the Mongol remnants out of China, talk about rags to riches heh.
Oh, and the term Kamikaze, which is a bastardized version of whatever its supposed to be, like most things, translates to "Divine Wind" in Japanese.
And that Divine Wind thing comes from a couple military episodes where the Mongols tried to invade Japan by boat, and they got turned back by Japanese weather (typhoons, which were seen as the Divine Winds that proved to the Japanese that supernatural powers protected Japan).
Anyways, just thought I'd mention some of the cooler stuff about all that ancient junk over there that I don't hear much about, usually the European slant on things is that Ghengis was a barbarian who just sorta harassed civilization, when actually, the dudes he was invading were a lot more primitive than he was, and he didn't harass jack shit, there wasn't anything in the world at the time that could even slow the guy down a little, I mean, when they were riding back home to elect a new Khan, they beat the living shit out of a couple countries on the way.
The Knights in Shining Armor and all that good stuff were still a ways off in time and space, and I think they were pretty lucky that they never had to stand in his way heh.
Man, the error checking on writing shit like this sucks ahaha.
Well, mebbe its all bullshit, but it sounds good, y'know.
And he was pretty Supreme, man, what with his incredibly fast travelling army of dudes who basically lived on horseback, with metal stirrups that held their feet in place and allowed them to drive spears into people with the combined weight of the horse and the rider behind it, insteada just shooting arrows and throwing spears at people, like all the other mounted folks (like Attila the Hun heh) did before that.
They never lost a fight, y'know, it wasn't until long after Ghengis Khan was dead that some folks in Egypt discovered that the Mongols weren't completely invincible.
And Ghengis Khan, with the help of Sabutai, his trusty general, pretty much ruled over three fourths of the Earth, and they're the reason that the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley is a desert, among a lot of other things.
Actually, the only reason that we aren't all Mongolians right now is that the Mongol army had to ride all the way back home in order to elect a new leader when Ogodai (son of Ghengis) croaked.
That's the only reason they stopped taking over the world at 75%, closing in on Vienna and Venice (and talking about the speed of his army, it took two days for his army to travel a hundred miles and kick somebody's ass in previous battles).
Speaking of Venice, it was founded by a bunch of folks running from Attila the Hun, hiding in the "swamps" heh.
So Ghengis had an extensive spy network, and all sorts of interesting military tricks, like breaking his army into separate groups with runners going between 'em to keep it all coordinated, so that he could bring 'em all together and surround his enemies from weird angles at a certain time and cut off their ability to retreat.
And he'd divert rivers and turn your country into a desert, too.
Anyways, at the time, China was the most technologically advanced country in the world, their elected "officials" and stuff had to take proficiency test to prove they weren't idiots (imagine that going on nowadays! ahaha).
So these guys, who had conquered China first thing, weren't just a bunch of barbarians who killed everybody in their path (although they did do that too, to such a degree, early on, that they got famous for it, and a lot of places basically just surrendered to them, without a fight, later on).
You've heard of Marco Polo, and probably don't know that he was a Venetian Trader guy that spent twenty years (along with his dad and uncle) as a guest in the court of Kublai Khan (a third generation great grandson of Ghengis), and he wrote a book about it, and nobody believed it was real, 'cause it described a civilization that was basically more advanced than everything in Europe, sorta like science fiction or something.
As a matter of fact, the Mongol Rule sorta dissolved into the generic chain of Chinese Emperors and stuff, and Kublai is generally credited with uniting China, y'know, 'cause Chinese Culture over there is a lot like Greek and Roman culture over here, it tended to convert everybody that came into contact with it.
Speaking of which, the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty (you know, that's where those Ming Vases come from), really was a peasant who got famous for his efforts in driving the Mongol remnants out of China, talk about rags to riches heh.
Oh, and the term Kamikaze, which is a bastardized version of whatever its supposed to be, like most things, translates to "Divine Wind" in Japanese.
And that Divine Wind thing comes from a couple military episodes where the Mongols tried to invade Japan by boat, and they got turned back by Japanese weather (typhoons, which were seen as the Divine Winds that proved to the Japanese that supernatural powers protected Japan).
Anyways, just thought I'd mention some of the cooler stuff about all that ancient junk over there that I don't hear much about, usually the European slant on things is that Ghengis was a barbarian who just sorta harassed civilization, when actually, the dudes he was invading were a lot more primitive than he was, and he didn't harass jack shit, there wasn't anything in the world at the time that could even slow the guy down a little, I mean, when they were riding back home to elect a new Khan, they beat the living shit out of a couple countries on the way.
The Knights in Shining Armor and all that good stuff were still a ways off in time and space, and I think they were pretty lucky that they never had to stand in his way heh.
Man, the error checking on writing shit like this sucks ahaha.
Well, mebbe its all bullshit, but it sounds good, y'know.
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