RPG Articles

and can’t help but feel somebody is fudging the math. Like, pretty extensively too.

“More energy will be produced by this ignition process than the amount of laser energy required to start it. This is the long-sought goal of energy gain that has been the goal of fusion researchers for more than half a century,” said NIF director Edward Moses.

I often find it amusing that people misunderstand quantum mechanics, string theory, probability, or what have you seemingly more or less because they want it to reinforce some crackpot point of view they grabbed from someplace.

The rest of the time I just find it discouraging.

If Windows were just a little less like a steamy pile of excrement.
Seriously; what the hell guys?

That some genius at Microsoft decided to not list system services by name in the task manager. Sure would be a shame if I knew what the hell was running.

I’ve been playing some Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance the last few days and it’s got me thinking about economies in games.

In SupCom you have three resources: Mass, Energy, and Your Last God-damned Nerve. You spend the entire game with a mess of power, but struggle constantly for Mass. It takes a brilliant game and dulls it. I realize that it can be made to work, and that it can add a good drama factor, but realistically this is only true on the fairly large maps. For a quick-ish game on a small or medium map it’s a pain in the ass.

In Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Arrakis you had two resources: Power (from windtraps for some reason) and spice. Spice converted to money over a small period of time. Power was not terribly insistent, so you just built some windtraps and had at it. From there you just had to manage your harvesters, but this largely automatic. All you had to really worry about was defending your harvesters. It worked brilliantly.

Rise of Legends was interesting. You had Wealth (or Energy for the Cuotl) and Timonium. The pacing and scale of the game worked with the map design in such a way that while your economy could be disrupted it wasn’t such a constant threat that it became the deciding factor of play. Also, I rocked with the Cuotl (at least amongst my loser friends).

Now for my favorite.

Metal Fatigue. You had two resources: Energy and Manpower. Manpower came simply from building units to thaw your crew, so it didn’t even feel like a resource. Energy could be extracted from lava pools or solar panels. Lava pools could run out, but replenished over time. It required no transport, power went directly to your base from the gathering unit. This model provided the edge of resource protection and expansion, but with absolutely no hassle.

Anyway. I was just woolgathering on the subject.

Everybody is at Multnomah Falls today. There are approximately -30 parking spaces. At least when I was out there earlier.

I think we, meaning humans, put way too much stock in there being some fixed identity that we either have or should have. Depending on ten thousand things you are different throughout the day, but the tendency is to filter memories through early experience and think “I am that”, regardless of how you might actually be right now.

At heart we are but mammals, beyond that fact there’s no good reason to hold yourself in obeyance to a self that is a fiction of memory. Choose who you are based on the situation and what you want from it.

This presents, at every turn, the interesting option of being either a thinking being, conscious of consequence beyond the immediate, or being the simple animal, responding only with thought to immediate results.

Sometimes you’ll be shocked into an animal response, accept it and move on. Figure out what the ripples will be, adjust your responses accordingly. Sometimes you may want others to believe you simple, a thing to be commanded, because that is the basis of half of every manipulation. The other half is to have others believe you mysterious, a slate for them to project what they want to be onto.

Might just be me though, and I’m crazy.

In PHP, it is $_POST not $_post.

That is all.

Is a fantastic word.