Olantern
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Posts
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I thought all of geekdom knew about this phenomenon. That'll teach me to make assumptions.
The thing I found interesting about that article wasn't so much the sun-against-stars slippage as the fact that Ophiucus the Serpent-Bearer was listed as a zodiacal constellation in their "updated" list. It is indeed located close to the zodiacal belt, but I've never seen it listed as part of the zodiac before. After all, it's logical to divide an earth year into twelve, or four (as in at least one Chinese rendering of the zodiacal constellations), or six, as in some ancient calendars I can't recall offhand, but a division into thirteen gives a division of the year into segments that don't bear any clear relationship to the lunar month (the source of the whole month/year thing in the first place).
Speaking of changes to zodiacal constellations, at one time (early Roman Republic or earlier), the classical zodiac counted Libra as part of Scorpio, forming the scorpion's claws, though it's thought that even earlier Western and Near Eastern peoples had some other constellation in the Libra "slot." Might this be the same kind of thinking that brought in Ophiucus? It's in the same general area. -
This looks weirdly similar to the cover of that comic that rebooted Superman a while back. Same target audience, I'd imagine. (Plus, how many ways are there to show a guy just standing around in part of a super-costume just looking serious?)
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Regarding any future animal-themed booster packs and costume parts, I'm going out on a very sturdy limb right now and speculating that there'll be a substantial forum contingent that claims "this pack doesn't fit those of us who want animal concepts" and that it "isn't animalistic enough." You heard it here first, folks!
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Quote:Give it time. Especially with the holidays going on right now, you probably won't get responses that same day, or even the following couple of days. (This is just with regard to the artwork, quite aside from the is-she/isn't-she interested in you thing.)Originally Posted by Agonus
Well this appears to be over before -anything- even happened. Sent her a message about the artwork for the comic. Haven't heard back, though I do have my guesses as to why. *shrug*
Oh, and, once again, never show her this thread. -
Quote:I consider this a terrible idea. I disagree vehemently with the attitudes of several of the AE subforum's self-appointed arbiters of artistic perfection. As I said in my earlier post, the single thing that's made me most sour about AE is the AE community.Originally Posted by Clave_Dark_5
But the second part of your post got me thinking that maybe the devs should instead choose a "trusted player" (they work for free!) to pick out some of the better arcs and label them as such... somehow. Pull aside List-Maker-X and ask, "give us a list of five good heroic arcs for levels 25-35"... Or something. Anything.
Maybe they could even just look at the lists we make and rubberstamp a few of them. -
Quote:The default system displays all the five-star arcs in the system, then all the four-star arcs in the system. The perception, right or wrong, is that potential arc players will page through from the beginning and never get to Page 200 of the four-star arcs. Further, when AE was newer, potential players would often search for only five star arcs, meaning that four star arcs would never be played. So, in summation, it isn't so much that authors want to reach five stars as that they're afraid their arcs will never be seen if they slip down to four.Originally Posted by bjooks
So my questions: Why do 4-star arcs have the stigma of existing in a "4-star wasteland," or that they "might as well be dead?" Can almost any arc really achieve 4 stars, making the rating meaningless? Or is the feeling that 4-star arcs are failures more because the "goal" is to get to 5 stars due to how it was initial advertised that 5-star arcs would receive praise and accolades and potential in-game recognition? Or am I just misreading things completely?
I know anecdotal experience is considered meaningless around here, but I can say that until the near-abandonment of AE by all but the cognoscienti over the past six months, my experience on all of my arcs exactly bore out the scenario I outlined above. For the first several weeks each arc was live, each was rated five stars, and each got several plays a week (sometimes several a day). As soon as the ratings fell to four stars, the arcs were either never played again or played only a few times a year.
The most amusing example was an arc that started off at five stars when AE first opened and got several plays a day, then suffered ratings griefing (zero-starring for simple orneriness was common back when zero-starring was possible), dropped to four stars, and didn't get played at all for several weeks. Once the rating system was tweaked, the arc's rating bounced back up to five stars, and it stayed there for six months, getting at least one play a week. Since it fell to four stars again, it's received only three plays, not counting my own.
So, in conclusion, the "four-star wasteland" is an issue of visibility. All that said, I don't think it's much of an issue these days, with the dramatically reduced traffic in AE. -
1) Interest in other parts of the game. I like AE, but there have been a lot of things added in other areas over the past several months, too, and I've been focused on those.
2) The inability to find halfway decent arcs. Unlike others in this thread, I don't see a way to improve this, either. It's simply too hard to judge what makes a "good" arc from a short description. (This problem isn't unique to AE, either; there's plenty of stuff, even newer stuff, that's considered lousy out in the regular game, too.)
3) The nastiness of the AE community. As much as I love AE, the hangups of the AE community are so odd and so intense that I've never promoted my arcs to any extent on the fora. Back when AE was new, I couldn't so much as list a new arc without one or more of the AE community's self-appointed arbiters of taste lambasting me for using custom characters, or not using custom characters, or being too serious, or not being serious enough, or using a line of text like, "It feels cold in here" (that gets you responses like, "Don't you know some people play robots that can't feel temperature! UR RUINING MA IMMERSION!!!! RARRRGH!"). There's also way too much complaining about the limitations of the system. Personally, I'm glad it works at all.
4) The nastiness of the non-AE community. I regularly get yelled at and criticized in my otherwise great global channels for being an "exploiter" because I use AE, and "AE is only for farming." This sort of thing is coming from people who'd gush about how wonderful some of the stuff in AE, if appeared in regular content. On the other hand, no one will run an arc that doesn't give overwhelming rewards; the achiever mentality isn't as strong in this game as it is in some other places, but it's still significant. Add the "AE is fanfic and fanfic sux!" and "AE is a waste of dev time!" crowd, and it's no wonder AE leaves a bad taste in authors' mouths. (Listen, I think raids and end-game systems are horrible, but I'm not going to trash the devs just for wanting to implement them.) Simply put, the hostility to AE in-game is so intense that I'll only run AE content solo these days.
5) The bad handling of AE on the devs' part. As I've said on numerous occasions, within anyone who creates content that can be communicated, there is an "artist" and an "entertainer." The artist wants to create for the pleasure of creating. The entertainer wants other people to appreciate the thing created and to be applauded for creating it. The AE system does all right for the artist. I can and have used it to create things simply to amuse myself. It does terribly for the entertainer. AE arcs (as opposed to the AE system in general) don't get any significant promotion from the system or the devs. The most they do is promote the odd arc to "Dev's Choice," which does little enough to raise its profile. (It doesn't help that some of the existing dev's choice arcs have been broken by patches and never fixed, but that's a different rant.)
In my opinion, the best thing about AE is that it can be used to create content faster than the two writer-devs can churn it out. The devs need to start making use of that virtue. They should be using their dev-like powers to ram AE content down the player base's throat, and the best way to do this is to go through the arcs that exist and start "promoting" them into the wider game world, assigning them to contacts, and the like. Yes, this would require a time investment for one or two developers. (How large? I have no idea.) Yes, it would require some rewriting and tweaking to convert content from the AE interface to the contact one, which would outrage authors. In my opinion, that kind of outrage is the price you pay for creating something in someone else's IP. All in all, if it gets more "regular" content out there, I consider it a good use of the AE system. -
When my team did the Apex TF the other night, there was much discussion of "You killed the Invisible Swordsman!" Unfortunately, no one sang the "My Little Buttercup" song.
What, too obscure a reference? -
Everything RemusShepherd and Ironik said is correct. Follow up on the issues they raised. And, personally, the whole situation sounds fishy to me, too.
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That's a nice one, but I prefer the Tiki God, by the same videographer. Dancing shamans!
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I just wanted to say publicly that I love everything about Henri's first screenshot there.
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Quote:It looks worth it just for Gentleman Mint's moustache.Originally Posted by Mystic_Fortune
I think I want these..
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Quote:More importantly, this technology is central to Connie Willis's novel Remake, in which no one can get real acting jobs in movies because everything is a computerized remake of something else, using dead stars. This ought to strike a chord with today's geekdom, what with all the (somewhat justified) nerdrage over remakes, quite aside from this technology.Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Howard Chaykin called this back in 1983 (Randall Flagg was fired from his TV show after being replaced by a computer simulacrum).
In unrelated matter, Ironik's note that "the dead don't care" reminded me of the novel of that title by one of my favorite forgotten authors, John Latimer.
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Nice Stella Dallas vibe in that Doc Ock story SMerc passed on. However, I just had to post because this sentence:
Quote:made me laugh with glee. Only in a discussion of comic books could someone say that with a straight face. And that's why I love comics!Originally Posted by SMerc
It's correct that they were also, at one point, engaged, though that ended with Octopus and Hammerhead presumed dead via nuclear explosion. -
27 out of 30. I only knew the "villain names" for the Skull leaders, so I couldn't get that one to register. I was looking for a different sort of leader for the Scrapyarders (nice tricky one there), and I couldn't remember how to spell the Igneous you listed. However, I don't think that character is necessarily their leader; in Manticore's Cannon Fodder thread, he gave the faction's leader as someone actually named Igneous.
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I once had a laptop on which the hard drive was called "Mr. Gates." Sometime, when I use it more, I might name something on my Mac laptop "Mr. Jobs." (Note for the hard of thinking: I am not a fan of either guy; the names are meant to mock them.)
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Wow. NONE of my guesses came out right. It's good to know geeks can still surprise me!
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Quote:If your chance to see something is negative, does that mean you have a chance to unsee it?Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Michele Gondry is an interesting director, which increases the chances I see this one at some point from negative eleventy-billion to, like, 8 2/3rds %.
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No real surprises this round. Here are my predictions for the next one (again, who I think will win, not necessarily who I'd choose):
Quote:I'm still convinced that the final round will be Finch against Batman.Originally Posted by GATE-keeper
Round 4 winners announced November 29th:
Region 1: Literary Heroes
#2 Atticus Finch
Region 2: Superheroes
#2 Batman
Region 3: Theatrical Heroes
#3 Indiana Jones (I suspect the winner of this region, no matter which it is, will get eliminated in the following round.)
Region 4: Historical Heroes
#1 Abraham Lincoln -
Quote:Sam is correct here, in my opinion. The "Longbow is the most evil of factions" is a player perception first and foremost. The player base has a number of odd perceptions like this, e.g., "Nemesis is a joke"; "Freaks are unrelievedly hilarious," etc., that have gradually filtered back into the game.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Actually, that's mostly player inference, which caused a feedback loop back into the game in offhand comments. The only real actual reference to flamethrowers = bad is in their info descriptions, in that they keep those away from the cameras. That's it. No horrors of war, no moral ambiguity, no questionable ethics. They just don't like to flame people on TV.
The comment about Praetorians being horrified by Longbow is actually the reverse - it's Longbow soldiers talking among each other. Specifically, that the Praetorian police officers are armed mostly with non-lethal weapons "and look at what we're carrying." Which is an amusing community reference, but goes on to ignore the fact that those "non-lethal weapons" were used to break a guy's back, and those same weapons were used by Chief Interrogator Washington to KILL Cleopatra.
Most of the "Longbow are actually evil" rhetoric has always come from players and their interpretations, or re-interpretations as the case may be, of the faction, and often in the face of stated canon. Whenever the game needs a default good guy faction, it defaults to Longbow, even in cases where that seems out of place. You need to spread Outbreak through Paragon City? Longbow are there to oppose you. You need to kidnap an important scientist? Longbow are there to guard him. You want to go blow up a public building? Longbow are trying to stop you. They are the de-facto good guys, and suffer mostly from the simple fact that they are a simple re-dump of the 5th Column Ubermenschen corps for the most part.
That's actually something of a pet peeve of mine, because it keeps being brought up and always with the same arguments, and these are arguments that were invented before my eyes back in the day. Keeping to strict canon definitions, the worst you can find is Longbow traitors like Lt. Demitrovich and that Longbow agent who was stealing from various factions, pinning it to Arachnos then selling on the black market. But they don't represent the faction. And I don't know how "arrogant" Miss Liberty is, since none of that characterisation is in the game, and the Top Cow comics aren't what I'd describe as "good."
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I'm not against better defined canon (where cannon is spelled with a double N), just so long as it isn't REWRITTEN canon which invalidates my characters who were perfectly fine up to that point. In fact, I prefer loosely-defined canon over that, if it gives me more creative freedom. I CERTAINLY don't want another mess like the Origin of Powers nonsense which suddenly tells me who my characters really are and where their powers actually come from. More to point, I don't suddenly want the game to redefine what it means to be a hero and yank my heroes from under me because they didn't fit someone else's definition. -
Quote:No, thanks. I'd rather not deal with a game that constantly beats me over the head with "all Americans are Nazis, stupid, crazy, or all three" (that's Moore) or that spends 90% of the game on elaborate, meandering set-up, then tries to cram all the action into the last 1/10 of a level (that's Lackey, based on her novels. Sorry, not a fan).Originally Posted by AzureSkyCiel
... but yes, perhaps it would be best left to City of 2 for a better canon, I propose getting Phil Foglio and maybe Alan Moore to help write it, given the alternate history nature of the game's backstory.
Also, Mercedes Lackey, the devs might even be able to pay her with game time. (Unlikely, but hey, I enjoyed night on the Boardwalk and Phoenix and Ashes) -
This news fills me with nerdrage, and Marcian is correct in all particulars. Not much more to say, is there?
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Quote:Nope. I just caught sight of the topic, and now it's making me hungry.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Am I the only one that misread the title as Edible Pets?
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I'm not much of a Green Lantern fan, but that is really neat.
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Quote:Same. Their work, while not without interest, always leaves me with a "you're not welcome here!" vibe.Originally Posted by Ironik
Despite the coolness factor, I'll be staying far, far away from anything run by CCP. That's a company that gets it wrong.