Istima Loke

I wanted to change mine for some time now and today I did. Here's my new one:

heh, my relationship with Le Guin's work is somewhat strange. I mean, she is a good writer and all that, but I can't say I really love her books. I have read "The Dispossessed: An ambiguous utopia" in which I didn't find anything attractive, and the "Earthsea Quartet", which let me with mixed feelings. For some strange (based on people speaking of Le Guin) reason, I cannot get into her world. Maybe because it's written clearly from a character's perspective, but Earthsea seems so narrow a world, with most of its culture presented looking as if existing to serve the plot instead of existing separately from it, that makes it "unnatural". Her stories are nice, though she is stretching them far too long, especially "The Tombs of Atuan" that almost made me quit reading, because of repetitiveness. Anyway, I hope that the Tales will change my mind. P.S. The Farthest shore was the best plot-wise, but the end being somewhat anti-climatic, left a bad taste. P.P.S. People usually consider me crazy (or an idiot) after saying the above.

I finally lured myself into reading "Sojourn" from the Dark Elf Trilogy, with the aid of some books I bought for Christmas, including the one I am starting now, Le Guin's "Tales from Earthsea".

I 've been playing Psychonauts almost non-stop for more that 12 hours. Maybe I should take a break. Though this game turns to be far more entertaining than what I ever expected.

What I dislike in DnDish fantasy is how magic is presented. It becomes standardized in such a manner that it renders itself obsolete. Also the way the races (elves, dwarves etc) are presented in the FR is annoying, because they are presented exactly like humans though elves are pompous, dwarves are drunks, halflings are thieves and so on. Different races should be different from each other. Other than that, story-wise and quest-wise I don't think that fantasy games differs from any other genre.

Yesterday I finally got TF2. Played for a few hours, during the night.

You can find a wrench in other places too. I think there is one in the Vault, in Vault City.

It was "hacked". Yesterday Hellgate: London, got to 666 votes almost instantly. Later it was raised again. Then someone counter-hacked to give The Witcher the lead again. If you read the comments you will see that a lot of folks are complaining.

Aren't those poems supposed to come from different eras of Hobbit history?

How far have you got in Kotor? Not much. I just got over the first part, (a tutorial of some sort, where I am in a spaceship and trying to escape) and then wandered a little around that building in that planet (must have taken me about half an hour). I'm not a SW fan and nothing happened to capture my attention (I am supposed to find a Jedi, I hardly know anything about). I will play some more (obviously) I am just wondering if a major plot point will appear soon enough, because the whole thing seems somewhat "alien" to me. P.S. hehe, I sound like some kind of fool...

I finished Darkness Within, (though I used a walkthrough a lot). I started KotOR for the first time, though I found it quite boring. Should I try to play some more? Will it pick up the pace later, or should I just play something else?

I just hope they won't turn it into one big epic awesome epic... epic thing, and leave it as it is, that is, a fairy tale (at heart). Seriously though, they 'd better keep the storyline as it is, and avoid making the Battle of the Five Armies last for 3 hours.

What's the voice acting like? I've heard people say it's bad to the point of putting them off the game entirely... It's bad enough for me to pay attention to that fact (and I don't usually mind about voice acting quality at all), though up to the point where I am, the protagonist rarely meets any characters or speaks to them, so, I guess, one can play it without putting them off.

I am playing through a game called Darkness Within. It's some kind of horror point and click adventure.

heh, I usually have a spare mail address for that kind of stuff...

Thanks for the answer. I was curious about the reason people see fairy tales that way.

So, what's wrong with fairy tales, again?

I just saw "Dark City". It had many similarities with Matrix (though it's older than it). It really had a nice atmosphere throughout the movie,

I experience deja vu, when I am really tired. So I (at a time) theorized that because one is tired the brain acts like that for some reason. Then I asked my brother and he said the same thing (that he experiences them when tired) . So are you tired when you experience deja vu? (maybe I should search the wiki).

I finished the "storyline" of Mario Galaxy (which is about 60 out of 120 stars). I tried some of the latter levels and the game is somewhat hard (for me) which is good. I missed dying a lot in a Nintendo game. Now I need about 55 stars to complete it.

http://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/244/ http://xkcd.com/5/ Some of them, which I find quite funny.

Ha, after a luck check (must have rolled a 20) I was able to get Super Mario Galaxy, so I am somewhere between it and ID1. P.S.: My head spins from all the walking around all sort of planets.

This argument is so silly it's not really worth responding to.. But OK, I'll humour you: Yes, I "meta-game" life. Mostly because it's not a game but also because it's something I have to do, whether I like it or not. Games I play for entertainment (and thus I don't want to have to meta-game) while life is everything else. Beginning to see why your argument is one massive fail? That is my point. You can't meta-game life, because you are not aware that there is a bunch of folks sitting on a table, throwing some dice, arguing over our actions. As much as you know about a job, that much is known to your character about his career of choice. You know that you need to be able to code to be a programmer and the thief knows that he has to stab people on the back to be an assassin. This is not meta-gaming this is just planing ahead for what you will do in your life. The only difference is that abilities in a game like that are translated to numbers, thus you have to think of numbers instead of saying "I ll study to go to a good uni". That simple it is, really. If you don't like planing ahead about a character because you just want to have some fun in the game it's fine, just don't blame meta-gaming for it.

When MotB came out, I was playing (for the first time) Icewind Dale. After finishing MotB twice and trying some Hl2 mods, I'm going back to finish it and then go through Icewind Dale 2.

So when you want to work for a company at a specific position, you don't check for the requirements, you just go there and say "Hello, I want to work here" and if you thought what you did in your life was relevant to the job, they take you? Or if you checked what the specific position needed, then you "meta-gamed" life? A character is well aware of what are the prerequisites for any class or prestige class because they are jobs. If your character wants to be an assassin, that means he wants to join a specific group of people (an assassin's guilt), which won't take anyone, so there exist prerequisites. Meta-gaming has to do with the knowledge that it's a game. It's the abuse of the rules because you know that the world is fixed by them. Anyway, by the definition you provided "planning your next mage-warlock-gnome-dishwasher hybrid ahead of the game" is not meta-gaming, since the way one plays his character is not yet set, thus cannot change.