Raithe

A somewhat amusing article by iO9 about 9 Reasons to be Grateful for Twilight... For no matter what way your feelings lay about the series, you can't deny the huge impact that Twilight has had on pop culture.

Part of it is also how many people get inspired by characters from fiction. How many times do you find the roguish swashbuckler who happens to know a couple of spells? Or the scholar-mage who can pick up a sword without slicing off his own fingers?.. Or the renowned fighter who left scarred from war retires to a monastary and becomes a monk... The kid who grew up on the streets as a thief, but then becomes some famous warrior adventurer.. While the main idea of classes are based around specific archetypes... A lot of fictional characters have a certain blending of abilities that it's impossible to pull off without some element of multiclassing. So if you get inspired by a few good books and think "yeah, I want to create a character with elements from that guy and that guy"... That can be balanced out differently in point-based game systems or such, but when you know a game is class-based, the question of multiclassing always has to come up.

I don't know what it was about Morrowind. The plot was forgettable, there were no really memorable characters, and the gameplay mechanics where cheesy bad for overpowering you, but there was something that could catch your soul and pull you into wandering around to see what was over the next hill and just what quirky bit of background lore you might discover... And then Oblivion looked pretty, had some good technical aspects..but was completely and utterly soul-destroying. Skyrim was much more .. self-contained? I guess I would say. It was more coherent in what was happening, but yeah, you run through it, you finish it, you forget about it. There's nothing that really draws you into the whole thing.

"If a man is not a liberal in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative in his old age, he has no brain."

3e and 3.5e multiclassing and prestige classes could work when you had a DM there to slap down players pushing minmaxing styles. When there were actual reasons for characters to dabble in other classes and part of the roleplaying of picking up new skills in x arena, or specialising in y aspect it can work quite well. Because it takes into consideration that you have a group of players and someone gamesmastering it who can apply the fuzzy logic to the rules system. When that translates into a purely crpg aspect, you lose the fuzzy logic and get just the strict by the rules which can let the minmaxing go wild with no real controlling hand to counter it within reason.

Caught the Firefly 10th Anniversary Reunion Special. Some interesting bits and pieces, and seeing how Whedon and the cast still get choked up talking about how it all went, when they found out it was cancelled, and when the Browncoat Nation kicked off and kept things flying..

Gaius Julius Ceasar was awarded the title Augustus by the Roman Senate, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire... The Medici family became official bankers to the Papacy... Ivan the Terrible became Tzar of Russia.. The League of Nations held it's first meeting... Adolf Hitler moved into his Underground Bunker Space Shuttle Columbia took off on it's final mission...

Recovered a bottle of some Jack Daniels variant that the dog took from my sister's room. I think her dog potentially has a drinking problem....

That at least got balanced out by some fairly amusing dialogue and storylines. Not monotone voiceovers as if someone were reading a book....

But the good ol USA isn't a country. It's an IDEAL!

Had some bizzaro dreams and have woken to face the delights of Monday.... Let us see where it goes.

An epic love story.. told only in long, lingering stares. And to persuade teenage girls it's really not creepy for an older man to watch you sleep...

So is it just a comedic hissy fit, or something to produce a lot of interesting sound bites in the next month? 20 States have filed to secede from the United States

For the comic beek geekasm (as far as I kinda recall) - Dinah Lance aka Black Canary was the daughter of a non-powered costumed heroine from the JLA days. She started out as a brunette who wore a blonde wig, a leather jacket and some fishnet hose as a way of hiding her identity whilst kicking butt with martial arts ability and general "scrappy attitude", then picked up some sonic based scream powers along the way... So far the series just has Dinah Lance as a brunette lawyer with a hardbitten detective for a father, and they've had the throwaway line about some costume she wore for halloween where she hated the fishnets... So potential for things to go somewhere with that in the future. On a sidenote, the old tv show Birds of Prey was a semi-adaption of the highly successful comic run Birds of Prey, which was Oracle, Black Canary and Huntress, The tv show wasn't too bad in that cheesy comic book show sort of way, but it offended the fans by rewriting a whole heap of stuff, and then projecting it into a pseudo future Gotham where Batman had disapeared and Huntress was the unrecognised daughter of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle (along with some mutant powers).

I'm in favour of making sure to drink water when I get in, and some chocolatey type goodies eaten away.. then when you wake up, hit it with some fruit juice of some sort to double on the rehydration and energy...

I think it depends on just where you know how to shop. I mean, currently the crop of consoles in the UK seem to be around the £170-240 mark, and that's with the next-generation consoles in the near future, so go back a bit in time and the price was higher. Compared to that, you can pick up a low-to-mid range pc for around £300-500. Hell, if you buy a pc without a graphics card and pick up something like an NVidia GT630 seperately, you'll be talking around £250-350. I guess a large part of that comes down to "are you only going to use it for gaming?". To me, whenever I've thought of looking at consoles it always seems that the price of console games has been about 20% more then the pc version of the game. So in the long term of a year or three picking up games the price would actually even out. So that combined with how much I use a pc for other things besides gaming pushes the pc into the superior choice for myself.

Because, Torment's story actually fit the "mechanics" of the Universe it was set in. The logic of the world (as it were) matched that. AC is (nominally speaking) set in the "Real World ™".

My Pc runs on Vista which yeah, was just being released when I got my PC, so, I've had no problems running games.

Okay, I picked up a fairly bleeding edge pc 6-7 years ago. Apart from having to replace the graphics card twice (because they died, not because of a need to make them better) , and a hard drive that also died needing to be replaced, I haven't had any issues and it still chews up modern games with no problem. And no, it still runs on the OS it came with. So, yeah, I'd say it's all working to the good. If I have a technical issue with my pc I can open it up and fix it. If a console has a technical issue.. you don't really have that same option.

Had a wander on the public test server of ToR. Interesting to see how the "Cartel" is set up for when they shift to free-to-play and wotnot. Edit: From the looks of it, free-to-play gives you the class storylines, but pretty much cuts down access to flashpoints, warzones (pvp) and operations. You can use micro-transactions to buy Cartel Coins which you can use to buy things from the Cartel which include more access to those three, plus a small horde of other things. Also a way of buying access to various Legacy perks, other gear, and assorted things. Subscribers will get an amount of Cartel Coins each month as is, and automatic access to all the things they've grown used to... And there was something else I was going to mention, but it's slipped from my mind. Ah well, maybe I'll edit it in later when it jumps back...

Had a push on Tor. Got my Sith Juggernaut to the end of Chapter 2, and my Jedi Sage through the prologue....

I have to admit, I can enjoy reading Pratchett's books once. But I find it hard to re-read them. Hm, apart from Good Omens, but that he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman.