I just noticed the name is "Three Tales" which sounds like a Tyranid you might have to fight in Dawn of War II. Right next to Old One Eye and that other named Tyranid whose name I suddenly forgot.
I now have a full pay period over with, two full weeks of fairly grueling training behind me.
Things are finally starting to click, although being a lifelong non-gamer and having not worked much with databases in the like in the past, this job does have a fairly steep learning curve for me.
The implication (though I can't quite tell yet) is that this person has a job working for VIDEO GAMES but doesn't actually play video games.
I don't see a problem here.
Actually it goes a long way to explain why games as a whole have started to suck.
Sure, the pros are obvious—but what are the cons of having a friend with benefits?
Today's writer's ('s's's's') block.
Pfffft, I dunno. Bitch might have a disease?
To be blunt, you can't always count on a FWB being totally disease-free, unless you're absolutely sure they're only your FWB and not someone else's too.
Yeah, there you go. The writer's block today is kind of a dud.
Oh boy, here's an idea for a video game.
Since I'll never have a chance to develop this, I thought I'd throw this out there.
The game would be called "Amnesia," and the premise is simple: you wake up one day, somewhere you don't recognize, as someone you don't know. You then have to collect clues as to who you are, where you are, what you do, and why you're there.
Only the situation you've been dropped into is anything but an easy one to adapt to. You've been dropped into a web of intrigue and one false move could mean you die before you even know your own name. You have to gather your clues about your own identity without letting your enemies figure out who you are first.
...
Surely you're fucking with me.
I mean you do know your name in Amnesia but otherwise it's the same fucking thing.
As for the visual style? Well, a nice noir story set in a crumbling art deco megalopolis might be interesting. I'm thinking a cross between "Bioshock" and "L.A. Noir" would fit nicely.
>Bioshock
>Noir
Ohhhh goodness.
I think I see why video games are shit now. This is who's designing them.
For the record, Bioshock is decidedly Art Deco.
Then again, the idea could work just as well in any setting. It might be interesting to set this in the 23rd century aboard a spaceship bound for a colony in the Pleiades system (hmm, sequel, anyone?)
You're seriously describing every survival horror game ever made. There's an entire genre devoted to "wandering around looking for clues while trying not to get killed". Your only contribution is "oh you have to figure out your name" which has been done before I'm sure.
Really original game design isn't even that hard. You just have to pretend you're on acid.
I mean think of the most endearing game icons of all time: a stocky Italian plumber eats mushrooms to power up to rescue a princess from a giant lizard?
A blue hedgehog and his sidekick, a twin tailed fox who spins his tails really fast to fly, run really fast in multicolored land?
ALL OF THESE PEOPLE WERE CLEARLY ON HARD DRUGS.
Like I got one. A train conducting otter has to rescue his girlfriend, a flying squirrel, from a demon-infested skunk by summoning his steam train through a dimensional pocket.
You can use the DS stylus to draw train tracks and run enemy pigs over.
THIS SHIT ISN'T HARD, PEOPLE.
Oh and then for the sequel (because it's Nintendo) we can do more of the same but you also control the girlfriend in a point and click adventure every other level in what reviewers will call "that part you wish you could skip."
Incidentally resume inquiries can be sent to--
Today Kobi and I went out. We hadn't actually done this in a couple weeks, so I was eager to take in some new sights and sounds (and new flavors).
Kobi is a dog, right?
Kobi has to embark on a quest of knowledge to learn what hiiiiiiiiiiiis (?) owner's gender is.
Pansexual furry cysgender transsexual furry community feminist--
He does this by leaping between the regular world and a multicolored psychedelic world.
First we went to the art supply store and I got Kobi a sketchbook. I'm going to try to prod him into doing some work in colored pencil, which he's very good at and really should do more often. *pokes Kobi*
... That he controls with his sketchbook.
I am good at making video games.
Apparently someone named their kid Kobi or Kobi is a very talented dog.
It was fun, too, looking at some of the more conceptual modern pieces in the gallery and trying to wrap my mind around what made them noteworthy.
Bunch of junk pretentious twats sit around and think is deep and meaningful.
Excuse me I like it when my paintings look like shit I recognize.
Like people or midgets or people with migraine headaches.
The implication there being midgets and migraine sufferers aren't people.
There are so many words that have been hijacked of their meaning and turned into ultimately hollow sayings by the media and politicians.
I say this not as a pundit, but as a writer. I feel like the language becomes poorer any time we run a word or phrase into the ground by parroting it mindlessly.
I can't wait for you to tell me your great proposal for a book where we all live in a dystopian, bureaucratic society run by communists and it's all set in the grim, far future of 1984.
I'm serious about that Amnesia thing from earlier. That was widely regarded as one of the best games released in the last 5 years and you hadn't even heard of it.
HOW CAN YOU MAKE VIDEO GAMES WITHOUT PLAYING THEM?
I'M GOING TO BE A WRITER WITHOUT READING BOOKS.
At least purpose-made buzzwords, like "synergy," "e-commerce," and "Islamofascist," can be abused in earnest because those words exist for the purpose of being repeated mindlessly.
Might want to look up "synergy". I said something similar once and found out it entered the English lexicon in the year 1295.
I think that's bullshit though because I have yet to read someone running around in Chaucer's time saying "Sir Gawainne hadde muche synergey..."
What I can tell you is that I'm training as customer support for a popular game console.
Ohhh. Answering the phones.
Also Microsoft.
Today was the first day they actually let us out onto the service floor to listen in firsthand on service calls, and I think I understand now why we are going to spend so much time training. This job is honestly 90% knowledge, knowing the system and company policies inside and out. The rest is having a good stomach for tedium and stupidity from customers.
Stupidity from customers.
Usually I'm very quick to blame people before technology but this is the exception that proves the rule: 9/10 it is that piece of fuck Xbox.
I have to say, after 27 years as a non-gamer, it's time to bow to progress and get a console and a few games so I'm not totally in the dark about my line of work.
Join a game of CoD
get called a faggot by kids
Fuck, I RROD'd.
I just wrote a haiku.
I'm still waiting on word from Furplanet. At this point I cannot project a date for its release.
On the off chance that they don't think they want it, I may go ahead and release it free of charge on FA and SoFurry. This would be a huge disappointment since I spent many years on it as my first book, but I've moved on to other projects long since. As my first book, it isn't quite up to the same standards as "Basecraft Cirrostratus" and it certainly isn't up to the standards of my most recent work.
WRITING A BOOK CALLED FURPLANET?
That's all I have to say.
The joke is you wrote a book called furplanet.
You topped yourself, man.
Anyone who considers me intelligent, erudite, intellectual, or otherwise of any sort of higher level of functioning should really look up those terms.
I am a charlatan and a pseudo-intellectual.
Hey look it's the first blog post that has my response built in.
I mean it's way douchier than I'd put it but I can't fault it for working twice as hard.
A true intellectual is well-read. What have I read of any substance in the last six years? Really, nothing.
Stop valuing my opinion. It means nothing. There are many others who know so much more than I do because unlike me, they haven't lost the ability to sit and read an entire book beginning to end without losing all concentration and wallowing in profound disinterest only to be distracted by something inane.
Yeah man--
Anyone reading this should value my opinion because I am literally superior in every meaningful way to 90% of all humans who have ever existed.
Now take these two views, combine them, and you have a normal person.
What opinion have you offered me outside your opinions on what makes a good game (Amnesia) and words are losing their meaning (crisis experienced by every litfag ever)?
For the last few months I've been thinking hard about the work of B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists.
Skinner's position- as one who had studied the relatively predictable way people and animals behave under given conditions- was that there is only so much choice in anything we do, and that simply by modifying exterior conditions, people can be made to do anything as if acting on their own free will.
True.
And you can.
Unfortunately most of the time you can't modify the "exterior conditions" to get the kind of reaction you want.
Skinner went further, by pointing out that, from a purely rational standpoint, free will cannot be shown to exist and that it amounts to a homunculus fallacy.
The disturbing thing is, I can't really find any good argument to debunk this from a purely rational standpoint.
Oh this is such a bullshit argument and you know it. It's like saying "well your brain is made of atoms and atoms behave in a predictable pattern so freewill is impossible."
This may be the case but you're talking about how many trillions of atoms? Eventually the structure collapses into chaos.
It's like Skinner. Yeah you can modify stimuli to make a kid cry at a white rabbit but there's so much sensory input in the real world you couldn't possibly hope to control all that to successfully mind control someone.
I'm sure you could readily argue that all the stimuli adds up to create what you are today and that was inevitable but you can't really say that's born from a lack of freewill.
At some point in your life you decided to be a douchecock is what I'm driving at, I guess.
I really do have an irritating, off-putting personality, no social skills, and a shrill squawky voice like a hyperactive 12-year-old. Also, I bet I smell like day-old cabbage and jock straps because bathing once a day isn't nearly enough to cope with my horrendous, antisocial stench from my hideous, freakish body.
Also, there isn't enough booze to make me stop thinking of how horrible it must be to be around me.
I agree.
And yet you admitting this about yourself is probably one of the more insufferable things about you. I bet your friends have to prop you up and cheer you up and all sorts of shit.
Today I'm 27 years old, and I'm just trying to make sense of what I've done so far.
And yet, as much as I've accomplished, I still feel like there's so much to be done.
Let's see what I've done in my life:
faced the slavering hordes of Chaos in real life and not only survived but endured long enough to keep my sanity intact.
There is little a mind steeled to the horrors of Chaos cannot achieve.
Comparing passages from the first chapters of his books to books I've written/worked on, I've noticed a definite trend.
My current work is rising in Flesch-Kincaid readability scores, but to date my highest is just over 60 (for my most recent work, the upcoming "Cirrostratus" sequel). All in all most of my work averages in the high 50s.
I wonder how readable my writing is.
Nope don't give a shit. I have enough of a sense to know what's good and what isn't. Dante and Homer didn't need Flesch-Kincaid readability scores and I sure don't either.
TAKE THAT, FANFICTION WRITERS OF THE WORLD.
TAKE YOUR WORD COUNTS AND BULLSHIT AND FUCK OFF.
Anyway this guy really is pretty boring so I think I'm going to go.
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