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OMG the dramaz

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:48:56 GMT

It seems WoW is not the only place that I can encounter the drama llamaz.

An odd thing happened at our last DnD session last friday. The party was composed of the following:

Half-Elf Paladin
Elven Avenger (me)
Human Monk
Human Warlock
Shifter Cleric

I'll won't go too much into detail of the backstory going on here, but essentially myself and the cleric were worshippers of the goddess Silvanis and were tasked by some Dryads of Silvanus to find out why crazy shit in the forest was happening.

So as we are wandering around the forest we find an Ent with another Dryad perched on it. They are ignoring us, so the monk thought a good idea of getting their attention was to punch it for 12 damage. Unfortunately, the ent was not amused about being injured and ended up going beserk with the Dryad.

At this point we were all confused about what to do. We all knew we didn't want to actually kill the Ent, but all attempts to reason with it after it got sucker punched failed. At that point the Cleric who was an extremely devout worshipper of Silvanus starts attacking the monk, since he really didn't want to kill the ent and the rest of the party had started attacking the Ent.

To cut the story short, Cleric eventually drops Monk, though we are all able to resolve the situation with the Ent peacefully at the very end (after literally knocking some sense into it).

Unfortunately, the monk after he was revived was not happy, and the result was both character ended up deciding they could no longer stay within the party, leaving myself, the warlock, and the paladin to continue forward.

There was actually not very much real life bad blood going on, just the 2 players essentially role-playing their characters to what they thought they would actually do (and they actually had a bit of fun doing so from my observation), but still it was really an odd thing to see happen, and certainly not something I have ever seen happen before. The DM however was probably not very pleased, since the Cleric actually had some importance to his campaign as a story element, so now that's been scratched.

I have to spend all day computing pi because he plugged in the overlord

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:28:20 GMT

With the impending release of Final Fantasy XIII I've come to the realization that I have no desire to play it.

I also still to this date never played Final Fantasy XII. I'm trying to figure out exactly where the whole JRPG thing went sour for me. Maybe it was Final Fantasy X-2...

Still it does make me kind of sad.

Enemy of my enemy

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:04:40 GMT

Sarah Palin endorse Rand Paul for the Kentucky Senate.

This is a bizarre set of news. It seems Palin is going through great lengths to try and prove she is not an establishment shill by trying to hijack the tea party movement.

Still, this just strikes me as odd, just given how the Republican establishment has gone to great lengths to marginalize libertarian ideas. In fact, Rand Paul's opponent, Trey Grayson had this to say:

"The Pauls' liberal views on social issues are entirely out of sstep with most Kentuckians and certainly the vast majority of Kentucky Republicans."

"Maybe Ron Paul's skills as a career politician will help his son Rand explain to Kentucky Republicans why they should elect a pro-choice marijuana advocate as their next U.S. Senator."

Perhaps someone should remind Mr. Grayson what happened to the republican party the last time they attempted to ridicule and marginalize Ron Paul ... say in 2008...

Palin. Bizzare. Can someone though explain the appeal of Sarah Palin to me. I still don't quite "get it".

As much as I despise Obama I understand the appeal. Palin I just don't.

Of Paragons and Renegades

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:10:39 GMT

Very quick hits on Mass Effect 2:

It looks very pretty. For the 1st time I've been able to take a newly released game on my PC and juice up all the settings to the max (1920x1200 resolution, 16x anti-aliasing), and it is wonderful.

I'm a little upset I wasn't able to find the save of my playthrough of ME1, as some of the decisions since the game defaults to some decisions that I didn't like (I saved Ashley in the first game, not Kaiden god dammit).

For whatever reason managing your squad seems to be very chaotic. Then again, my squad mates don't seem so stupid as they did in ME1. They instinctively find cover without me even asking now. Though I'm sure they'll lose their brain cells at some point. Of course I could just be spoiled by the party management of Dragon Age. Mass Effect doesn't let you directly control other squad mates and that part of it is really getting difficult to get used to.

I'm not sure how much I like addition of the concept of ammo in the game. It feels like I'm just walking around playing Quake or Doom hunting for ammo clips after battles.

Speaking of ammo clips, it seems like Bioware couldn't decide if they wanted this to be an FPS with RPG elements or a RPG with FPS elements, the latter being what the first game was. There's even mission summary screens that pop up every now and then. Yuck.

Inventory management is utterly fucking confusing, but maybe it's somewhat more realistic that way, I mean it was kind of silly in the first game that you had access to dozens of armor and guns when you couldn't really realistically lug them all around.

I'm unsure what to think about the quicktime events for paragon and renegade actions. It is a "different" way of doing the whole good/evil thing but it seems unnecessary, dialogue options woudl have seemed to suffice, honestly. I guess it just seems a way to make the actions a little more dramatic i guess.

Don't fuck with Aria.

The paranoia about PC piracy has really reached true lunacy. The hoops I needed to jump through just to install the game was ridiculous. Also the online mechanism for authorizing the DLC that came with the game was done for about an hour, which means that I couldn't access it. Wonderful. And there's indications some gaming companies want to make the whole process even worse. Argh.

And the corporations sit there in their... in their corporation buildings, and... and, and see, they're all corporation-y...

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:52:44 GMT

So pretty much everyone is going nuts over the Citizens United vs. FEC ruling. Depending on who you talk to this is either the greatest thing ever or the end of our "free" society as we know it. By the way, Keith Olbermann, please calm down, you're probably going to give yourself a heart attack soon enough.

I'm not sure exactly if this ruling will be a good or bad thing, but I do believe that the ruling from a constitutional standpoint is correct. The main argument I have heard from the liberal side is that "corporations are not people", "and money is not speech"

The 1st argument I don't think is particularly relevant. Last I checked there was no "exception" clause to 1st amendment. It does not matter who or what funds a particular form of speech, in this case political ads during an election cycle. The 1st Congress shall pass no law abridging free speech. It does not say "Oh by the way if the speech is funded by a corporation then it is subject to government regulation or can be suppressed."

The 2nd argument is just silly. Spending money to support a cause is indeed speech. To regulate how much money can be spent on airing speech abridges that speech, akin to Bush era of locking up protesters in "free speech zones". And as such it runs afoul of the first amendment.

Still, it's difficult to really predict what the consequences will be. To be honest though, the world didn't begin with McCain-Feingold, and the world wasn't nearly the Coroporo-Facist nightmare that Keith Olbermann was predicting as the result of this ruling. Who knows maybe this will remove some of the barriers to entry that are keeping 3rd parties out of the election business.

But there are certainly still issues with our electoral process, and I'm unsure whether the results of this ruling will be positive or negative. We'll see I guess.

Be well, John Spartan

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:33:53 GMT

Legislation fail.

And unfortunately it seems Michael Bloomberg got the wrong message after watching Demolition Man.

We've been cheney'd again!

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:14:30 GMT

So much for that open transparent government Obama likes to talk about.

I have to ask in light of all the broken promises, the lies, the shady back room deals, why should we believe the final version of this health bill any of the supposed "good things" that its shady proponents say it will?

Why should we believe this charming liar has our best interest at heart instead of enriching their politically connected friends at Big Pharma?

Hey! These floors are dirty as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:53:19 GMT

A wonderful bipartisan movements from the LRC and the Huffington Post to stick it to the bailed out bankers and retake the financial system from them.

Not a bad thought.

As long as there are no follow up questions ... yes

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:57:19 GMT

During this whole comical health care "debate" something that really tickled my funny bone was the democrats becoming incensed that republican senaotr forced a clerk to read a 767 page amendment.

This strikes me as something that should be required of everything that congress votes on. I'm going to go out on a limb that probably nobody aside from the people who wrote the amendment actually read the contents before it was going about to get to a vote. It shouldn't be too much to ask that members of congress be forced to listen to what they're really voting on, and more importantly, that the american people know exactly what's being voted on as well.

Somehow I don't think its the republicans intention to start a Read the Bill Act movement, but hey maybe it'll catch on.

And as amusing turn of events, I have ended up completely agreeing with Howard Dean, albiet for much different reasons.

Protecting Fat Cats: The US Governments #1 Priority

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:25:37 GMT

When it comes to actual meaningful reform in health care, the government doesn't seem to be very interested.

At least we know who's bought and paid for by the drug industry now (including the flip-flopper Obama).