The lows are low, but the highs are home

So my Hardcore character on Dragon Tavern (permadeath) just upgraded his equipment enough to stop adventuring cautiously. Today, he died.

Sad, sad day. Sad day.

I just got the title for spending 300 day’s worth of AP as well.

Sad day.

edit: For those of you that know the game, I took 31 hits from a single boss. I didn’t bother to check what my success chance was. It was my first adventure after returning from the tavern >.>

Also it’s like Echo Bazaar is just looking for excuses to throw nightmares at me. Not finding someone (Watchful challenge), thus not getting paid, gives me nightmares? Really? Explain that one to me, please.

I’m stuck on my ambition until I get Watchful 45/Dangerous 37, and I’m stuck on the Absconding Devil until I get Bohemian 3 again, so basically I guess I’m going to go be Dangerous because it’s the least dangerous thing I can do.

Derp.

Once, I posted an e-mail from Kingdom of Loathing. Now, I post a letter from Fantasy University.

Imagine if KoL were made by the Facebook-generation.

Ready?

“Congratulations!

        Your application to Fantasy University has been accepted!

        We are looking forward to having yet another bright young mind take advantage of the unending knowledge of the country’s finest and foremost Adventuring College (that we know of)!

        We hope you are looking forward to the challenges presented by a Class-A Adventuring Education, and hope that you will meet any and all challenges with the same kind of fervor and optimism we exhibited in preparing this form letter!

        Before you are actually accepted, there is one formality that will be taken care of by this magical letter. It contains a disclaimer form that must be accepted before enrollment becomes final.

        Agreement: I, Demi Victus, do solemnly swear that I will do my best to uphold the traditions and integrity of Fantasy University and will always remember that I become the property of Fantasy University and that any accidents or punishments that may befall me up to and including death, dismemberment, depression, apathy, illness, decapitation (real or imagined), fraud, theft, delusions, nightmares, food poisoning, Rapture, stolen organs, borrowed organs, hallucinations, leg trauma, lupus, being burned alive, water torture, tickle torture, plain old torture, spasms, night sweats, day sweats, pant sweats, restless leg syndrome, restless elbow syndrome, poverty, canings, heat stroke, heat exhaustion, plain stroke, extortion, blackmail (which is technically different from extortion), blindness, deafness, loss of an ear, loss of one or more shoes, dew crotch, being forced to watch bad comedians (you know, the really bad ones where half of you wants to feel sorry for them, but the other half can’t stop laughing at how awful they are), and jury duty are all considered perks of the University and must be enjoyed as such. Furthermore, it remains the right of the University to… Geez, does anyone even read this crap? I spend 24 hours a day down here in this well, shackled to this printing press, writing up legal documents for you people BY HAND, and for what? A few half-hearted chuckles? My humor is all I have to give, and I try so hard, but what’s it all amount to? You’re never going read this anyway, and that’s okay. My wife will probably run off with some romance novelist, who she’ll fall in love with after he writes her into every single one of his best sellers. That’s cool, I’ll chill down here, with the rats, and the constant trickle of dank sewer water. No really guys, it’s fine. I’ll just keep making you laugh throughout this entire game, as you never once question where such brilliant humor stems from. You’ll never realize that every joke you read is really told by one lonely guy trapped in the bottom of a well, and that’s a fate I’m willing to accept. Bye forever.”

So from what I can tell Echo Bazaar is user-created. There’s a button you click on the storylets you see that tells you who made them, which could just be all developers, or it might not be.

        I like the system of the stats, the storylets you unlock and the opportunity cards… However, what I’m most interested in is seeing what they have to make me coerce my grandmother into playing. Not every game is Demon’s Souls, where the gameplay itself is enough to sell copies. More on that when I get to my lodgings and see what kind of activities my friends can engage in there. Or something.

        Well, ok. Standard procedure, I said a thing on facebook and I got more action points. More on this as it develops. This is a game on the level of The Ruins Of, where I practically love it just for existing. However it’s too damn polished for automatic love and its status as a social game as opposed to a simple browser-based game (these are developed very differently - compare Echo Bazaar to The Ruins Of and you’ll get the idea) makes me want proof of its excellence.

        I will be back to declare a judgement on its excellence later. If it is excellent, I expect you to be my neighbours so we can perform various activities at each other’s lodgings. Or whatever.

So that Vanquish demo. It’s pretty nuts. Something tells me the final levels resemble a three-dimensional bullet hell game.

        I died five times during the demo. Short jog through a base, fight against a four-legged mech (legs are weak points, knock one out, shoot the core - if you’re lucky you’ll take it out after two, if not, three is fine), which then TRANSFORMS into a two legged version with electro-whip arms. Checkpoint is at the first part of the fight so dying against the second means starting it all over. Your health regenerates and all, so it’s not like you’re weaker by the time the second half comes along, but still. One thing that made me feel less like a failure is that your weapons upgrade themselves as you either pick up upgrade chips (probably dropped from specific enemies during missions) or as you pick up the same gun (if an enemy drops an assault rifle, you pick it up and gain ammo, and some work towards a gun upgrade). When you die, you restart with the current state of your weapons, so it’s like a short term new game+.

        So the game itself. You have an uber nanotech suit thing, titanium neuroskeletal technomagic armour stuff. It has a booster pack that for some reason requires you to power slide to use. So you press L2 and you power slide until your suit overheats. Then you can also do a dodge roll, and if you press L2 while doing that, time pretty much stops and you get to fire away until your suit overheats. When you do a melee attack, which are as effective as an EMP blast/titanium fist to the face should be, your suit will also overheat for a bit. You lose a third of your movement speed while your suit is overheating, so it comes at a cost. But I did a flying knee to the face and killed a guy instantly. That was cool.

        So this game is like style and then substance. First you do cool shit, and then they try to justify it. For example, you don’t actually carry any guns - your suit morphs into guns by replicating any guns you find. It can store three in its memory at a time, but it’s suggested during the tutorial that you can upgrade that.

        Did I mention there’s a turbo power slide button?

        Oh, and you get the slow motion effect automatically when your health gets low, and that’s really cool. An explosive barrel blew up beside me, and the physical barrel or whatever put me at critical damage, and then I outran the explosion and survived.

        If I can finish the demo without dying, I’ll buy the game. If not, I have no chance to survive. Make my time.

I’m sure you were totally interested in my schedule (I know you weren’t) but I’m interested in my progress and it makes me feel good to remember I’ve accomplished something. So, for that selfish reason, here’s the homework I did over the weekend!

ALDS: I did my readings. Nothing crucial here, so nothing exciting to really report. However, my experiment did not lead to any interesting paper subjects. Oh well.

FREN: Watch my movie, read Voltaire, listen to music - and then write about all of those for my cultural journal. This was what I spent most of saturday doing. That’s four hours of stuff without the writing, which is kinda silly because I’d ALREADY DONE four hours for this project, but I decided they weren’t good enough so I started over. But hey it’s good now.

LING: Take notes on chapter 3.

Well damnit. That… looks like a lot less than it felt like. I know where and how I ended up spending time not working, but excuses are pretty useless. I know I’m not in trouble, I mean the next thing I have due is on thursday, and I could probably do it the day-of and print it off at school.

I do wish I had magically finished all of my work this weekend, but I was probably a little bit too optimistic on thursday. I’ve got psych and applied linguistics tomorrow, and since I won’t be starting on that paper just yet, I should get some solid work done on psychology notes. I’ve got from the end of my computers lab (11-11:30 at the latest) until 1 pm, then 2:30 until 4 pm, so that gives me three hours (minus eating lunch and time spent in transit and etc. etc.) to work. I’ll get at least one chapter done for psychology, and likely some of the second. Then that night I’ll do my linguistics assignment and check out my next computers assignment.

Riveting excitement here, folks. Don’t miss a minute.

And actually more applicable than I might even think when reading the textbook. Diagrams of how you breathe when you make sounds?! That’s so forgettable and not at all interesting to people who don’t have a Ph.D. in Linguistics, namely, the people taking intro to linguistics.

        First, something I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of days: the schwa. Basically, it’s a mid-central laxly produced vowel - and it’s all over the place in tons of languages, though very few include it in their alphabet. North American english actually deletes it a lot (how do you pronounce chocolate - with or without an o? that letter o is actually a schwa), and that’s another neat thing about language - we’re optimizing for speed, so we throw away useless sounds and don’t pronounce things properly. Back to what mid-central laxly produced vowel means, it’s pretty much the very middle of your mouth. I’m assuming that would be the natural resting position for your tongue. So at any give time, if you were to just open you lips (no tongue movement allowed) and make a noise, it would likely be a schwa!

        So the schwa is in tons of words because it makes them easier to pronounce, and a great example is foxes. Try to pronounce fox, and add a -zzz at the end for the s, WITHOUT any sound in between. Very difficult to produce, harder for the hearer to understand that you mean multiple foxes - so a schwa goes right in between those sounds as a transition and to make them more pronounceable.

        I thought that was neat so if I explained it poorly just pretend it’s really cool.

        Next thing is I’m going to write a paper about how communication on the internet is still communication. It’s a little bit rough because linguistics has proved that writing, whether it’s a letter or an “instant message” is not equivalent to pure language use, but I’ll just have to pick my thesis carefully. The reason I say “pure language use” as opposed to “speech” is because sign language is equivalent to spoken word, and actually ten times more amazing in certain ways. But suffice to say that sign language uses the language centric parts of your brain (a couple places in the left hemisphere) exactly like spoken language, AND it develops an extra part on the right hemisphere dedicated solely to understanding the spacial dimension of signed language. So, as far as your brain is concerned, speaking with your hands and speaking with your mouth are just as good.

        What I want to somehow work into this paper is that communication over the internet is similarly equivalent to communication face to face - that’s not to say I don’t think there’s any point to meeting someone in person to discuss something with them, just that internet friends are as valid as friends who sit beside you in class.

        Take vael’s post about a support system - who says a “support system” is restricted to people physically close to you? You want to see an internet support system, go to deviantArt or Gaia Online and see all the little peoples complimenting eachother and generally just making everybody feel good about being average. It’s as easy as that to prove. I don’t have the equipment to do brain scans and crap like that, but I’m willing to bet there’d be a lot of similarities between a kind word from an internet friend and a kind word from a friend in the same room. Maybe we internet kids (and don’t doubt that people who grew up on computers have differently developed brains from those who didn’t - look at 3D artists, a field requiring spatial knowledge that could never have existed before, and imagine trying to teach such a program to an older artist) connect avatars with our concepts of “others,” the vague sense that in fact someone does exist, as easily as other people connect faces.

        This is what I’ve been learning at university.

        This is optional reading, consider the post done, but what I meant by ‘concepts of “others”’ is by contrast to the concept of self. Turns out, concepts and exercises that relate back to your sense of self use distinct areas of your brain from ones that don’t. Which is to say that science is working on determining where in your brain YOU, as a person and an idea, exist. Based on that, I’d definitely say it’s possible there are similar areas in the brain related to other people, as concepts and as people with feelings and thoughts of their own, that I can guarantee would relate back to the monkeysphere.

        The easiest way to test that would be to lesion someone’s brain and see if they stop understanding that other people exist just like they do. Easy way to figure out where I should try that would be to test people with severe autism. Now, I don’t necessarily need to cut/burn anyone’s brain for this (electromagnets and drugs can actually turn your brain off temporarily - god I love science - and see what would happen if we theoretically destroyed a part of your brain) but where would the fun be in that?

        Line-up for electrodes in the brain starts to my right, folks. Don’t be shy, we’ve got enough for everyone!