What is that? The dulcet tones of
two women?
There's a little pizza place seven blocks from my apartment and they have ruined me for anything else. (Except on certain afternoons, because one of their cooks evidently doesn't understand what a topping is. I deliberately eat late when I eat there.) Everything else is cardboard with sauce on it or gum with sauce on it.
So games are doing the
opposite of browsers and trying to make LOWER numbers?
Steve's Rocky mnemonic is both clever and absolutely horrifying in that it needs to exist.
Ah, stealing tanks. The only thing better than stealing a Goliath tank in Unreal Tournament is stealing a Leviathan, the great bringer of laser death. Except for that guy who was positioned right in front of his Hellbender to grab a gun on the ground. I hopped in and ran him over. It was AWESOME!
Ew, rats. I was outside the conference centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia with a Minor-League-class pitcher. He picked up a rock and said "Hey, watch this."
YOU NEVER WANT TO HEAR THE WORDS "HEY, WATCH THIS".
Before I could do anything, he pitched the rock, a perfect fastball right for a nearby dumpster. The rats that came out when the rock hit were like a Biblical plague, larger than some cats and present in the dozens. I have never run so fast in my life.
Thank you for the awesomeness, @MiracleOfSound .
Is there some sort of comedy monologue thing we could get Susan into? That Mudcrab routine was great!
When I'm about to get a cold, brushing my teeth becomes an unpleasant experience. It feels gluey.
Thanks for the quick summary of the survey we did, @s0osleepie ! Nice to know that I'm almost a complete outlier.
As to games being European.... Tolkien knockoffs are easy. Look at it this way. What's this mean?
People will generally say "plus" or "add" or "and", the idea being to add something to something else. What is it about two crossed lines that tells us "add things together"? Nothing, it's a cultural shorthand we use to communicate something complex. Semiotics. Now let's try this again. What's this mean?
You probably think of a tall, thin, pointed-eared person, maybe in a forest and carrying a longbow, with a haughty attitude. (Ah, the importance of a comma.) So if I need a tall thin humanish guy in a forest, there we go! Or if I need a tall thin humanish guy in a mine, I change one thing and call it a "Dark Elf" and I'm Gary Gygax.
It makes it easy for the creator if he can build on cultural touchstones. As an exercise, imagine yourself describing your car to someone you know. Then imagine describing it to someone from the 1600's.
I'm not saying it's not worth the effort to build on another mythology or build your own mythos, but damn is it easier to stick with what everyone is assumed to know!
Related....
As a teenager, I'd sometimes read the "Tell Me a Story" bedtime story segment in the Sunday paper. Some were novel because they came from different societies, some were well-treaded fairy tales, and then there was the WTFs. One of them was about a dragon in the basement a young boy had to defeat.
Only instead of deadly breath, its gaze was dangerous.
And instead of setting you on fire, it turned you to stone.
And it was small for a dragon. More of a large snake, really.
And now you've probably said one of two things: "It's a basilisk, not a dragon!" or "It's a cockatrice, not a dragon!"
But the story wanted to start from baseline the kids would understand. So it took the thing they knew, the dragon, and worked back until they got a cockatrice.
Brisbane: +10 GMT (Yahtzee's in Brisbane, right?)
Durham: -5 GMT std, -4 GMT DST
Yahtzee's a full 15 hours ahead. (Or 14 depending on time of year.)
When it's 9 AM on Friday for Yahtzee it's 6 PM Thursday for The Escapist.
Amusing trivia: Both of you are in a timezone the locals call "Eastern Standard Time"
(Not to sound like a know-it-all: I had to look it up. I knew it wasn't 12, though, so I was compelled to find out. Long dull story: I used to know a guy who called his mom in Perth, and that was exactly 12 hours away from Atlantic Canada. The extreme west of Australia is 12 hours from the extreme east of North America, so there's no way to maintain the 12 hour difference and remain on both continents, DST notwithstanding.)
Golf clap for Justin for the achievement of destroying an argument with one question. Even Socrates couldn't pull that off.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.