Category Archives: Humorous

Humorous, Life

My AirBnB experience: 9 different places in 9 weeks.

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For the most part, my AirBnB experiences have been really positive. So far each one has had at least one thing wrong with it, but often getting to meet someone new or seeing a different part of the city or having other really nice amenities easily makes up for it. Better experience and/or cheaper than many hotels, and, as with hotels, if you spend more you get a nicer experience. Still, this post is a listing of those nigglings.

Once I got to LA in September, I decided that I wanted to live in a bunch of different places to check out different neighborhoods before committing to a place more permanently. My appointment at Pepperdine is for this school year, which is about 8 months, so the plan was to check out different places for 2 months and then sign a 6-month lease. At the time, this plan also made sense because I knew I was going to be gone for 3 weeks at a couple of different conferences in October, so why pay rent for those 3 weeks?

Continue reading My AirBnB experience: 9 different places in 9 weeks. →

Academia, Games Research, Humorous, Life

IAmA This guy who did his PhD on WoW

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I did an AMA on Reddit about my WoW dissertation after someone found it and posted a thread about it back in 2011, but apparently I never archived it, so here you go:

IAmA This Guy who did his PhD on World of Warcraft

(the best comment: “Do you find it odd that you are still a virgin?”)

and the original thread that found my dissertation defense videos on YouTube:

This Guy did his Ph.D. dissertation on The World of Warcraft

Games, Humorous

SimCity Social is surprisingly post humanistic

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Been getting SimCity Social invites in my inbox this week. Tried it this morning. I like how the advisor that helps you is a spinning wheel. So post human.

Also, apparently, it runs on Dunkin Donuts.

Art, Humorous

Wow, I remember thinking Rob Liefeld’s sense of anatomy sucked… and I wasn’t the only one!

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Liefeld's PsylockeIt’s been like 20 years since Rob Liefeld made a name with X-Force or whatever. I remember loving McFarlane’s Spider-man and wondering how Marvel could hire both McFarlane and Liefeld at the same time. Thank god Jim Lee was around, too. I remember hearing that Liefeld had taught himself how to draw and never took an anatomy class and thinking “well, no shit!” It’s completely inexplicable that he could get a prominent job in the comics industry.

Anyway, I found this blog post on Progressive Boink about the 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings. It’s from 2007, but it’s new to me! Read this early on and decided to link to it here before reading the rest of the write-up:

The most important thing you need to know before reading about all the terrible things Rob Liefeld has drawn is that he has never seen or talked to a woman in his life and has no idea what they look like or how their bodies operate. If you asked Rob Liefeld to draw a diagram of the uterus he’d put on a pair of gauntlets and punch the shit out of your chalkboard. This is how the man operates, and though I know it sounds like a lot, you have to believe me. I don’t want you looking at the stuff he’s drawing and think he’s a conscious adult male with a creative job who can and has influenced the minds of young artists. The man is a pair of blue jeans with a face. He has on a backwards cap, and when he turns it around, it’s still backwards.

Games, Humorous

Two iPhone game ideas

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Woke up with two iPhone game ideas. Very, very simple:

  1. Ultimate Gamification. Player earns points while the app is on. Random awards once in a while with bigger rewards happening to greater fanfare, bigger badges, etc. Nice confetti showers or fireworks or emblems or whatever. The description will hint that some rewards are tied to activity, using the accelerometer, gps, gyroscope, or compass. This is untrue, but hopefully players will link coincidences to ritual. (Or maybe it’s actually true… 🙂 )
  2. Phone Killer. Player continually accrues points while their phone’s screen is off. The points continually increase exponentially, encouraging people to keep their phone screens off for as long as possible. Long idle times = bigger payoffs. Additionally, a large lump sum payoff is given when turning the screen off after the phone is active, though, if someone chain-turned on and off the phone, they’d get points at about the same rate as if they just left the phone idle while the screen was off. The idea is subversive in that it rewards players for not using their phone. Oh, while the phone is charging, player receives no points. If the battery is lower than 25% player receives double points.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure these games are even possible on the iPhone. How is it with background apps or apps running while the phone isn’t actually active?

Humorous, web 2.0

Uh… I don’t *think* I’ve written about Ashton Kutcher…

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I was checking out my site stats for the first time in months, since I thought maybe my post to Terra Nova got me some hits (it did but not significantly–I get about 130 hits a day).

And, man, look at my most popular pages:

Title Views
Home page 26 More stats
Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Invisible War 16 More stats
The Witcher 12 More stats
Splinter Cell vs. Hitman 2 11 More stats
Half-Life 2 mods 4 More stats
Dr. Video Games: Reflections of a PhD Graduate 3 More stats
Dissertation ready for download 3 More stats
A bunch of short game reviews 2 More stats
Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in WoW 2 More stats
Bike USA: July 10-20, 2000 – Wall Drug, Badlands, Kadoka, Murdo, Valentine, Norfolk, Fremont, Omaha 1 More stats

That’s from today but it’s pretty much the same top ones every day. A large portion of my site visitors are interested in Deus Ex, The Witcher, Hitman, and Splinter Cell. A part of me feels like I really ought to capitalize on that somehow…

And what’s more? Why, check out these search terms that got people to my site:

Search Views
hitman 2 9
deus ex 6
the witcher 5
half life 2 mod 3
deus ex inventory 3
deus ex 2 invisible war 2
overland maps in neverwinter nights 2
ashton kutcher naked 2
deus ex 2 inventory screen 2
colossus movie 2

Lol. I swear I don’t have a thing for Ashton Kutcher… though I guess writing this post will make my website even more relevant for that search term. :/

(Now, why did I just add ashton kutcher to my tag list?? This makes me think of GNU and other self-referential acronyms… THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT ASHTON KUTCHER! There hopefully, that’ll satisfy the google bots.)

[Edit: Oh.. it was a post on cmgp (which is now archived on my website) about ashton kutcher… lol. Yes, I can do searches on my own website, thanks. Still.. doing a google search shows that my website doesn’t appear in the first 10 pages of results. Someone’s gotta really be digging deep for those photos to try clicking on my link…]

Humorous, web 2.0

5 BS facts about games that everyone thinks are true

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Sorry, you fell for linkbait. 🙂
Check out Linkbait Generator.

But now that you’re here… maybe a new game could be to take the headline generated by Linkbait Generator and then actually write something on that topic…

So, here goes:

  1. Games are a valueless activity.
  2. Games promote violence.
  3. Games are addictive.
  4. Games drive new technologies.
  5. Games are not serious.

Actually, that was very, very easy.

Games, Games Research, Humorous, Life

Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation

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So, I played Dragon Age for a couple of weeks. It’s engrossing. Very engrossing. But I *was* disappointed with how little change there is to the plot or storyline with each of the six different starting conditions. Each start story was really well done, so to have the narratives from a particular one be mostly forgotten once you get to the main game… Well, on the official forums, SLPr0 wrote up a nice overview of some of the ways in which the plot could have been so much more (included after the break). Head on over to the forum thread (Literary Criticism in Regards to Flopped Plot Opportunities and the Human Noble Origin) to read the ongoing discussion.

And, of course, there’s Yahtzee’s take on Dragon Age, which is, as with all his Zero Punctuation videos, hilarious and spot on in that scathing-yet-there’s-a-bit-of-truth-there kind of way.

Continue reading Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation →

Humorous, Life

Telephone Pictionary online

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We can finally play Telephone Pictionary online at BrokenPictureTelephone!

Thanks Aaron for forwarding this!

Humorous, web 2.0

just for posterity – #@ hashattery

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just in case it becomes popular, I’m posting this so that I know when I thought of it.

Being an asshat on twitter = “#@” aka hashat

🙂