This Way Lies Pedantry

Shop For Pedantry!

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:23:00 -0400

http://dennisnsantana.tumblr.com/ShopPedantry

I’ve updated the “buy stuff, i could use the money for foods” page with the fact that Outdoourcing is now on Kobo. As far as more things to come, I’m still working on my next book which will go up for sale when it’s done (still working on 1st draft, then I need to edit, then I need to overcome my darkest fears and anxieties, then you can buy it). There’s a lot of invisible work going on that I hope you’ll be able to see come to fruition soon.

Call of Duty got a playable dog character before it got any playable women characters

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:43:05 -0400

Actually there was a playable female character in Call of Duty: BLOPS 2 during one of the Strike...

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:43:00 -0400

Actually there was a playable female character in Call of Duty: BLOPS 2 during one of the Strike Forces missions. But the spirit of that post remains, I bet the customizer is gonna be 100% dudes. EDIT: Apparently there was also a Russian lady in COD: Finest Hour you could play? I didn’t play Finest Hour nor even remember that was a game so.

"We’ve had dogs in Call of Duty before, but never like this."

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:42:55 -0400

“We’ve had dogs in Call of Duty before, but never like this.”

- I can’t believe this sentence was uttered (via voiceofwind)

Wyatt's RTS Idea, Part 2.5: Amera FAQ

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:04:29 -0400

I received some questions about Amera that I think would be fun to answer. If you have any questions, or if you think you’d have questions after checking the WyattRTS tag there and looking at the rest of my self-indulgent posts on the subject, be my guest! If you’d rather not hear about this nonsense any more, put WyattRTS on your Tumblr Savior.

Questions and their answers after the break.

Would you try to Kickstarter this?

Noooooope. It takes a lot, lot, lot of money and talent to make a big ol’ strategy game, and while you could probably make something like an Advance Wars clone more easily, it wouldn’t have the dynamics I like. I’m not a programmer or anyone like that with a real, awesome talent. I’m just a dude who dreams up and then writes things – that dreaded, useless “ideas guy.” I can’t even draw or do anything respectable! So no, none of this is a Kickstarter pitch. It’s just for fun stuff, and talking about RTS games and my weird setting for stuff like Ladybird.

Amera’s army is missing [x vehicle or personnel], why?

Amera does have whatever component is missing there, it just wouldn’t be part of an RTS representation of its army. RTS armies are hardly ever fully representative of the whole of an armed forces. There’s a lot of stuff that would be too tedious to include, and it would be difficult to balance out really huge, diverse forces. It may be overwhelming. You can and probably should think of RTS armies as an abstraction, and whatever is not necessary to the combat mechanics is assumed to be working behind the scenes to streamline the process.

I gathered that Amera consists of North and South America, Japan and South Korea. What about Israel, and the Atlantic?

Israel is its own thing (Merkaba) but in a campaign would be functionally identical to Amera and just use Ameran units. Countries like Puerto Rico and Guam are also part of Amera, and probably the Phillipines too. Amera is much more than the territories I mentioned, but I didn’t want to make a huge list, as I haven’t come up with an exact world map of the dystopian alternate verse I’ve invented. But there’s a lot of countries that the USA historically has intruded upon in the real world which it successfully conquered in Amera’s reality. Not all of them are very happy about it, even if they do get V-Marts out of the deal.

What kind of campaign/missions would Amera have?

If I was making an RTS campaign nowadays I would seriously look to Starcraft 2 for inspiration. I love the idea of the little dialog hubs, as well as having some choice as to what places to go to first. If you want to save time and space you don’t even need to have character models standing in a big rendered place between missions – you can just have character portraits, backgrounds and a menu, and dialog option stuff.

As far as missions I’d try to give every faction (there will be three, Amera, SENTINEL and Chung Kuoh) a chance to fight the others, and itself, multiple times. Amera vs Amera could be stuff like fighting Merkaba (for some reason), fighting against PMCs or Corporate security with functionally identical equipment (for some reason), or fighting against mind-controlled Ameran armies taken over by President Cassandra Ableman’s demonic vengeful psychic little sister.

Why is Amera so imperialistic and seemingly evil, but has a completely desegregated and egalitarian armed forces?

Because you can be a mass murderer with standards. More seriously, because I’m tired of portrayals of racial and sexual prejudice and I don’t want it near my own work. It’s all too easy to cite the real world as a reason why your escapist fantasy is devoid of black people, women and LGBTQ — it is all too easy to hide behind “this is realistic, the world is a shithole so I’m making my own world a shithole.” Instead, I choose to represent different peoples in my work out of the joy I draw from being able to write about all kinds of characters without caring whether or not something is “realistic.” So Amera are imperialistic assholes, but they believe everybody should have a right to pick up a rifle and fight for glorious capital, plus the more people you let into the armed forces, the more bullets you can send flying downhill at any given time.

There is something to be said for how particular genres would be able to depict, for example, transgender people, and be able to reveal those facts to the reader without just writing it down on the manual and doing nothing after. If this were a real RTS I’d have a narrative campaign with commander characters who are fully developed and come from those groups, rather than relying on units along to represent them.

How would Political Will and Market Stability accrue?

Political Will would just go up by itself, while Market Stability is gained by specific actions in the battle. I haven’t thought this out super well yet, as I’d like the second resource to be somewhat unique to each faction, but if worse comes to worse we can default to “you get it by capping points” or “you get it by mining stuff.” I’d prefer the former.

Pit Fiend isn’t a daemonology demon name you cheaty cheat.

No, but it fits well with what the thing is.

Have more questions? Send them and I’ll answer them plus add them into this thing. Well, if they’re Ameran questions anyway. I’m currently working on the next real article, for SENTINEL.

[insert literary reference]: Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:35:08 -0400

[insert literary reference]: Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?:

literaryreference:

You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play video games, watch movies, go hiking, go to concerts. You invite him to your parties. You listen to his problems. You do all this because you think he wants to be your friend.

But…

the comments are awful, please avoid them and just read the wonderful post

jmkmagnum: snakes and reptiles are great Sorry ffarqhuar, but...

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:07:57 -0400

jmkmagnum:

snakes and reptiles are great

Sorry ffarqhuar, but I must reblog for cute snake

One of my dad’s paintings. He painted it on a commission...

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:40:37 -0400

One of my dad’s paintings. He painted it on a commission recently. He did not paint for a while but it’s nice to see him back doing it. He really loves to paint, and I think he’s pretty good at it.

"Well, why not? The old sciences of human nature didn’t have such a fabulous track record. They gave..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:00:07 -0400

“Well, why not? The old sciences of human nature didn’t have such a fabulous track record. They gave us segregated drinking fountains, “invented spelling,” and the glass ceiling—all consequences of scientific theories about the way human beings really are. Possibly, there is a lesson there, which is that the sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired. Maybe this is unfair to the new sciences of human nature, though. It could be that the problem with the old sciences was simply that they weren’t scientific enough—that they were mostly wishful thinking projected onto dubious data about skull size and the effects of estrogen on the ability to balance a checkbook. Today’s scientists might have the capacity to get right down there among the chromosomes and the neurotransmitters, and to send back reports, undistorted by fear, favor, or the prospect of funding, about what’s going on. Maybe the new sciences of human nature are really scientific.”

- Louis Menand - What Comes Naturally (via basedsushigoat)

jmkmagnum: whaaaaaaaaaaat look at those skills

Mon, 20 May 2013 02:15:09 -0400

jmkmagnum:

whaaaaaaaaaaat

look at those skills

1984 Quotes For Your Tumblr Paranoia Needs

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:01:00 -0400

After a crisis reaches a certain point, it becomes time to reach for quotations from that venerable classic, George Orwell’s 1984. First you ask if the crisis you are witnessing is really happening; then you start bombarding the timeline with all caps posts about murder; then you quote 1984; then you go “first they came for…” I don’t know, “whovians;” and then you live forever in regret. I’m going to help you skip right to step 3 so we can begin the healing process.

•Doublethink is the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them: for example, that Yahoo will ban gifspam and memery from tumblr, and that this is somehow not a desirable outcome.

•”Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. Yahoo seeks developing internet properties entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of Tumblr; we are interested solely in brand expansion, pure brand expansion. What pure brand expansion means you will understand presently. This is different from the buyouts of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. Google and Facebook came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized prime web real estate unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be able to post gifs of Benedict Cumberbatch and Doctor Who in peace. We are not like that. We know what no one ever acquires web sites with the intention of bettering them. Brand Expansion is not a means; it is an end. One does not exploit web properties in order to expand their brands; one expands their brands in order to exploit web properties. The object of monetization is monetization. The object of advertising is advertising. The object of brand expansion is brand expansion. Now you begin to understand me.”

•”It is not enough to fear Yahoo, Tumblr. You must love him.”

Man it sure is pretty fucked up how Yahoo! bought tumblr in order to integrate it with yahoo...

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:35:00 -0400

Man it sure is pretty fucked up how Yahoo! bought tumblr in order to integrate it with yahoo messenger and slowly turn it into a Google Plus clone monetized through interest collection on user-to-user bitcoin tips and frivolous account upgrades. They are also banning gifs of Benedict Cumberbatch and that twiggy looking guy from that british scifi show. Wicked.

grabsomelasers: didyouknowgaming: Harvest Moon DS Cute. Parts...

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:15:02 -0400

grabsomelasers:

didyouknowgaming:

Harvest Moon DS Cute.

Parts of the feature remain in the game, but anything post-proposal is blocked, meaning no ‘best friends’ or marriage.

Source.

…GOD FUCKING DAMNIT

Weapons To Bring To A Knife Fight

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:02:57 -0400

You don’t get into knife fights, because nobody wins those. Sword fights? Maybe. Fist fights? I suppose. Knife fights? Just no.

They’re nasty and brutal and even if the other party is repelled you won’t like how that was carried out. UNLESS you cheat.

Basically every knife fight carries the assumption that nobody is going to stay in the ridiculous sideshow-esque confines of a “knife fight” for very long before pulling fire. Because you WILL cheat a Knife Fight and because you WILL cheat by bringing a gun, here’s a bunch of guns you should consider bringing for when the inevitable occurs.

•Plank w/Nails In It: Okay so you don’t own guns or maybe you just don’t like them, for inexplicable reasons. I’ve got a solution you can put together in your backyard in a few minutes. Cons: it’s hard to conceal it without poking yourself. Pros: It feels like WWE wrestling. We can declare a plank w/nails in it an honorary gun for knife fight cheating purposes.

•12 ga Shotgun w/TASER slug: Everyone will at this point be expecting you to bring a gun to the knife fight, but if you bring a less-than-lethal gun you’ll be able to retain your chivalrous appearance and still win the knife fight. As I’ve established before a shotgun is basically a sword.

•Bofors 40mm Gun: If you’ve got a knife fight scheduled and you’ve picked out the location and everything, arrive early and set up a Bofors for perimeter defense to prevent friends and loved ones from interrupting the knife fight. You can also use it to win the knife fight if you’re some kind of jerk, but I don’t recommend you do.

•Flammenwerfer 35: While the gas backpack IS a weakness, you just have to cheat first, and then you’ll win by the technicality due to the hidden BBQ clause in every Knife Fight contract and/or blood oath pact.

I feel like shit today and want to crawl into a hole and disappear. I’ve already subjected...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:04:16 -0400

I feel like shit today and want to crawl into a hole and disappear. I’ve already subjected twitter to this for a while now so I’m just gonna post it on tumblr now instead.

dus8256818: ㅁ Even in my darkest days, foxes are still the...

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:53:30 -0400

dus8256818:

ㅁ

Even in my darkest days, foxes are still the most wonderful animal.

awkwardsituationist: 98 year old dobri dobrev, a man who lost...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:28:06 -0400

awkwardsituationist:

98 year old dobri dobrev, a man who lost his hearing in the second world war, walks 10 kilometers from his village in his homemade clothes and leather shoes to the city of sofia, where he spends the day begging for money.

though a well known fixture around several of the city’s chruches, known for his prostrations of thanks to all donors, it was only recently discovered that he has donated every penny he has collected — over 40,000 euros — towards the restoration of decaying bulgarian monasteries and churches and the utility bills of orphanages, living instead off his monthly state pension of 80 euros.

historicporn: “Gays against fascism”.The first official gay...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:26:38 -0400

historicporn:

“Gays against fascism”.
The first official gay pride parade held in London.

1972.

av0idant: pervocracy: thatscienceguy: I’m sure everyone has...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:24:00 -0400

av0idant:

pervocracy:

thatscienceguy:

I’m sure everyone has heard about the great Lake Baikal, and if you haven’t,boy, are you missing out.

This ancient lake, which is about 25 million years old, and thought to be the oldest in the world, contains 20% of the world’s unfrozen fresh water. That’s right, it contains just 1% less fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined,while it’s surface area is over 7 times smaller.

Why is that, you ask? It’s because Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world: It’s maximum depth is 1642 meters, which is deep enough for the Eiffel Tower to stand on itself 5 times and not reach the surface.

But it gets better: the Lake Baikal is among the clearest lakes of the world, so you can see the bottom to a depth of nearly 40 meters, and you can drink right from it, no purifying needed. Furthermore, Lake Baikal sustains 2630 different species of animals and plants, 80% of which are unique to it, and can’t be found anywhere else.

Oh, and by the way? Under both the lake and it’s underwater sediment some of Earth’s tallest mountains(plural!) are submerged, their height over 7000 meters.

Lake Baikal is perhaps one of the world’s most amazing, awe-inspiring, and unique locations, and I would seriously recommend everybody who has some free time on their hands to discover more on their own.

P.S. Have I mentioned that when it freezes (fully, whoa!) it’s ice looks like this? And you can listen to some beautiful sounds you can make with it here!

Lake Baikal has seals, even though it’s more than a thousand miles from any ocean. No one’s really sure how they got there.

have we fucked this up yet? we’re going to fuck this up

It’s an amazing place, I want to go check out some docs on it now

whendoiturnbackintoapumpkin: Welcome to Amy’s Baking Company. —...

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:17:21 -0400

whendoiturnbackintoapumpkin:

Welcome to Amy’s Baking Company.

— Kitchen Nightmares [x]

i’m scared i’m never eating cakes again, what if it has cyanide