Destiny - The Good Bits

So…Destiny. It’s a big game. Four planets, plus another area, with more promised in the future. Three Classes, with two Subclasses apiece. Procedurally-generated loot leading two dozens of variant weapons and armor pieces. It’s SO BIG, in fact, that I’m not going to try to review it in one unified article. I’m going to talk about the good parts of Destiny in today’s article (as the title might lead you to suspect) and the bad parts in the next (which should go live by the end of the week.)

Almost a review of Destiny...

This post was originally going to be my review, but then I hit this tangent and I wanted to get it out of the way before getting into the meat of the game. (Not to mention that I'm writing that review now and it's going to be pretty big, so I'll probably break it up into two or more posts.)  I only hint at the overall feeling I have toward the game, but that's what the proper review is for. Anywho, tangent!

I’ve never played a game quite like Destiny.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve played FPSs and MMORPGs before, and Destiny borrows liberally from both of those to make something new. What I mean is that Destiny is inherently conflicted in a way that I’ve never seen in a product THIS BIG. Activision, one of the largest (and most hated, but let’s not get into that now) game publishing companies in the world, teamed up with Bungie, creator of one of the most iconic video game franchises ever made. (If you don’t know which one, why the hell are you reading a blog post about a video game in the first place? Go play some games and come back later.) The hype machine was in full swing for this one; pretty much the only time you see ads for video games on TV is when the heavy hitters come out with something new they want everyone to see.

There were preorders, more than any other game this year.  There were preorder bonuses, like the ability to dye your little robot buddy and speeder bike red. (Presumably because Gamestop -with its clean-cut red-white-black color scheme- was involved.) And of course there were the usual cries of corruption, with the release tied to the activation of servers in such a way that the game would not run until the day of its launch, making it impossible to give a full review before millions of players threw down $60 or more on it. It reminds me of a movie that a producer knows isn’t any good not getting a press screening so the reviews don’t scare discerning moviegoers away.

If it were any other game, by any other developer (My low opinion of Activision notwithstanding) I’d be crying foul like anyone else. But here’s the thing: Destiny doesn’t need “protection” from the free press. If anything, I wish more people knew this thing existed, and was on the previous generation of consoles (which is where I, an impoverished peasant, am probably playing it as you read this.) so they could play WITH me. It’s a game with a lot of content and a lot of intermeshed systems, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re better experienced with friends. My next post is going to be something of a holistic review of the game as I’ve experienced it; I aim not to tell you whether it’s a good game and fun to play (spoiler: it REALLY is) but WHY it is. (I'd meant for this post to be that review, but it sort of got away from that.)

Moldy bread, linguistics, and you.

So I was looking at bread last night (I have WILD NIGHTS) and I thought to myself: “Why do we say bread ‘goes moldy’ if it doesn’t go anywhere?” After I finished giggling at my inane banter I gave the matter some more serious thought. I hypothesized that we developed these ways of talking about food during a period after the food in question was invented (DUH) but before the process of spoilage was commonly understood. Ancient precursors to scientists observed a loaf of bread harboring colonies of mold, or raw meat being seeded with maggots and starting to rot and assumed that what they observed was simply a natural part of the life-cycle of meat and bread; the theory of Spontaneous Generation was born, and the lingo of the now-defunct theory made it into the common lexicon. (Or more likely, people with no knowledge of theories, science, or hygiene left their banana bread out too long and decided the bread killed Mildred after she ate it, and that it was part of the natural life cycle of banana bread to turn green and poisonous.)

This little thought exercise serves no purpose, I just thought it was neat the way commonly-accepted beliefs from the past can shape the way we talk about things today; we say bread has “gone moldy” even though we now know that the bread is being consumed by tiny organisms that only become visible on the macro scale long after they’ve set up shop. If asked, you might say that you talk about it that way because “it’s more natural to say it that way.” But it’s only natural to say things like that because they’re entrenched in our culture, and linguistic drift can only change so much.

I just wrote 300 words on linguistics and banana bread; I think it’s time to go to sleep now.

Why "The Fastest Man On No Legs" Scares the Crap Out of Me

I don’t really care about sports. Let’s get that out of the way right now. I have respect for most athletes (the ones that don’t do notably bad things, at least) because of the time they put in and the lengths they often go to for their chosen sport, but I have no real interest in playing them, nor do I care who is currently doing the best at them. As a result, the Olympics mostly passed me by without a second thought. Sure, America’s swimming and gymnastics teams did fantastically, but we’re one of the wealthiest nations on Earth; of course our athletes are going to be among the best. The one story that really did jump out at me was that of Oscar Pistorius, a South African sprinter who made it into the semifinals and then finished that semifinal dead last. Why did he jump out at me? Because he was born with no legs.

D&D Post Op: Design Philosophies (Or: Can Someone Come Up With A Better Name For These?)

So in my last post (which no one who values their free time has any business reading) I examined these editions of D&D from a purely mechanical standpoint. I made that obnoxiously long post so I could make this one and have something to cite. This is largely hypothetical, as I didn’t really follow the development cycle of either edition of the game and am not particularly inclined to research them too thoroughly. I don’t want to talk about what the designers SAID they were aiming for, I want to talk about what they actually DID aim for.

Once again:

DISCLAIMER 2.0: I’m not unbiased in this; I prefer 4th edition to 3.5 for reasons I SWEAR I’ll elucidate by the end of this piece, but I’m not going to let my opinions color my commentary at all if I can help it.

D&D Post-Op: 3.5 and 4th

Finally. Almost a full year since this blog was first established, and I’m just now getting to the subject I was going to tackle day 1. I need to step it up around here. Anywho, in this post I’m going to do an autopsy on two editions of D&D that have officially ended their runs. (Yes, 4^th edition is soon to be a thing of the past, since since 5th Edition is now in development.) The transition from the former to the latter was one of the most acrimonious in RPG history, to the point where it adversely affected the sales of 4th. The 4^th Ed Essentials line was, in part, an attempt to recapture some lost players by rolling back several of the changes made in 4^th. Not popular stuff.

SUPER-MEGA-DISCLAIMER: I am personally a fan of 4^th edition over 3.5. I’ll end this piece with my explanation for why, but I’ll do my best to avoid letting that bias interfere with the examination itself.

This first part will examine the two systems from a mechanical standpoint, comparing the rules of the two systems to see the kind of games they build. To prevent ruining the nice formatting, I've implemented a handy dandy jump-off below:

Asexuality and the Pedant (Or, lookit me bein all pretentious and crap)

An average night of me trawling the internet:

Me: Hmm, I wonder what’s on 9gag tonight?

9gag: Hey, let’s taunt McKinney with a blatantly-incorrect representation of his sexuality and provoke him into writing a boring blog post about it on his boring blog.

So here we are.

As the title of the post states, I am asexual. I experience no desire to have sex with anyone, regardless of their appearance, gender, personality, or philosophy. You’d think this would be an easy concept to grasp, but you’d be wrong. I’ll be using this post to clear up a few common misconceptions about asexuality, because I’m sure everyone will enjoy that.

The post (and woefully-misinformed fb commentary) in question

And the rant: an asexual relationship is NOT the same thing as being “friendzoned” The very concept of the friendzone is founded on butthurt men and women on the internet not grasping that not everyone everywhere who wants to be on friendly terms with them also wants to sleep with them. Asexuality is not about love or an inability thereof. If someone is asexual it can mean a variety of things but generally means they simply have no desire to have sex.

The simplest way to explain it is in terms of a linear scale: In a similar manner to the way Kinsey described the spectrum of human sexuality (from purely heterosexual to purely homosexual) the scale can be expanded into two dimensions to account for the spectrum of hypersexuality to asexuality. This does not cover the entire breadth of what asexuality is to different people, however. For some/most people (indeed, when one immerses oneself in so-called “non-standard sexualities” as I have, it’s easy to forget that I’m talking about a relatively small fraction of the population here.) their desire to be romantically involved with their gender-of-choice is intimately tied to their desire for sexual intercourse with them. For many (though by no means all) asexuals, this tie is still present, so a lack of sexual drive results in a lack of romantic drive. For others, this tie is negligible if even present at all, which leads to a more active romantic life. And there are certainly some who don’t even think about dating in those mechanistic terms! Thus, our newly-2D Kinsey scale (Kinsey Scatter Plot?) must necessarily be expanded to include a 3^rd axis: romanticism.

Moreover:

Sex is NOT the universal end-goal for relationships. One can have a wonderful, fulfilling relationship with another person without ever being physically intimate with them in any way. Love is an emotion; what people do in their romantic unions is as unique to them as the couple itself. I’d certainly like to think that if I can maintain a relationship for over a year, then my non-sexual relationship is a bit more emotionally-founded than Joe Blow’s one-night-stand. Dating is like a huge, many-layered cake; some people like the top layer, others like the bottom (Insert dom/sub joke here) and others like different layers in between. Making the assumption our unfortunate example has (that if a guy likes a girl and isn’t boning her six ways to Sunday) belies a sad lack of emotional depth. They assume that the dating cake only has one layer. And a one-layer cake is still going to be delicious, but it’d be remiss of me not to at least understand what the other layers have going on.

I guess the most important thing one should take from this is: love who you want to love, in the way and circumstances you want to love them. Just don’t trash talk other people’s relationship paradigms without learning anything about them. You know who else does stuff like that? Homophobes. And homophobia is not welcome here. And another thing, asexual relationships are not the same thing as friendzoning, and the friendzone isn’t even a thing, and- *is shot*

Well I guess the friendzone rant will have to wait for another night. I hope that this is at least slightly coherent, dear reader. Until next time!