howdoyouspell.cool

cool reader

“It takes an idiot to do cool things. That's why it's cool.” —Haruko. FLCL.

wanna join? reach out to the admin via email at f0rrest@pm.me.

from Lucifer Orbis

Confession

There are people who are very humble Others who are insecure So they seem arrogant – but they're not They're just insecure I seem humble But in reality I'm arrogant and proud And then humble Because life teaches us that there are no certainties And this brings insecurity And frustration For an arrogant person there's a lot of frustration

 
Read more...

from Crapknocker

Wolf 3D (PC DOS) In middle school, I had a fantastic teacher named Mr. Ziegler. He taught our little class a ton of interesting and fun things, but he also trusted us and sometimes left us to work unsupervised. Abusing this trust, I was messing around one day with the singular classroom computer. This was in the days before broadband internet, before thumb drives, before CD drives. It was a DOS computer, with some frontend tacked on that showed a list of programs. The top entry, which at the time I had no conception of what it might be, was titled WOLF 3D. Hitting enter on that opened my mind to a whole new world. Videogames were not exactly new, but then were somewhat primitive and rare, so seeing a texture-mapped 3D space filled with machine gun toting nazis shouting at the player was wholly new and unexpected.

Classroom work came to a halt as everyone gradually noticed the game I was playing and Mr. Ziegler eventually had to intervene. To his credit, he harnessed our curiosity about the game into a reward for work well done later, but that first taste of FPS goodness stuck in my brain permanently.

Doom ][ (PC, DOS/WIN95) This was the big one, the grand duke of FPS games. The introduction of the super shotgun to the universe.

I somehow missed the original Doom, but made up for it in the fervor that I pursued the sequel. I played the first few levels so much that I could probably draw them from memory. This is where I got into mods and my first attempts at level building.

It’s also where I found out about the huge online community of people making stuff for Doom. I eventually downloaded some total conversions, Ultimate Doom 2X, Doom 2X Gold, and Doom 2 X-Treme. They were part of a trilogy, with custom enemies and levels, modified weapon characteristics, and graphics taken from other Doom mods. The maker, Chuck Lai, even changed the cheat codes, which forced me play through them honestly and made the experience one of the most fun of those early years in the modding scene.

Half-life 2 (Xbox) Despite being mainly a PC gamer throughout my life, I first played this on the Orange Box collection for the Xbox 360. I sat my chair squarely in front of the good old tube TV, probably too close, as I prepared to immerse myself in the sequel to one of the best games ever made.

The game did not disappoint! It pioneered so many things that modern games accept as standard, which is one of the reasons that it holds up so well today. I’ve heard it likened to Citizen Kane, in that watching it or playing it today it just feels like a good game, but at the time so many of its techniques were revolutionary and copied endlessly by media afterwards.

I have a hard time imagining a better value than getting all three games of the Orange Box together at one price. Portal itself was an instant classic and hilarious. TF2 is still going today, and playing HL2 on the Xbox 360 still seems somewhat miraculous. A true cornerstone in gaming history.

Pong (?) While my parents had good intentions buying me presents for birthdays and holidays, their budget and lack of knowledge on the topic led to some interesting times. One of the most interesting was a hand-me-down relic of at least ten years prior. It was a single game console that plugged into your TV and came with two ‘controllers.’ That one game was a generic knockoff variation on Pong.

Now this was in the early 90s, we had a NES and knew of the new SNES and Genesis systems available out there. This Pong console was probably from the 70s, one step removed from electromechanical devices like pinball tables.

It came with physical switches on the controllers that allowed you to adjust the difficulty, the size of the paddle, the speed of the ball and other parameters. I couldn’t get my sister interested in competitive Pong, so the unit got handed down to kids even less fortunate than us. I have a hard time imagining they had much fun with it.

Planescape: Torment (PC) This was second on my PC RPG playlist, right after Baldur’s Gate 2. While BG2 got me used to D&D 3.5-era rules, Planescape turned all that on its head. Here you could improve base stats through dialogue and leveling up, you could change class whenever you wanted, there were barely any swords in the game and combat took a back seat to dialogue and character interactions.

I got lucky in playing through this before the era of rampant spoilers. My first playthrough used no guides or walkthroughs; I went in blind and excited. Since I want to preserve the plot for any people potentially reading this, I won’t go into details, but this game featured the synergy of gameplay and plot in a way that few others have done before or since.

And it’s all incredibly written! So many wild concepts come part and parcel with the Planescape setting and the writers made full use. Wrapping the plot around a character that’s immortal and still retaining a sense of stakes and progression is no small feat.

Ninja Gaiden (Xbox) Another indelible memory is that of sitting on the communal couch in the house I shared with way too many friends from college, playing my original Xbox. I was wowed by the return of the NES-era Ninja Gaiden into a fantastic 3D brawler / action game. Being a central congregation area, the basement couch also frequently provided an audience for my ninja escapades.

While others quickly bounced off the title due to its rather severe difficulty, I persevered. I got way into the game and my compatriots enjoyed watching me taking down the game’s array of giant skeletal dragons, demon lords and other assorted mutants. As with any group activity, it quickly turned to trash talking the enemies as I beat them down. This morphed into a stupid little song I would end up singing as I played. I’ll preserve the lyrics for posterity here:

You're fucking shit up and you don't even know what shit you broke, bitch. Bitch.

Halo 2 (Xbox) This is another game linked with a specific point in my life. I was in school and had made some fantastic new friends, all of whom were also into nerdy pastimes like myself. Comics, cartoons, and videogames were regular topics of conversation. As we all enjoyed relatively similar games, we all got heavily into Halo 2 upon its release.

We regularly played splitscreen together. I was never a big console FPS player, but I got good in a relatively small timeframe and was able to dominate just about every style of gameplay offered by the title. So we had to up our game. We took our Xbox on the road, attending console LAN parties, hooking up multiple controllers and TVs together to battle against other teams of players. We even ventured into that most forbidden of areas, online play.

Halo 2 offered a ton of options for playing online, including a Forge mode that allowed changes to the basic systems of the game. I fondly remember playing infected maps, where one player would start being able to run at ridiculous speeds but having no shields and only an energy sword for a weapon. Every player they killed would join the infected team until everyone was converted. The other team had the regular array of weapons and a fortress to hide out in and defend. Between that and racing four wheelers with rocket launchers, we had a blast. So many fond memories of that time and place in my life.

Carmageddon 2 (PC Win95) I was a PC gamer for a long time, but that doesn’t mean I always had the peripherals to go with it. I played through many PC racing games without the benefit of analogue steering or analogue braking, using only a keyboard. Carmageddon 2 was one of those games.

Carmageddon 2 was the full-3D sequel to the hilarious and bloody original. It stands out even today with its over-the-top ability to run over pedestrians for bonuses. I loved it then for its surprisingly detailed car deformation models and twisted sense of humor.

You could smash off the bumper, destroy the quarter panels and see them go flying off, and break parts off of opponents cars as well. You could even split your car evenly down the middle, which would only occasionally not kill you and end your run.

The wacky powerups contributed to this game’s sensibilities, giving you among other things a giant cartoon spring to push pedestrians or other drivers away from you. It also played with the gravity, giving both moon and Venus powerups which made you undriveably floaty or unbelievably heavy respectively.

I had a million fun times with this game, smashing other cars, pedestrians and the occasional cow or reindeer through the varied and expansive levels. The ski resort, amusement park, mine and nuclear power plant all still live fondly in my memories. I’m still waiting for a proper sequel to this one, but I don’t expect to be satisfied any time soon.

Diablo 2 (PC) This game. Oh, this game. I played Diablo 2 far, far too much in college. I was hooked more than any other game I have played before or since. Endless Pindle runs, Mephisto runs, trying to get my Necromancer up to level 99. So many good memories.

But I also played so much that I ended up late for class on several occasions. I rejected far too many social interactions in favor of that last bit of exp. I bought items off of eBay, for Christ’s sake! Mistakes were made. Time was not merely wasted, but executed with prejudice.

But for all the good and the bad, this game sticks with me. It pioneered the modern skinner-box-style of gameplay that so many others have since incorporated. It’s addictive qualities started many conversations about predatory mechanics in games. It spawned so many other ARPGs, like Path of Exile and further Diablo sequels. For better and worse, this was a turning point for gaming at large.

Super Mario Bros 3 (NES) I had a big, old tube TV in my basement growing up where I played NES games. The TV was so old, it didn’t have RCA jacks for video in, only two wires to hook an antenna up to. But we got the NES running nonetheless, so me and my sister played on it all the time.

Mario 3, the best of the NES Mario games, was either a Christmas or birthday addition to our game library, I don’t remember which. I do remember my sister and I taking turns playing the 2-player version for hours in the basement. Since it was brand new, we had gotten to the boss of the first world and were taking turns getting killed by him over and over. The frustration grew as did the volume of our disappointed outbursts. Eventually our parents came downstairs and grounded us both for cursing at the TV, although to this day I maintain my innocence.

Final Fantasy (NES) You always remember your first. Final Fantasy was the first RPG I ever played.

I had the Nintendo Power special issue solely devoted to Final Fantasy. I had read it cover to cover countless times, imagining the adventures I could have. It took years and buying a used copy, but eventually I did get to dive into its world.

I remember endless grinding for gold, constant referrals to the strategy guide to pick only the best spells for my party, checking where to find items in dungeons, and the peninsula northeast of Provoka; the best grinding spot in the game.

I still play different versions of this classic game to see what twists and improvements they’ve added. But I’m always surprised how well the core of the game holds up, how well the curve of enjoyment bends with the curve of the gameplay and story complexity. Hats off to you, NES Final Fantasy.

Seaman (DC) This game came along for me in the aftermath of the death of the Dreamcast. Games were cheap as the hardware stopped production, ceding this round of the console wars to the Playstation 2. I picked this one up after hearing how weird it was from various gaming websites and magazines.

They weren’t kidding. After an intro by Leonard Nimoy, you’re put in charge of a few eggs bobbing in a virtual aquarium. Gradually the eggs hatch into fish with human faces and eventually learn to talk. This is where the microphone peripheral comes in, as you can answer the questions they pose and they will remember your responses.

I played this in my dorm room at college, baffling both myself and any passers-by. This kind of wild interactivity and odd real-time gameplay has to my mind never even been attempted to be replicated. This was the strength of the Dreamcast, it was a place to take these kind of wild swings. In return it offered gameplay experiences never to be forgotten, if only for their peek into the future.

Duke Nukem 3D (PC) My memories of this game are inextricably mixed with my high school experience.

My grade year in school was one of the first in my district to offer programming classes. Being a nerdy sort, I relished the opportunity to play on computers more than I already did, and on school time to boot. C++ was somewhat fun to learn, but the real fun came after all of the people in class had finished their assignments for the day. Our teacher, who was probably only a lesson or two ahead of us in programming in general, let us play Duke Nukem 3D once our work was complete.

Those frantic deathmatches in the last few minutes of class were incredible. Other than a LAN party, which I had scant access to, I would never have been able to get that many people playing one of my favorite games at the same time.

I even ended up making my own deathmatch levels with the included level editor. My favorite was a facing worlds-esque level with one entire huge wall of the arena being a giant mirror. The whole idea revolved around a rarely-used quirk of the game mechanics where if you got hit by the shrinker, using steroids would return you to normal size. Also, shrinker shots bounced off mirrors, so I tried to make fun use of that in my level.

I also recruited friends with computers to try using their dial-up modems to play a game of deathmatch. This was complicated by the fact that one friend didn’t quite grasp the concept of how the whole thing worked and kept answering the phone when the modem would dial his number, instead of letting the computer connect. This lead to us cackling in laughter and frustration every time we would hear our computer speakers outputting the confused “Hello? Hello” of our friend, who we eventually did get to fight in deathmatch one he figured out what was going on.

Ikaruga (DC) This game landed at the exact right time for me as a gamer. I was getting into shmups on the Dreamcast and there were so many great titles to choose from. Giga Wing, Mars Matrix, Under Defeat, I loved all of them. I heard about a Japanese game that people considered head and shoulders above the rest: Ikaruga.

Game magazines lauded its deceptively simple black and white bullet mechanics as well as its artistry and feel. I knew I had to have it, but it came at the exact wrong time for me financially as I was a broke college kid with barely enough money to scrape together for pizza. But I bought an import copy on eBay anyway for a then princely sum of $60.

I have never regretted it. This game is the zenith of shmups, both in style and substance. This is the high water mark and for me no shooting game has matched it since.

ToME 2.3.4 (PC) I’ve blathered on about roguelikes for quite a while, so I’ll be brief here. ToME was my first roguelike and the first one I ever won. I had tried Nethack before, but bounced off due to the huge amount of info you needed to know to be able to successfully play the game. ToME has quite a bit of info you need to know too, but it was several degrees more approachable than any others I had tried.

The power curve of your characters’ growth was fantastic. In the beginning by gaining levels, in the middle by acquiring items, in the late game by completing quests. The variety of enemies, stages, items and character options never got wholly boring for me. There was always the hope that that next quest would give you access to a skill far outside your normal playstyle and let you crack the game wide open. Or that you’d get some amazing new ring which would make the next 20 levels a walk in the park. So many good times.

Final Fight 3 (ZSNES) When I got big into emulation for the first time, it ended up biting me in the ass.

I had an NES growing up, but I missed out on the SNES era. So when emulators became widely available I went in heavy, rummaging through the library of games I had missed out on, but this time with savestates and fast-forwarding.

There had also been a wave of technology grants for schools at the time that allowed my high school and many others to have computers to help expose kids to technology. But the software and expertise to lock down those computers had yet to catch up, so I often ended up playing emulated SNES games in the computer lab during my study hour.

I played through all the big JRPGs, all the platform games, everything I was vaguely curious about I smuggled onto the network. But there was one series I kept coming back to: Final Fight. The first game was only a port of the arcade game but with fewer characters, the second was a SNES only sequel with barely any tweaks to the gameplay formula. But the third introduced sprinting, complex combo options, more weapons, hidden items and routes, new characters and Street Fighter-style special moves. There were enough fun additions to keep me playing and trying to master its many systems.

In my exuberance, I got carried away with my keyboard punching and was noticed by the vice principal while she passed by. A detention for me and new rules for the computer lab later, I had learned to keep my obsession with emulated SNES games better hidden. But regardless of all that, Final Fight 3 still holds up as probably the best beat ‘em up on the system.

Kirby's Dreamland (GB) I have a strange relationship with music in games. While so many other people make much of the quality or incongruity of the music accompanying the action in a game, I generally find music forgettable in most games I play. There are a few exceptions to this rule, like when music is a cornerstone of the game design as in Hotline Miami. The only other one I can think of is Kirby’s Dreamland for the Gameboy.

I played this game so much, the sheer repetition has ingrained the soundtrack into my mind. The crisp tones of the Gameboy were bent to a number of musical styles and the gameplay was cute and just difficult enough to be consistently fun. Some part of my brain is eternally in the back seat of a station wagon, letting the music and the comfy fun wash over me while I play.

Kingdom of Loathing (Internet) I don’t know where I stumbled upon it, maybe one of those early internet magazines or some odd gaming website I used to go to, but when I started playing Kingdom of Loathing (KoL) I fell in love right away.

KoL is nominally an online browser RPG where you have a certain number of turns each day to adventure, fight monsters, level up, etc. But every enemy, place and item you encounter is stuffed with jokes. Really dumb jokes, bad puns, esoteric references, song lyrics, all that jazz is packed into a surprisingly fun gameplay loop. Oh, and all the graphics are stick figures and the currency is meat.

I chose a Pastamancer as my first class and joined a clan called Pastamancers Unite! In clans you can share consumables, get tools to make more advanced items and go on special raids. Over the course of a year or so I donated a bunch of items, helped fellow clan members through the chat and ended up as the clan leader after the previous one left. I ran the clan for a while, but real life has a way of sweeping you along with it and I had to retire.

The clan is still going strong. My account is still there after all these years. The same group has released two rather hilarious RPGs on Steam, West of Loathing and Shadows Over Loathing, that are well regarded, also filled with tons of jokes and also feature stick figure graphics. I recommend you check all of them out, you have nothing to lose but free time.

Metal Storm (NES) When I was a kid, I was a ravenous reader of Nintendo Power. This was in the full glory of the NES era, where the magazine was one of the only sources besides store shelves to see and learn about new games coming out.

My parents, concerned about my grades no doubt, made a deal with me one year. If I made straight A’s, they would buy me one NES game of my choice. Now this was around 1990, games’ $50 asking price then is akin to more than $120 today. For our family, this was no small purchase. But at the time, I saw only an opportunity. I put in the extra effort, pulled off the ace and proudly presented my report card at the end of the year.

Nintendo Power had recently run a cover feature on Metal Storm, featuring its gravity-changing gameplay. I was going for this one from the start. I knew this was what I wanted. It was and remains a fantastic game with unique mechanics, great NES spritework and fun gameplay.

Daggerfall (PC DOS, Unity engine) For the time, this game was insane. It had miles and miles and miles of world to explore, which was mirrored by the grotesquely labyrinthine dungeons that also populated the wilderness. All in early 3D with creepy pixel monsters on top.

This started my love affair with the Elder Scrolls series because I spent hours upon hours making the most powerful warriors and mages imaginable with the flexible character creator. But the quests were hazy and occasionally impossibly difficult, even with cheats enabled. Even with the mark and recall spells, you might never find your way out of a dungeon if you went far enough in.

Most of the original game’s problems have been remedied by the remake of Daggerfall in the Unity engine, which has options to limit the size of the dungeons and fix the numerous bugs it originally shipped with. Also with mod support! Now you can see the countryside fly by as you fast travel, with vastly extended view distance. And since it’s been forever, the game is free on Bethesda’s website. Go check it out if you’re interested in where the series came from. DFUnity makes it a much better and more modern experience.

#20games

 
Read more...

from DigiVoyager

There was a lot of this going around yesterday. Too much, possibly. It makes sense if you're in a good place, with things to be happy about, so most places but Pakistan. There are of course, a few worse too – very few, our passport is 4th worst in the world for a reason – hence my usage of most. Of course, if you happen to be in unfortunate circumstances, you have my heartfelt sympathies – there really is no ideal place but you can get darn close with the right people. Take my colleagues, they're from privileged families and their discussions revolve around things like Macchiatos (I literally had to google what this was, and the spelling too) which place has a more authentic steak and so on, and there is me who pictures a carpentry business when he hears them talking about Sabrina Carpenter (yes, I was called a country hick for this already) so they might as well live in their own world – heck they kind of do, it's scary sometimes.

But back on Earth, Parachinar is locked down, Shias – a minority – are being genocided – and rather than helping them, the government is cracking down on those protesting for their rights, while people just celebrate New Year's day, turning a blind eye to yet another genocide. So, everyone's celebrating Happy New Year's, even here at work. Very, very desensitized, Orwell would feel the worst kind of existential horror here. Then again, I suppose that's how the world's always been, seldom do people notice atrocities not near them. Far from home, far from the mind is a mantra often cited by those whose family members died in drone attacks simply due to living in a certain area, reminding one another their own tribes were all they truly had – because you certainly don't have the government in your corner, or the army and intelligence services – they'll just accuse you of being someone else and send you off to Guantanamo for a bounty of $5000; the case of Ahmed Rabbani is just one example, where the intelligence services misidentified him on purpose as Hassan Ghul – a known terrorist – to the CIA – and he ended up languishing in their custody for almost 20 years with the bulk of said time being in Guantanamo. https://reprieve.org/us/client/ahmed-rabbani/

Now, for the suffering majority, there was no power in many parts of Peshawar for over 9 hours on Happy New Year's Day, sounds pretty bad, but hey, as those in charge will tell you, it's not the worst thing that ever happened. See, the thing is, in a bottom of the barrel, or I should say cesspool, country like ours, the barometer is usually lives lost. Now hospitals don't usually get loadshedding, well, they're not supposed to. And it didn't happen in Peshawar, so, no biggie, life goes on. I am making a mountain out of a molehill, so what if power was gone for 9 hours, no one died. True, not in Peshawar. But many lives were played with somewhere else, nearly lost in District HQ Hospital, Battagram. The pain of many patients has been worsened, many conditions exacerbated, no one dead so far, thankfully.

Now, what is loadshedding, you ask? It's when your power gets cut, usually done by the power company itself because they can't quite handle the load. It's a complicated mix of issues, and the solar panel revolution has caused its own set of problems for our monster of a power grid, so hacked together that it makes the Atari Jaguar seem well thought out. But that is its own problem, one I will delve into some other day (the power grid, obviously)

Back now to Battagram. I am something of a semi-regular visitor here, and it is very serene – in my humble opinion, anyways. So, it does hold a special place in my heart.

Battagram

Beautiful, huh?

Now, there's a lot that can be said about Battagram, but for now, the only pertinent fact is – recovery rates are over 90% – this means that over 90% of people there pay their electrical bills, so the issue of power theft – one so serious in Pakistan – isn't that big a concern here. This is important because, while they vehemently deny it, power companies always cut power on low recovery feeders. Makes sense, right? People aren't paying, don't give them power. There's also the issue of ghost bills, and made up bills, so yeah, PESCO, the electric company, is downright nasty. And despite a presidential ruling meant to end said ghost bills over a decade ago, that still hasn't happened – but I digress, that is a matter you can look up at your own leisure, if interested.

So with such high recovery rates and a populace that pays its bills regularly, plus a dam nearby, you'd think there wouldn't be any loadshedding in hospitals. Sadly, PESCO does not care about the law, for they are above it; just like most institutes, wealthy people, connected people, a lowly cop, and so on and so forth; unfortunately, we have to exclude those who smoke scorpions, they are not above the law, they only think they are until the large hand of the law comes down upon them.

So, unlawful loadshedding happened. In Battagram. Hospitals in such areas are more in need of power than say, your average hospital in some big city. Besides the usual catalog of dialysis, diagnostic imaging, incubators, operation theatres and the like – you need to run it for tube wells and sanitation, thus making an uninterrupted power supply even more mission critical to the smooth functioning of the hospital. But that would never occur to those at PESCO.

Thing is, outside of the fudged “we are reducing inflation” figures, the country is in dire straits right now, the ground reality is far worse than one can imagine. Both gas and electricity are in short supply. You may have solar power if you are privileged, but you still have to go out and get your cylinder filled with gas. Of course, the privileged have servants for that so it's a non concern to them, but your average joe will still suffer daily in search of gas.

Yeah, slavery is a thing here – for instance one of my colleagues has two servants, both basically do all the housework, cooking, cleaning, chores, all for the equivalent of 53 USD a month.

Sorry, I digress as always, anyways, what happened was bad enough to cause both doctors and families who had brought their patients to come out on the roads, as well as most of the patients that were OK to mobilize – a rare showing of unity at a time when doctors are more despised in the public eye than anything. They stormed the PESCO offices, and locked the workers out. About the only thing they could do. Now, there are some privileged people calling them criminals, anarchists and the like, but let us look at why they did this.

A few examples:

  1. An elderly patient said that he had been hospitalised for two days but couldn’t undergo surgery due to the power outage.

  2. Another patient said that his wife had to return home without receiving treatment because the hospital’s equipment was not working due to the power outage.

  3. To give a more specific example: Mobeen Madakhyal, a patient’s relative who traveled from Torghar to the DHQ Hospital, said: “We came all the way from Torghar hoping for treatment at the DHQ, but the protest has left us stranded. My relative’s condition is worsening, and we don’t know where else to go. This situation is extremely difficult for us.”

Starting from Torghar, literal translation being Black Mountain is a 3 or 4 hour drive to Battagram, and people in that region are poor, it takes a serious amount of their means to reach Battagram. Now imagine, you are a poor person, you need healthcare, you travel 3-4 hours on a critical percentage of your funds only to get this in return. To make matters worse, the road is dangerous to put it mildly. It is the kind of place where bombs have gone off, the army has killed terrorists, terrorists have killed soldiers, so on and so forth for police. Torghar itself is one of those places that faces the constant gloom of being a gathering spot for terrorists, there was an army operation in 2014 meant to get rid of them, yet to this day the people of Torghar are resisting terrorists – this was just to give some context about why Mobeen's journey was so dangerous.

There are also woodworkers suffering due to this, engineers, tailors, computer shops and the like. Life, in general, is interrupted.

Someone on Mastodon once asked me why I had referred to Pakistan as a resource extraction colony for our establishment – meaning most of our areas except where the privileged are, and especially my own province and Balochistan – to this day I don't know why they did it in my private messages, were they Pakistani too? Probably.

I went into it at length initially, but upon the final message I never did get a reply from them. For a while, I was even scared that somebody as important as me, who has a readership somewhere between none and three people had attracted the ever paranoid eye of the state. Here, though, I will just say this:

There is a dam in Battagram. It is known as Allai Khwar hydropower station, it tops out at a capacity of about 121 MW and is connected to the national grid. Despite there being electricity generation in 29 village councils of Allai tehsil, not a single electric pole has been installed to supply power to the area.

In 2020, the people were asking for a mere 9 MW. Now, they are asking for 5. I doubt they will get any.

If you read all this, you have my sincere thanks, my only aim is to raise awareness about what's happening here. Battagram is just one case, if you look close enough you'll spot similar exploitation and issues all over Pakistan.

Let us hope next year we have cause to be happy.

Mac

It's kind of like this these days, sigh.

 
Read more...

from DigiVoyager

In the ramshackle city of Quetta, once a prosperous hub of economic activity, now more akin to a dilapidated frontier town because of the devastating earthquake of 1935, life is viewed through a very narrow schism. The good old days, before 1935, before the earthquake that ruined almost all of its infrastructure, killing over 30,000 to boot, and the bad days since. Add a heaping dose of doom and gloom for every year post founding of the once Dominion, now Islamic Republic, of Pakistan in 1947. In this corner of the world, people tend to believe hope was locked inside Pandora's Box for a different reason entirely. For hope is an evil thing, just as rotten as the rest of the inhabitants of that contraption.

We now move forward in time, from the once hopeful times of Independence Day circa 1947, the hope of a new nation and better days to come, until we hit the 2010s – but we do not see any development. The economy has stagnated, and the people are worse off than they were before. There is only disillusionment and deprivation. Added to the box of despair and misery is the missing person phenomenon, state sanctioned abductions are now the norm.

We now present for your consideration, the tale of a journalist, seeking gainful employment. One Bilal Mehngal, who works as an honorary journalist in Noshki, a correspondent for a newspaper called the Independent, the kind that you won't find at a news stand, or even with a seller that carries most newspapers. The Independent did not pay him a salary, and eking out an existence per story covered was miserable.

Picture a journalist, in need of money, and picture the Pakistan army, the country's most successful business enterprise. Picture, if you can, that journalist trying to make his way out of the quagmire of poverty and squalor.....but the people of Quetta are people of few means, and life treats them just as apathetically as it does Bilal.

Picture then, his euphoria, when the army itself wanted to hire a tailor on a long term basis, the most gainful employment of all and Bilal just happened to have a background in tailoring, due to having worked with his older brother, who was a tailor. Lucky break, you would say, and you would be wrong if you were at all familiar with what happened in Balochistan.

In order to stitch for the army, our friend the tailor had to work within the garrison, an extremely secure, highly regulated environment. He and his son were the only civilians there, everyone else was from the army.

Now picture if you will, the chain of command, and the army's officer cadre. Picture if you will, a baboon smoking a cigar, and drinking whisky, picturing himself as the very height of culture. His qualifications? A useless Bachelor's, and a schooling just as pathetic. His patience? None. These people only care about results. And when something bad happens, they want a name. Failure to supply one means an end to your career. In Pakistan, everyone is a wolf, but also a sheep that hopes to survive by throwing you to the wolves instead.

Now picture, if you will, the tension in Quetta. A city where the number of abductions and missing people continues to spiral. The abductors? The ones within those garrisoned walls.

Picture our tailor, and his son, happily working at their station, when a soldier is shot at. The time? 6:30 PM.

The soldiers of the army are just as savage as their masters, only they put on no airs. A name is needed. A name is given, the name of one of the only two civilians in the garrison at the time.

The civilian was the tailor's son.

It did not matter that he was with his father in the shop, or that they had proof of his presence there, or even a register logging him as leaving the shop at 7:15 PM, and not a minute before.

What matters is what was said by one uniform to another.

And so, our tailor, once seeking gainful employment, now stands outside the Quetta press club, lost in the sea of fellow Baloch faces seeking something even more elusive than hope, justice.

45 disappeared, 48 killed. A headline for the ages in any other nation. But for the Baloch people? Just another month. August, 2022, in fact, and almost every other month is just the same.

The citizenry of Pakistan, however, may as well have prosopagnosia, for they see no difference between him, and countless others. There is a reason the Baloch lock hope away.

 
Read more...

from Lucifer Orbis

I've spent the last two hours caring about the wonders of bank accounts, outstanding payments, various updates, invoice control, etc. I would love to have someone who could take care of this mess for me, but part of being an adult – so people say – is being able to control our own finances and everything else in our life. I am on the good path! Also, I'm happy living in a country where if I fail to remember some payment, I will get spammed with notifications. In my home country I'd get one notification and then, shortly after, a fine. Maybe things have changed now and I'm too absorbed in my life to notice it. I mean, I see things changing for the worse. No, this is not an introduction to some profound message. I'm too tired even for that.

When I was a child, my grandfather used to say that I was already born tired. He did it with a chuckle and tenderness that still fills my memories every time I think about him. My grandmother was the boss. There wasn't time for exhaustion and tiredness. We should go to school or work, be active, and don't think too much about our problems – we should solve them instead. I miss her resolve. I can imagine her in Heaven, with everyone lying on the clouds in peaceful meditation, and complaining that she has to do all the tasks and paperwork by herself. “You, get up and help me.” If you think Heaven is easy – not with my grandmother there. What could be written in those papers? Words no one cares about here below.

My divinely sweet cat has been very sick. We took him to the vet, they didn't find anything, but he has a chronic illness that, little by little, will take away years of his life. He lost a lot of weight, at least for a cat. I have much to learn with him. How to feel weakened, living with an incurable disease, and still being simultaneously happy and cranky. Our relationship has evolved greatly after I took care of him during one of his episodes. If he wants something, he will make himself understood, and when he doesn't, there's claws and teeth waiting for me. I'll gladly take everything if it means taking a glimpse at the enormous spirit inhabiting his eyes. When I arrive home, he's the first to run towards the door to congratulate me for having survived another day in the adult world. Then he jumps into the kitchen area and says “Human, I need food. Go to work.” But I know it isn't food that he wants; it's just his convoluted way of asking for cuddles, because he's as good at communicating feelings as I am. Then, cuddles it is, but not without some protest in between. Then comes the food, and of course he doesn't eat it because he had done it five minutes earlier.

In the end, I give him a big hug. “No-no, go away, you witch.” I put him on the floor, and he comes back straight after, asking for more pats. And then there's lap time, but carefully, because Your Highness doesn't like to be petted just like that. Things should be done with grace. One takes ten minutes to find the right position and then God help me if I need to get up because my feet got numb. There's a bit of protest and then, finally, relaxation. At this point, a book or a handheld console can rest on his back. As a proud owner/owned I was well trained in the art of staying still. Some movement is allowed, but what he really enjoys is conversation around him. The sound of our voices and the company (without touching!) is the best a King can have. The sound of talking about life, politics, culture, religion, everything is music, even if it's about the US. He's very attentive to everything I do. If it's bathroom time, “Better go and keep watch lest she gets swallowed by the toilet and I lose my source of food!”

I have another cat. A cat-cat. When I arrive home, he keeps napping, and doesn't even notice me. I fill him with kisses and he doesn't bite or scratch. He chirps a little, still half asleep, starts purring and falls asleep again. When it's time for cuddles, he doesn't understand the word “no.” How could I dare having any will of my own? The difference is that I can do whatever I want with him. I can go full Elmyra Duff on him and he loves it. His favourite place is the crook of my arm (before, it was my head, but even I have limits) and I use my other arm to pet him. All arms on deck and no books. But if the King dares to set paw on the bed at that precise moment, the Dragon is unleashed, and a fight ensues. Being able to defend the territory is of paramount importance to ensure the source of cuddles is well protected against intruders. Sometimes, even a simple eye contact for a short moment is enough to expel the intruder from the battleground. This little Dragon Snake has been with me for many years and now he's taking advantage of his brother's illness to steal his special food. He also stole his bed.

When there's fireworks outside or any other suspicious sound that could indicate a catastrophic hazard, the King rings the alarm, “Alarm! Alarm!!! Move, you fools!” running around plants, over the furniture, on window sills, to the front door and back; while the other one just sits and stares in pure ataraxia, watching the world burn around him, watching his brother panicking over nothing. Purr, purr, purr.

Reality is always More or less Than what we want Only we are always Equal to ourselves.

Ricardo Reis (excerpt) 1-07-1916

 
Read more...

from rC:\ Writing Portfolio

I Believe In the Fediverse

In 2022, tech magnate and bombastic personality Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, thumbing the scales of an already polarized social media website further toward censorship, misinformation and ideological warfare. Twitter once was—and arguably still is—the closest thing to an open forum on the internet with widespread participation among people of all social status, from A-list celebrities to run-of-the-mill crackpots. While this may be true, it hasn't stopped millions of people from completely abandoning the site as the quality of the user experience continues to degrade beyond our wildest imaginations.

The critical weakness of Twitter was exposed during the aftermath of this multi-billion dollar transaction: a forum cannot actually be open when it is owned and operated by a central authority with a transparent political agenda. Much digital ink has been spilled over when exactly Twitter was ruined, but it's hard to deny that it got there. People have begun to understand the need for an alternative, seeking it out in new and familiar destinations alike.

The new social web, in many ways, looks like the old social web. The kinds of people who were on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Vine in the early 2010s are likely spending more time on Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Bluesky in the mid-2020s. We're still tapping out ten-second, hundred-character ephemera into our pocket rectangles, the parameters have just shifted slightly. While I'm glad to see people recognize the need to cut ties with a burgeoning hotbed of reactionary ideology in the case of Twitter, I worry that many have not learned the correct lessons from this saga and are setting themselves up to repeat the same mistakes.

As we continue down a path toward tech oligopoly and unfettered transfer of wealth to the upper echelons of society, it should be clear that another centralized, corporate platform cannot be the key cornerstone of a free and open internet. An alternative will always be necessary when the entire infrastructure of a communication service can be acquired with a cash transfer. Enter Mastodon: an open-source, decentralized Twitter equivalent that could be a viable solution to this growing problem.

Mastodon is part of a vast social networking platform known as the fediverse. This platform makes use of the ActivityPub protocol, a framework for seamless communication between various interlinked, disparate services. In practice, a Mastodon user can see content and interact with profiles from all over the fediverse, well beyond anything that exists under the Mastodon umbrella. Fediverse servers (referred to as “instances”) are comparable to email servers, hosted by different kinds of people from around the globe and able to communicate with each other by design.

The fediverse is as much a part of the small web as your personal website or blog. Its utility in your life is as shallow or deep as you want; your experience will be the priority every step of the way. Fediverse services are never going to harvest your data, advertise to you or psychologically manipulate you into scrolling further—they only seek to connect you with other fediverse users. The fediverse is also literally a “small web” in the grand scheme of social media. Mastodon only has about 7,000,000 users, around half of the total Bluesky userbase and about thirty times smaller than the population on Meta's Threads app.

Threads is technically part of this federated network, though its users currently cannot follow or see replies from other fedizens, demonstrating Meta's lack of good faith commitment to the concept. Bluesky is another popular refuge for Twitter expats, developed on a similar protocol to ActivityPub. The Authenticated Transfer protocol is not linked to the fediverse or any other service outside of Bluesky, suggesting this for-profit service's touted openness could end up being more style than substance. It's possible to bridge profiles between Mastodon and Bluesky using hacky third-party methods, but this is not quite the same as the intercommunicability you'd find between fediverse instances.

Most people are not thinking too deeply about the technical minutiae, they simply go where other people are. Once you get used to a certain place, it's difficult to see the point of spending time anywhere else. Enmeshing yourself in any given service will eventually expose you to its limitations, there might be ways around them but you're going to be aware of them regardless. There's a certain Stockholm syndrome-like quality to social media partisanship; I can't confidently say I've been above it in all my years of using the internet.

I've always been fascinated with the abundance of social media apps that all end up doing the same thing. If social media is supposed to be a place on the web to share shortform text, pictures, video and audio clips, why do we need so many places to do it? At a certain point after uploading videos to Twitter, posting a Notes app essay on Instagram or publishing an animated photo album reel on YouTube, how have we not discovered that this is all the same?

The beauty of the fediverse is a distinct recognition of this fact; the entire utility of social media has been flattened into one logical, streamlined plane of deployment. The services that make up the fediverse aren't deadlocked in competition, instead collaborating with each other to popularize the ActivityPub standard. Rather than being driven by market forces that funnel development efforts toward unwanted features, fediverse apps endeavor to provide the best possible experience for their intended use cases and nothing more.

Mastodon is the premier service, it's practically synonymous with the fediverse among the uninitiated. There are also several other federated Mastodon-likes offering comparable features and exclusive benefits, such as Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica and Pleroma. Pixelfed is the designated Instagram replacement, about as straightforward as it gets. A TikTok competitor called Loops was also recently made available by the Pixelfed developers. Peertube remains criminally underutilized as people clamor for a viable YouTube alternative, though it can be challenging to find a suitable instance. Lemmy successfully gained a foothold among disillusioned Reddit users, but it's still too niche to be useful for certain interests due to lack of engagement. WriteFreely is a solid, if bare-bones choice for blogging in my experience, seemingly lacking functionality offered by other free services.

The fediverse as it exists today is clearly a mixed bag. It's nice that all of these services can talk to each other, but the practical application of this is questionable at best from my vantage point. Further buy-in is required from wealthy, technically-skilled people to keep the project sustainable. Prominent instances that serve a specific niche on the fediverse like botsin.space are forced to shut down due to lack of support, exposing a weakness of this concept and demonstrating why it might not actually be the one-size-fits-all solution needed to fix social media altogether.

It's been a great service for my specific interests as a tech blogger, but I worry the evangelists can't see past their nose when it comes to clarifying the benefits of joining for other kinds of people. The sign up process is notoriously confusing for those who are more familiar with conventional social media. The actual usability of fediverse apps is almost never a clear upgrade over their mainstream counterparts. We've reached a point with computing—and every experience downstream from it—where the focus has shifted away from providing a quality product and more toward extracting value out of those who are too dug in to learn a new way of doing things. The alternatives don't currently have the infrastructure or cultural cachet to compete, requiring more effort and compromise than the average person may be interested in.

All I can do is share bits of personal experience in hopes that it resonates with people. I've enjoyed my time on the fediverse, but I'm just not as deep into it as other folks. While I think it would be a fun project to start my own instance from home, I don't exactly have the time, money, housing continuity and technical competence to get it done right away. Still, the act of remaining on a large general-purpose instance like mastodon.social does not make me less of a fediverse user in the same way that relying on a desktop environment does not make me less of a Linux user—yes, it's true.

I decided to join Mastodon in the summer of 2023 when I became fed up with the direction of Twitter under its new leadership. By this point, Twitter had become more of a news tool than a social media site for my uses. I was drowning in a sea of voices; nothing I shared had any amount of penetration, and the mutual acquaintances I once kept up with grew distant or dropped off completely. I chose mastodon.social because it seemed like the most logical starting point for getting into an ecosystem I knew practically nothing about.

It took a period of months to start coalescing around like-minded individuals on Mastodon. Posting in several hashtags, monitoring the various timelines, filtering out obnoxious keywords and vigilantly muting obviously fake, spam-ridden and low quality accounts worked wonders for discovering people. I can proudly say I've made more genuine connections on Mastodon in under two years then I ever did on that Twitter account I made in 2009. Though I may not have the energy to post multiple times a day, every day, I'm likely to get something out of it when I do.

I believe in the fediverse as a Utopian concept for a social web unconstrained by corporate influence. I've been exposed to avant-garde ideas and artistic creations I wouldn't have encountered anywhere else. I've met some wonderful people who've encouraged me to be more creative, put myself out there, think in different ways and grow as an individual. There is a personal touch to the fediverse that can be difficult to describe. Fedizens appreciate your contributions in a way you won't find as easily in other communities focused on cultural narratives and clout chasing. It can be easy to forget how small Mastodon is when you're reaching an engaged audience without much barrier to entry.

That being said, it's important to recognize that the fediverse may never end up being a snug fit for everyone. It's not likely to win over anybody who is averse to using social media or those who struggle to find a healthy balance with online activities. While it's not as explicitly hierarchical and addicting-by-design as some of the other corporate services I briefly mentioned, the perverse incentive structures baked into the concept of social media are inextricably linked to fediverse apps as well. The ways that social apps shape our behavior are beyond the scope of this piece, but suffice to say, the fediverse won't likely be a panacea for anybody's social isolation or attention span issues. All the negative factors I've discussed add up to a potentially tough sell, hence why I don't normally extol the benefits of the fediverse to everyone I know.

The irony of this ambitious interlinked system of cooperative social media services ultimately having limited appeal beyond a thin slice of diehard enthusiasts is not lost on me, but at the same time, that lack of reach might actually be a good thing. The small web is experiencing a revival, in part because previous attempts to create a central location on the internet for every kind of person to mingle have mostly proven to be a failure, a net negative for society at large. The internet was always better when there were degrees of separation between demographics—the evolution of the new social web is bearing this out. It would be great if humans could get together, sing Kum Ba Yah and find ways to appreciate each others' differences, but that's simply not the world we live in. Until that day comes, I'll keep sharing periodical musings with the handful of people in my circle over here.

(Originally published in Ctrl-ZINE Issue #17: https://ctrl-c.club/~/loghead/zine/Ctrl-ZINE.issue.17.pdf)

 
Read more...

from Lucifer Orbis

Updating on my previous post, I finally – finally – finished The Mirror of Simple Souls by Margaret Porette. I’m so happy because it wasn’t easy and I may or may not have something to say about it. Maybe in general terms, but even to me it was too much. And not even on purpose, another book came out: Dissident women, beguines, and the quest for spiritual authority by Catherine Lambert. I’m going to read it after taking 1000 naps. I mean, the book title says everything. What I enjoyed the most about Margaret was precisely the independence with which she lived her faith, especially at a time when independence and women were mutually exclusive. I wrote the following text a while ago, but didn’t publish it because I didn’t think it was that good but here goes.


I was listening to a song called Ballad of the Prodigal Son. It's terribly beautiful and collected. It's actually funny that the story, being a joyful one, and with a happy ending, at least for the father and the son – the brother being rightfully pissed at the special treatment and kinda missing the point – the angelic voice shifted tone just in the right measure to bring tears to my eyes. I still have no idea why I listen to these things, but I do. Oh, it's late at night. Silence! And a midlife crisis.

Circling back, this is a very well-known story but as my memory fails me consistently, I don't recall it from my childhood; or maybe it was in a book a nanny gave me. I must have heard it, but without much contextual memory from those early years, I can only trust that the story reached me one day somehow. It’s common knowledge that the communion of saints is one of the fundamental principles of the Catholic Church. But why exactly do people need saints? What's a saint supposed to do? After all, Christ is Lord. He is, but sometimes you just need a little nudge to get there. The saints can do precisely that. So, a normal Catholic will tell you “we don't worship saints!” even though they may be talking with their favourite saints the whole day, but this is the part that they don't tell you so it can't get confused with “worshipping”. However, if they tell you that they're talking with other Catholics the entire day, it's not worshipping, it's a conversation. This is exactly what the communion of saints is – relishing in the very connection between earthly and heavenly things, and everything in between – that of holy people united by the sacraments and communion with Christ our saviour. Think about it as a connection between the human and the divine; the human turned holy, touched by grace and by the Holy Spirit which is common to us all. In other words, it’s being in touch.

Of course I’m only mentioning this in very loose terms, not even explaining anything, but you get the idea. Where I want to get at is, as made abundantly clear in a previous post, I have a favourite saint. That person died 400 years ago. I could try to update myself a little bit and choose another saint as a guide but I can’t. My head is resting on the perfect lap, if I can be so candid. I can push it a bit further and say that my body is being held by the perfect pair of arms and my soul is being fed the most eloquent whispers. That my will is being guided by the wisest actions and my dreams are being set on fire by the most ferocious passion. Ok, I’ll stop here before this gets weird – and it does. Remember that angel? Where do you think that passion comes from? It came from God, it was infused into a human being who subsequently wrote a number of theological teatrises that pierced the soul of another human being 400 years later. Now think about this as a web of connections, of a pulsating heart from where all arteries and veins expand. This is just the power of one saint and her communion with Christ. Think how many individuals are connected to Christ through a web of connections with other people, and these, with others. It is, in other terms, a Church.

My head is resting on the perfect lap My body is held by the perfect pair of arms My soul is fed the most eloquent whispers My will is guided by the wisest actions My dreams are lit by the most ferocious passion

Hah, it almost looks like I’m in love! Teresa of Avila, in her younger years, got access to a number of books. One of them was Letters of St. Jerome. See, St. Jerome was an inspiration to her and a guide in her own faith. As such, I also started reading his letters, learning that he was the translator of the Bible to Latin and a few other facts about his life. I wanted to read his letters, because they lingered in the eyes of Teresa and his words flipped a switch some time later. One of his letters caught my eye – To Theodosius and the rest of the anchorites. It was there that I saw Luke 15:3-5 and ended up reading the whole passage. For context, St. Jerome wrote: “I am the prodigal son who although I have squandered all the portion entrusted to me by my father, have not yet bowed the knee in submission to him; not yet have I commenced to put away from me the allurement of my former excesses.” Oh Jerome, how much we have in common! And then, by some weird coincidence, the heavenly voice I mentioned in the first paragraph starts singing the ballad that gave melody to my ears, a ballad previously unknown to me, playing on shuffle on YouTube, echoing the Holy Spirit, echoing Luke’s gospel, echoing Jerome, echoing Teresa, and piercing me.

 
Read more...

from Lucifer Orbis

I am exhausted. It's a good kind of exhaustion, but still, I need naps. I've been able to juggle my job, drawing, reading, writing, playing video games and watching silly horror flicks. After all, it's October and I need inspiration to keep going after the cold and darkness sets in for good. Winter is coming, right? Last Winter, we had a lot of snow. Our little neighbourhood looked like a cosy postcard people used to send to their families during Christmas. Do people still do that? Things at work have been fine despite the fact that sometimes what I really, really need is silence. I've seen that silence these days can enter the realm of luxuries. Not everyone has access to it, not everyone can enjoy its all encompassing bliss, it's the realm of the privileged.

Silence, silence, silence. I need it so my soul can sing.

Maybe it's the reason why I sleep so little. I enjoy the early hours of the night to stay in absolute silence. During this time I get inspired to write or draw while processing the many thoughts flowing in waves through my head. Sometimes I get desperate! I need to do everything all at once and can't seem to find rest. At least, I don't have neighbours digging their heels on the upper floor, children practising the piano right above my bedroom. Beats all the neighbours I had before, though. These don't make free use of an hi-fi system or play video games at maximum volume during the night. I am very lucky and enjoy their presence even when we don't interact.

Following my last post, I wrote some ramblings in my journal about a somewhat new translation of Teresa's biography. I'd like to transcribe it here, but first I need to understand my own handwriting and second I need to edit a fair amount. So, I think the idea will stay inside the drawer alongside my journal. Writing about Teresa's works and ideas wasn't easy and I assume that when I start seeing what I wrote here, I'll probably bin the whole thing. The gist of the text is translation for authenticity vs. translation as experience. At first, I didn't understand the whole purpose of changing so many things in the original text “for a modern audience”. I also shouldn't fall into traditional bigotry over religious texts. It's exhausting and useless. I just got slightly annoyed because one part of me thinks the original text and respective direct translation (as far as possible) is the right thing to do, whereas the other part felt the new translation is the right way to take it in. Therefore, if you want to read the original text, as written, in all its authenticity and sweet imperfection, all well and good. If you choose instead to read something that is truly transformative, then the new translation is the way to go. Why, though, can't the old one be both? Well, it can. I’ve experienced it both ways and the conclusion I reached is, in order to grasp the old (original) discourse, the one thing we have to put in is work – a lot of it. And it's this work and effort that I miss when I’m reading the new translation. I must be very clear that this translation couldn't be more beautiful and rich – it’s the one I have in physical format – but it just did all the work for me.

In the end, I rambled intensely about this in my journal. I had to cross-reference some sources. I was comparing translations all the while reading about traditions on literature produced by women in the Late Middle Ages. It was over 4am, fortunately on a Friday. My brain was on fire. Then, not on the same day, I wrote about my progress with a book called The Mirror of Simple Souls, written by Margaret Porette. It's not an easy read, but the translation I got, from the University of Notre Dame Press, comes with a f a n t a s t i c introductory essay. Ah, joy! I'll transcribe what I've written here if the inspiration strikes again as I still have to finish the book and read another one about the Latin translation. What drives me to the Mirror is pure curiosity and it's a brilliant piece of spiritual literature from the Middle Ages. The essay focuses on what we know about the life of Margaret before being taken by the Inquisition, as well as theological themes, literary style and tradition, reception, custodial history and translation. A treasure, is what it is.

I finished reading River Kings – The Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman. Wonderful read about the exploits of the Viking Army and viking presence in Central and Eastern Europe, and then further East. I got a deeper look into their society, belief system, military operations, trade, expansion and connection with Constantinople. The book was recommended by someone who knows about my peculiar taste for badass saints and it presented me with a couple of pages about Olga of Kyiv, the scourge of the Drevlians. I wondered if she was the patron saint of widows, and that she is! It was a great way to finish the last chapters at the prow of trade currents possibly reaching Baghdad and further beyond, maybe.

After finishing this month’s Inktober event, I’ll be dedicating more time to Trails from Zero on Nintendo Switch and will hopefully write a few words about it on my blog. There’s a website that runs prompts like Inktober, except it’s year-round. In order to make some effort on that front I could challenge myself to create at least four or five drawings per month, just to train the line and eventually develop my skills. I like to draw on prompt; it’s easier to come up with something almost immediately, without having to waste a long time staring at a blank page. A prompt can either summon something of a creative nature or purely descriptive. I’m satisfied with whatever comes to mind. Time is something I don’t have when I feel that I already have so much going on. And time with silence, lesser still.

 
Read more...

from Crapknocker

A few times, I’ve had really great or interesting runs in FrogComPosBand, so if you’ll bear with me, I’ll reminisce about them a bit here.

Angel runs

Angels have a ton of advantages compared to other monster classes. They have all the normal human item slots, they get basic resistances as they level up and they get a bunch of useful spells without having to tote around any books. The only downside is the huge experience penalty, it takes them forever to level up. They have to grind grind grind to get anywhere, but once they get there they can usually kick ass.

I’ve done a ton of angel runs. Usually they end up the same way as most of my decent runs: dead around level 30 after I try to fly too close to the sun and get burned. The one I most vividly remember was popping around the lower levels of Angband when they encountered the legendary Metal Babble. This is one of those enemies from other videogames, this time the Dragon Quest series. In those games, this enemy is nearly unhittable but gives a ton of experience and items if you do manage to vanquish them. In Frog, it has its own aura of darkness and fires high-level spells with a ridiculously high speed. It took me a few rounds to figure out why my health was dropping considerably until I noticed the little guy teleporting about. Since I was low on health, I used the Globe of Invulnerability spell to keep myself safe from almost all attacks. I say almost because it was that day that I found out that the Psycho Spear spell is one of the few, if not only, spells that go through the globe of invulnerability.

Sometimes that’s how your knowledge of the game grows, through the blood of your previous characters.

Dragon runs

Dragon monsters are really fun to play as, but have a few quirks that make them stand apart. First is the equipment slots. Most of their resistances have to come from rings, as they only have amulet, light, cloak and helmet slots apart from their six rings they can wear. They also have the breath weapon you would expect as well as pretty good claw and bite melee attacks. They get to specialize in a particular domain later on, which gives you some flexibility in how you want to dragon.

Breath specialization gives you powers and shapes for your breath weapon. Armor gives you an AC boost and occasionally reflection. Attack ups your melee and gives you some related buffs. Craft gives you powers related to making and dealing with weapons, Lore gives you identification and detection powers. Domination gives you summoning powers. There are also a few realms restricted to certain types of dragon, namely Death and Crusade. Only Death dragons can choose the Death realm, which gives you some summoning and nether-firing options. Law dragons can use Crusade, which gives some light healing among other powers, similar to the magic realm.

My most memorable run was with a steel dragon, which doesn’t have a breath weapon but does have incredible AC and slightly better melee than your standard dragon. I somehow managed to drag this guy to the higher levels in the game, as his melee kept being awesome despite lacking any distance attack. Also, the high AC helps slightly lower the damage you’re taking in melee, which is where you’re strongest. If I slapped on a few rings of protection with AC bonuses, I became very hard to hit. 250+ AC!

But like so many of my characters, I think I got double-breathed on by big dragons. And no matter what your resistances or AC are like, you push your luck too many times and eventually you’ll lose.

Filthy rag runs

As I’ve said before, I love running Filthy rag monsters. For a long time, I tried to get one with the Lucky personality off the ground, thinking that the luck would help offset the need to dive deeper before certain resists showed up on dropped armors. Turns out, the class is very weak in the beginning, somewhat weak in the midgame and stronger in the end. Having the Lucky personality’s -2 to all stats makes the early game that much more difficult.

Filthy rags are a patient player’s game. You need to get resistances, but to get them you need to go deeper but the puny offense of the class means that you have a hard time killing monsters. Not to say that it’s impossible, there are several Lucky rags on the Angband ladder, but you have to grind, grind, grind and hope you get lucky with your drops.

The big bottleneck for these guys is Confusion resistance, at least when I play them. Base resistances show up fairly early on and you can get them here and there without too much trouble, but getting that first bit of confusion is much more difficult. You’ll probably be wanting it about halfway through the Hideout dungeon, thanks to the good ‘ol Variant Maintainer unique that shows up there. But the only armors that even have the potential to drop with that resistance are ego armors ‘of the imp’ that might randomly get a single high resist. So not only do you have to get lucky and have an enemy drop one of these, which is difficult in itself, but then it has to roll confusion resistance out of all the possible high resistances, which is also rather unlikely. And because of how the filthy rags acquire resistances, you have to do this three times or possibly more. Remember, rags can’t wear rings or jewelry and gloves or boots that have confusion resistance only start dropping in much much lower depths. Good luck!

Same goes for gloves with bonuses to hit and damage. These also drop very rarely at the early levels and are your main source for increasing melee damage. And as you can’t equip a shooting weapon, your only other option are wands and rods which rags aren’t the best at. You can eventually find body armor and occasionally some boots with hit and damage boosts, but these are rare even at the deepest depths. Again, good luck.

So you have to grind to get exp to level up, which increases your life and melee damage. But you can’t dive too deeply since you don’t have the damage output to keep up. You could try and stairscum on high-level dungeons to maybe get some items just lying around, but this is even riskier.

I will say, I haven’t ever really gotten over this hump in my playthroughs. I once got a Lucky rag to level 30, but that was as far as he got as he (it?) was still missing tons of resists and had puny damage. One day I’ll roll that boulder up the hill, though, and it will stay at the top.

#FrogComPosBand

 
Read more...

from how do you spell cool

promo image for the zine showing a picture of the zine superimposed multiple times with different coloring

The first issue of the official howdoyouspell.cool ZINE is now available for download!

Download here!

Featuring words from the following articles/authors:

  1. WE ARE BESET BY SUFFERING ON ALL SIDES by forrest @ Mastodon
  2. Long Weekend (Battles Without Honor and Humanity) by Hazardes @ Mastodon
  3. Misc. FrogComPosBand sentiments by CrapKnocker @ Mastodon
  4. Shonen Weekdays by DharmaDischarge @ Mastodon
  5. Hot Dark Love: Work Date by SodiumReactor @ Mastodon
 
Read more...

from dharmadischarge and his comics

Eternal Eclipse: Book One of The Brutal Song of Aziel Bartholomew

A prototype of my current main project which will be a comic. this is however a long fragment of a novel that will likely never be finished. I had typed nearly three thousand words by the time dawned on me that this is more visual and would work better as a comic.

Will try to only post comics and updates of making comics on this blog but thought I would share this because I dug parts of this and still do.

Chapter one

Drifting through the lake of stars. Out of the port hole of the celestial cruiser christened Giga-Death, we see a small starship large enough to hold a hundred persons drifting serenely through the lake of stars. Aziel Bartholomew lay in his bunk in his cell waiting for the trial that would lead to his execution. He knows that By the standard of the Scarlet Templars, he is guilty. He betrayed the royal family, and embarrassing the Royals is a cardinal mistake for anyone living around these parts.

The Celestial Dynasty is an empire in the galaxy known as the lake of stars. This empire has over a hundred thousand planets within its space. Each one has a king. Each king has an army. This is an age of fragile peace.

Every gambit of the political spectrum is expressed in how these planets are governed. Some near utopian democracies while others are prisons for breeding prisoners. The kingdom is diverse but power is the name of the game.

Aziel killed two of his comrades in the Scarlet Templars. They were soldiers sent with him to purge a bloc in the urban mess that is Sprawl 4. A megacity in his home world of Lohiri. It was his first day on the job. He had made it back home after some combat in the orbit while on patrol near the Hopecraft's home world. He was a proud veteran of a conflict that did not require a duel between the royal families... and their Holy weapons the Panzer Striders. Yet when he saw what they did to that family... He lost it. Without hesitation nor with fear he executed both men with his Flail Blastor pistol... They were reapers of the law by all means he was guilty. So they sent him before a council of the royal family to be judged.

So he lay in his small cell till he heard an explosion. He walks over to the port hole looking out at the wreckage not knowing why the ship is shattered but still it drifts on the lake of stars and the corpses around it.

Then next to his reflection in the glass he sees a face. With a cone hat angled off to the side. The Bright red clown nose is bulbous and absurd. the black around his eyes like gothic tears contrasting with the white painted face. The clown's red and yellow jumpsuit with blue buttons is profane and grotesque.

Aziel turns around. staring at the terrifying fool.

“Well... Who are you?” Said, Aziel.

“I am the Yama Yama Man.” Said the Clown.

“Be you a Banished Heart? Or Hoblin from the abyss to torment me?” Said Aziel.

“I am a bringer of gifts,” said the clown.

Then fanning his fingers in a dance with a twist of his wrist and a clap of his hands. In his hand appears a bag. Knotted up and balled up it is empty. Yet still in escalating theatricality, he lays the bag down reaching into and pulling out a blade.

The black blade was fat with steel. Glittering red runes on both sides said something Aziel could not understand. The blade was a short sword barely longer than Aziel's forearm. Yet the object screamed authority.

“This is Eternal Eclipse, The cunning of oblivion.” Said the clown.

Then staring at the blade in the light he seemed almost reluctant to humor whatever was on his mind.

“This is a Rune Sword of channeling. A lighting rod for destiny. A blade that needs no sharpening. A gift or a curse.”

Then in his theatricality, he kneels as if presting the blade to a king.

“Take it,” he whispers.

With a vague second of hesitation, Aziel tries to discern if this is fancy or delirium caused by spun sugar withdrawals.

“Take it!” Says a demonic voice without subtlety only dominance.

Whether afraid or Obedient Aziel takes the blade.

The clown please smiles showing golden cavity teeth. His eyes Gnarley with terror. Then he picks up the sack he pulled the sword from and places it in oblivion... it returns to the void.

Aziel looks at his eye's reflection on the blade's edge and does not know what he is considering.

“you will need this.” Said the clown holding out a round canister of spun sugar.

Aziel takes it and while blinking the clown's hand is gone as is the rest of it. Not slowly fading into nothing. but is gone as timed with Aziel's lids closing.

As if waking from a dream He in his frustration clenches the can of spun sugar in his hand and whispers “Eternal Eclipse: The cunning of oblivion...“.

chapter two

Aziel is standing with the Rune Blade. He is feeling the handful of spun sugar dissolve on his tongue. He needs channeling rings. His freedom demands it. Yet he will have to make do.

Aziel holds up the Rune Blade pointing in with the tip at the cell door.

He commands the sword “Open the door.”

The first rune on the side of the blade begins to glow red and then after its glow is vibrant the next. With each Aziel feels like he is pushing a blouder destined to roll back down the mountain. Yet, (and this is the touch of destiny) with each Rune lighting up. The door and wall around it are bending. Through sheer psychic will, The warping of steel is growing in distortion. the steel ballooning away from him until glowing red like lava the door rips outward dissolving and pouring out into the hall.

The growing heat triggers the fire alarms. Hundreds of gallons of water start pouring throughout the Celestial Cruiser. the water sizzling the steel to coolness. Aziel does not hesitate he runs.

/v\/

He pushes his mohawk out of his eyes and off to one side and peeks out looking around the corner. Wearing his Black and white horizontal-striped prison jumpsuit he runs.

He does not make it far before he hears the chugging explosive blast of crusader rifles.

“Wump!-Wump!-Wump!” the rifles scream.

The bullets explode past his body being only saved by the quick use of the words “Protect me!” to the sword.

An inch-thick bullet of warbling steel. stops near his hip then explodes at the two Scarlet Templers. One of them dies instantly from where the bullet struck him. Left only with a fist-sized hole in his face. The other soldier stops firing and runs with a tomahawk at Aziel. His Crusader Rifle hanging from a strap on his side.

They fight without sizing up their opponent. a tomahawk swinging by aziel face. while the rune blade dances close too but is unable to connect a stinging blow to a plate exposure of his opponent's exoskeleton.

Till at last beneath his enemy's left armpit he pierces between the plates of armor. Sending the soldier towards his judgment. Aziel pulled out the blade, blood-stained but ready.

Taking from the dead men a crusader rifle and as much ammo as he could carry (Two belt straps thrown over his shoulders). He leaves at a jog. The wet floor from the sprinklers trips him more than once, as he goes sliding from one side to the other. Occasionally he will hear explosions that he assumes are out of the hull but other times he is not so sure.

He thinks “If by chance this is real I can not waste this opportunity.”

He walks for twenty minutes before running into another living being.

The Electric scorpion-like legs of a Delta Pulse Computer. Its pinchers are jittery and unpredictable in their automation. the Stillborn Fetus that houses the AI of the machine hovers in the scorpion tail. It looks at Aziel and starts squirming and spinning in its plastic and steel tomb. The machine starts to manually scan with a blue laser flickering out in triangles. Yet Aziel to it does not exist. only the baby's eyes notice it and that without understanding.

Aziel thinks “The unborn child is the machine's subconscious. It knows something is wrong but can not rationalize it.”

A door opens in the black halls of the ship. Eight feet from him stands a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She is wearing a toga.

Aziel thinks “A toga... not only is she a noble... but one that has committed adultery...”

“Don't kill me.” Says the woman.

“He might be my ticket out of here.” she thinks.

Aziel points the rifle at her.

“Please don't!” she screams.

The Delta Puls computer opens its claw revealing plasma blasters. and rotates on high alert back and forth dancing to find whatever has startled her, But, It can not.

“Stand down.” she says to the machine “Return for maintenance your not working properly.”

The delta prime says “As you will.” and wanders off while the fetus clings to the glass in fear, yet wanting to know what happens next.

Chapter Three

Captain Naomi Mercia Stood with her sword tightly clasped in her right hand as her other... the left palm (and artificial prosthetic going from her left fingertips to a surgical implant in her shoulder) rested on the one holding the hilt. Sheathed but dangerous, all attention was drawn to the rapier between her legs. using it to shift her weight forward the aurora of hostility backing it up more than her slight frame. Standing on the deck of Celestial Cruisor: Giga Death.

Her checkerboard short skirt is a Black and Green pattern though with golden shoulder boards. Her blouse was also the standard uniform of her rank. Black and button-up with medals and officer marking all around. Her hair hung loose bleached blonde combed to one side beneath a bicorne with plumes of red feathers out of the top. Polished to precision were black standard-issue-laced the edge of her knee boots.

“Captain!” Says an armored young soldier with his face visor raised.

“Speak.” Says Naiomi.

“The son of Young Bull....” He hesitates and struggles to find the words.

“Yes,” says Naomi

“He has... Taken your wife hostage.” Before he can finish the pronunciation of the word hostage she floors him with a straight jab from her left arm crushing his face and knocking him out cold.

“get this worthless... useless trash off of my deck.” Says Naomi.

Two soldiers drag off the young recruit by the legs leaving a trail of blood and teeth on deck.

“And get someone to clean this mess up,” says Naomi. wiping off the blood from her prosthetic arm with a handkerchief.

“Where is the slut?” Says Naomi.

“Captain we still can not locate the prisoner.” says someone looking at the screen of the scans from the Delta Pulse computers. “We're not seeing anything.” He continues.

“put a guard detail around the little punks Panzer Strider: Wizard Tusk. We may not know where he is but we know where he is going.” Says Naomi.

Then staring off into space she turns red in the face and screams with Rrimal glory an expression of not only what she was feeling but everything she could feel and it trailed off with guttural glory

“FUUUUUCK!”

(The Brutal Ballad of the Young Bull)

How am I to tell the ballad of the Young Bull? Well for one that was not his name. His name was Bartholomew Rainwater. He was the leader of a group known as the Battle-Axe Horde. A bunch of violent psychopaths Would tie their prisoner's hands with ropes soaked in gasoline and then set them alight.

They were a primeval kind of debauchery about the lifestyle of that gang. They aspired to be a crew of Star-Rogues but even if they were a major player on their block in the grand scheme of things Even if he was tribal king to millions... On his last day... He was a serf-like you or me. Property of the Royal Blood.

They planned a kidnapping that was not properly thought out. It never should have happened. They kidnapped a minor noble's daughter who has a small claim of blood to the Ashe birth line and its inheritance. When they sent the transmission saying they had the young women. the soldiers sent back the question “Who is the young bull that has my daughter.” Bartholomew Rainwater laughed and said, “I am the young bull”. He raped the poor women. He Got her pregnant and when the nobles sent word there would be no ransom paid. He decided to keep her as a concubine.

What he did not know was the nobles had been lenient for a thousand years. They let the cities be run how we the people saw fit. as long as our quota of product (whatever that be!) was met.

Within twenty-four hours the noble sent the whole fleet to orbit the planet shooting anything out of the sky that tried to leave orbit. A single ship. A celestial cruiser. opened its mouth and spit lightning and fire. With one blast megalopolis-4 was removed from existence taking billions of lives with it.

That would be the end of the story... except... the concubine of the young bull was smuggled out of the city to another of the megalopolis. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy... well... that's another story.

chapter four

“My name is Terry Mercia. My wife is captain of this vessel, as long as I am still breathing you can use me to get off of it.” Says the young woman.

Aziel says “The only way we're getting off this ship is with my Panzer Strider. Where is carrier bay?”

“How can you believe what I said... how can you trust me?” Says Terry.

“I don't. But I will kill you if you turn out to be lying,” says Aziel. “it's no skin off my teeth, either way.”

Terry nods in agreement. Then thinks “He is telling me the truth. Every word he has said is as honest as it could be.”

“It's an elevator ride away.” Says Terry.

Then she turns with Aziel following sword in one hand and a rifle hanging at his side. It is a short walk to the elevator. they get to the carrier bay without conversation or hitches. Crawling with Scarlet Templars. the bay could be a quarter mile with small fighter ships lining the floor and large carriers that are nearly twenty-five feet long.

“what are we going to do?” says Terry.

Aziel closes his eyes and points to Wizard Tusk his Panzer Strider. Seemingly on its own, it activates. Stomping and killing Dozens of soldiers bighting some in half and spitting out the mess. A twenty-five-foot tall psychically fueled weapon of mass destruction. Going into a full Rampage. Roaring with unnatural sounds like a whalesong or a gorilla's bark.

When most are dead it fly's over Aziel's chest opening after it sits in full lotus zazen posture he climbs on its legs. and into it's cockpit.

“You staying?” Says Aziel.

“No,” says Terry running at a full stride toga bouncing in the wind. she climbs onto his lap and the hatch shuts. inside there is little room. a locker opens where he places his weapons and they seemingly are swallowed by the Panzer. Even the seem disappears as they are locked away. an orb lowers in front of Terry and Aziel. He places his hands on it and possesses the Panzer.

Soon after some explosions, they are outside. making the jump

 
Read more...

from dharmadischarge and his comics

one-page comic with full description below for alt text.

comic-1.jpg

panel 1 “This is me renewing my dreams with a bootleg handheld game console.”

image a cartoon anthropomorphic cat playing a Gameboy clone in a computer chair. The cat looks kinda like Felix the Cat but with fur on his chest and a scar on his forehead. he has mischievous eyes and fangs on his mouth that are nearly always visible.

panel 2 close up of the cartoon cat staring off from his game remembering the past while the game still says beep boop while he is distracted.

panel 3 the cartoon cat as a kid watching roo rami (a legal parody of Toonami name but from a kind scooby doo influenced place in my heart.)

the text above the image says “When I was a kid I watched anime and played retro games.

panel 4 him sitting in in a side view

the cartoon cat says “it doesn't get better than this right guys?)

below the text says “those are my fondest memories.”

panel 5 the cat looks back at the reader and sees he is alone with the text “Where did you go? overlayed over his head.”

panel 6 The view is like panel 4 with the only difference the cat cartoon cat is crying while a Toonami promo plays and says “A boy has the right to dream.

 
Read more...

from Crapknocker

Just a few bits of general advice on playing #FrogComPosBand gleaned from dying over and over and over.

Once you’re deeper than level 30, watch out for summoners. Lots of different monster types can summon on you, which is generally a really bad thing to have happen. Watch out for qulythulgs, as that’s their main jam to summon nasty stuff right on top of you. Bigger demons can summon as well, which can also lead to chain-summoning which can royally ruin your day. Always have a means of escape; teleport scrolls work very well for this. You can also find ways to cast the genocide or mass genocide spells to clear things out, but be aware that for every monster you delete using these methods you lose 1 HP. When the dungeons fill with hundreds of monsters, this might do more than just sting. Also be aware that uniques are resistant to genocide.

Keep out of open areas, for the simple reason that monsters seeing you will begin to attack you. If you’re playing a stealthy class they might not see you until you’re closer or at all, which is highly to your advantage. Whenever you can choose the battlefield and tilt things to your advantage, you should do so. Open areas give the monsters the initiative to start chasing you, and many have very nasty distance attacks like Hell Lances or Mana Storms. Keeping out of sight of summoners can prevent them from summoning on you as well.

Buffing yourself up before a fight is almost always worth it. Potions of Speed, Heroism, Resistance, and temporary armor buffs like Stoneskin can make the difference between having to retreat and heal and sticking out that last turn and killing that tough unique. Eventually you will find a rod of Heroic Speed to hit you with both at once and perhaps save an inventory slot.

Always have a source of healing! Early on you will have to use potions of cure (light, medium, whatever) wounds but towards the midgame those won’t be as effective as you would like them to be. You can search for staffs of cure wounds that can have you back up in a jiffy, but as you go on, you will need to rely on potions and later staffs of Healing unless you have some healing magic to fall back on. Stockpile these potions! Buy them from black markets when you can. In the late game, staffs and rods of Angelic Healing can replace some of these needs, but having potions as your backup is a zero fail method you can always depend on. Potions do give you nutrition, so if you’re planning on chugging a bunch of potions, you may want to come on an empty stomach, as being Gorged slows you down significantly.

Always have a source of detection! Knowing what’s coming and how to deal with it is paramount. If there’s a tough unique up ahead, you would definitely rather know about it rather than just blindly getting ambushed. Furthermore, knowing the layout of the dungeon around you is helpful for the same reason. Taking a quick sprint across two tiles is much safer than walking up to that big summoning monster and just hoping they don’t get too many shots in before you get there. In the early game you will have to find or buy rods or staffs of Detect Monsters, scrolls of Magic Mapping and Detect Traps, but towards the midgame you will replace all these with rods of Detection, which rolls a bunch of useful things into one (monsters, traps, items, stairways). You will also find staffs of Clairvoyance later on to help map the terrain and light things up for you. You can also use potions of Enlightenment on levels you think will be tough to find out the whole layout at once.

Ideally, here’s how a battle against a difficult enemy would go: you use your rods or staffs or whatever to detect the enemy far off in the distance. You do a little magic mapping to see the terrain. You choose the best possible approach, one that keeps you out of line-of-sight until you’re right next to them. You buff up before you engage. Then you hit them until they drop all that delicious loot.

What actually happens in practice is that there’s some element you’ve forgotten or something unexpected occurs. For example, just out of range of your initial detection radius could be another difficult enemy that wakes up when you’re fighting the first, putting you at more of a disadvantage. The enemy could escape or even steal something of yours before running away. Enemies can also buff themselves with berserk rages and globes of invulnerability and the like. Some enemies can dispel your precious buffs or suck the charges from your wands, rods, and staves. One of your potions of speed might shatter after an enemy’s elemental attack, causing that enemy to be much faster than you were originally estimating.

You can always ‘l’ook at a monster and hit r to recall information you know about it. If you’ve seen that type of enemy before, you might know what it resists, what it’s immune to, it’s speed, it’s HP, lots of different information. This is invaluable, and you can turn on the ability to remember this info between characters in the settings. There’s a billion kinds of enemies, so having this info around can keep you out of the frying pan just a little while longer.

One last thing, don’t rush. The game doesn’t do anything on its own until you press a button to move or act. Take time to pay attention to what enemies are around you and what they might do in the next few turns. Other games may have conditioned you to push buttons quickly to get yourself out of danger, but doing this only gives enemies more turns to act while you might not be noticing what they’re doing. It’s tempting to start smashing the move buttons after an enemy gets you down to half health in one round, but acting without thinking, especially in the lower depths of the dungeon, will get you killed. If you get in a tough spot, think over your options before doing anything. Teleporting out is usually safe, unless there’s a big enemy you’ve passed by that’s awake somewhere else on the level that you might accidentally end up next to. Staffs and rods have a chance to fail and if you do in the midst of combat, the round you spent trying might be your last one. Keep low or no-fail options like scrolls or potions in your inventory as well.

Level feelings

I’ve you’ve been playing the game, you’ve probably noticed a message pop up, something like, “This level looks relatively safe.” This is the level feeling and can give you an idea of what’s waiting for you out there in the rest of the level you’re on. The color of the level indicator in the lower left of the main screen will change depending on what message you get. This only applies to the level you’re currently on, if you to a new level in a dungeon you’ll need to wait a bit there until you get a new feeling.

The level feeling takes around a hundred turns to pop up. But once it does there are several useful things you can take away from it that might change how you play the level. Possibly the best one is “There is something special about this level.” in a baby blue color. This means that somewhere on the level is an artifact, just waiting to be picked up. Depending on the level you’re on, this could be a huge find.

There are a few levels of messages that indicate how difficult the enemies you will be facing on the level are. The first, in light brown is something like, “You’re feeling nervous.” In the early levels (0-20), this probably means there’s a unique monster somewhere on the level. Next is, “You have a bad feeling about this level” in dark brown. That means there’s more difficult enemies waiting for you, probably still a unique or a few out of depth monsters waiting for you. The next level is in orange text and I can’t remember the message. The final one that I’ve seen is in dark red, indicating that there’s something extremely dangerous out there. Probably a vault or a bunch of out of depth monsters.

Line of sight

You’ve probably noticed that enemies don’t start firing distance attacks at you until they see you. There are a few ways to keep out of sight of monsters but still cause damage to them. The first is by using a rod, wand, or ammunition of exploding to fire an area of effect spell that hits the monster without you being in its line of sight. This becomes extremely useful when dealing with enemies like qulythulgs and druj (drujes?) that are immobile but can cause all sorts of problems for you if they see you. If you can avoid being seen by these guys and have enough charges or ammo, you can safely kill them from out of sight without them being able to do anything about it.

Personalities

These are options in character creation that can add some additional wrinkles to your run. A few of the easiest ones to ‘get’ are the Combat and Mighty personalities. They are trading your int and wis for additional strength, dex and con. If you’re planning a warrior-type, these can give you some extra early game oomph at the cost of higher device and spell failures in the lategame. On the flipside, there is Crafty or Shrewd, which somewhat does the opposite of the previous two mentioned.

Some of the wackier choices are Unlucky, which gives you a boost to all your stats, but makes it harder to get good drops, occasionally makes you miss in combat and gives you higher spell and device fail rates. The opposite of this is Lucky.

Sexy gives you a boost to a few stats but gives you inherent aggravation, which causes enemies to instantly wake up on level generation. This puts you at a serious disadvantage to start with, but can be mitigated a few different ways. And you can wear items that aggravate since you have it already.

The in-game help has good descriptions of how each of the different ones work, so check through the list and see if one might make an interesting twist on your character.

 
Read more...

from Crapknocker

I can’t give too much advice on the endgame, having only gotten there a handful of times myself, but in general, be a coward. Detect everything as thoroughly as you can before ever entering a room. Kill every weak enemy you can for exp and use every cheesy strategy you can come up with. Dig holes in walls to draw out powerful monsters and fight them one on one. If you’re an archer, use scrolls of phase door to bounce around once a monster gets into melee range with you. Use every advantage at your disposal, because once you’re in Angband facing down monsters that breathe multiple elements simultaneously, can stop time, and summon enemies that then summon more enemies, you’ll wish you had practiced running away earlier.

In general, keep more items in your inventory than you think you'll need. When you have more than 300 HP, start carrying around potions of Healing for emergencies. Speaking of Healing and Healing potions, you'll want to hoard all you can of these to prepare for the final fight. Use them if you need to, it's stupid to die with an inventory full of healing potions, but keep as many as you can for later.

Check out the Angband ladder for FrogComPosBand https://angband.live/ladder/ladder-browse.php?v=FrogComposband&r=&c=&n=&e=&s=0, especially other characters of your class. Read spoilers on monster levels, spells, anything you can find.

Advice for quests found in towns: https://pastebin.com/ZLZZz45j

Demigod mutations: https://pastebin.com/hTi24Nky

Arena rewards and various other small spoilers: http://nikheizen.github.io/pages/rewards.html

Dungeons, dungeon guardians and quests: https://pastebin.com/AVsp31k8

One last bit of advice, maybe try the Munchkin personality if you get stuck in a rut. It gives huge boosts to your stats, makes it easier to level up, and starts you with a million gold. You can't really get credit for beating the game using this mode, but it is great for trying new character combos and learning how places you've never been work. It's worth checking out at least once, especially if you're learning the game. Preparing to fight big J

Some tips I've gleaned from excessively reading winning posts on the Angband ladder on what to do and how to prepare to fight the Serpent of Chaos:

Double breaths

You have to have a bunch of HP to even think of fighting the serpent. The main reason for this is that the big guy is super fast and even at +35 speed can get two moves on you before you have a chance to react. If the serpent decides to breathe some exotic element on you like chaos, it’s a problem. If he decided to do it twice in a row, it can be deadly. Having a big batch of HP is the best way to deal with this. That way, if you get taken down to minimal HP you can teleport out to heal before resuming the fight.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these double moves can occur halfway through the fight or when you’ve got him down to his last bit of health. You will need to keep your HP above a certain level to avoid instant death if the serpent gets a double move on you. The energy system underlying the turns in the game is somewhat randomized, so you won’t know this is coming until you get hit with it. Keeping your HP up is the best defense alongside having your resistances covered.

To help buoy your HP levels, you can do a bit of manipulation with your Life Rating. If you managed to come across a potion of Self Knowledge, you probably noticed you had something called a life rating. Here’s how I understand this system to work. Every level up, the game rolls some dice behind the scenes to determine how much HP you gain. Over the 50 levels you have available, a series of bad rolls can really hamper your total HP. To counteract this, you can drink potions of New Life, which reroll these dice and can give you a larger HP pool and potentially different stat maximums. Your life rating is a general feel of how high you could’ve gotten on these HP rolls. Anything over 100% is great here and potentially worth keeping. Basically if you stockpile enough potions, you can drink a New Life followed by a Self Knowledge to see how good your new life rating is. This can get you 50 or more HP in the endgame, which is nothing to sneeze at and may save your life.

Summon uniques

The Serpent of Chaos has a power that I think no other boss in the game has, to summon unique monsters. If you have gotten to him (it?), you have probably gotten surrounded by bunches of high level undead summons, dragon summons and tons of others. But summoning unique monsters is probably the most nasty one of them all. As you probably already know, unique monsters are some of the hardest to defeat in the game and can complicate any encounter they pop up in. This goes double if the encounter is with the toughest boss in the game, the Serpent of Chaos.

The quirk here is that the serpent will only summon uniques that are currently living, i.e. those that you haven’t defeated yet. The problem here is that there are a bunch of high-level uniques that can make your life hell in the lower depths of Angband. Some especially nasty ones are Godzilla and Nodens, both of which have boatloads of HP and devastating attacks so you don’t want to be engaging with them at the same time as the serpent.

One approach is to troll the lower levels of Angband in the 90+ range and try to kill all the uniques that pop up there. This is useful for two reasons, one it lowers the amount of uniques that the serpent can summon and two it gives you the really useful drops of the uniques from that low in the dungeon. Better equipment is always better.

Another way to deal with unwanted summoned uniques is to use scrolls or staffs of Destruction, which turn the usual dungeon terrain into random mashes of stone. Uniques caught in the radius of a destruction spell will be despawned from a level (not killed). However, if you accidentally catch the serpent in the radius of your destruction spell, he will also be despawned. But then he will immediately be respawned elsewhere in the level at full health, so you really don’t want to do this unless you’re trying to escape or something.

But destructing the level before the serpent finds you can be a useful strategy to limit line of sight and the summons that might occur. Enemies can only be summoned in the squares surrounding your @ character. If your back is to a wall, that’s a few less squares that bad guys can occupy trying to kill you. The only downside to this is that the serpent immediately knows where you are on the level as soon as you go down to 100 and will begin making his way toward you, smashing down any walls between you and him as he goes. Even if he tunnels through a few walls, taking control of the terrain you fight on can give you an edge in this battle of attrition.

There are a few things you can do to help even the odds, though. The first, if you’re planning on fighting the serpent in melee is to have as much damage as you can without sacrificing too much in the way of resists. Having a few pluses to hit and damage on random bits of equipment can end up giving you hundreds of extra damage per round. You’ll want at least 500 damage per round to even stand a chance in melee, and the more the better.

A few notes about the Serpent of Chaos. First is that he’s not immune to stun, so if you have a weapon that stuns or a reliable stunning attack, you can make the fight much easier by keeping him stunned, which I believe increases his chance to fail casting any magic (including summons) and lowers his chance to hit you in melee. Second, he’s considered an evil, living monster so if you use gloves of slaying that do extra damage against either evil or living monsters, they will work on him as well. My third note is that he frequently breathes chaos, so bring along at least double chaos resist to help mitigate that damage. He also has an aura of shards, so don’t go up against him without resisting that.

There are a few other techniques to reduce or prevent the serpent’s summoning powers. If you can mix it into your equipment, there are amulets of anti-summoning that exist in the game (denoted by [Sm). Keep your eyes out for those. Some classes have access to anti-magic, which also helps prevent summoning, which is also available in amulet form ([M). You can also turn the tables and have your own summoned minions occupy all the spaces around you so that big J’s summoning is blocked that way. This can be doubly helpful if you bring heavy monsters of your own to fight on your behalf. Some classes can summon dragons and Great Wyrms of Power (GWOPs) and Steam-Powered Mechanical Dragons are two types that I’ve heard hold up decently against the serpent. Even non-summoning classes can get in on the act by capturing these monsters in the capture balls available in certain stores, then throwing them (‘v’) when you want to release them, Pokémon-style. But be aware, the chaos breath he breathes has a tendency to polymorph monsters occasionally, so your big badass summons might get turned into tiny, fragile rats.

 
Read more...

from hazardes

i bought a box set of three films directed by Takeshi Kitano (aka “Beat” Takeshi) “Violent Cop”, “Boiling Point” and “Sonatine

Kitano is very famous in Japan. for most of the 1980s he was known as a stand-up comedian and tv host before moving into film directing and acting. in 1989 he was set to star in “Violent Cop” with Kinji Fukasaku directing, however the scheduling didn't work out due to Kitano's tv commitments and Fukasaku dropped out of the project, leaving the film without a director. someone suggested to Kitano that he direct the film himself and that's what ended up happening

i watched Violent Cop last weekend expecting great things, and it certainly is a film about a violent cop. Kitano stars as Azuma, a police detective with a habit of using excessive force when dealing with criminals. Azuma is assigned to investigate the murder of a drug dealer and the film follows the investigation, and Azuma's life when he is off the clock. the plot is a fairly standard crime film along the lines of something like Dirty Harry but what makes it interesting is Kitano's direction. i mentioned Kinji Fukasaku was set to direct, and if you have read my earlier posts you'll know what i think of his yakuza movies like Battles Without Honour and Humanity, there is so much energy in them, particularly the action sequences, with the camera violently shaking all over the place. you can practically feel the energy crackling through the screen like a jolt of electricity

well, with Violent Cop it's like Kitano decided to do the exact opposite of what Fukasaku would've done. the camera hardly moves, and i don't even know if you could call the performances acting. there is virtually no emotion at all in the entire film, the actors deliver their lines in long drawn out scenes with no camera movement, long pauses, and sudden outbursts of extreme violence. it gives the film a very nihilistic tone, but it feels completely lifeless and when it finished i just kinda sat there feeling nothing at all about what i had just seen

i can kinda see what he was going for but it just didn't work for me. i didn't care about anything that happened. there's even a pretty nasty rape scene involving Azuma's disabled sister but it's filmed in such an emotionless dispassionate way that i sat staring blankly at the tv

weird as fuck

Boiling Point is Kitano's second film, about a hapless duo of lowlifes who work at a petrol station. their boss is beaten up by a local yakuza and they go on a trip to Okinawa in order to buy a gun and get revenge

filmed in exactly the same style as Violent Cop with all the same problems, lack of emotion, and nihilistic style. i enjoyed it a little more as the characters are more fleshed out and interesting, and there are a few moments of black humour

Sonatine is the final film in the set, and Kitano's fourth as director (his third, A Scene at the Sea is not included here) the plot follows a yakuza gang led by Kitano who are sent to Okinawa by their boss to help resolve a gang war

the plot reminds me of Fukasaku's yakuza movies, and is full of the same allegiances, betrayals, and violent revenge that characterised them, and it's definitely the most interesting film of the three. but again i just found it dispassionate, emotionless, and nihilistic due to the way it was shot

here's an example of an “action” scene from the film, to give you an idea of what i mean

Sonatine bar shootout

contrast it with this from Fukasaku

Battles Without Honor And Humanity Shuji Yano death scene

so yeah, Takeshi Kitano. definitely a unique director, but his style just doesn't work for me. like the characters in his films i just sit there expressionless while events unfold on the screen in front of me, feeling nothing. and when it's over i slowly walk over to my tv, take the disc out of my player, and put it back on the shelf

 
Read more...

from hazardes

today was a public holiday here in the UK and i had the day off work. it's the end of the month and i have no money left so the plan for today was to sit around at home, do a couple of chores around the house, have some dinner, and then watch a load of films

mission accomplished!

i ended up marathoning the last three films in the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, which will come as a shock to you i'm sure. i said writing this blog would give me an excuse to watch them all again. i honestly don't think i've ever been as into a series of films as i am these, like i mentioned in an earlier post they're just so dense, and i really feel like i'm learning lots of things while watching them; language, history, culture, all of it very alien to someone who grew up half a world away

the third and fourth films; Proxy War and Police Tactics are the two films in the series that are the most closely linked together, Police Tactics follows directly on from the events in Proxy War, and tells how an all-out gang war erupted in Hiroshima between rival yakuza factions in 1963, and the subsequent crackdown from the authorities. the plot gets very heavy in these two, when i talked about the first film i mentioned that it can be hard to follow in places, and that is magnified here as there is so much going on, it all follows the familiar pattern of alliances, betrayals, and violent revenge, but i did find it a lot easier to keep track of who everyone was the second time round

it's funny, you'll spot an actor and be like “oh i recognise him he's so and so from the first film” but then you remember that the character he played two films ago was brutally murdered and that same actor is playing someone completely different now. this happens quite a lot

one actor i have to mention is the amazing Nobuo Kaneko who plays Boss Yamamori in all five films. i came to absolutely love him by the end, Yamamori is a slimy double-crossing cowardly snake, and Kaneko delivers such a memorable performance. he appears in loads of other Japanese films i've watched recently from around this time too, always playing similar characters – scheming bosses, corrupt politicians, he was definitely typecast, and he's great in them all. i looked him up on Wikipedia and he had a really long career, even hosting a popular cookery show on Japanese TV towards the end of his life. such a character

the fourth film Police Tactics was originally planned to be the final film in the series, and it's written that way, however it was such a success that Toei put up the money and got Fukasaku to direct one more. i'm glad they did because Final Episode is an absolute banger movie and a great send off for the series. set a few years after the events of Police Tactics, the public have turned against the yakuza and their constant violence forcing the gangs to try and rebrand as respectable businesses and a “political organisation” called Tensei. predictably this doesn't go well and infighting soon leads to more violence

you really get a sense of how tired of it all Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) is by the end, when he realises that he's become the boss sending the young footsoldiers out to die

so, which one of the five films is the best? i can't decide, please don't put a gun to my head and force me to choose, all five of them are simultaneously the best film i've ever seen, but Proxy War is probably my favourite

still can't believe i got the box set for twenty-five quid

 
Read more...