A list, of all things

Appropriated from smurasaki:

Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either.

BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.

(I may have done this before, but I can't remember off hand. I've also included my opinions after the ones I've read or tried to.)

( List: shortened )

26 points. What do I win?

Watching?

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Did I mention a while ago that I was going to investigate Death Note on account of it airing here? Well, I did, and I decided not to watch because I dislike Light and didn't want to watch umpteen episodes of him getting away with his actions (I had a rough idea of the overall arc goes).

More recently I've been wondering if maybe I want to watch it after all, the better to enjoy seeing him suffer and die. Sometimes I wonder what that says about me, and sometimes I don't care.

Rambling

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Within the set of relatively open-ended games in which players can accumulate resources, I have taken to pondering (not much!) the resources in these games.

Mainly it strikes me that in some games the amount of resources in the world is fixed, while in others it expands. People playing World of Warcraft, for example, constantly find more money, gear, ore, cloth, etc. generated ex nihilo. The resources existing in World of Warcraft keep increasing, although maybe not faster than the population does.

On the other hand, so far as I understand Dwarf Fortress it is a game with fixed resources, or intended to become such. The world is generated with minerals, with a population, and then the game proceeds from the interaction of whatever already exists. I think the game has not yet achieved that state perfectly, but it does seem to be the goal. The amount of iron in the whole world is limited by the amount of iron generated initially, and so forth.

I think I was most recently prompted to think about this by the Fairy Garden game on Facebook, which is clearly a game of expanding resources. More gold is on offer to every player every three hours, helping people out can mean a reward of still more gold, at no cost to your beneficiary. The longer people play the game the more gold (and diamonds, and etc.) exist in the world.

NetHack is a game on the border, I think. There are only so many artifacts in the game, and monsters become extinct when enough are killed, preventing and unlimited number of item drops from being harvested, however there are ways around that which can be exploited to farm for new items nearly indefinitely.

Angband features expanding resources a bit more clearly. Although there are only a limited number of artifacts and unique enemies in the game, the fact levels appear only once when entered and can never be returned to means there are an effectively endless number of places to visit and find items at (or monsters to kill and find items on the corpses of), which I'm told tends to facilitate grinding for whatever items are still felt as lacking from the player character's kit.

Oh! Nearly forgot another example, although by now it is getting far off-track from the sort of game I originally defined. In Doom / DoomRL each level is generated with a set number of monsters and items and cannot be returned to once cleared. The only way to get more items than were originally created is to let an arch-vile revive an enemy that drops ammunition, then kill it again.

So far I haven't thought of any such games that don't have increasing resources... I wonder what I am missing. Well, any game in which defeated enemies (or whatever) drop resources and which can be reattempted for the same reward is going to have an increase in resources over time. Unless doing so is a net loss for the player, of course.

I think I stop here.

Songs, and things like them

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Listening to music again, of which I'd forgotten how vital it can be.

Aanyway, listening to 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' again reminded me of the time my 4th grade teacher had the whole class learn and sing that song. Mainly that one sticks in my memory of all the songs she had us sing because for that one she struck out the word Christ from the chorus.

I think she replaced 'Chris' with 'Lord', since you pretty much have to for the song to make sense. It is after all John Lennon talking to Jesus, saying Jesus must be able to empathise with Lennon's situation of exaltation and persecution.

"Christ, you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me."

So you can take the Christ out, but the way I see it that lyric's going to be blasphemous whatever you call the god in it. Sometimes I wonder if that was a bit of a response to the 'more popular than Jesus' incident.