In my efforts to prep for my Day 2 fitness exam I think I gave myself a cold.
I don't get ill for several years, healthy as a horse, run like the wind, but the moment someone wants to measure my fitness level I get a strep infection for three months and then a cold a week before the test.
I hate this fucking world. >:|
---
Regarding other things that make me angry:
If you're writing fantasy fiction, or drawing fantasy characters, or, ya know what, if you go anywhere near fantasy anything, learn what things are fucking called.
Just met a guy on DeviantART who decided to draw a Dwarf - short, broad, line based patterns on his clothes with squares and diamonds, long white beard, granite express, the works - and then he tells me he's a Gnome Warlock.
UPDATE: Before blocking me from his account he sent me a message saying 'maybe I'll decide what and how do I draw?', direct quote from http://philiera.deviantart.com/
I don't remember telling you what you can and cannot or how you do or do not draw anything man. What I remember is telling you that you drew a Dwarf and are calling is a fucking Gnome.
I don't know what it is about artists but for some reason the ability to draw goes hand in hand with the ability to not see reason. They think with their emotions and when you settle down to try to explain anything to them they fly off the handle instead of listening to a word you say...OK, so do most people because most people are godawful dumb, but artists, almost intentionally, miss the fucking point.Nothing against Gnomes, and Warlocks can be interesting as dark wizards, especially Blizzard's masters of the demonic realms in World of Warcraft.
But for crying out loud, Gnomes are effectively natural midgets.
Halflings, Hobbits, or as I prefer 'Lilli' which is short for Lilliputian - the antithesis of Gargantuan, as I prefer the word Gargant instead of Giant, the opposite of which would be Small or Tiny possibly, which is ridiculous as a racial name - are miniature humans.My point here is this; I know my fantasy races and lore. And ye gods is it ever annoying when people misname things, like someone going around calling their dog a fox when it's clearly a German Shepard.
Halfling was coined by Wizards of the Coast after a copyright disagreement with Tolkien over the use of the word Hobbit, and Hobbit is related to Hob, as in Hobgoblin, or of the Hearth and Home which is why they're so homely. I go with Lilli and Gargant, both of which sound better and are taxonomically accurate.
Gnomes are a sort of Light Fae like variant of Lilli, their opposite being the Goblins, which are technically Dark Fae, although some people prefer to lump Goblins into the same category as Orcs, which are effectively bestial humans, especially those in World of Warcraft. Elves of course are the Light Fae opposite of Orcs, their grace an antithesis to the brutality of the Orcs.
Other stupidity includes people naming their Wyverns as Dragons. No, that is a Wyvern. It's only got two legs and bat like wings. It's a draconian bird, not a bloody true Eastern Dragon. And what's it doing breathing fire like that? True Dragons breath fire to guard their hoards, but that thing would burn it's own nest to cinders.
Poetic license is all well and good when it comes to rewriting Game of Thrones with more magic, but don't tell me that bloody flying lizard is a Dragon when it's very obviously a dam Wyvern.
And Nagas, oh idiots of DeviantART who I had a three month argument with over a misnamed Medusa, are lower half snakes, upper half humans regardless of if it has snake hair or not. Snake hair on a human, now that's a Medusa. What you have there is very clearly a Naga.
Get it right or go home.
A lion is a lion, and not a cheetah simply because you like the word and that they run quick and this specific lion you've defined in your work is fast on his feet.
---
What else...well, there's computer game genres.
The more or less industry standard list is on Wikipedia, although it seems to me like every shop, developer, player and anyone talking about them categorizes games their own way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres
What do we have here?
Action games. Action? Really? What interactive software doesn't include action of some kind? I've never played a game in my life where I thought, 'this game, this game right, what it needs is action of some sort because it just doesn't have any'. Biggest misnomer in the history of naming conventions.
Action-adventure. OK, firstly you've got two genres with the same word, which suggests that the latter is a sub-genre of the first, and secondly the addition of the word 'Adventure' does nothing for clarification on what games are part of that genre. Legend of Zelda includes both 'Action' within your own context and certainly has a deep and abiding adventure to it, but it's neither stealth nor horror, so wtf?
Roleplaying. Like action, most games give you a role to play, and it's a misnomer on general principles because most roleplaying games in my experience are essentially strategic number crunchers, and level grinders with more emphasis on base maths and inventory management than anything else.
Sports. Most sports titles are in fact based on the principles of strategic management of assets, environmental navigation, and effectively the same gameplay as your average combative game. Hell, eSports use strategy titles like StarCraft II because they play almost precisely like football games.
And the rest are 'We've not got a good way of categorizing these, so we're lumping a lot of gameplay types into the minc. category and closing the browser'.
NOTE: Recently I've grown to really hate Wikipedia and Wiki's in general. Their rules, apparently, don't allow for people to define self-evident facts about, for example, a book series.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher has 15 books out in it's series as of 14/06/2014. Each 5 thus far, so 5, 10 and 15, all contained the same antagonist. It is a fair prediction that this is intentionally the case by the author. I stated that based on precedent and rumour the final in the main series of 20 books, which has been confirmed by the author for definite, will feature the same antagonist as 5, 10 and 15 as they feature every fifth book.
This observational note counts as 'Original Research' and is therefore inadmissible to any Wiki website despite being self-evidently the case. A statement of fact of the nature of three books, a definition of a trend in their creation, and the statement of the fact that a rumour exists that each fifth is thus is not original research, it is a factual conceptualisation of the truth.
By this logic you could not post on the 'Sky' Wikipedia entry that the sky is in fact usually a blue colour to humans. That's original research. Self-evident, obvious, and a statement of fact it might be, but unless a meteorologist wrote about it in a published work with evidence to prove it, it would be inadmissible.
Someone actually used the phrase 'Truth and fact don't actually matter here' during the argument, and it was at this point I just walked away shaking my head. When they stop mattering, so to does the argument.Whatever, so the point is that I categorise games thus:
- Strategy [Information]
- Roleplaying [Setting]
- Platforming [Environment]
- Racing [Interface]
- Combat [Interaction]
The second word is related to systemic design whereby you have the base information of a game, which is presented via a setting [system mask; matter which can be quantified by math for example], that is built using an environment, which is interacted with via an interface, and those interactions are quantified.
The most important factor about my genre list is that no game belongs to only one genre. Quite the opposite in fact; all games belong to every genre, but are categorised by their apex aspect.
Take away any given factor entirely from a piece of interactive software, and you no longer have a game.
A game of the Strategy [Information] genre could be Civilizations for it's emphasis on information management, but it includes a setting, an environment, an interface, and interactions between units and the civilizations themselves via diplomacy.
It is categorised as a Strategy [Information] title but includes lesser components of all other genres, if quite significantly developed. Primarily though it's about information and numbers.
Tetris, under this definition protocol, would in fact be a Racing [Interface] title as it's emphasis is on precise control of the interface. It has information [different kinds of blocks and a score], a setting [the presentation stylization of information and environment], an environment [block shapes which drop down a rectangular gameworld], and interactions between the controllable units [lines vanish if made from wall to wall, if blocks pile up to the ceiling the game ends], if beyond the interface all of these are most basically defined, but nevertheless those components are part of the entire design of the software.
This is a genre categorization system designed by a actual games designer, an interactive software engineer, and not superficial morons who coined the 'Action' genre.
---
The last pertinent thing I can think of in relation to this, especially as I need to go get on with my college work, is this:
The lack of education of games industry 'professionals' is shocking.
No one has ever sat down and categorized computer game cameras for example. No one except for me anyway.
First person [Eye], second person [Shoulder], third person [Behind-the-Head], topdown [Birdseye] and sideon [Spectacle], with Cinematic [Rail] for recording in-game movies.
It's not complicated, it's not hard to build if you know about quaternions matrix math, but go find a university, find the head tutor and/or course designer and ask them about the different sorts of cameras in computer games, their best use protocols, and if the course includes how to make them and see what they say.
A blank look and/or a deflection is what you'll probably receive.
Games are interactive software. Virtual engines. They have components to them which are standard because of the technology we have, like 2D monitors and TVs. And no one I've ever met builds the basics. No one sees them like I do.
I know it's a young industry, it's still in it's infancy as far as RnD is concerned, but it just seems to me that people go around doing the same stupid shit over and over without ever actually sitting down and thinking about how to do it the right way for once.
If I had the time I'd go over the whole user customization of game content issue in RPG's. How old character classes are, as a concept, and how the addition of mastery trees is dam stupid in comparison to the rejected notion of freeform character class construction, but that'll have to wait for another time...
---
Got through Week 2 of my Certificate in Basic Policing course last night. Week 3 and 4 left to go by Thursday. Lots of running around on Monday still to do, revision for Week 5 exam on Saturday, and the forms for my Day 2 police interview Friday are under my keyboard and need filling out.
Asides from that; fight my cold and the strep [good grief] and don't play too much Hearthstone.
Against my better judgement I'm half tempted to give League of Legends ranked another go. Not out of expectation of being allowed to rank up through the ELO Hell I mentioned last post you understand, but out of a change of pace really. Hearthstone is OK, but I need to spend a lot more money on it before I can realistically rank up, and I'm not that bothered to do so.
Tempted to play World of Warcraft as well. Did a few years back around Lich King. Left after I made an OP Hunter who couldn't be killed because of a flaw in their pet/ranged system where my damage output on pet masteries resulted in insta-murder of anything I was fighting. Plus they required me to spend 10,000 hours grinding to gain a decent flying mount and I thought 'Fuck that'.
They might have made some improvements in several major updates though, especially to PvP and I wouldn't mind doing some third person rather than topdown.
We'll see...
Food, shower, college work, and maybe a trip to the hypermarket for caffeine later.
GG.
