Tales from the Tigerfort

It seems to have been a while. I haven't been good even at reading other people's posts recently, at least in part because most of my mental energy is spent either (a) fearing the apocalyptic wastes of brexit or (b) trying not to think about brexit.

The most important household event of the last three months was that ceb and damerell visited and moved many many boxen around for us. Multiple rooms are now actually pleasant to be in, and there's a table that's accessible to play games on. (I have in fact been doing a certain amount of soloing[1] to occupy some of the more sleepless nights.) Spare beds are more of a work-in-progress, but it's potentially possible for us to put up about three visitors. (There are also two fairly comfy sofas, but they're both in conservatories that don't have curtains; a situation with substantial drawbacks:)

[1] If people would be interested in coming and playing games with me, and possibly even seeing the sea (weather permitting), we're pretty accessible by rail for physically fit people. Assuming there are still trains, food, etc in the coming months, obviously. We might also be able to find some boxes or furniture you could move if you feel so inclined, but David and Clare have very much done the bulk of that :)

The second most notable happening was a brief psychological rollercoaster that came in this week's post. This was a government-issue brown envelope of the kind all British disabled people know and fear (we'd already had our letters saying that there's no cost-of-living increase in benefits this year because us silly paupers would only waste it on food or such). The mental atmosphere lurched (briefly) even further into "I don't need this" territory when I opened it and read that it was the outcome of our tribunal appeal, for which we'd not received any notification of a hearing date. The next page much improved my mood, however; it stated that the tribunal had decided (a) in our favour (b) without a hearing, because it was obvious from the paperwork that the DWP were completely in the wrong. And not only did they state that K is entitled to the higher rate of the PIP "daily living" component, but also that the award should be for at least five years (rather than the DWP's two years), to minimise the psychological harm.

Now, of course, we have to wait for the DWP to act on the decision, which they try to do as slowly as possible - but some extra breathing room should return to our budget. I deny having eaten my own bodyweight in chocolate pudding to celebrate :)

The second round of Fallen London Mysteries are closing tomorrow, and I've been meaning to get my answers down. I'm making a record of them here so that I can check how many I got right after everything's sorted.

Update: I got fifteen out of twenty. I feel a bit hard done by about one of the other five.

( Probably of little interest to those who don't play Fallen London )

I've been playing No Man's Sky recently. I got it heavily discounted around Christmas time, and for the £15ish I paid for it, I reckon I've had pretty good value. As a fairly relaxing mentally undemanding space-wanderer/gardener sim, it's quite fun in a lightweight way.

If I'd bought it at launch, even at the price I paid (~1/3 the launch price), I might well have joined the angry hordes complaining about it.

But for all that the several vast post-launch patches have added (base construction, freighter fleets, gardening, bounty missions, a (very basic) story that adds a bit to the (mostly awful and/or trite) lore, and a variety of other stuff) ( some problems remain... )

And yet, I still had something over 100 hours of gentle, (mostly) relaxing fun with the game, despite its best efforts. And depending on what the next big patch adds, I might go back. I think of what the game could be if the effort expended on annoying the player had gone into adding more fun instead, and I wish I could play that game...

I seem to have found myself playing Fallen London, as a devious and observant person of mysterious and indistinct gender. Browser-based, free[1], heavily text-oriented (the illustrations are entertainingly thematic, but there wouldn't be any difficulty playing the game without them) and very silly. And I haven't even managed to gain entrance to the Labyrinth of Tigers yet; not enough rats on a string (they have a lot of stripey mouths to feed, after all). Originally, my character set out to be a poet, but they seem to be making most of their actual income from hunting sinister moths and robbing drunks. Oh well....

If anyone else is playing, feel free to get in touch. If anyone who isn't thinks all this sounds interesting and would like an invite (which opens up otherwise inaccessible substories for both inviter and invitee), do let me know. Mushroom wine, anyone?

[1] A small subset of the later story-arcs are inaccessible unless you pay to play them, but that seems fair enough, and there's no pay-to-win aspect.

I'm planning to buy a copy of Torchlight 2, on the grounds that the original game is excellent[1], and the beta of TL2 was even better. Torchlight is a Diablo/Fate-style "action RPG" created by the people who designed Fate and the first two Diablo games, and TL2 looks to be Diablo 2 to TL's Diablo 1 (bigger, better, kaboomier!). Steam does a four-pack (for the price of three), which includes four copies of the first game as a pre-order bonus. I currently need either one or two extra people to make up a four-pack: is anyone here interested? (If you want to give things a try, there's a demo of the first game here.)

[1] Steam claims over 250 hours total playing time between myself and stripey_cat; I also have the achievement for doing a speed-run of the plot missions in under four hours. That's some serious replayability.

(I've been meaning to post this for a while, but the imminent announcement of a release date has prodded me into actual action.)

This started off as a collection of links to go into a comment on naraht's journal, but it got a bit out of hand, and took rather longer than I intended, and....

Behind the cut, you'll find a very slightly ranty description of some of the evidence that using DRM not only increases costs, but actually cuts sales too. That is, if you have two identical (electronic) products for sale at the same price, one with DRM and one without, not only is the margin (and thus profit-per-sale) on the DRM-free version better, it will sell more copies as well. Big media companies tend to insist that everything needs to have DRM because all their customers (you and me, in other words) are thieves by nature: the evidence is that not only is that attitude highly offensive, it's directly costing them money as well. Where does the evidence come from? Well, mostly from sales figures provided by big (and some smaller) media companies, actually.

( Read more... )