Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Sifting for Gamers
January 10, 2011

Building a new gaming group is always a struggle because it’s difficult to get a good balance of player personalities that all enjoy the same style of play. Maybe it’s more difficult for me than for others specifically because my style of play isn’t incredibly common.

I’m more of a story-oriented player. Sure, I enjoy the occasional hack and slash, but I do not relish the never-ending onslaught of random monsters that have no point to the story. Contrasting the two games that I’ve participated in over the past year, one game started out as much more story-oriented than its current incarnation, in which we’re stuck in a terrible place, looking for something/someone I can’t remember the name of, just killing everything that shows its head in long combat sessions. In the other game, which was much too short-lived, the story drove the adventure, and even the few encounters between interacting with local NPCs were oriented at furthering the story. The players of both games preferred these play styles.

Phone Wars
December 14, 2010

Every time I hear someone rave about how some new cell phone is going to kill some other cell phone, I get a little twitchy. Certainly some of this feeling comes from the same place that their angst comes from: The feeling that you’re spending several hundred dollars on a phone and several thousand dollars on a plan to be locked in for a year or two using that phone and you want it to retain it’s shiny “best new phone” status. Sadly, it never does, because new phones come out every year.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that most of the reason we don’t see any uber-phone released - a single device that does everything very well - is because they’re simply taking their time adding the features consumers want just to make them long for the next year’s phone release. The phone manufacturers are like cocaine dealers in that respect. It’s kind of dirty. But we knew the cell companies were dirty, didn’t we?

2010 Geek Gift Guide
November 28, 2010

Well, you blew off Black Friday. Good for you – it’s just a hassle with the crowds when it’s not online, anyway.

Rather than looking at Wired’s mostly awful gift listing, which included the canned unicorn meat from ThinkGeek, an old April Fool’s joke, I have a few gift ideas for this year that are pretty nifty, some of which won’t even break the bank.

TSA Scans and Pat-Downs
November 19, 2010

I’ve been reading a lot online about the TSA’s new scanning machines and security pat-downs. Particularly vitriol from potential passengers reacting to people who don’t like the screening procedures. I am left with many questions that I don’t hear anyone asking.

How did we arrive at this situation? I guess we’re talking about a repeat of 9/11, as if any post-9/11 passengers would let something like that happen again. It seems to have occurred to few people that the planes driven into New York and Washington were not carrying bombs or guns. In fact, the passengers of United Flight 93 were able to force the hand of the hijackers even after they had taken control. So why are we in need of something more than the metal detectors we had been using?

To Do Task List App
October 24, 2010

I’ve been downloading practically every app on the iPhone I can find that does to-do lists. My discovery: They all suck.

There exist fundamentally two different kinds of to-do apps, falling on either side of the GTD line. In one camp, the strict GTD mentality, with apps that all look fundamentally identical and are tedious to use effectively. In the other, apps that stress (either on purpose or by ineptitude) simplicity at the expense of useful features.