Last kid in the neighborhood to get his first set of dice…

Given to me by Kyliegh. I used them for the first time at the latest session in Ziggy's campaign. Crit-failed every roll.

Paul Robertson’s World of Pain

Runescape

My father got deep into Runescape a few years ago. I tried playing after he’d started, and I just couldn’t give a fuck. I couldn’t! It was all… boring and simple and I couldn’t invest myself to it.

I tried again a few days ago, and you know what? Same thing happened. It isn’t the fault of the designers or the game itself, I think. I just believe that MMOs aren’t my thing at all. I will cease my bitching about MMO players, guys. These are individuals who have adapted parts of their own minds and lives around a form of social connection with other human beings that I do not understand, and it’s not my place to judge these people and lifestyles.

Who else can I bitch about, now? More United States cosplayers should dress as United States characters.

Portals in Real Life: His or Her

Image via Wikipedia

The review for Portal 2 on Spill.com has gotten me thinking about real-world applications for a portal gun.

The first thing to come to mind for me would be emergency transport to the hospital. Say that a hospital has a set of portal guns. There’s a hub just outside of the ER, walls are covered in untapped orange portals with alpha-numeric codes above each one. Every ambulance driver has a portal gun only capable of firing blue portal openings and each ambulance has bare, solid, white walls on the inside and outside. In the case of an emergency that requires immediate attention, the driver with gun D-5 fires a blue portal and the patient is instantly in the ER through the D-5 portal opening at the hub.

Now I’m thinking about shipping goods. Two options: an orange and a blue portal gun that work together, a “safety” feature on the dual-portal gun.
First, the buyer sends a blue portal gun to the seller. The buyer fires his or her orange portal within a local warehouse. The seller fires his or her blue portal where his goods are waiting to be shipped. The two guns can only form a space anomaly with each other, and not other portal guns.
Next, a portal gun with a “safety” feature could be used by a traveling investor. He or she fires the orange portal at his or her desired location for the goods he or she is after. This person travels for as long as it takes to find what he or she is after and doesn’t worry about misfiring the portal gun because it’s been given a mechanism that prevents itchy fingers from making messy mistakes. The goods are found, the blue portal is fired, and the investor simultaneously closes the deal and returns home with the goods that he or she is after.

What about space travel? And not “space” that can be interpreted as any open area within which one may travel under his or her own power, but traveling from celestial body to celestial body. A cosmonaut team suits up, ground control fires an orange portal here and a blue portal on the moon, the team has tools and materials with which to build simple, temporary structures. Cosmos enter the pressure chamber, the airlock, and set foot on the moon. They build a structure around the portal on Luna’s surface. Next, a moon-trained team of construction specialists use their materials to build something more substantial and safe. A moon colony has begun to take form.

What kind of stuff would you guys come up with if you possessed the portal gun? (EDIT: Everyone knows that astronauts can’t build shit. It’s as much a fact as the natural ally of the bat being the robin. I mean, come on, where did YOU go to school? Not-School High School?)

Fan Fiction: Wheatley’s Adventures

This contains NO spoilage. If you have not finished playing Portal 2, the content will not be given away in this post. For those who HAVE finished playing, don’t worry, yo. To others, this list of ideas will seem unrelated to the official viral media released by Valve.

I imagine a series of short adventures for adults where Wheatley encounters characters and witnesses events from television shows, comics, movies, and albums about space. He tries helping everyone he meets in an overcompensating idiot sort of way, like he believes he’s Bakula in Quantum Leap or something. But things either go perfectly well without being due to Wheatley’s attempts to do right, or they go catastrophically, heart-breakingly wrong.

In one episode, he meets an intergalactic police force and he’s there long enough to see the entire history of the GL Corps condensed into 24 minutes.

He could whiz by a satellite shaped like a bone once a season.

Throughout the series, Wheatley is constantly finding old British police boxes; he get’s excited, tries looking for a goofy Englishman, opens the box, and is always disappointed to find that it’s yet another police box flying around in space. Every season finale will have a four second “egg”. Like the TARDIS‘ traveling sound playing in the background, or a Dalek shadow cast from around a corner. Brief and small, so it won’t be apparent to everyone, and they can find it in others’ Youtube videos.

In season two, he’ll meet an advanced race of mechanical beings who build up his body to be a gigantic ship, like V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

He’ll happen upon an anomaly that sends him back in time, and he becomes the set of a television show hosted by a famous scientist. The show then becomes one that is not about Wheatley being a loner while trying to help people, but one about this foolish person who is given an immense amount of responsibility and how he learns, through carrying a television crew inside of himself through space, to become the person that he wants to be.

Every time someone says, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” someone else will always slap that person.

Xbox Problems

Halo 3 edition 360 overheated, thus red lights. What to do?

Fallout 3

I’ve been playing like mad.
I’ve become the richest person alive, saved Megaton, become a Regulator, brought peace to Canterbury Commons, protected an android from enslavement, suppressed an ant infestation that slaughtered a whole town, assassinated Tenpenny, made peace with vampires, become a hero of escaped slaves everywhere, aided Three Dog in The Good Fight, taken an alien spaceship and slain a handful of Brotherhood Outcasts for a bunch of old weapons, with the help of my manservant Charon. I can’t always afford a new set of Microsoft credits to purchase add-ons. I’ve read online about quests and characters I’ve never heard of.
The adventure is kept at a standstill, now, because the damn disc got scratched to fucking hell.

Oh, and I’m shit, playing Left 4 Dead.

Team Fortress 2: N008

Just got Team Fortress 2. I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO PLAY! My first encounter with an online FPS… I’ll figure it out, once I learn what the use of the word “server” means.
By no means should anyone assume that I consider myself a frequent gamer, so if someone happens to feel the need to pwn me wit werdz, I want to remind you to take a few moments to bask in your superiority of computer experience over someone beneath the status of a novice. Good show.