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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

Matoyak

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Posts posted by Matoyak

  2. Posted

    12 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

    I still would like to see examples of Ellen, Nanase and Elliot actively violating that principle with malice aforethought rather than through teenage overconfidence and the pressure of circumstance. Until then, I personally will not accept the use of the verb 'betray.'

    One need not be malicious in order to betray something. Would you call Melisa's betrayal of Justin's confidence malicious? On top of that, one doesn't even need to know they're doing any betraying in order to betray someone. It can be accidental, it doesn't have to be intentional. Now, am I saying that's what's happened here? Eh. Dunno. Probably not. But it isn't as cut and dry as "they weren't malicious, therefore they didn't betray any trust". Words aren't that rigid in meaning.

  3. Posted

    1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

    ... in videogames, anything which is not background is obviously for you to take. Even when nailed down.

    (In minecraft, background = bedrock)

    In Bethesda games, items can (and often do) have an "owner" tag (Or an "owned by someone other than the player" tag). You can take them, but it's stealing and there are consequences if caught. Mostly the consequences are "Get stabbed or shot to death, or put the law and the former owners to death yourself". In Oblivion you could pay a fine or go to jail. (The latter would then kickstart the Thieves' Guild questline, if you had yet to track them down yourself).

  4. Posted

    20 minutes ago, hkmaly said:
    38 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Another option to add some realism would be to have a small but non-negligable chance of the gun going off accidentally any time you point it at someone.  A few great runs ruined by having a vital NPC getting taken out before they can help you might teach players to respect their weapons a bit more.

    Wait. I though that most NPC are unkillable because the chance of friendly fire is big enough to make players complain the game is too hard if they kill something by mistake.

    In games like Skyrim and Fallout it's mostly a case of "this quest is given by this NPC, and were we to allow them to be killed it'd either mean we'd have to replace them via another NPC or cut that quest out entirely"* combined with "this game is on average 20-60 hrs long***, and with the possibility of multiple factions, betrayals, and the insanely complex and complicated clockwork world and physics simulation we've created, it'd be really bad form to allow quest givers to die."**

    *Bethesda does both of these. The former means the characters are SUPER bland and generic, and the latter would be really bad design as the default in a game like what they make. Too easy to accidentally kill someone, or for them to get accidentally killed by the hundreds of potential threats they face in the wasteland even when you're merely in the area.

    **This is mostly covered by the first asterisk but it can't be over emphasized. These kinds of worlds are monstrously large and the potential combinations of possibilities approach "stars in the universe" levels of big. The devs have no idea what will befall any one quest giver at any time.

    ***These are REALLY conservative numbers. I spent 200 hrs in Oblivion before beating the main quest in my first playthrough. 300 in my second. 80 in Skyrim and never beat it. These games (by default) need some kind of allowance to get these quests to kick off. Invincible quest givers is the least bad option, honestly.

  5. Posted

    2 hours ago, Scotty said:

    I know in Oblivion and Skyrim, NPCs reacted to you having your weapon drawn. I think FNV did as well. Mainly just comments like "hey, watch where you point that thing." I can't remember if it affected how you interacted with NPCs though. I want to say it affected trying to get information in Oblivion (that speech wheel mechanic) but can't 100% remember if it did or not.

    IIRC it lowers your speech checks, barter checks, and other such stuff. Makes it harder to accomplish things via smooth talk. (Though that may have been a mod?)

  6. Posted

    17 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    why is everyone so hung up on egg-theory relatives anyway? while the hidden relative thing works for a few (well, just the twins in my eyes, but whatever), for several of them, particularly Noah, they actually work better if they're NOT related to that many of the other cast members. noah's back story works fine as it is, but him having additional family just raises the question of why he didn't track them down to ask for help during his whole revenge kick.

    ~nods nods nods~ I've grown to rather dislike the egg-related relative theories. They're brought out for every "what if x was related to y???!!!" theory someone dreams up. It'll eventually be true, because it's used for darn near everyone with every potential combination. I just find it the most boring possibility and that you really have to stretch to make it work.

  7. Posted

    53 minutes ago, Scotty said:

    Yeah, Dan has stated that he considers the NP to be multipurpose and that it allows him to do Canon storylines alongside the main comic so that he doesn't have to try to fit all the main characters into a story, especially if the stories aren't related to each other. Playing with Dolls ran alongside Squirrel Prophet (the card tournament portion of it) even though it technically occurred the next day, but imagine if Dan ran Playing with Dolls in the main comic after Squirrel Prophet? It would have been a few months before we got into So a Date (and that's assuming Dan did 6-8 panel pages instead of spreading it out on 3-4 panel strips), and then how would he have fit Question Mark in since it takes place alongside both Playing with Dolls and So a Date in terms of being on the same day, (Sarah would have been messing around trying to figure out what the spell was while Susan and Nanase were at Tedd's and then Sarah would have discovered the spell and then later got visited by Pandora while Elliot and gang were dealing with the griffins) so yeah I think the way Dan's done it works best for trying to cover what everyone's up to. It still remains to be seen if the next NP is about Diane and Susan finally meeting, we only know that it does involve Susan and it does seem like too much of a coincidence that Dan was in the process of doing the comic where Nanase makes the decision to tell Diane about Susan when he came up with the NP story idea and basically had to stop the main comic to write the NP stuff. Guess we'll see in a few weeks. ;)

    I mean, the solution to the timing issues is to not have them take place at the same time. There's law stating he had to condense it down into such a short period. Many of these story lines (The exceptions being the ones dealing with parental control [ie: Tedd and his Dad]) could take place when the group is in college, for instance. It'd be a different story and different flavor, but that's an extreme case. Most of these could be spread out across weeks or months and it not really change too much.

    That said, I agree with your general gist, I just don't think the time frame issue is all that important a factor. I mean, there are (hopefully) reasons why he's compressed so much into so little time, but the way the comic has run thus far strongly implies the timing isn't completely rigid or necessary to be so compressed.

  8. Posted

    17 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    Whoa you're right. The "X replied to Y's topic in Z".

    ... frankly, the rule for "div p.ipsType_blendLinks, div p.ipsType_blendLinks span.ipsType_light" is very suspicious, as it sets both white text AND white background. For the source it's at least not the same rule.

    It really seems like a CSS or JS file from another site was dropped in a tad too hastily, when combined with the other color and layout issues this one has over the initial one on the forums. I mean, it's rather nice that we're not AS blinded by the vast swaths of white, so I'm not saying we should go back or anything. Merely that this one needs some tweaks :P

  9. Posted

    7 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    Which is something I do, and I've seen other people do, to calm down when in a stressful situation. She just lost a shot at would have been a good story, i think that counts as stressful. and the interview idea could just be her desperate attempt to salvage the situation.

    7 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    ...or to take a moment and think to self "How do I salvage this situation?"

    6 hours ago, Scotty said:

    The way I see it was Carol was all frantic rushing in and finding out she just missed Cheerleadra. She then closes her eyes in a "Okay calm down Carol, we can still do something with this can't we? Wait, this is a mall, lots of witnesses!". She would have been so eager to get right to it that she wasn't aware of Phil initially. No special magic ability needed for that, just a one track mindset.

    That's my thoughts on this as well. I think the chances of Carol having magic are very very low. But eh, with EGS it's hard to know.

    InfiniteRemnant reacted to this

  10. Posted

    26 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    Isn't "stagnant" what such water IS, and not what it become? Hmmm ... no word for what I mean on wikipedia's water stagnation article, maybe it doesn't exists (like, maybe generic term like "bad" is used).

    Anyway ... the point I wanted to make is that even water which is not contaminated in obvious way will become unhealthy if stagnant for some time. (Mostly because bacteria will multiply from normal to dangerous levels.)

    AFAIK, It's just referred to as "Stagnant Water" like InfiniteRemnant said, and it's known stagnant water is bad to drink. It's one of those things where English behaves a bit odd. Water becomes stagnant when it sits without flowing in certain conditions. It's both what the water is and what it has become.

  11. Posted

    1 minute ago, hkmaly said:

    I don't think she was supposed to reform them in first place. But I didn't played it, so ... can someone summarize what are the crooks about and what are you supposed to do when police attacks them?

    The crooks are there to attack and kill you, so that you have someone to attack and kill. You're supposed to kill them when the police attack them.* Very nuanced design.

    *IIRC, I'm only oversimplifying a very little bit here. As I remember it, the only sapient group with less nuance are the Raiders. (Or maybe the Super Mutants?)

  12. Posted

    4 hours ago, Scotty said:

    Well, I did tweet at Dan that Tedd would need to do some experimenting with Elliot...

    Oh my. ( ;) ) ( :P )

    2 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    Just a guess, but since they are part bird could it be a Pigeon English?

    Woof. xD

    51 minutes ago, Scotty said:
    58 minutes ago, showler said:

    On a topic other than phone integration, Tara memorizing the configuration of the trees is another level of badass for her.

    Being able to memorize terrain features is pretty useful for a soldier type. Knowing where the best cover is and possible dangers is probably something that Tara is good at.

    Terrain features is one thing... but the context says she's memorized the tree formations well enough to be relatively confident in finding their way back to this exact location in the forest. It's one thing to be talking about "Near x boulder, y tree grove, and z hill", but to be "This pattern of trees leads us to this location in this forest of trees" is a level above. Very impressive, even for a soldier type.

  13. Posted

    4 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    Carol is a TV reporter.  If Sarah told Carol about magic, could Carol the Reporter honor the confidentiality given to Carol the Sister?

    Looking at the two from this vantage the similarity between Melissa's sister and Carol is interesting...

    Depends on the moral character of Carol, and depends on if Sarah thinks to say "Everything here needs to be completely off the record" before telling her anything, and how much Carol's willing to be beholden to that in addition to how she views betraying and endangering family and family friends.

  15. Posted

    2 hours ago, Ser Pentrose said:

    The sad thing is that drinking is all too often portrayed as either this awesome thing that makes you more social and fun, or this horrible thing that either turns you into an arsehole and has no redeeming features. The truth is, as so many truths are, somewhere in the middle.

    Anecdotally*, 95% of the time it's the latter. Very rare for me to experience anything anywhere close to the middle, much less the former. And the ones that start out in the middle veer sharply towards the end by the time the day/night is through. Intellectually I know that the majority of the time it's in the vagueries of the middle, my life just doesn't come close to reflecting it at aaaallll.

    *note that this is a mere 25 years of experience, so...keep my relatively young age in mind here. Also, much like Hack and Sweveham, I grew up in a family with an alcoholic in power (Step-dad, in my case).

  16. Posted

    5 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    I'd bet against his being able to drive with the car keys absorbed into his body. The ignition switch in his car has a mechanical component - you have to physically move things around, and the shape of the key sets cams to the point where that's possible.

    Most smartphones are purely electronic devices. The few physical switches are momentary-contact things that don't DO something, they just ASK THE SOFTWARE to do something. (Which is why each of them can do several different things depending on context - the software has to decide what that button-push means right now.) In most cases there are other ways to ask the software to do the same thing - the most common exception being "turn on".

    Well, aren't there cars that just turn on via a button on the key now, rather than turning the key? I know that my dad's pickup you don't turn the key in: You push a button. But that one requires the key being plugged into the slot. No turning though, just button. Pretty sure I've heard of ones that work at a distance.

    3 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    IIRC there's a Minecraft port to android/iOS as well...

    It's not quite a port. They're actually versions built from the ground up for those environments, without using any of the Java PC codebase, from what I remember. But yes, Minecraft: Pocket Edition is def a thing.

  17. Posted

    2 hours ago, Scotty said:

    Could always do what a couple friends of mine do and watch SAO Abridged.

    If it's one of the parody "Make fun of the show" shows like YU-Gi-Oh Abridged or DBZ Abridged, that's not really a replacement for the show, and doesn't fill the gap if someone was hoping for something to be good, but ended up disappointed. And (not saying this is what you're doing in this case, but I've seen it a fair bit on other forums) sometimes suggesting watching them as a replacement can come across as a way to brush aside the criticism of the show, in a "If you don't like it, go watch the thing that makes fun of it. Obviously you're THAT type and thus I can ignore your criticism" dismissive kind of way.

    (As an aside, I also really dislike those kind of parodies in general. I just don't find them funny at all).

    InfiniteRemnant reacted to this

  18. Posted

    1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

    Requiring same version of "base code and software" is much stricter than the "same dialect" one - and still, there are bugs proving it is not always the case.

    On the other hand, those are BUGS. It's not deliberate, the coding languages are not SUPPOSED to work that way. And opinion of some language pundits notwithstanding, the spoken language ARE supposed to work that way. If you try to describe version of spoken language as strictly as a programming language is usually described, you will end up with language versions spoken by three people. Wait, one just diverged.

    But note that tone (which specifies sarcasm) is part of language and slangs are different versions (dialects). Best examples for something with different views are sentences like they saw a girl with binocullars - those are hard to parse correctly even WITH context.

    Nevertheless, if this is what Matoyak talked about, he didn't explained it clearly.

    I still haven't been able to figure out what you're saying, so I can't say one way or another whether that's what I was trying to say.

  19. Posted

    42 minutes ago, hkmaly said:
    6 hours ago, Sweveham said:

    Grace is being very cheerful and friendly for walking around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, isn't she?

    Also, I love how upfront this guy is about being a violent criminal. Even if he's not trustworthy, he is at least honest.

    Why not? She's player. She's not in real danger.

    If you die in the game, you die in real life.

  22. Posted

    5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    You say they are rigid, but you speak about the fact that they change in discrete steps (called "versions"), whereas spoken languages changes continuously. (Also, yes, in most languages the change is more explicit.)

    Uh-huh...? I'm very uncertain as to your point. Rigid doesn't mean "unchanging over time", it means "not flexible".

  24. Posted

    10 hours ago, partner555 said:

    Whoops!? You could have killed if not seriously injured Elliot!

    4 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    Soooo ... Andrea is bad at navigation and Tara forgot important knowledge about place she's traveling to.

    To be fair to her, though, we don't know when that flashback takes place, right? Andrea's been here for months, and the actual flashback could be years ago. Especially if this half of the world is a particular interest area for Andrea. If Tara is used to Andrea giving out random facts about this world, then it's easy to let it gloss over. Think about any time your S.O. has talked to you about a specific detail of their work or school major. These are topics that come up enough to make you think you've heard it all and don't really need to completely grab hold of the specifics... especially if it's in a field you understand little about and have already decided won't ever fully understand. When I talk about specific aspects of learning programming, there's no way my gf would be able to remember specific trivia about a random language construct. She doesn't know enough about the subject for the info to do her any real good, and doesn't care about it beyond it being something I like, and thus she likes it by virtue of it making me happy.

    Point is that unless we learn this flashback is specifically their preparation for both of them coming over to this world, there's ample reason to not get too down on Tara for not remembering this one aspect of the world.

    HarJIT, Ser Pentrose and SeriousJupiter reacted to this

  25. Posted

    3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    Which programming language is absolutely rigid? At least some programming languages directly say what version of specifications they are supposed to be compiled with.

    In a programming language you can't suddenly decide to change the meaning of a key word. You can't change what the language considers as a scope limiter. They're ALL rigid in that you have to conform to the language specifications, or if you wish not to, then create a new version of the language / a new language outright. You can't just decide that the keyword "final" means "ironically final" or "actually first" (like for example what happened with "literally" or "awful" in English). You'd have to change the language definitions itself, and it would be a conscious, explicit change, which is not close to normal for how spoken and written languages change.

    3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    You think there are parallels between spoken languages and this kind of intentionally obscure and hard to program in languages?

    Not really, no. Nothing explicitly about esoteric languages. I was talking about programming (and markup, to some extent) languages in general. There are interesting differences and interesting similarities in how they evolve and are used. Having the equivalent of a programming linguist chat about that and related topics with a spoken and written word linguist could be neat.