@MadMAxJr yeah, that was January I think. Was a very nice box. Feb was retro, and had a copy of Ready Player One...which is a great read if you spent any amount of time in the 80s

I am a bit jealous of the random SUPER crates full of expensive goodies.

It's like turning your entire subscriber base into a Magic: The Gathering pack. "There's a rare somewhere inside!"

@MadMAxJr It seems like a pretty effective business model.

They could go one step further and turn this into the insanity that is Yugioh boosters. THEY'RE ALL RARE, BUT SOMETIMES SUPER ULTRA MEGA HOLOFOIL RARE. Like a loot crate that is shining beams of light on your doorstep and blindingly difficult to look at directly. And it is full of Non-expired Hi-C Ecto Cooler, a Flux Capacitor, mint condition rare console games, a four pack of Surge, and a 1:1 Master Chief helmet

@MadMAxJr yeah, they look awesome. Maybe someday.... :)

Benefit: You gain a +2 trait bonus to Perception checks when trying to locate undead, and can attempt to locate ethereal undead (though they are still considered merely invisible, +20 to Stealth).

I am presuming that the +20 to stealth attributes to the ethereal undead, and not that it gives the PC +20 to stealth?

yes, that's how I'd parse that too

stoopid parens.

(they go from impossible to locate to needing to hide at a +20 stealth, and you get +2 to perception to find them)

yeah, yeah, I got it.

:)

Oh, great. There's a heavy metal band called "Pathfinder" that has an album called "Metal Hammer". SCrews up google searches :/

@JohnP lol, so badly. I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago. Trying to search for "Microsoft Convergence" the big biz conference I was going to, kept turning up hits for the "Microsoft Windows 10 mobile/desktop convergence"

@waxeagle hah! :)

@waxeagle That wasn't in Vegas by chance, was it? One of our developers just went to a Microsoft thing in vegas last week.

@JohnP Atlanta

@waxeagle I liked it, some of his world building was only meh in it, but the concept is interesting

@JoshuaAslanSmith MC is also a total Mary Sue

but he rocked the 80s nostalgia hard enoug that I didn't mind

@Aaron he was also in charge of 4e's essentials line

@waxeagle yes this, so much this

Ah. I asked because of the article that was quoting him. Figured he was some big name in rpg.

Its interesting because the virtual world the story portrays is basically the in my head what I wish every MMO was

instead of being somewhere between keystroke macros and 2nd life

@JoshuaAslanSmith yeah. And The tech he outlines...at least the baselines for it are pretty close at hand

@JoshuaAslanSmith yeah, I haven't actually played an MMO...I bought WOW ages ago, but haven't actually installed it. Don't really multiplayer much. Partly a symptom of having seriously bad interweb access for the past 3 years

yep, its funny I am 100 percent against 3d gaming headsets because I think its actually a rather dead end and extremely limiting because of the dangers to users perceptions, but VR headsets for Alternate reality art installations (something can also be easily done via phones right now) is what Im really interested in

@waxeagle Ive utterly fallen in love with a few mmos over the last decade but had to leave them all behind because real life, MMOs arent really compatible with having a relationship or IRL friendships you maintain

@JoshuaAslanSmith heard some stories about that recently. It's a very interesting concept. The ability to create immersive art

@JoshuaAslanSmith yep

Ive been big into EVE twice, and super feel in love with this indie Post apocalyptic mmo called Fallen Earth because it allowed me to be rather self sufficent, but group when I wanted to.

@waxeagle augmented reality is the specific term I was looking for

110stories.com

@waxeagle If I ever go to NYC, definitely using that app

@JoshuaAslanSmith I was unemployed, met with friends two evenings a week max, had another evening and another morning occupied and still MMOs aren't really compatible with all the time that was left.

its really quite easy to do right now, I'm surprised its not taking off faster though. Smartphones are fast enough to handle overlaying the AR and the direct feed camera footage, you just need to have your AR installation set to a specific co-ordinate and have a set orientation for it there, and then the phone works out the angle based on its current coordinate and orientation

@Zachiel yeah I mean even in college with lots of free time it was tough, its definitely something I may revisit when I retire (really long time away)

@JoshuaAslanSmith ooh that looks amazing

speaking of art: t.co/ftFxw2BSl3

@waxeagle Ive only ever been up there on a school trip to the statue of liberty, which we just drove to hoboken from philly and took a ferry straight to Ellis island. As much as I denigrate NYC in comparison to my love/hate relationship with the city of brotherly love I do wish I'd gotten the chance to see the towers in person

@JoshuaAslanSmith it's a fantastic place to walk around. I wouldn't want to live there, but I'll definitely go back and visit.

It's weird being in a place that you're used to seeing on TV, that has so much history, and where you instantly recognize places even though you've never been there before in your life

@StackExchange I just realised that we should probably be using a filtered URL to keep the theatre stuff out of the feed: thealexandrian.net/wordpress/category/roleplaying-games

I'll update the meta post with that.

I'm not sure that took as it's not an RSS. The feed mechanics for the chat aren't consistent on that.

BESW controls the horizontal and the vertical.

And re: reviewers, there's a tendency for us to remember Ebert saying "The director has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why" but forget when he says "Gradually during the opening scenes, my heart began to quicken, until finally I realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before."

@BESW Oh, right. Wordpress is picky... Here's the actually feed URL for the category: thealexandrian.net/wordpress/category/roleplaying-games/feed

Liking things is considered more risky than disliking them, and we have a tradition of enjoying witty deconstructions more than sincere admiration. Reviewers pick up on that. One reason I cherish Stuff You Like.

@SevenSidedDie Thanks. [runs it up the flagpole]

And thanks for suggesting it!

@BESW Welcome! It was kinda selfish: since Google Reader died I've been at a loss for feed readers and mostly stopped reading blogs except occasionally the hard way. It occurred to me I'll miss less of The Alexandrian if it's here. :)

Speaking of, looks like he updated. *click*

I've been using Feedly, for what it's worth.

@BESW I vaguely recall looking at Feedly and not liking or using it or something, but that was years ago. I'll check it out.

It can be a little clunky, but it's vastly superior to a sharp stick in the eye.

@BESW They're pretty much all clunky, which is the tragedy of losing G Reader.

Yar.

Whaaaat. GReader still exists. It's just a app-only, for Andriod.

That is less than entirely useful.

I'm kind of offended, or betrayed, or something else vague but definitely displeased.

Wait, it appears to be by a non-Google company. So maybe the name is just trademark-infringing confusing, especially since it hasn't been C&D'd.

[bemused]

Last I heard (a few years ago) Google Reader was only still available to certain parts of the Middle East, for Reasons.

(Something to do with being used as a loophole on Internet messaging bans, for communication between dissenters.)

Feedly is much wooshier than I remember, but less finicky than Newsblur...

@SevenSidedDie If you're consuming on mobile, I quite like Press. It backs up against a handful of different feed aggregation services (including Feedly) to actually pull the content.

I really liked Pulse, but then LinkedIn bought it and, well, let's say I was unsurprised at the outcome of that.

Yeah, I need my services to cross-platform between Mac, Android, and sometimes Windows.

I've basically segregated my news consumption into anything I can read in Press, Ars Technica (desktop web), and everything else which I'll maybe look at every few months possibly.

Which is sad, really.

I'm glad to say that my feed list is largely not news media.

Lots of art and design stuff.

I've had terrible luck in finding such sources that have an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.