I kinda opened 5 projects in 1 day.
So after submitting a crapload of new issues on the OCTGN github page, I decided it would be a good idea to add the Doomtown definition there as well, and then…eh, it kinda snowballed from there.
So, yeah, now I’m on github as well (and I like it). Unfortunately around that time everyone else also went inactive. Oh well, see you around there.
I’ve finished creating all the 7th Sea CCG sets and now I invite you all to join me for a game.
Recently I’ve finished porting all the 7th Sea CCG sets to OCTGN and like my previous post about Doomtown, I thought I’d make a post on how toĀ setup and play the game.
First of all an introduction for those not in the know:
The 7th Sea CCG is a defunct collectible card game based around naval combat in all forms. From blasting your opponent’s ship to splinters with your cannons, to boarding them and hacking them to bits. It plays around the common theme of Swashbuckling Pirates and Privateers and thus you do stuff such as send your crew on adventures and generally try to control the 5 seas the game is played in.
Deck building revolves around many things:
And there’s a lot of other fine strategies in deckbuilding that emerge once you start to understand how the game works and the cards interact with each other.
The game is primarily designed for 2 players playing as opponents, but you can easily play it with more, albeit a Free-For-All is not recommended. However some of my fondest experiences with card games were when playing this game as 2 vs 2 team matches.
EDIT @ 02/07/2013 : I’ve moved the installation instructions on to the dedicated page for this game definition. Please follow the step-by-step installation instructions for 7th Sea CCG there.
Now that we have the game ready, the only thing that is left is to find someone to play with. Fortunately, the new OCTGN 3 has a built-in game lobby capability, which means that whenever you go to the host/join tab, you’ll see any available game lobbies for the games you have installed, and if you host a game, anyone with the same game can see it and join. Unfortunately the 7th Sea CCG is even less active than Doomtown which means it is unlikely anyone will be hosting or looking to join a game at the same moment you are. Even worse, there’s not even a specific community for the 7th Sea CCG. There’s a Facebook group with 4 people (at this time) which you might ask in, A Facebook page with more fans, but related to all things 7th Sea, which for most people is only the RPG, and of course our own OCTGN Game fora where you may inquire if anyone if up for a game. But very likely, your best bet would be to contact me directly š
The 7th Sea CCG version for OCTGN is not yet as automated as Doomtown, mostly because I “power” my motivation to code this stuff depending on how much I actually play the game and thus see areas for streamlining and improvement. Given that I haven’t managed to find a single person to play with (something which I hope to change with this post), it’s no surprise that the scripting behind it is minimal. Still, I do plan to improve it as much as I can, even if I don’t play much personally. Eventually I hope to make it as streamlined to play as possible and take away much of the “carpal-tunnel” tediousness that online play introduces to card games as well as help players avoid common mistakes done while playing complex games.
If you do get to play a game with your friends and find things that annoy or could simply be improved, do contact me and I’ll work on it as soon as possible. And of course, spread the word.
Enjoy!
I am generally very healthy but my mouth more than makes up for the pain quota.
So, a few hours ago, I got back from the university dentist clinic…with one tooth less. Finally my odyssey in finding why I’ve been in having pains when chewing with this tooth and lately simply constant extreme pain on it and around its area, are at and end.
You see, this particular molar had been torturing me for years, IĀ initially noticed a few years ago, shortly after I got my wisdom teeth removed, chewing particular foods with it, (especially “chewy” ones like rump steaks and the like) sometimes caused extreme pangs of pain, but it was infrequent enough that I could dismiss it. Unfortunately it wouldn’t dismiss me.
The pains started getting more frequent and later on affecting other kinds of food as well. I mentioned this multiple times to my dentist when I visited for my regular check-ups, but every time he looked at it and said that it doesn’t lookĀ as anything more than pressure from my grinding issue. With alarm I kept mentioning that the pain was growing in frequency and intensity as time passed but nothing else came of it.
Eventually, one week ago, things came to a head, ad this tooth simply started hurting constantly one day. It started as a weak pulsing pain but day by day it increased to annoying, then distracting, then intense, then “the painkillers, they do nothing!” to “Gawds please kill me quickly” kind of pain. At around the point where it was just “intense” I decided to get a second opinion, since my regular dentist couldn’t find anything wrong with it (“But it’s a perfectly healthy tooth!” were his words – granted this was before the pain become a constant experience, rather than only present when chewing on this tooth). Frustratingly, this second doctor made the same exact remarks and thought it was simply pressure as well and gave me a small drilling to alleviate it. However to his credit, he did passingly suspect the true cause and said that I should return if the pain persists.
However after the pain didn’t dissipate and one particularly painful night, and a suggestion by liriel and my mother-in-law, I decided to go for the ultimate investigation and visited the university clinic. Unfortunately I didn’t know the correct time, so I ended up in the emergency care, after roughly 3 hours of waiting around, I got to sit on the dentist chair, and the doctor that checked it, announced that I have aggressive periodontitis. She did some cleaning and said that I should visit the clinic again during daylight hours and go see the Periodontology experts.
Fortunately, the cleaning she did seemed to stop the general pain all around the area (until then, the pain was a “throbbing” kind that seemed to move from tooth to tooth, and even reached my ear), which allowed me to sleep easier. Unfortunately, it focused all that pain into the problematic tooth itself which made the pain constant, rather than throbbing and made it so that even the slightest touch hurt like a motherfucker.
So into the periodontology clinic I went, and after significant waiting again, I got looked at by a certain long-haired expert who announced that I definitely do not have aggressive periodontitis. Dismayed I asked “Then what do I have doctor” who then, to my frustration announced “I have no idea, but it looks very healthy, albeit suspicious”. Fortunately he had the good grace to say that a healthy tooth shouldn’t be hurting like this, so he would refer me to some other experts who would drill in to check the nerve itself…next day. I went into the clinic at 1pm and left at 5:30 so they were about closing at that time and I had to practically run to an arranged meeting I had for Mage Knight (Note to self: Not a good idea to try to explain very complex board games while having intense tooth-ache).
Anyway, so next day (i.e. today) I started quite early on and went for a visit to those other experts. Fortunately the waiting time was much less and soon I was in to figure out what the problem was. After a few tests on how alive my tooth was, where I didn’t even neither cold nor electrical shots to it, they declared that I had…aggressive periodontitis. Their suggestion was they should simply clean the area and make me come back next week. Fortunately I managed to convince them that this was definitely not a good idea with the amount of pain I was in, and that they should go and consult with the Periodontology expert who said that I don’t have periodontitis. More specifically, I asked them to look for the long-haired blond dude ((I am so fucking lucky he was distinctive like that and I could make them figure out who he was, without remembering his name)) and see what he thinks because I damn well was not going home without a definite diagnosis today.
Fortunately the guy was still available so they went to fetch him. After a while however, rather than him, I saw yet another dentist come in, in a rush, wordlessly grab his utensils and start banging on my teeth once more. Once I made it clear that the molar really really fucking hurts when he’s banging on it, he discussed a bit with the others and then got to the anesthetics. At around the time, the long-haired dentist (by now I knew he was dr. Roellke) arrived as well and he got to see them drilling it to figure out what the hell was wrong with it. Fortunately, they suspected correctly this time (I must have got the drilling expert this time) and they saw my tooth had a small fracture right down the middle…vertically.
This kind of fracture was positioned in such a novel way ((seriously, they came and took pictures to teach other students about it)) as to make it invisible to x-rays as well as to the naked eye, which is why my regular dentist as well as everyone else couldn’t see anything wrong with the tooth and announced it as perfectly healthy. Unfortunately, all this time, the fracture as deepening until it eventually reached the nerve area, which allowed germs to pass through and wreak merry hell on my pain receptors. I suspected something was horribly wrong with the tooth for years now, and perhaps if we had caught the fracture when it was still beginning, we might have saved the tooth, but everyone was so focused on my grinding problem that they didn’t believe me that this tooth has a special kind of pain.
Unfortunately this meant that the tooth was unsalvageable, so this time dr. Roellke himself took me to the surgeons who would extract it. 3 different anesthetics and some serious pulling later, I had the bad tooth lying in front of me, looking all ashamed for its act. However, I really don’t care. Testing my teeth now, I finally bit down without any pain, which is something I haven’t had for years no, so one bad tooth is a small price to pay for this.
Time for my first golden tooth methinks!
Modern America is worse than the USSR. Fact.
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
An interesting tidbit of information about the police state of the US of A, and how their capitalist system has found a way to rework the justice system itself in order to secure cheap and maleable labour.
Patriot Americans love to remind everyone on the socialist side of the prism, about how better capitalism is than everything else, and bring about comparisons with Russian gulags and the like. It’s hilarious to point out that they’re actually far worse than they were.
I’ve spoken in length about how sexist S2 and Heroes of Newerth is, which is not surprising given how bigoted their CEO is, and other have written about how Riot games and League of Legends is not far behind in providing fan service and all the other things that implies. But I still had some hope for DotA 2,which was being developed after all by Valve, which has at least somewhat a better record at how it presents women, as seen by the absolute top male nerd fantasy: Alyx Vance. Sure, their promo images of the game characters were obviously sexist and others have raised concerns about the direction the community was taking already, but hope dies last as they say, so despite all this, and despite the fact that MOBA communities are the absolute scum of the earth, I wanted to believe that some Valve guidelines and strong moderation might improve things
It seems that the DoTA2 community is shaping to be as bad, if not worse than the S2 community and the all-powerful report function isn’t having any effect whatsoever, especially given that the moderators are actually of the same shitty opinion as the rest of their scumfuck players.
There’s really not much else to say, that the community can’t say by itself. Some choice quotes
I’m not homophobic and I call people fags all the time.
george just come out of the closet already
Because, of course, only secretly members of marginalized communities might ever be against their oppression. This argument would be so bad if it wasn’t so fucking common.
For example, I have multiple homosexual friends including one who enjoys dressing up in feminine clothing and a wig, putting on make-up, to become his alternate persona “Greere Grimes”. He has 2 or 3 friends that do this as well regularly. When we see each other at the gym and talk to each other, and he says something such as (This is a true story), “Did you see the guy at the check-in? OH MY GOD I couldn’t breathe!” and I laugh and go “Dan you’re such a fag ahahah”, he chuckles and says “Oh I know! I’m gonna go talk to him” and viola. There is no offense taken because he understands that while society attaches negativity to the word, he knows I personally do not and as well, he is in fact a faggot and is fully comfortable with it.
This is the same person who as Greere Grimes was at a bar and left early without his friends, while 3 men followed him outside and broke multiple ribs as well as giving him many bruises including a black eye. These was a hate crime and the 3 men are still at large. He was in the hospital for 4 days.
Someone who understands the hate that people can have in their hearts, and HE is comfortable with someone calling him a faggot?
[…]
I will continue to call people faggots until nobody is offended. And then I will use the word to refer to homosexuals. Because that’s what it’s already supposed to be doing.
There are no words…
I don’t get offended at asian jokes being asian myself
Nor do I get hurt by random t2s randomly throwing out racial slurs and happen to hit one
Never will be and never have been.
If I talk to my mexican friend and say something about her getting smuggled over the border she will just laugh.
If I talk to my blonde friend and tell her a really crappy dumb blonde joke she wont care.
Someone please bring out the Special Snowflake award.
This is like black people still crying about shit all the time. “Yo we can say nigger but if you white people say it that shit racist yo”
^ THIS WAS A GAME MODERATOR SPEAKING ^
Same game moderator went ahead to complain about how hard straight white mailes have it. Seriously.
Anyone who actually posts in here and tries to defend it saying that its hurtful are gay. Straight up I want your wiener in my mouth gay. Now get your ass outa the closet and stop being a white knight of the internet.
Quality
I gave up shortly after the last quote.
Send all your support.
Quoth Mandy Hiscocks (via Guelphabc)
You speak of dignity, that everyone should be treated with dignity. I agree with you. But you canāt treat someone with dignity, or expect to be treated with dignity in return, while one person is up high and the other person is down low, while your boot is on their neck.
It is unfortunate but expected that the Anarchist Mandy Hiscocks has been sentenced to prison time for their acts in the G20 protests. In their closing statement, they provided a scathing critique of the “justice” system and its support for systematic oppression. I can’t recomment reading it enough.
Also visit Mandy’s blog.
The “Get Shit Done” committee really doesn’t like being reminded that it’s acting at the mandate of a community.
This has been a common trait of almost all the ones who have expressed their intense dislike towards me ((for not being “anarchist enough”. I was also hated by many on the other side of the coin for supposedly facilitating authoritarians)) since the Great /r/Anarchism ShitStorm of 2010, while I was acting as a mod, and even now where I’m not.
Even more hilarious is that about half a dozen of those most vocal about me being too “liberal”, ended up transforming into authoritarian Marxists of various strains.
I find it very disconcerning that many self-professed anarchists will support some of the most authoritarian decision-making styles, if it will “get things done”, without ever thinking of the costs. As if a movement which based itself on hierarchical and authoritarian “get things done” mentality would somehow transform into a democratic and mutual aid society after those things had been done.
The ShitRedditSays Fempire is quickly becoming the only worthwhile place to hang out in Reddit (aside from a few places that make an effort to being inclusive such as /r/anarchism). One of the classic things that happen with some regularity are the so-called “effortposts”, which are basically long text posts, meant to go into some depth into reddit depravity, or simply into a specific subject.
Such is the case with this amazing effortpost on racism in contemporary America and how it’s alive and kickin’ in the 21st century, regardless of what privilege blind white dudes think. I can say, as a white dude, that this was immensely educating, especially since I am very unfamiliar with the realities of racism over the pond.
Look through the following, save it in your bookmarks, and rub it in the face of any idiot redditor who tells you that racism in America is over.
An American Perspective: Why Black People Complain So Much.
Also, don’t forget to apply join the Reddit Gynocracy. Start gathering the required amount of foreskins for your application ASAP.
My internet is having problems and the German ISP Alice DSL is unable or unwilling to fix them.
Rant time children.
For the last few weeks my DSL connection to the internet has been having some pretty annoying problems. Very specifically, the WAN (The connection from my home to their servers) is dropping intermittently and comes back again after a minute or so. How often it will drop varies. I’ve seen it do it 3 times in 10 minutes and I’ve seen if happen once a day. I do know it’s the WAN specifically because I have a router with DD-WRT which can show me exactly what the connection is doing. I also know because I’ve had this exact same problem 2 years or so ago, and after a lengthy investigation back then, they eventually realized the problem was on their end. The problem back then was resolved after 3 months and a dozen support calls or so.
The nature of this problem is likely to be almost invisible to the average user, but for someone who likes playing games online, this is a show stopper. I can tolerate being disconnected once from the game, but once it happens 3 times in 15 minutes, I give up in frustration usually.
So you can imagine my dismay when the same exact issue cropped up a few weeks ago, becauseĀ I remember last time getting Alice DSL (My ISP) to fix this took an enormous amount of effort on my part, just to convince them to look in the right direction. The reason for this is because their first and second line support is atrocious and it becomes even worse when one does not speak good German.
The first problem one encounters is that they will actually refuse to speak english on their standard tech support line. It’s not like you happen to always fall on the odd person who hasn’t learned a word in english. It seems to be a company policy not to speak to customersĀ in english. After speaking to at least 12 people in their first line support, I find it impossible that not one of them knew even bad english, especially given that every other german I’ve met does, and that all Ggermans learn them at school. There can be no other explanation than that they’ve been instructed not to speak english at first line support.
This is obviously very discouraging for their non-german customers which brings me to my main suspicion that Alice DSL does not care about solving your problems, but primarily about getting rid of you. If they can do that quicker by fixing your problem, all the better, but if they can get rid of you by not allowing you to even report your problem, fine as well. Btw, if you mention that you do not speak german, then your only option is to have some of their english tech support people call you within 1-2 hours via phone appointment (and I think, only during business hours). Good luck if you have stuff to do in that time. Better drop everything and wait for the call.
But even broken german is usually not enough. Much of the time I can somehow speak well enough to make my point andĀ get someone to look into it, but then they will start using some fairly complex words I’m not familiar with and half the time at least, I’ll have to ask my wife to take over.
If you somehow manage to get past the hurdle of language, then you still have to deal with them not knowing what the hell they’re doing.
So as I said, I’ve got a problem on the WAN. This is the first thing I mention, as well as the fact that I’ve had this exact same issue before and it was on their end back then. I also mention that I’ve called before and we’ve gone through basic and advanced troubleshooting. Much of the time, they don’t care so back to basic troubleshooting we go.
Basic troubleshooting of course means that you’d better not be running anything other than MS Windows and Alice-approved hardware. Anything and everything else is absolutely not supported. GNU/Linux? Not supported. Third party router after their modem? Not supported. It doesn’t matter that the problem might be entirely unrelated to the hardware or the desktop, if you have anything that is not MS Windows connected to your network, your Alice support is liable to be revoked. So before you even think of calling Alice support, reboot to windows (reinstall if you don’t have any) and connect their modem directly to your computer and run their crappy installation disk. Otherwise, no support for you.
One time, at my 4th or 5th call to Alice support in 2 weeks or so, after I’ve already replaced modem and had some backend troubleshooting done by them, I called to report the issue persisting and got transferred to second line support again. There was a guy who refused to speak a word of English (of course) and demanded to know if I have a direct connection from my PC to the Alice modem. I told him that it didn’t matter because the connection was working just fine until now and I had already tried connecting directly to the model without success. He insisted in learning if I had anything connected and I said I had my own third party router. After some back and forth in German that I couldn’t really understand well, I passed to my wife to talk to him. He had her go look at the router, which I’d already told him is third-party, and tell him if it had “Alice” written on it. After that, he denied helping us further until we disconnected everything and connected only Alice hardware. And of course then we’d have to call Alice again and get a different technician…
Not all support techs are like that, but there are enough that are, and what inflames the issue is that Alice support refuses to open a ticket to track the progress. I’ve asked multiple times for a ticket number or something so that I don’t have to explain the same thing again and again, or go through the same basic troubleshooting steps every time, but they tell me it’s not necessary. Rather, I would call, and if I managed to get to someone who realized the problem was on the WAN connection, they would do “something” (They wouldn’t tell me exactly what. Usually they mentioned “restarting this connection” or “initializing that line”) and then call them back if the problem happened again. The problem would happen again, I would call, and then there was a high probability I would end up with a tech who just didn’t want to work that day, and start looking for excuses to avoid looking at my problem.
The latest of such excuses was that I was running Windows 7 English. I had my wife on the phone and the tech had her go on my workstation to check the windows settings. This is after we explained that this is the 9th time we called and we’ve already checked all that. Due to there not being a ticket open of course, he could just choose not to believe it, and rather have us check the same basic things again. Unfortunately, the settings the technician wanted to check on my workstation were in English and he couldn’t give my wife the correct instructions. His solution? “Call us back when you’ve had Windows 7 German installed”. At this point my wife hang up the phone in frustration after telling them that we’d rather switch ISP first.
To add to that, apparently the tech support was extremely patronizing to my wife, as if talking to an idiot, so there’s that as well.
And if you think that’s a one-off case, I will note that I’ve had the same exact troubles 2 years ago. Back then, they even sent a tech to my home who finally acknowledged that the issue was on their end. This after replacing virtually all Alice DSL hardware and making me run through hoops with my LAN.Ā After that, finally the problem was fixed (and I got a ticket number), but this time I couldn’t even get this far.
After 9 calls to Alice with no success to even to get them to listen to the issue, we’ve had enough. All those “call us back if the problem persists” wouldn’t be as bad if we didn’t have to explain the same thing again and again every time, and then still get a few techs that insist on taking us through basic troubleshooting in order to find an excuse to deny service. I should also note that calling Alice support is a charged extra (Yes, you pay them to have them fix their own problems) by the minute and the minimum wait on hold is 5 minutes.
Aaargh.
So I’m still with the same shitty issue. My wife refuses to speak to Alice DSL support anymore (and I don’t blame her) and would rather switch providers altogether. And after 9 calls to support, I doubt we can get Alice DSL to even look at the issue.
The problem is that we don’t know what ISP to go for. I’m excluded some obvious bad choices such as Telekom, but there’s still a lot of options left. So if anyone is in Germany, perhaps you can offer some advice. I’ve been thinking of checking out Cablesurf.de which is a small provider that seems to have the highest speeds and rating on Speedtest.net but my wife is not liking this idea because their small size might mean even worse support from Alice (doubtful but who knows).
If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.
And any other fellow expat: if you’re not a good german speaker, stay the hell away from Alice DSL.
I’ve started watching Errant Signal from its review of Game Advertising, and every other video I see from him is just as great. Wholly recommended.
We need more videos like these, and less stale and shallow IGN reviews.