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I hope you farmed Serana, those Parasite Spider Eggs are useful.

Are you kidding? I'm not touching that! It's all yukky!

 

Don't coffin-dodgers drive Cadillacs?

 

You're right. I nearly made a serious mistake there.

You should find some Will Self.

I'll look him up. Thanks!

 

Any particular game examples? How have I missed this complaint?

Eh, not really... actually I was more complaining about a specific book author, and couched my complaint in unnecessarily broad terms.

I do have a bit of a problem with some of the dialogue written in Skyrim (also Oblivion come to think of it), but that's mostly because it was intended to be really good but just turned out cheesy.

 

Also, after some experimentation I have determined that my state of mind at any given time hugely influences how I respond to writing. For example, it's just past midterms here, so I have had the terrible great fortune to read student papers. I know it's a popular and common complaint to decry the younger generation's intellectual and academic accomplishments, but I have noticed a sharp decline in the quality of student writing in recent years. This has not been a gradual decay, but a very sharp drop.

After having been forcefully subjected to these papers, I have come to the conclusion that the emphasis the NCLB put on rote testing is at fault.

 

One person's epic poetry is another's doggerell. What might sound like a truly dire line might be a writer's favourite bit they did as they managed to shoehorn in "gallimaufry" or something. In general in a game I want the message to be just enough, more than "I'm your friend. go here, kill that" even if it boils down to just that. I remember with no fondness 8-bit RPGS for pages of utterly redundant conversation.

 

Badly-translated dialogue, euro versions of 90's Japanese games, particularly, has moronic, perfunctory English that could be just as confusing when working out what to do.

I used to find badly translated dialogue hilarious. These past few years, though, it's just become annoying.

 

Or really immersion-breaking like the classic HouseOfTheDead2/TypingOfTheDead.

 

 

English, courtesy of Molesworth:

 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_wpemeRoXIYg/TAKIvAoJp3I/AAAAAAAABsM/9ZJTDLJVFp8/s1600/gerund.JPG

 

 

 

 

 

Seven months and one day!

Not like anyone's going to read this, considering it's a comment on a seven month old blog post about a four year old game in a blog on a website primarily dedicated to erotic or pornographic content and often not frequented by people who enjoy reading walls of unformatted, bland text. But I'm writing it anyway, because why the hell not?

Seth Godin recently wrote a post on vocabulary, and how an extensive vocabulary is correlated (it's actually a little ambiguous as to whether he's assuming a correlation or a causation) with the ability to fully understand new concepts. In general I agree, but it did remind me about my repeated complaint about the overuse of what he calls "needlessly fancy words" by authors and game devs. I'm not disagreeing with Godin's argument, but I have found many such authors tend to obfuscate otherwise simple statements, either deliberately in an attempt to give the impression of intellectual superiority, or accidentally. A good example is pretty much any book written by Alan Dean Foster - he's a good author, but he does tend to overuse esoteric adjectives where they are unnecessary and, sometimes, inappropriate. Another good example is any idiot using the word "obfuscate" with malice aforethought.

Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer goes just the other direction, deliberately, to make the reader laugh.

My problem is not with big words, nor with those authors who choose to use big words. My problem is with those authors who choose to use big words in an effort to confuse the reader or tout their own intellectual superiority. I have said before that an impressive vocabulary is not indicative of an impressive intellect (though it may be indicative of an impressive library ). Complicated syntax too is often an entertaining thing to encounter or construct, but it can be taken too far.

tl,dr: Big fancy words in technical reports or academic papers and the like is fine, expected, and desired. Big fancy words in an entertainment venue is also fine, and is also often a desired thing. But there's no need to overboard.

For example, the person who wrote this post is a real blowhard.

I imagine all parchment has a voice too, but it's old and coughs a lot because parchment is dusty. Face looks a bit like that rock thing from Return To Oz.

Reminds me of the Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett, when the eight spells are speaking to Rincewind.

 

The Dexion thing was really annoying to start with, just wondered what was the point of him at all. Eventually started to see Club Dawnguard as the best populated place in the vanilla game, with plenty for NPCs to do rather than standing, twiddling thumbs. For a bunch of vampire hunters who have dedicated their lives to eradicating the bloodsucking menace in the world, they do tend to spend most of their time just idly standing around. Needs a couple more guards but it's kind of cozy, and more NPCs just add to this. Especially with everyone sleeping in the same room.

 

Apart from when the NPC masturbate effect from SLsomething kicks in and the room turns into Wank Club, that is.

And now I'm picturing Isran, late at night. An alarm goes off...

Ding dong, ding dong! What's that? Oh, it's the alarm. Must be midnight. Come on, everybody, up and at 'em! Hands off socks and on your rocks! One two three, one two three, beat that meat, fondle that teat! Let's go, people, let's not have a repeat of last week's incident, I want everyone masturbating furiously here! Come on, Agmaer, didn't you tell me you were skilled at fucking wolves and touching your pa's ass? Durak! Stop moaning about your lost wives, Ingjard is right there, ready and willing! Florentius, you and Arkay get your dicks over here, we're starting a circle jerk. I want to see the floor wet and sticky within five minutes, folks! Move it!

Intrigueing! It sounds like Dragonborn is (slightly?) more interesting than the rest of the Skyrim story. 

 

Well, it's personal taste, of course, but I really do like Dragonborn quite a lot. 

The Civil War questline is actually one of my least favorite, but mostly just because of the fort battles. If you can slog your way through those, the rest is okay.

Mwah ha ha ha ha! I'll never tell!

Next up: A cigar is just a cigar... or is it?

Honestly, Miraak is supposed to be one of those bog-standard villains. He's arrogant and supercilious, but his snarky, smarmy dialogue often actually comes across as sincere, like when he congratulates you on killing a bunch of dragons. Or when he does the evil-villain thing of feigning thanks for what you've done - "thank you for your help" actually sounds like he means it. Yeah, he's got the whole "I am more powerful than you" and "I will rule the world!" thing going like all villains, but he's not going about it like any of the others in this game - randomly killing his underlings, slaughtering civilians, kicking puppies, etc.

I always get the sense that his cultists are just worshipping him without any actual direction from him. Even the letter you get on the first cultist's corpse seems to be the orders of someone who wants his approval without actually asking him what to do.

Dragonborn in general is actually pretty cool. The new spiders (especially the summonable spiders) are really cool, new architecture, new creatures, new enemies, new spells, new Sexlab animations ( )... it all adds up to a solid expansion. Solstheim is often visually quite similar to Skyrim (aside from the new dungeons and stuff), and the Reiklings are basically Falmer only messier. I made a big deal out of Apocrypha being an ugly place, but it's actually quite visually striking. Like most Daedric realms, it's more or less two-colored, but the way it all works is really surprising and quite nifty, and the shifting nature of the place always gives me a bit of a thrill, even after playing it a whole bunch of times.

Overall, yeah, I can recommend playing it.

The part I absolutely hated the most about the whole Dragonborn questline, was when I had to

SPOILER ALERT

kill Miraak at the end of it. I mean, here's a guy who wants to control the world, sure, which puts him in the same camp as Ancano, Harkon, Ulfric Stormcloak, and a bunch of other villains... but on the other hand, he's not a moustache-twirling villain, he doesn't smarm at me (much), he seems genuinely concerned for the welfare of his subjects, his plan to conquer the world is actually not too terrible (compared to the other villains here), he is generally polite and well-mannered... aside from his dragon-killing penchant, he's really not that bad a guy at all. I figure, if he wants to control the world, let him have it. He can't fuck it up any more than generations of warring idiots who currently do control parts of it have done. I mean, who else do I know that'll do a better job? The Thalmor, a race of people bent on subjugating everyone who looks a little different from them and ruling through magic? The Stormcloaks, a race of people bent on subjugating everyone who looks a little different from them and ruling through physical might? The Imperials, a race of people bent on subjugating everyone who looks a little different from them and ruling through stupid bureaucracy? Hell, as far as I'm concerned, Miraak can have it. If he'd let me, I'd work for him.

The only other villain in the game I felt no animosity toward was the Caller.

It's too small for me to read!

I think...

Stupid cunt?

I HAVE NEVER SHOUTED AT THE ORB!

 

WHY WOULD YOU SHOUT AT THE ORB?

 

You continue to amuse, particularly like "Daedric Prince...told me to".

Accidentally, the first time. IIRC I was trying to shout a Falmer off a ledge, and hit the orb. Then a dragon popped out.

Just makes me wonder how much other interesting stuff I'm missing...

http://www.imdb.com/...84/fullcredits/lists a Dan Donohue

 

http://www.imdb.com/...=ttfc_fc_cl_t79

 

came up with a link from a UESP talk page (http://www.uesp.net/...ctors/Archive_1) about him too...

 

http://charlottegeeks.com/dan-donohue/

After listening to his voice on youtube, that sounds like him to me. Thanks!

In honor of this missed-by-two-week anniversary, here are some word count statistics:

Something I learned is that most people do not like reading big-old Walls Of Text. Understandable. Most folks like pretty pictures. Shame that all I'm good at is lining up a bunch of words and firing them off semi-coherently. A three-digit WPM speed helps.

I just realized that Intermission 4 was written on September 14, the one-year anniversary. Happy birthday to Mace!

I just barely noticed - September 14 (the day of this intermission) is the one-year anniversary of this story. 40 chapters written as of this date (october 3) and we're still not done. I despair...

Morrowind, Shivering Isles, Blackreach... they really do like their giant mushrooms, don't they? Makes sense to me. I mean, what else do you have that can be both "natural feature" and "home?" Caves, sure, but everybody already uses caves as dwellings. Trees, too, and the "tree house" thing is pretty common too. For the metal house market, you've got Dwemer ruins. So in a world limited by the number of relatively "realistic" shelter types (no force fields, houses of glass, or walls made of solid fire here), mushrooms are about as exotic as you can get.

Morrowind had giant arthropods could have their carapaces hollowed out and turned into homes (and, for that matter, transportation!), which was pretty cool.

p.s. I really do love that VA for Captain Veleth. Wish I could find out who that guy is, but UESP doesn't list him.

I enjoy reading these very much.

Honestly, most of it doesn't apply to me directly, since I rarely take screenshots and almost never try to tell a story with pictures, but it's quite interesting nevertheless.

One thing I have noticed is that most people use the word "realism" when often what they mean is "verisimilitude." It's nice to see someone make the distinction directly and acknowledge the importance of internal consistency.

Well, the very lucrative ebony mine played out, they had a volcano drop a few tons of ash on them, and then something's mind controlling them to spend their well earned nights rest hammering away at some wierd arch thing.

I have no sympathy for those destitute, mind-controlled people. The world revolves around me! Me me me me! Waaaahhhhhhhhhh!

 

I think I'd be depressed if I lived there.

I'm depressed just walking through the place. The best I can say about it is that you can do several quests (including the main quest) that help out - rooting out guard corruption (if you can call alcoholism that), getting rid of Mogrul, reopening the ebony mine - eventually it gets a bit better.

 

You add quite a bit of humor though, maybe you should stay and be a standup comic in the Retching Netch?

I just flew in from Skyrim, and boy are my Dragon's wings tired! (chirping)

So this time I got a lot more people casting votes on where Mace should go. My audience is growing by leaps and bounds!

With the following totals:

12  Dragonborn

1    Main Quest

2    Miscellaneous Quests

3    Civil War

1    Companions

The astute mathematician may notice that 12+1+2+3+1 = 19, not 16. Gods know where the three other votes went. My guess is, they were eaten by a grue.

Anyway, off to Solstheim we go!

I knock Raven Rock, but that's just because I'm kind of disappointed. I spent quite a lot of time building up this town from absolutely nothing back in Bloodmoon, and here it's been turned into a corrupted husk, a hole in the ground populated by ne'er-do-wells and assholes. I remember when this place was a bustling, green and happy place where everyone was going to strike it rich. Here we are, two hundred years later, and it's become a dump. Sort of like visiting your childhood home and finding the block has been replaced by a shopping mall. Disheartening, is the word.

It also occurs to me that repeated complaining about the environment and local landmarks is rather boring, but I don't give a damn. I mean, what else is there to complain about? A whole host of things I've already complained about ad nauseam, that's what. So you come here to read my never-ending bitching about the scenery. I gotta complain about something. This is Skyrim, and everyone knows that if you love the game, you beat the shit out of it periodically.

Seriously, though... the environment is about all there is to complain about, at least for the first bit on the island. And if I am to be completely honest, it's probably just because I remember it far differently from Bloodmoon. I've got a real "golden age" problem here, where I can't help compare the place to how it used to be. Taken on its own merits, this is a really interesting place, and it makes sense in-universe, at least as much as anything does in this game.

She does seem to present the aspect of someone who is going to go for the throat, doesn't she?

I actually like the idea of the meat stamp being totally permanent. A brand, more than a tattoo. In my mind, I didn't have a daedric "curse" inked onto my skin so much as burned into the skin.

The consolidation of the butt tats is a good idea, but I wouldn't combine them with the belly. If people want to remove the tattoos, I'd just recommend giving one bottle of tattoo remover, and then making a quick quest to get another one. Something simple, like use the vanilla radiant system to put the bottle in a chest in some random dungeon somewhere, and then have a local innkeeper or something know where to get another. Make it possible to remove the tattoos, but not a freebie, is my opinion.

Or, just depend on people using Remove Your Tats mod. That's what I use.

Oh, I see it! It's a pair of owls flanking a couple of penguins with black bottoms!

Hmm... would Sheogorath or Vaermina be better candidates for the Daedric Prince of Rorschach Blots?

Normally I don't particularly enjoy stories broken up with pictures. This one, though, is nifty! Can't wait for the next bit.

Very nice description on how to do it.

Remember, it is often common (though not obligatory) for the initial letters to be colored differently (usually red). I know Slavetats can do multiple colors - just look at Dibellan Defender - so there might be something there worth checking out too.

My notifications are being delayed. Sometimes for hours. Not sure why...