Don’t tell me you have no idea what ‘show, don’t tell’ means

Definitely not a review, more of a nigh-incoherent rant about Shadowrun (Dragonfall), a game by Harebrained Schemes.

You know, I’ve been chewing on this for a while but I still have no idea what to think about Harebrained Scheme’s Shadowrun series. Or Dragonfall to be specific, because that’s the only that I’ve tried. Am plowing through. Anyway, it’s the sort of RPG that you plow through. Not a single-weekend-of-serious-focus affair, more play it for four hours a week for a month or another couple.

I guess most of my opinions about it derive from that I usually play it when I feel sick. I don’t know why. It doesn’t make me feel any better, but I guess it has that throwaway sort of gameplay that’s good to play when I can’t think of anything better.

Which is bloody ironic because it’s a tactical role-playing game.

Anyway, the game itself. Shadowrun Dragonfall is Harebrained Scheme’s second game for the Shadowrun series, which is a series that started about twenty years ago as tabletop RPGs. I don’t have any experience, like at all, about tabletop roleplays–it’s just not the sort that exist where I live–but I’ve been around the internet. I’ve played some play-by-post roleplays, I know how dice-rolling and stats management work. So the way that Harebrained’s Shadowrun video games work, with its overabundance of numbers and dice rolls, turn-based schemes, and heavy customisation–classic RPG mechanics that modern video games have eschewed because, heck we have better technology now, why are we still rolling d20s–they’re not really strange to me.

I’m not surprised that Shadowrun is very much a classic RPG. I’m surprised that, in the year 2013 of the twenty-first century, they’re still relying so much on words as if we’re still listening to a Game Master rambling about what sort of horrors your character has discovered.

So I have a Tumblr Now

Never really liked that place, over there, on the other end of the blogging island. Yeah, that one, the one covered in thick meme forest, barely perceptible beneath the endless streams of links and reblogs. That fenced area over there, that has grown so big you can barely see the rest of the blogosphere beneath its overreach of memes. That place is called Tumblr. It’s a microblogging place, they say. Like WordPress? Look man, I’m not here to talk about the geography of the internet. I just have one thing to say.

I’ve been sticking around WordPress for a hecka long times. At one time I moved to Blogspot, and then to Posterous (bless that dead service, I wish it good fortune in internet afterlife), but then I just eventually came back down to WordPress.  Nice place here. I get to post lots of jabbers, and sometimes people read them, and it makes me feel really nice when they favourite something I made because at least then I know that there are people reading them. Thing with the WordPress blog here is that, even with all the Aside post, I really would rather not clutter it too much with, say, half-arsed bits of stories I’ll probably never finish.

So instead I made a Tumblr blog for just that, bits of stories I’ll probably never finish. I have a problem with writing stories. Mostly they just end up being kept in vaults somewhere in the clouds, never to see the light of the day. I heard posting your work-in-progress can kill your motivation to finish it, but I don’t even have the motivation to begin with, so why not.

pseudomon.tumblr.com/ is now a place where I stash my writings and stories, work-in-progress, bits and pieces, things that may or may not actually be finished, usually without being proofread or even looked over first. It’s strictly for stories (at least for now), so I’ll continue to rant or post reviews here. I’ll probably also post finished stories here, edited and somewhat polished and all.

This whole posting-WIP thing stems from that, well, I was browsing through my older stories and some of them are actually pretty good, even if they’re unfinished and visibly unpolished. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever edit them to be good enough to show to actually show to people, but I still do want to show something to somebody out there, hence the Tumblr.

Was really looking for an alternative to Tumblr, since I still don’t like that jungle of memes and Anon wars. Was even thinking of setting up a Github Page, because I’m a hipster and all. But it’ll do for now, I think.

Still looking for alternatives, though. The Tumblr dashboard lags very very badly.

Finding Determination

I… I cried.