Brinens and Things

Word on the Runescape technical-support subforum is that the version of the Linux client I eventually ended up with works on and off, usually on the scale of a few weeks. The client maintainers say that the problem seems to be on the server's end and there's nothing they can do about it.

Sure enough, yesterday it started working. Presumably at some point it will go back to [immediately crashing on startup] for a while, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

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On one operating system or another, I've been having fun playing again. I think I might do a quest tonight.

Not wanting to risk going through all the effort of coaxing Ubuntu and Runescape into cooperation only to find my hardware insufficient, I tried Runescape on my Windows partition first.

Turns out, the minimum available graphics settings for Runescape are very minimal indeed. There should be no question (at least hardware-wise) of whether I can play-the-game-at-all, only how pretty it will look while I do it.

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There's still the software issues to deal with, of course. I mean, I guess I could play on Windows? But I know from experience that rebooting twice (there and back) every time I want to play a game is annoying, and camping out on the Windows partition for the entire duration of being-in-the-mood-for-that-game is even more annoying. My Windows partition is *not* set up for long-term habitation, and I don't even really want it to be.

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(Writing these posts out, especially the first, *does* seem to be helping me sort out my thoughts on the matter.)

Me: Huh, I'm having Runescape cravings. I haven't had those in *ages*, and haven't played in even longer.

(Me: How long was it, anyway? *checks document labelled "Runescape Notes"* Wow, this to-do list is dated mid-October 2016. Yeah, I guess that timing *does* check out, come to think of it.)

Me': Maybe we should play? We did leave ourself some spare premium-membership credits†, in case we ever wanted to come back.

Me: I don't know. I mean, we have enough trouble with feeling overwhelmed by our to-do list as it is, and Runescape is so large and complicated that one's Runescape-related to-do list can easily be overwhelming all by itself. That was why we stopped, after all: they'd added so much content that it was just too much, we couldn't deal with it all anymore.

Me': We could just focus on one aspect of the game at a time and ignore everything else?

Me: I don't think our brain's set up to make that easy, and certainly the game isn't. We *like* to play a game optimally, and Runescape is so complicated that optimal play for almost any given task has a whole bunch of prerequisites, many of which have prerequisites of their own. And many tasks have real-time restrictions on how much you can do them, which means that *overall* optimal play requires switching between them all.

Me': What about Crawl? We don't play *Crawl* optimally; we don't even try. We *like* to approach Crawl with a certain amount of recklessness, not caring too much about whether a given move was technically the right one.

Me: That's because Crawl has no long-term meta-game unless you count stuff like greaterplayer. Crawl is almost entirely about the journey and very little about the destination: no individual Crawl game really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Me': I mean, *nothing* really matters in the *grand* scheme of things.

Me: That's a cached idea from people who are less egoist than we are. If playing Runescape would make us worse off in the moment *and* not set our future self up for a better life later, it is among the *worst* things that could happen.

Me': Counterpoint: resisting our brain's whims regarding which video game to play has, historically, almost never been a good idea. It makes us feel miserable and incomplete, and it should only be done under dire circumstances like a chatroom we run (and frequently re-read) whose archive is about to be lost. (and as I recall, it was in fact specifically Runescape that we were resisting in order to complete that project, and it *did* in fact make us feel miserable and incomplete; it's just that *that* miserable incompleteness was temporary, while the miserable incompleteness of not having a DS9 Rewatch archive would have been permanent, and so it was the lesser evil)

Me': Lowering our threshold for whether a circumstance is sufficiently dire, making us feel like playtime--and specifically playing *whichever game we feel like playing*, not whichever game we intellectually think we are in the best position to play--was a bonus for when everything else was done rather than a load-bearing psychological nutrient that needs to be given a certain amount of priority, is perhaps the single worst thing the financial nadir in 2017 did to us, and we should try to heal it.

Me: ...okay, you've got me there, that *is* an excellent point.

Me: Our current practice is to take civic holidays off, and there's a civic holiday on Monday. Since our exam is on Tuesday (I hope), we've already agreed to switch the Sunday and Monday workloads, taking tomorrow off and doing school on Monday.

Me: I propose the following: tomorrow, we take a look at the Runescape wikia, which last we checked was excellent. I'm sure they have a guide listing the time-limited tasks currently in existence. We will sort these tasks in priority order--completely ignoring any task whose sole reward is experience in a skill we already have max level in, even if we don't have max experience; we are *not* going to aim for max experience unless we somehow manage to reach a point where we've done everything else--trace back their prerequisites, and underneath the list of tasks themselves add a similarly sorted list of prerequisites. We may, optionally, pick a *single* additional aspect, and add that aspect and its prerequisites beneath that list.

(Me: I know this isn't how we normally go back to a game after a break, but we probably should *not* read through all of the news posts since October 2016: that's likely to be overwhelming.)

Me: We will aim to ruthlessly prioritise, and to not be too hard on ourself if we don't do as much on a given day as we'd wanted to. After all, if we weren't playing, we wouldn't have gotten to do *any* of it.

Me': *nods* [in the tone of one reciting a proverb] Some is better than none.

Me: Indeed. We'll see how it goes, and I reserve the right to leave again if we find we can't handle it. But there *are* a lot of good things about Runescape, and it would be nice to experience them again.

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†Context note: Runescape dealt with its gold-farmer problem by legalising gold-farming as long as you traded with the gold-buyers in Runescape store credit rather than dollars. I was high enough level when they did this (and therefore had enough access to high-level money-making techniques) that I haven't had to pay dollars for premium membership since.

Comments on my own posts:

Okay, folks, let's get this show on the road.

The one in which I get IP-banned from Tumblr [comment 1]

The one in which I get IP-banned from Tumblr [comment 2]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] No, Dreamwidth is not just as prone to linkrot as Pillowfort.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by nightpool) Another post on ArchiveTeam's Tumblr-scraping project.

(Re: the ArchiveTeam thing, I gather that some people are [viscerally horrified by the idea of] or [otherwise don't want] their Tumblr ending up on the Internet Archive. While I do not remotely grok this feel--surely the viscerally horrifying idea is that of your Tumblr *not* being archived?--I will note that the Internet Archive accepts takedown requests at info@archive.org.

Also, the Tumblr project is ongoing: while it's too late to save the NSFW *images* of the remaining sex blogs, they can still save the other posts (and let's face it, almost nobody trusts Tumblr not to eventually purge the rest too, either through censorship or through just pulling another Geocities). And even after the Tumblr project either completes or is forced to stop for good, ArchiveTeam has several other projects running, and I for one intend to continue helping out now that I know that's a thing.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (in response to dreamwidth-help) The backstory behind my "How to Backup Your Dreamwidth" post.

[cw: apocalypse] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by femmenietzsche) The Sentinelese guard us against God.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by oligopsony) Competitive RTS (Real-Time Strategy) players give a new-to-me perspective on the genre.

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Links:

[Tor; Wayback] (by Michael Livingston) A sporking† of Braveheart.

[Y Combinator; Wayback] (OP by user patio11, but read the whole thread) Starfleet as an in-universe LARP. (Note: the canonical 47th Rule of Acquisition is "Don't trust a man wearing a better suit than your own", which is...actually not entirely unlike "never, ever, ever bet against the humans", particularly given that the thread is emphasising how vast the resources and power of the Federation are.)

[cw: nsfw text] [Tumblr; Wayback] (I know who wrote this, and it's not a *secret* per se, but I'm not sure if he wants his identity to be *obvious* either) A review of virtual-reality porn, written by an asexual.

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†We're on a Livejournal fork, everything old is new again, I can call it a sporking if I want.