Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: poverty, first-world problems, government bullshit] The one about the burden of U.S. citizenship [three comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by cryptovexillologist) Children keeping unimportant secrets as practice.

[cw: amnesia] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Current (lack of) fannish blogging platforms. [three comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Dreamwidth writing styles. [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Inspiring videos from space agencies. [two comments]

[cw: illness, food]
( Read more... )

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Links:

Laugh rule:
[New York Times; Wayback] (by Caity Weaver; h/t Matt Levine)

I investigated the possibility of purchasing Dunkaroos on the Dark Web, and discovered to my horror that three people in Australia had recently been charged with running a syndicate that moved roughly $12 million worth of drugs “disguised as candy” across the country. I envisioned myself ripping the foil from a pack of hard-won Dunkaroos and finding only LSD tabs inside. I couldn’t handle that kind of letdown.

The link roundup I got this from quoted the line “I transformed my iPhone into a landline by disabling notifications for every application except calls, and leaving it plugged into a wall outlet in my kitchen.”, and I would like to point out that if you need a landline-like thing for any reason, leaving a cell phone plugged into a spot in your house is in many cases cheaper than an actual landline. (assuming you choose your phone plan right, of course) Use a flip phone, though, unless you were going to have a spare iPhone lying around anyway.

If you want, you can get a gateway that allows you to connect the phone to your house's landline infrastructure: that way you can have multiple receivers in various parts of the house. We have this one, although it was cheaper at the time we bought it and might not still be the best option.

(We used to leave a flip phone plugged into a living-room outlet, but when Dad started needing a cell plan we gave the number to him. While it does mean he has to relay messages received while out and about (it still connects to the gateway when he's home), it beats needing to buy a separate plan.)

(context)

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Well, to be fair, there are definitely some aspects of the way my mind and life work that would tend to make it easier for me to handle this:

1. The video-game playstyle that meshes well with my brain is very much depth-over-breadth: I prefer to play a small number of games that each offer an indefinite or near-indefinite number of playtime hours, rather than a large number of small games. A game taking longer to complete if you don't spend money isn't necessarily a problem: sometimes it just means postponing the day where I go "wait, crap, I actually *finished* that game, *now* what I am going to do when I feel like playing it". (This also means that I don't really have experience with all that *many* games.)

2. While I am as much of a sucker for unlockables as the next guy, I generally don't care about cosmetic stuff for its own sake. (Not really into aesthetics much.)

3. I don't enjoy gambling unless it's the kind where the outcome is always positive (just by varying amounts). (I'm *willing* to make possible-loss gambles if I'm confident enough that the expected value is positive, but it's not fun; negative-expected-value and insufficient-information gambles don't even have *that* going for them.)

4. While I *have* a minimum-wage job, that doesn't mean I can just pick up an additional hour of minimum-wage at will. My *marginal* wage is about $1/hour, and an extremely tedious $1/hour at that. As I understand it a lot of games will let you make a couple bucks of premium currency per hour at the margin, hoping that your marginal wage is high enough that the calculations come out in favour of spending another hour at work and then using the money on premium currency, but *even if you ignore in-game methods being more fun* my calculations often come out in favour of in-game methods.

(Huh, I guess that--in a way, and to an extent--those games *do* price-discriminate: if you're so poor that a couple bucks an hour sounds like a good deal, they don't charge you.)

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Of the six games that I currently play at least occasionally, three have some form of microtransaction element.

Flight Rising: the dev-run microtransaction store deals pretty much exclusively in stuff I don't care about (non-unlockable cosmetics, things to speed up a part of the game I don't even play much anyway), so the only point in getting premium currency at all is to trade it with other players. (The Flight Rising player economy runs on a fully-fledged dual-currency system: the player marketplace has an option to denote your item's sale price in premium currency, there are player-run exchange booths on the forums with floating exchange rates, and other player-run services will generally take both currencies.) Premium currency inflates less than the regular kind (though the regular kind of inflation isn't hyper- or anything), so I use exchange booths and arbitrage tricks to keep most of my money in premium form.

Marginal wage is maybe $2.50 - $3/hour, though mostly because I am very good at FR merchanting.

(Note also that the prevailing interest rate (denominated in premium currency) is *much* higher than in the real world: 35%/year is extremely simple and pretty low-risk to obtain (and zero risk of outright loss), and with somewhat more care and more understanding of the economic patterns, 50% is only slightly harder. Most people either never save up enough to make the investment at all (the extremely-simple investment is in increments of $20), or are unwilling to tie up that much money for several months.)


Runescape: microtransaction store has a bunch of cosmetic unlocks that I *might* save up for one day if I run out of higher-priority things to do; a few useful things like increases in item storage space that I will probably save up for somewhat sooner (though for item-storage-space specifically I am nowhere near running out, so that's a pretty low priority too); gambling (with a small number of free plays per day; because of point 3 I am perfectly content to take the free plays and then stop); and a premium-currency form of the membership subscription (which gives you access to a *lot* more content) they've been doing since before microtransactions were really a thing (I used to pay money for this, but the moment they introduced premium currency (and legalised gold-farming to obtain it) I switched to that method instead).

Marginal wage is about $2/hour if you are bad at both bossing and micro-ing (I am bad at both), $4.60 if you are good at both, and $2.60 if you are good at micro-ing but not bossing. (To be good at bossing you must also be good at micro-ing.) Non-marginal wage is about $4 - $5.60/hour and is sufficient to pay for membership at my current level but not by much (I'm currently doing a bunch of the more marginal methods because I want to have more buffer for when I'm not playing as much); at higher levels it's more than enough, and I put a higher priority on levelling that gives access to more non-marginal gold-farming methods than on levelling that doesn't.

(The Runescape player economy is larger, more complicated, and more difficult to get clear information on than the Flight Rising one, so--for the moment, anyway--I'm not very good at Runescape arbitrage or investing. (I did make a spreadsheet to determine the most profitable form of livestock-farming, though!))


Pokemon Go: the only natively mobile one (though I hear many people make do with accessing the Flight Rising desktop website on mobile, and Runescape is working on a mobile client), and indeed the most aggressive. Certainly the hardest in which to gain premium currency through in-game methods: last I checked, there was a 50c/day cap on the sole available method, so if you're capable of maxing that out every day (I usually can't, but then I'm not very good at Pokemon Go) the marginal wage is zero.

Still, at 50c/day you can max out your storage space in...five-ish months, if I've got the figures right? And you get one free raid pass per day (though you're only allowed to accumulate a one-day buffer). And you get some of the time-saving consumables through levelling up (which means the supply through that method is finite, since there are only so many levels to gain). So while it *is* very much trying to entice you into buying stuff (not even counting transportation costs; I only show up to places if I can get there on foot or was going to go there anyway, but I know a lot of players who drive around), it's also very much possible to play with just what you can get in-game. There's still plenty of things to catch and train and so on after you've run out of raid passes for the day.


(The other three games, in case you were wondering, are Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Age of Empires III, and Nethack.)

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.