efaardvark

This thread is giving me flashbacks. When I was in about second grade we lived for a year or so in Huntsville, Alabama. Back then that was pretty deep south and the accent/slang was pretty thick. My dad was from S. Carolina so he was used to it, but my mom and my brothers and I had lived on the west coast (US) for virtually all of our lives. Fortunately kids that age learn fast so after a few months my mom developed the habit of using us kids as translators.

No, but I did play Dragon's Gate (also on GEnie) before they shut it down. After that I also ran my own CircleMUD for a while in the early days of the internet. Fun times, but eventually I had to shut it down due to lack of time to admin it effectively. I was also a fan of the early single-player text adventures like Adventure or Zork. To this day I often install Colossal Cave on my unix/linux systems for the nostalgia factor.

I wasted a couple hours this morning playing an old (like really really DOS-days old) text RPG game called "Moria". This is what cutting-edge gaming looked like before GPUs and the 'Net. Ran pretty well even on a 386.

For me minecraft is one of those classics that never really gets old. There's so many modes of play that pretty much anyone can get into it too. Sometime TOO into it. :D

I seem to collect a few things. My most massive collection is books. I have shelves full of books.. mostly SF and some science/technology-related documentary or non-fiction (Stine's "Halfway to Anywhere", O'Neill's "2081", Mahaffey's "Atomic Accidents"). Some fantasy as well though. All of The Lord of the Rings, including Hobbit and Silmarillion. All of McCaffrey's "Dragonrider" Books. All the Dune books. All of Zelazny's Amber series. A whole bunch of Niven, Clarke, Heinlein, and Azimov. Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Piers Anthony are well represented. I've got the last few years of "Analog" magazine on the shelf as well (and all the other issues back to 1972 packed away in boxes in the garage). I've got 3 floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of old-fashioned, dead-tree books in my bedroom and several more shelves-worth scattered around the house. I wish I had more space for a real book library. I also have a large number of items related to deep-space science and exploration missions like Voyager, Viking, Galileo, MRO, MSL, etc. Mainly stuff like lapel pins and "baseball" caps, but even some things like event access badges for those that I was involved with. Also copies of press kits, a Mars Exploration Rover lunchbox, Lego sets, stickers, coffee mugs, a bunch of buttons.. Mattel did a "matchbox car" version of one of the Mars rovers and I snagged one. All sorts of space-related knick-knacks. Most of it is just in a jumble in boxes, but some of it - like the lapel pins - I have on display. I've also got a small coin collection. Noting formal or valuable I'm afraid however. My grandmother was a traveller and I expressed an interest in some of the coins she had after one of her trips so thereafter every time she went someplace she brought me her pocket change. Probably well under $100 worth of well-circulated small-denomination coins from all over the world.

Binged Sora no manimani last night. Couldn't resist checking out an astronomy-themed seinen anime... [mal type=anime id=6098] I liked that one.

I actually prefer the one- or two-season animes. The ones that go on and on (and on and on) tend to get repetitive and boring and I lose interest. Give me a real story with a beginning, middle, and a great ending.

No time for games recently.

I'm a (wood) dragon in the eastern zodiac and a virgo in the west. Of course, being virgo I don't believe in any of that stuff.

Is it just me or is ARM becoming the next PowerPC? Not that that's a bad thing necessarily. RISC has a lot going for it. As far as "Yeti" and Google's rumored streaming games service.. I'm not a fan of streaming everything over the 'net. I'm not a big fan of "cloud" services in general. I'm not a fan of movie/game/etc rentals on a captive platform. I'm not anti-console, though do think the industry's current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Call me old-school, but I want to own my entertainment. I've never bought into the Kindle or Alexa or Facebook games. From what I can tell this seems to be driven by Google wanting a piece of that action. I'm interested in hearing what Google has to say, but they're for sure going to have to convince me. (That includes explaining why I want to give the world's biggest advertiser a permanent presence in my home and control over my gaming life.) Certain "features" - such as a closed platform or microtransactions - would pretty much make any system/service a non-starter for me. I also would not look favorably on a system or model that requires being online to play.

I've liked it so far, though IMHO it seems to lack direction. New characters come and go, sub-plots present and resolve themselves, but even after so many episodes I still don't really have a sense of where the writers are/were going with the overall story. At one point it brought to mind a game called The Settlers that I used to play. It kind of has that feel of one of those that will be popular and go on forever yet never really gets anywhere and after a while starts to seem repetitive. If all it is is a series of boss battles then I may wind up dropping it. The next season will be key. I had that sense as well.

Today was sunny, with scattered butterflies!

Watching someone else play KSP while I drink coffee & try to wake up. Don't know if I'll get to my own game this weekend. Right now my brain is too caffeine-deficient for playing something like KSP and there's sun and a butterfly migration going on outside that's making it hard to focus on the computer.

I've had to deal with this for a long time. I have a number of friends, but over the years pretty much all of them have moved away as the rising cost of living in S. Calif. forced them to relocate. Several family members as well. My neighbor of 15 years retired and moved to Oregon a couple years ago. My last remaining high school friend in the area finally threw in the towel and moved to Arizona just last year. Fortunately communications technology has allowed us to keep in touch and made that process less painful than it might have been in past eras, but Discord and email can only do so much. It is getting harder and harder to meet new people too. Everyone seems too busy trying to make ends meet to take time out for socializing. I know I'm guilty of that. And even when I'm not too busy, I'm too tired.

Hi! Welcome! 54 here. I don't worry about the age thing anymore.

Windy!

I think that's called "discord". Seriously though, while I would kind of be interested in an AF chatbox, honestly I doubt I'd use it much. I don't even use discord much, and I have that on both my phone and on my desktop. (I usually do have discord running in the background, but it is always buried under approximately 37,864 windows. Give or take. ) Every day or so I dig it out and look at it or post something to it, but at that point I might as well just be hitting a URL and using a web-based forum like AF. The only time I really use discord in real-time mode is when I use it as a TeamSpeak replacement while actively gaming. Not exactly the typical chatbox usage mode. There was some talk a while back about getting AF users on a discord channel somewhere. I don't think it went anywhere though. There's also a few existing anime-themed discord channels (not AF-related) already out there too. I've tried a couple but never found one I liked. And like I said I don't do the realtime chat thing much anyway. (I'd be interested in hearing from people on their experiences if they've tried that sort of thing themselves though. Anyone found a server they like?)

I thought of going with something like that myself. I still get things like holodecks and/or the Matrix in mine though. I'm good.

I'd be interested in your opinion of it once you've played with it a bit. Been thinking of getting one myself. Anyone else here have one & care to share thoughts/opinions?

Good to know. I also am sometimes offline for extended periods, then swoop thru and post/react in batch mode. 50 should be plenty however. (For me anyway.. I never even hit 20 yet.)

My body is still in hibernation mode. I usually feel like I could sleep from about November/December to April. Once the weather warms up a little I'll probably do some hiking, but for now I just want to sleep until Spring gets here.