Category Archives: General

COTB 020 – PAX, Kickstarter, and summer movies

Carlos and Ben give a shout out to their local gaming store before reviewing the Neverwinter beta and the upcoming MMOs from the PAX convention. Then they discuss the upcoming summer comic book movies and discuss Joss Whedon’s reaction to the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.

Dear Audible: Your DRM sucks

I would love to have the opportunity to easily buy and listen to books in my car. We have a fairly long drive to and from work, and we occasionally take very long drives to visit our families. On the audiobook front, the most popular website appears to be Audible. I tried it once before on a trial basis, and disliked-it-with-prejudice for reasons that will become clear, because not a lot seems to have changed from my earlier experience.

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Song of Fire and Ice Roleplaying Game

So, I took a look at Green Ronin’s Song of Fire and Ice Roleplaying Game. I’m actually pretty interested. It’s actually fairly unique (at least among the systems I know) in mechanics. It’s sort of like a lot of things, but doesn’t match any of them.

It’s mainly based on attributes, which is fairly true to the books.  Your attributes define the number of dice you can roll – 2 is base, 7 is, I think, max.  When you’re testing, you roll a number of d6 equal to your attribute, and sum them, to try to beat a target number. The interesting bit is the bonus dice piece – skills and training are represented by bonus dice (which can’t exceed your attribute dice).  But bonus dice are extra – you roll more dice, but still only choose a number of dice equal to your attribute.  So you get *better* results with bonus dice, but it’s never above what someone can achieve naturally with some luck.

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I don’t want to go off on a rant here….

But SERIOUSLY.

I created an XBL account for my daughter, so that she can play Minecraft in an online game.

I get an email to her address saying that we have to verify the account (perfectly fine) by an adult.

Click it, and get taken to MSN (MSN? That’s your interface? Really?). Where it has two options – “Get your parent” or “ask by email.” Note that I’ll later find out that the “Ask by email” link doesn’t even work – it goes to a dead page.

Choosing ask a parent gives a confirm or deny link. I click confirm, and it asks me to sign in my account (fine, no worries).

Then I sign in, and it says it wants to verify me as an adult. And to do that, I see this:

“To verify that you’re an adult, you must provide a valid credit card number. A credit card is the only method of age verification we accept.

We’ll charge your credit card $0.50 (50 cents) and a portion will be donated to charity.”

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Speaking of isms in geekery…

Lots of things have come up this week.