Read Roadside Picnic. It's the book that Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are based on. It's the only one of the three that I know, so I can't comment on the relative quality or entertainment value.
There's a ~20 dollar sterling silver Utena ring on Etsy. Obviously I have the one included with the season 3 box set, but between some stupid mistakes I made and natural wear and tear, it's kinda damaged. Does the forum think I should replace it?
Looks like both. I could repair the metal part, but the enamel would be tougher. I could probably fill/replace it with resin but I'd need pink opaque dye. A real jeweler would do better.
That looks like pretty inexpensive surface enameling, though. Get some Testors model airplane enamel for metal fuselages and you can probably touch it up at home. Make sure to color-match, though.
They didn't announce it. I read it on an Utena forum. http://forums.ohtori.nu/viewtopic.php?id=2913 It doesn't say the number you have to call, so I guess just call whatever number is on the Rightstuff website.
Okay, so, the universe of Hardboiled is basically real life circa 1920-1939 with pulp elements, some cyberpunk, and the serial numbers filed off. The world isn't arranged at all the same way as ours, but they have analogs to most major geographical locations and cultures. There are direct analogs to real places as well as pastiches of certain sorts of popular fiction the same way that Union City is both the United States and noir detective stories. It's only really important for Hardboiled itself because Union City is very much an immigrant culture, but I really want to have the elements lying around for expansion in future games.
Italy is Viteli, a weird mix of Roman Empire and Renaissance Venice. The British Empire is the Anglian Empire, which is one part a "post-steampunk" world in decline, one part Sherlock Holmes and one part neverending Jane Austin novel. Nazi Germany is the Golden City, a sort of dark take on the 1930s World of Tomorrow trading on the unspoken undercurrent of eugenics and social darwinism that peppered such visions. There are also analogs for China, Russia, India, and Canada/Australia/New Zealand, and more general analogs to Southeast Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East, all of them presented in the way you'd expect to make an early 20th century "World of Adventure!"
Anyway, what I actually need are names for the analogs of France and Japan. The France-analog is a struggling colonial power known for progressive attitudes, hedonism, and Jules Vernes-esque scientific adventuring. The Japan-analog is very much directly based on Imperial Japan. They do speak French and Japanese respectively, though obviously with a different name depending on what they are called. I've been wracking my brain and scouring the internets for ideas on what to call them and I've got nothing that sounds good at all. Help!
So you want to have a France analog and a Japan analog. But you aren't just going to call them France or Japan. Does this world have the same geography as earth, and a reasonably similar history?
Not even remotely. The world has a very different structure to our own, with more archipelagos than continents, and furthermore is tidally locked with a dark and light side. Heck, it's moon is a silver solar reflector; as well as more down-to-earth crime and spy drama, "ancient archeotechnology" is one of the potential story hooks. Accurate recorded history is only a few hundred years deep; everything before is contradictory legends which form the basis of the various cultures. (For instance, Union City, the US analog, has what is essentially a creation myth starring the Founding Fathers, and the Anglian royal line is said to descend from "The Goddess Victoria".)
There are historical similarities that have popped up since, like a US civil war, decline of the British Empire, and First World War, but they have more of a superficial resemblance in practice.
The implication is that the historical and cultural parallels are artificially guided or initiated; the adventure game I plan to write in the same setting and system uses the "Why are we here?" question as one of it's central hooks.
So, I've been trying to do some web design work, but I have heard that GoDaddy sucks face and that I should use someone else.
So who should I use for my web hosting that doesn't suck?
Also, what's the best tool/language to learn to build websites that are accessible by the people you make them for? I've been using Wordpress, and sometimes Squarespace, because they can be easily updated by the person I'm working for, but it seems like those are too limiting from a design sense. In the professional web design world, do people just make things from scratch and force people to pay to have their website changed?
I've had good luck with Dreamhost. I don't think I'd recommend them for a very large or high utilization website, but for development or a hobby project they are more than adequate.
I think even a very large portion of "professional" web development these days is done on WordPress. It's a competent and very customizable CMS. You might be surprised regarding how drastically you can change its look and feel.
I'll second Dreamhost. See if you can get in when they have a deal on. I think I got a year of hosting for like $10 or something.
If you want something that is totally customizable but able to be maintained by an average person, look into making a Django site. Django basically let's you program your own Wordpress-type forms (though it has nothing to do with wordpress).
If you want something that is totally customizable but able to be maintained by an average person, look into making a Django site.
I have minimal actual programming experience, I just do random HTML/Javascript shit normally, and I have some knowledge of C++ and Python, but not more than on a concept level. I.E. I understand what object-oriented programming is and how it works but I've never really coded anything substantial. If I sit down and try to work with Django, am I going to be totally lost? Should I just quit being lazy and learn python?
WordPress is definitely not limiting for design. There are many sites you wouldn't even know were WordPress unless you looked at the source. The WordPress codex is very good for explaining how to do stuff. Sounds like with your experience you would indeed be a bit "lost," so I would think WP would be a good starting place for the amount of documentation they have. That and you can do a simple site extremely easy and build from there, just look up how to make a custom template. Plus its free, and most hosts have an easy button for installing it, too.
Also are you any good at proper HTML and CSS? You should have that down before trying to do anything complicated. (Then again, most CS guys suck at it and make sites with ugly HTML and bad CSS, and they still think they're amazing... but whatever :P)
If you go with WordPress, PHP is the thing to learn, not Python. It's fairly simple and you'll have a lot more flexibility w.r.t. customization. The WordPress Wiki is (or was) pretty well fleshed out and documented the API quite well. The only issue I ever had with it was that when I was doing my sites, the API was being updated much faster than the docs.
Wordpress ain't bad, but PHP is a shitactular language. Still, Wordpress is pretty well done and PHP, despite being so shitacular, does get the job done (despite glaring security holes, incompetent core language developers who just don't care, and whatnot) for its part.
Oh, and I'm one of those CS guys (okay, computer engineering, technically, but my career is definitely more CS), and I agree that my HTML and CSS looks like ass. I am fortunate to be married to a graphic designer who can make really attractive HTML and CSS, but she's usually too busy with her stuff to help me out with my pet projects. :P
PHP gets messier as it goes on, but it doesn't have security holes so much as it doesn't hold your hand w.r.t. database security, and it has so much built in crap that it actually simplifies most tasks, even though the built in commands aren't consistently named, or use consistent parameters, or follow any rules at all....
PHP gets messier as it goes on, but it doesn't have security holes so much as it doesn't hold your hand w.r.t. database security, and it has so much built in crap that it actually simplifies most tasks, even though the built in commands aren't consistently named, or use consistent parameters, or follow any rules at all....
Actually, it has some pretty bad security holes built into the language (these may have been fixed by now, but the PHP developers in general seem to be bottom-of-the-barrel coders who don't care all that much about quality code):
This took me all of a couple of minutes to dig up on my favorite security website. I also purposely skipped security holes that date before 2012 -- if I included the older ones, you'll see how much worse it is. These are holes in the PHP interpreter itself, not holes in apps written in PHP.
Comments
Oh wait, you meant the ring.
http://forums.ohtori.nu/viewtopic.php?id=2913
It doesn't say the number you have to call, so I guess just call whatever number is on the Rightstuff website.
Italy is Viteli, a weird mix of Roman Empire and Renaissance Venice. The British Empire is the Anglian Empire, which is one part a "post-steampunk" world in decline, one part Sherlock Holmes and one part neverending Jane Austin novel. Nazi Germany is the Golden City, a sort of dark take on the 1930s World of Tomorrow trading on the unspoken undercurrent of eugenics and social darwinism that peppered such visions. There are also analogs for China, Russia, India, and Canada/Australia/New Zealand, and more general analogs to Southeast Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East, all of them presented in the way you'd expect to make an early 20th century "World of Adventure!"
Anyway, what I actually need are names for the analogs of France and Japan. The France-analog is a struggling colonial power known for progressive attitudes, hedonism, and Jules Vernes-esque scientific adventuring. The Japan-analog is very much directly based on Imperial Japan. They do speak French and Japanese respectively, though obviously with a different name depending on what they are called. I've been wracking my brain and scouring the internets for ideas on what to call them and I've got nothing that sounds good at all. Help!
There are historical similarities that have popped up since, like a US civil war, decline of the British Empire, and First World War, but they have more of a superficial resemblance in practice.
The implication is that the historical and cultural parallels are artificially guided or initiated; the adventure game I plan to write in the same setting and system uses the "Why are we here?" question as one of it's central hooks.
So who should I use for my web hosting that doesn't suck?
Also, what's the best tool/language to learn to build websites that are accessible by the people you make them for? I've been using Wordpress, and sometimes Squarespace, because they can be easily updated by the person I'm working for, but it seems like those are too limiting from a design sense. In the professional web design world, do people just make things from scratch and force people to pay to have their website changed?
I think even a very large portion of "professional" web development these days is done on WordPress. It's a competent and very customizable CMS. You might be surprised regarding how drastically you can change its look and feel.
If you want something that is totally customizable but able to be maintained by an average person, look into making a Django site. Django basically let's you program your own Wordpress-type forms (though it has nothing to do with wordpress).
Also are you any good at proper HTML and CSS? You should have that down before trying to do anything complicated. (Then again, most CS guys suck at it and make sites with ugly HTML and bad CSS, and they still think they're amazing... but whatever :P)
Oh, and I'm one of those CS guys (okay, computer engineering, technically, but my career is definitely more CS), and I agree that my HTML and CSS looks like ass. I am fortunate to be married to a graphic designer who can make really attractive HTML and CSS, but she's usually too busy with her stuff to help me out with my pet projects. :P
http://eindbazen.net/2012/05/php-cgi-advisory-cve-2012-1823/
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Jul/331
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/i-forgot-your-password-randomness-attacks-against-php-applications
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=60227
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2012/Jun/87
This took me all of a couple of minutes to dig up on my favorite security website. I also purposely skipped security holes that date before 2012 -- if I included the older ones, you'll see how much worse it is. These are holes in the PHP interpreter itself, not holes in apps written in PHP.