541–550 of 1001 posts
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Casablanca for me. Oddly I can't think of many stand-out moments in it. If you asked me why you would enjoy it, I couldn't say. But you would.
I had a film professor who always thought that Casablanca should be number 1 on AFIs Top 100. I tend to agree with him. I think Citizen Kane is a cinematic masterpiece, but Casablanca has a much better and more coherent story.
The Impossible burger is pretty good. I was skeptical. They did a good job creating non animal meat.
Lisp (specifically, I've learned Common Lisp). The power is amazing, being able to have code write code was something I didn't realize I was trying to do over and over in different languages, but to have it all just be code....amazing. And the parentheses are also great, just a simple syntax and auto formatting with a decent editor. Which brings me to Emacs. Still learning and being amazed at what can be done in ther…
Can you recommend a resource on lisp? I have some interest in learning a bit of it for fun because proper around here seem to marvel over it so much and I'd like to see what the hype is about.
Two finales: - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When the seventh book came out in 2007 there was this fear among the fandom that JK Rowling couldn't deliver a great ending. I think most people agreed she did very well (even more than expected, considering the complexity of the story in the prior six books). - Breaking Bad last season / last episode: there aren't many tv shows that can end in a high note (check G…
> in general, what separates the best tv shows from great tv shows - is that they are able to have a good ending. "Dexter" has made this painfully clear.
I'm gonna go back a short bit and say, for me? Ruby on Rails. In 2007 I was plugging away at PHP with whatever frameworks were around at the time -- the vast majority of web dev that I saw then was pure procedural scripting down the page, maybe some `include` statements to pull in database functions. Especially in PHP, which encouraged mixing logic and HTML. The consultancy I was with had built custom stuff on top of…
Earlier this year I played around with Phoenix for a bit. As a JS dev learning about all this all at once it looks like such a great dev env. One thing that still felt rough around the edges was the tie in with npm packages. Has that part been improving?
You have an `assets/` dir that contains your javascript stuff, and out of the box Webpack is set up there, but besides that it's all your choice, with the exception of the pre-shipped stuff for Channels and LiveView.
- A lot of people watch it with no background knowledge and subsequently don’t quite understand the “best film ever” label, but Citizen Kane is indeed a fantastic film. Just read about Orson Welles first. - Most religious books that have stood the test of time have lived up to the hype. The Bible (especially certain books like Ecclesiastes or Proverbs), The Quran, The Upanishads, to name a few. Again, don’t just go i…
Casablanca for me. Oddly I can't think of many stand-out moments in it. If you asked me why you would enjoy it, I couldn't say. But you would.
As far as video game examples go... The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. The trailers made them out to be the pinnacle of their respective franchises, and people's expectations for the two games was sky high. This plus all the changes made to the 3D Zelda and Mario formats meant there was a lot riding on these titles. But both delivered on that hype. They've both done extremely well in term…
Really funny how that works out.
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>A lot of people watch it with no background knowledge and subsequently don’t quite understand the “best film ever” label, but Citizen Kane is indeed a fantastic film. Just read about Orson Welles first. Interesting. About 10 years ago I was tired of modern cinema and completely stopped watching new films. After some pause I decided to start watching classic cinema from 1930 onward in more or less chronological order…
Sure, I’m not sure I’d actually call it the Best Film Ever, but it is a great movie. Part of its importance, compared to some of the other movies you’ve mentioned, is the story of how it got made / that it got made at all. Welles had zero film experience, yet was fully funded, and the movie itself was a direct attack on one of the single most powerful men of the era. Welles himself was a larger-than-life character an…
Most critics would, though. And I've never heard that its importance is in any way tied to its production. Welles took film from "filmed stage plays" and literally opened up the genre. He ripped up floorboards to get the right perspective. He innovated direction right and left.
The only aspect of the film being about Hearst was that its debut was canned, distribution was shot, and he would never (really) be allowed to make another film again.
World of Warcraft. Blizzard mentioned development of a MMORG in the late 1990's and started teasing in the early 2000's, and really ramped it up prior to launch. And when it landed, holy hell: it devastated worker's and student's sleep schedules for years. Plus it lived up to the hype: the world was huge and immersive, and they had tuned raiding & PvP based on the experience with co-operative Battle.net.
Still could never get into WoW after enjoying Everquest for so many years. Such an amazing game if you had the time to sink into it.
The main limits on free play are you can't have as many different characters, and you don't get some of the newer features or you get limited versions of them.
If you can remember your old account information, your account will have limits and abilities somewhere between a paid account and a new free account.
Some big changes since the old days, aside from a very large number of new zones, include:
1. The game is much more solo friendly. I had no trouble soloing a bard a couple years ago to around level 60 on a free play old account. I then switched to paid and got him to the mid 80s. There I stopped, not because it was getting difficult to solo, but because I'd satisfied my nostalgia need.
2. Related to #1, you can hire an NPC mercenary. There are tank, healer, and DPS mercenaries. There are apprentice mercenaries and journeyman mercenaries, with four different tiers of each type (lower tiers cost less, but are wimpier). If you play a healer or DPS class and hire a tier 4 apprentice tank mercenary, you and the mercenary will be able to take on nearly any content that would normally require a full group, up to around level 60. Same of you play a tank class and hire a healer mercenary.
Only paid accounts get to use journeyman mercenaries. That was the main reason I switched to paid after level 60.
3. There are a large number of good quests now. You can go to a lot of the expansion zones and find quests that will involve taking you to all the interesting spots in the zone. The Hero's Journey quest, which you get in a book at the start of the game, will suggest a path that can keep you busy and advancing for the next 60 levels.
4. Lots of UI improvements.
5. Veteran Rewards for existing accounts. For each year of your account, you get certain bonuses. One big one, which will almost certainly be on your old account, is a free resurrection. Once a week real time, you can go to an NPC healer in certain zones and ask them for a resurrection, and they will summon all your corpses and then give you a 100% XP resurrection.
Other Veteran Rewards include a 15 minute resist, stats, and run speed boost, usable once every 20 hours, a health/mana/endurance complete restoration usable every 3 days, 30 minutes of double XP usable once every 20 hours, one that summons a banker to your location and one that summons a merchant (both usable every 20 hours), and a few more.
All in all, free play EQ is nowadays a quite good solo game, at least for 30 levels or so, and for at least 50-60 levels if you have an old account, and for quite a bit farther on a paid account.
PS: system requirements are quite low by today's standards. My ancient PC (Asus P5Q, Core 2 Duo e8400, 8 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 460) has no trouble running two instances of EQ at once. It could probably do 3.