Short version:
Kickstarter for a TTRPG version. Nearly half a million $.
It ran late (of course).
They released the "beta" for public comment.
It was a badly reskinned 5e.
Comments were harsh.
Beta was removed.
Is now canceled: www.kickstarter.com/projects/gee...
Nielsen Ratings newspaper clipping from February 6, 1995. Top shows are the 8 pm hour: Monday - Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (NBC), 22.4 million Tuesday - Full House (ABC): 20.9 m Wednesday - All Star/Bloopers (NBC): 21.0 m Thursday - Mad About You (NBC): 22.6 m Friday - Family Matters (ABC): 19.7 m Saturday - Dr. Quinn (CBS): 16.9 m Sunday, 7 pm: 60 Minutes (CBS): 24.2 million
Compare to the 1995 ratings. Today's top ratings are cancellation fodder 30 years ago.
Today's audiences are very, very scattered. The media companies want you to believe the "top shows" are watched by "most of the US." Today's top shows are the past's "I guess I've heard of that" shows.
It's like the crafter's dilemma: GOOD FAST CHEAP, pick 2.
You have three omnis: Which one doesn't apply?
(For myself, I go with "actually none of them apply" but that's a different argument. You can pull off a solid argument for any 2 of your choice. You can't have 3.)
“God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent – it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.” - RA Heinlein
There's a game jam for that: itch.io/jam/go-weave...
(Okay, it's not "must make up your own system." But it's "hey, what works WELL for the parts of Neopets you care about?")
...Mine is going to be Fate Accelerated based.
1. Yes.
2. There are maybe logistics issues bc I'm pretty sure sharing the link publicly is a good way to get it removed. (I also have a PDF but the formatting is wonky.)
3. My internet has problems (AT&T promises they're working on it) so sorting out options may take a while. But yes.
ooh nice. yes.
I saved out a copy of the beta release doc with comments, because I figured those were going to vanish pretty quickly. And they did.
That is, of course, not what we got. And while they said "we have more stuff; we promise! that you didn't get to see! that we can't show you!!!" ...nothing of what we did see inspires hope that the rest of the content would've made it a functional game, much less a *Neopets* game.
Grabbing the details we do have and turning them into a playable world, writing up all the species and what changes about them with the various paintbrushes, having a few chapters of detailed history, would be enough of a core worldbook that people wouldn't mind if the mechanics were thin.
Neopia, as it stands, doesn't work as a TTRPG setting: It doesn't have enough details (what kind of gov't do the various realms have?), info about travel (how do you travel from one area to another instantly?), immersion (is a character a neopet - or a person who can manage several neopets?)
You don't describe the characters in terms of stats and abilities; you describe them in terms of origin realm and relationships and goals and what kinds of adventures they want to have. You paint the world vividly enough that they can plug whatever stats they want into it.
You can do games of "LORE LORE LORE (eh here's some mechanics I guess if you want)" but in that case, you don't release *just the mechanics* for public review.
You lean heavy on the lore. What do Neopets in a TTRPG *do*? How do you make adventures from "click the wheel to see if you win a prize?"
Also:
Will there be refunds?
Probably not. (It says: Some. Sorta.)
In which case: Geekify can get fucked. I don't care how badly "Neopets screwed them over" if it's within the terms of the contract. Geekify's who collected the Kickstarter money. Geekify is who said they'd deliver a game.
Yeah, the explanation had a whole lot of "err we didn't think anyone was actually paying attention when we released this to the public and ah weren't ready for real-time responses" and "why are people judging our non-lore-related mechanics for this lore-heavy game setting?"
The "Go Weave a Basket" jam is open for another month.
...I'm working on a Fate Accelerated-based game for it.
itch.io/jam/go-weave...
If the issue is "shows up wrong on screen but prints correctly," it's likely a monitor/display issue. And a lot of devices' default settings are not good. (I've had serious-design friends who always tinker with new devices to adjust the settings so that what they see is closer to what prints.)
A while back, some techdude was crowing about some "amazing" AI-written short story. It was not. It had a mildly interesting concept and a cute twist and by the end - all 1500 words of it - the gimmick was getting repetitive.
Dude must not normally read anything if he thought it was innovative.
It's a sentence fragment, but other than that, yes. And it's a perfectly comprehensible fragment. Adding a comma would change the meaning.
Of course, logic and law are not their strong suits, so that doesn't mean they won't try.
There is, fortunately, no legal mechanism for "federalizing" elections, and no coherently arguable reason to do so: Elections are more stable being managed by local authorities instead of through a central org that would create a single point of vulnerability.
Any chance it's an issue with the color display on those devices rather than the PDF itself?
Can you use a color-picker to see if the color's actually part of the document? Something like this: supertool.org/extract-colo...
(Have not tried it; I have Acrobat Pro.)
It's hard to place them in the water without boats.
But they don't need to be Special Military Mine-Laying Boats. Just boats.
They have a lot of coastline. They have a lot of boats.
Yeah, any kind of "pay on publication" contract - if it's considered at all - should include "if publication has not happened by [DATE], publisher loses all rights to the work and they revert to the creator."
If they miss the deadline, they'll need to re-negotiate the terms.
They could also stop calling his actions "shocking" and "violent," which he thinks makes him sound powerful, and call them "weird" and "incoherent" and "ignorant" and "a sign of senility and distractability" and let him ramble about how he is The Most Coherent President Ever.
Because they did impeachment before—twice—and it will go nowhere without a Democratic majority in the Senate.
However, they could stop cooperating with business-as-usual and require full discussion & votes on everything, and filibuster to block his candidates and his plans.
Yeah, Life + 50 countries have them already.
May include Australia; they were L+50 for a long time and switched to L+70, but works that were already in the public domain stayed there.
The case against "The Wind Done Gone" had a strong concurring statement from Judge Marcus:
"[The law] should not also afford [IP holders] windfall damages for the publication of the sorts of works that they themselves would never publish, or worse, grant them a power of indirect censorship."
The Doyle estate litigated extensively over issues of "the character's in the public domain but [list of details] didn't show up until later and are still under copyright." So there's some groundwork to help figure out what's likely to kick off a lawsuit.
jipel.law.nyu.edu/sherlock-hol...
However, they do somehow manage to pay their rent & electricity bills every month, so they have something that works faster. It's just that many freelancers don't know how to push them into using those systems.
It's "payment is due in 14 days" vs "payment is due in 60 days." Many large businesses work on Net-30 or Net-60 - because they're working with other corporations, and billing has to go through several departments & be approved etc before the payment gets sent to the provider.
