Proudly a craftsnugget!

Read an interesting post by Mark Boulton - Not a craftsman.

I usually like what he's written, but in this case, I have to disagree. He's defining it wrong. ;)

But wai nugget?

Well see...

"If my uncle was restoring traction engines for a living, he would’ve been out of business. Craft is love. And love takes time. And time is scarce and probably best spent elsewhere."

That statement immediately made me think of the story where Picasso does a little sketch in 5 min. A potential buyer goes 'Omg! How can you charge <whatever ridiculous sum> for something that took you 5 min to do?!?!' Picasso looks down his nose regally, and replies, 'That, ma'am, took me my whole life.' (Or something similar.)

I disagree that craft has to be slow. Yes, love takes time. Expertise takes time. But that doesn't mean you bill your 10k hours to your clients directly. The 10k hours you have under your belt are what affects the asking price you give to clients! The 10k hours are the love.

The 10k hours are your craftperson's gift to the leanan sidhe that you can never get back. ;)

Also, because everything is always about food, anyone who thinks craft has to be slow has never watched a real sushi chef at work. XD

Slutty brownie with almond-coffee, crispy chocolate swirl with chopped nuts icecream

Someday, I really need to:

  1. Come up with better names for my icecreams
  2. Overcome my laziness and start documenting the insane number of different icecream flavours I make

...but today is not that day.

Today's lazy 'recipe' is instead, a bunch of links!

I got the idea from these two places…

http://www.thelondoner.me/2011/06/slutty-brownies.html

and

http://whatsgabycooking.com/slutty-brownies/

…but of course, being me, I changed stuff a bit…

I didn’t use a brownie base, I used my own flourless chocolate cake base here
http://nugget.posthaven.com/flourless-triple-chocolate-cake-of-lazy-doom

I was lazy for the cookie dough and used a Betty Crocker mix. You can of course, use your own nummy version!

I baked the thing for 40-50 minutes at 180C, non-fan-forced. Check on it often towards the last 10 minutes, because you don't want the cookie bits to overcook/burn.

LICEcap by Cockos Inc, a free, GIF screencast app that's as awesome as its name is awful.

Sample GIF from Mars - a web business intelligence tool for community pharmacies - that we recently launched at Minfos.

I recorded this as a PoC to show my colleagues, but it's had the fortunate effect of making me realise that the way we've implemented that checkbox is pretty bad right now. It shouldn't dismiss the dropdown menu the moment the checkbox is checked, but only upon the user clicking 'Apply Settings'. Otherwise (as you can see), it's quite horridly disorienting.

Get this wonderful, shiny LICEcap tool.

The Secret World (TSW) is (almost) everything a nugget wanted GW2 to be.

Combat
TSW's combat is GW1 style, only evolved, and with enough differences to not be a blatant ripoff - more of a homage. Same way GW1 was a homage to Magic: The Gathering.

You can equip 7 active skills, which you can pick from any skills you've already learned, and you can use them as long as you meet the weapon requirements, if any. 1 of those 7 active skills can be an elite. There are another 7 passive skills, which can also contain one elite, so they don't crowd your skillbar. Similar, to, but at the same time, very different from, allocating skill points in GW1 to make a build.

In terms of combat mobility, you can move while casting (at least, I think you can), double tap to dodge, see AoE rings, blah blah. Circle-strafe like mad when outmatched, stand still and hit buttons when your opponents are puny. At least, in melee. Not sure how ranged works yet.

Mobs don't seem to be as smart as GW1 mobs, but I'm a newbie still (a whole 3 days!), so maybe they get smarter later on. So far, though, they're still better than many other MMO mobs. They DO try to surround you (and hit your back). But they currently don't run from aoe automatically, don't rez each other, etc.

The skills themselves have a lot of interplay between them, but the kind of interplay seems less sophisticated than what GW1 had. There's no costly skills that make a lot of sense - e.g., Flesh of My Flesh, Infuse Health, not that many skills that promote team play above selfishness, e.g. splinter weapon, and protection is not as subtle and beautiful, e.g. Reversal of Fortune, Aegis, Aura of Faith. And there are no minion masters. *sob*

Setting
If you like Lovecraftian alternate-universe type stuff, TSW is great. It feels like a rich, solid, plausible, well-built world. The world feels like it has history. Of course, it's easier in their kind of modern alternate-universe-history setting than in a purely made-up world, as it's as simple as going, 'Oh ohtay, that's New York, and Kingsmouth is in Maine.' ;)

Writing & Voiceovers
The writing is just a notch under Witcher and Witcher 2.

The voice acting is superb, AND, like Witcher and Witcher 2, the animations are well done enough that cut-scenes feel like movies, like actual... acting, instead of a poor relation.

Pricing Model
It's on a buy-the-box ($30 or $60, you pick), then subscription-optional model. As far as I can tell, the cash shop is not rapacious or evil. There are a few (very few, well hidden) lottery boxes, so it doesn't seem like that's their main revenue push, and there's very little to no outright selling of power. Lots of selling of fripperies. And subs members get a 10% discount.

Fashion!
Fashion is great fun. Since your gear doesn't show as clothes, your clothes don't matter. Meaning you can wear anything you like! ;) And there's heaps of it in the Pangea shop in London. And of course, more in the cash shop. I love fashion cs fripperies. XD

TSW is the place where crazed build-tinkerers from GW1 should go. For peeps like that, GW2 is an utter travesty. TSW is... the game that GW2 should have been.

LegendMUD folks - TSW is like GW1 met Legend, and they had an MMO baby. ~_o