#2014 is boring because it's carried by an unlikable and boring cast

[cloudsoffire]

big godzilla fan but i will never in my life interact with the fandom based on what i've seen on here

[flych1]

Kehlani singer on her new album

Kehlani, singer on her new album

Photo: Pari Dukovic

Kehlani

In early March, Kehlani was due to meet his label. She was preparing to release her second album - her first since she had a baby and a return to her roots R-B. She was scheduled to perform the first part of Justin Bieber's Changes tour, as well as a number of dream solo dates. Atlantic executives told him they believed in the album, which was scheduled for release on April 24, its 25th anniversary, but the coronavirus pandemic made it impossible to develop a promotion plan. We'd have to postpone it. "I was casting actors and actresses. I was doing all kinds of things," she says of all the pre-production she had completed at the time of the mid-March meeting. We're talking about a video call from Zoom; Kehlani sits alone in a sunny room in his Los Angeles home. (Later, she will be joined by her dog, a pint of ice cream and a tequila-based drink with a slice of orange coming out). It just so happens that today is the original release date. They said, "We don't think you should take it out,"" she said. "And then I went to my room and made the 'Toxic' video on my laptop." She posted it on YouTube at the end of March. "People messed with it," she adds. When Kehlani's label accepted her request to release the album this month, it was stipulated that she had to do it all herself. "If all we do is make music and press the button, then you can do it," she says. "And I was like, 'Okay, challenge accepted fucking.'" So now Kehlani and her photographer, with whom she's in quarantine, are planning and editing music videos, photoshoots, and album coverage. (She also lives with her daughter, two younger siblings, a close friend and her assistant). His garage has been converted into a two-level studio, one side for music, the other for visuals. Kehlani has been a professional musician since the age of 13. A series of mixtapes - full of overshares about having a heart built and broken - and a random but successful debut album have already made her a leading figure in the industry. His music is R-B in its purest form: songs about how love defeats you, about floating on the pure adrenaline of a crush, about the desire of someone you can't trust in your heart. It's no coincidence that when white artists like Bieber and Charlie Puth want to look into an R-B sound, they call on Kehlani to help them. The new album, It Was Good Until It Wasn't, is part of a revival of the genre in the midst of its fiercest debates. It is also a transition disc, a bridge between adolescence and adulthood. Throughout her career, Kehlani has been considered the daughter of the R-B: sexy but boyish. In her old music, she played with both sides of the binary. On the new record, it got too big. She did so immediately after giving birth to her daughter Adeya, who is now one year old. (She is currently co-parenting with her ex, Adeya's father, Javaughn Young-White, younger brother of Jaboukie from the Daily Show). "People would always be like, Kehlani is adorable or, like, Kehlani is cool hella. But then I had a baby and it made me look more feminine," she says. "So I guess I thought, OK, I'm going to start shaking my ass and talk about it." (She wanted Bieber to do a song for her album, but he refused. "Because he's a super-married guy now, it didn't really fit," she said. Kehlani's self-managed music video for "Toxic", filmed with the only camera on her MacBook, shows the nervous figure of the singer slipping and squirming, rubbing her arms and hips. "Don Julio has ridiculed me for you," she tells her former lover that she won't reach out to him, even if her body urges her to do it out of instinct. Kehlani insists this is not his last relationship, which ended publicly and painfully, with Compton rapper YG earlier this year. It's the kind of personal drama that made headlines and made Kehlani's blog famous. She writes songs that address all of this openly. Her fans grow up with her career because she is transparent, sometimes to excess. Or, as she says, I do in public, and it makes people feel like I'm not a stranger. I'm a person with a human ass. I'm screwing up in front of the whole world." The conversation about the state of the R-B was revived last November, when Lizzo, often considered a pop artist, won album of the year at the Soul Train Awards, beating soul singer Ari Lennox. ("It's clear that I'm not cool enough," Lennox tweeted after his loss. Last February, rapper Young M.A. went further, saying that "we barely have R-B". Indeed, in recent years, the superstars of the genre - like SWV, Boyz II Men, Ginuwine, Toni Braxton - and their musical descendants have mostly failed to stop the charts as they did two decades ago; many contemporary black musicians evade the label, preferring to be called "alternative R-B", while others experiment more with genres that were once declared out of bounds by the guardians. Kehlani, on the other hand, is part of a coterie of artists who maintain the relevant R-B today, alongside newcomers like Summer Walker, Bryson Tiller and Lennox. She has a song for every step of a relationship: going under it, going over it, watching the door ahead, a personal promise to stop texting her. His music seems new - not as a consistent copy of a Brandy song - but the influence is palpable. She finds the current debate about gender - what the R-B is, what it was and where it has gone - boring. It may no longer sound like it did in the 90s, but rappers (think, more recently, Drake) have expanded it beyond the desperate desire (or desperate loves) of the last century. "I think people don't know enough about music to make these kinds of accusations [that the R-B no longer exists]. The R-B is simple lyrics and a great song. Lots of harmonies and batteries and melodic production," she says, as if it were easy. "I'll never be able to make 90s R-B music. I'm never going to be able to make R-B music from the early 2000s, because that's not when I was making music. It wasn't when I experienced things that shaped my words and my sound." Kehlani was born in Oakland and raised by her aunt. His mother struggled with drug addiction, and his father died when he was 24 years old and she was very young. A stint on America's Got Talent put her in touch with Nick Cannon, who paid for her to spend time in the studio to make her first mixtape in 2014. On Cloud 19, you can hear the beginnings of a great talent: his voice is more acute and younger, but it is overflowing with emotion. On the deck of Cloud 19's "As I Am" film, she sings and succeeds in the chorus of a Mary J. Blige classic. A week after the release of her second mixtape in 2015, she signed with Atlantic Records. Kehlani turned to pop with his debut album of 2017, SweetSexySavage, an album full of rushed and half-finished ideas. It was carried out amid a personal mental health crisis, sparked by rumors that she cheated on her ex-boyfriend, NBA player Kyrie Irving, in 2016. The relentless online bullying led her to attempt suicide. (Kyrie Irving later admitted that she had never been unfaithful.) "I started an album as a person and experienced the most traumatic event of my life," she says. Her label held on until the deadline, letting her make an album from songs she barely recognized. "I had no connection with the music," she says. "I was embarrassed about everything." The new record is a reset, closer to the Grammy-nominated mixtapes that made it famous. It Was Good Until It Wasn't Gives you the Pure B-R rush, the R-B "waiting for you to call me", the R-B "the only thing that interests me is you": the hits of Brandy and Monica in the 90s, the classics of Alicia Keys of the early 2000s who fall in love. She is also less affected by the nostalgia of adolescence than by the immediacy of adult desires. His first mixtapes were about childhood and adolescence; It Was Good Until It Wasn't at peace with the way most conflicts or heartaches unfold. The title comes from a conversation with a friend about her recent breakup. That's the life of this, you know? she said. The is good and then it's not good anymore. Although she has been in the industry since she was a teenager, Kehlani has never had any decisive success for her career, and it is unlikely that the new album will deliver one. "F-MU" is hot and dancing, and the collaboration with Canadian R-B star Tory Lanez, "Can I," is a sexy earworm - although neither song seems particularly suited to virality. His greatest successes are gossip blogs that overshadow his music. His three-month relationship with YG ended just after they released a song together proclaiming their love. (Their duet came out on the eve of Valentine's Day 2020; three days later, she released a breakup song after images of him cheating her surfaced). Minutes before one of our calls, Kehlani posted a series of tweets about a feud with another Oakland native, rapper Kamaiyah, who slammed her on Instagram Live about a previously unreleased mixtape and accused her of being a colorist, among other things. "She gave the green light to my family and me and told everyone in Oakland to kill us for a song," Kehlani says. (Kamaiyah later replied, telling Kehlani, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't threaten you," but added that "a green light means going like a fight, not shooting"). A moment after our discussion, she answered a phone call from a friend and nervously asked if her tweets - which had let the rapper know there was no bad blood - were correct, if she had handled the situation properly. Kehlani and Kamaiyah had long argued over a joint mixtape, which was to be released before the release of their two albums. Her production was difficult, and even the basic decisions - how many songs she should have, what it should be called, what the visual aesthetic should be - met, according to Kehlani, with Kamaiyah's resistance. In the end, she had had enough of back and forth, and the mixtape didn't seem as essential to her as the release of her album. When she came back to our call, her mood was appalled. I tried to contact her to do good business and she said, "If the project doesn't come out, you can't have it [one piece]," she says. "Even though I wrote it." Once again, she was swept away in a drama she couldn't control, tweeting clarifications about a quarrel she didn't care about, instead of celebrating the upcoming release of her album. But why challenge a misinterpretation if she is tired of getting carried away by the drama? How can I put this to rest and out of my body? Because I don't want to wear them," Kehlani says. "Even if you never want to piss me off again, how can I make sure you know it's love on this side?" she tweeted Kamaiyah to let the rapper know she wished him the best. She is satisfied with the way she has defused an unexpected quarrel. A few years ago, it would not have been as weighted. It took a lot of to get to this point, she says. The death of two friends in three months has put a lot of things in perspective. Philadelphia rapper Chynna overdosed in April at age 25; Minnesota rapper Lexii Alijai, whom Kehlani considered "a little sister," overdosed on New Year's Day at just 21 years of age. Lexii Alijai was scheduled to perform the first part of the post-Bieber tour as the headliner. "I couldn't believe it because Alijai was so young," she says. "It was a click, it was amazing, it was sad and it was heartbreaking. I'm always trying to find the best way to help them continue their legacy." Being 25 was also more than a quarter of a life. It was a horizon she never thought she would see. "I've always had a strange feeling about being 25 or older," she says. "It's a shock because I'm now older than my father was." that's part of what made It Was Good Until It Wasn't feel like the album she finally grew up on. "I wanted to be 25 on this one," she says.

Instagram

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[xtruss]

We Just Got a Rare Look at National Security Surveillance. It Was Ugly.

Charlie Savage

WASHINGTON — When a long-awaited inspector general report about the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation became public this week, partisans across the political spectrum mined it to argue about whether President Trump falsely smeared the F.B.I. or was its victim. But the report was also important for reasons that had nothing to do with Mr. Trump.

At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil. And what the report showed was not pretty.

The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

“The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how the secrecy shrouding the government’s one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The concerns the inspector general identifies apply to intrusive investigations of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are necessary.”

Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to regulate domestic surveillance for national-security investigations — monitoring suspected spies and terrorists, as opposed to ordinary criminals. Investigators must persuade a judge on a special court that a target is probably an agent of a foreign power. In 2018, there were 1,833 targets of such orders, including 232 Americans.

Most of those targets never learn that their privacy has been invaded, but some are sent to prison on the basis of evidence derived from the surveillance. And unlike in ordinary criminal wiretap cases, defendants are not permitted to see what investigators told the court about them to obtain permission to eavesdrop on their calls and emails.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Mr. Horowitz’s report on Wednesday, both Republicans and Democrats suggested that legislation tightening restrictions on FISA surveillance may be coming, and the A.C.L.U. submitted ideas to the committee.

a view of a city street at night: A new report highlighted longstanding issues with how the F.B.I. conducts national security surveillance.

Jason Andrew for The New York Times A new report highlighted longstanding issues with how the F.B.I…

Civil libertarians for years have called the surveillance court a rubber stamp because it only rarely rejects wiretap applications. Out of 1,080 requests by the government in 2018, for example, government records showed that the court fully denied only one.

Defenders of the system have argued that the low rejection rate stems in part from how well the Justice Department self-polices and avoids presenting the court with requests that fall short of the legal standard. They have also stressed that officials obey a heightened duty to be candid and provide any mitigating evidence that might undercut their request.

But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.

To give just three examples:

First, when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials scoured information from confidential informants and selectively presented portions that supported their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign’s onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.

But officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation — such as the fact that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he “never met” or “said one word” to Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page’s emails. Even if the investigators did not necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court should have been told what he had said.

Second, as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement officials prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had uncovered information that cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But law enforcement officials never reported that new information to the court.

Specifically, the application included allegations about Mr. Page contained in a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats. In January 2017, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Steele’s own primary source, and he contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in the dossier.

The source for Mr. Steele may, of course, have been lying. But either way, officials should have flagged the disconnect for the court. Instead, the F.B.I. reported that its agents had met with the source to “further corroborate” the dossier and found him to be “truthful and cooperative,” leaving a misleading impression in renewal applications.

Finally, the report stressed Mr. Page’s long history of meeting with Russian intelligence officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with the C.I.A., and it turns out that he had for years told the agency about those meetings — including one that was cited in the wiretap application as a reason to be suspicious of him.

That relationship could have mitigated some suspicions about his history. But the F.B.I. never got to the bottom of it, and the court filings said nothing about Mr. Page’s dealings with the C.I.A.

The inspector general’s report contains many more examples of errors and omissions. Mr. Horowitz largely blamed lower-level F.B.I. agents charged with preparing the evidence, but he also faulted high-level supervisors for permitting a culture in which the inaccuracies took place.

And while Mr. Horowitz obtained no documents or testimony showing that the inaccuracies stemmed from any political bias — as opposed to incompetence and negligence — he also rejected as “unsatisfactory” the explanation that the agents were busy on the larger Russian investigation and that the Page wiretap order was only a small part of their responsibilities.

Still, it is undeniable that the agents and supervisors compiling materials for the Page wiretap application were under far more pressure than in routine counterintelligence investigations. Both in terms of the stakes and the tempo, the early Russia investigation may have had more in common with a counterterrorism investigation.

But that factor also raises the question of what goes into applications for wiretaps in lower-profile cases. Indeed, everyone involved in the Page wiretap knew that what they were working on was likely to come under close scrutiny, yet they still repeatedly failed to follow policies.

Mr. Horowitz also said senior-level supervisors bore responsibility for permitting systemic failures to fester, and his office has begun a broader audit of unrelated FISA applications.

His exposé left some former officials who generally defend government surveillance practices aghast.

“These errors are bad,” said David Kris, an expert in FISA who oversaw the Justice Department’s National Security Division in the Obama administration. “If the broader audit of FISA applications reveals a systematic pattern of errors of this sort that plagued this one, then I would expect very serious consequences and reforms.”

On rare occasions, the public has caught glimpses of problems with the information that goes into FISA applications.

In 2000, the Justice Department confessed to errors in F.B.I. affidavits submitted in 75 surveillance and search applications related to major terrorist attacks, a FISA court opinion disclosed.

The court met “to consider the troubling number of inaccurate F.B.I. affidavits” and barred an unnamed F.B.I. agent from making affidavits before the court. In response, the F.B.I. came up with far more rigorous internal procedures, pledging to ensure the accuracy of FISA affidavits by more carefully reviewing them.

But when Mr. Horowitz’s investigators looked at the underlying files for the Page applications, they found errors and omissions that showed that the F.B.I. had not scrupulously followed those procedures.

The government has fought hard to keep outsiders from seeing what goes into its FISA applications. In 2014, a federal judge in Illinois ordered the government to show a defense lawyer classified materials about the national security surveillance of his client, which would have been the first time a defense lawyer had been given such materials since Congress enacted FISA in 1978.

But the Obama administration appealed, and an appeals court overturned the order, agreeing that letting the defense counsel see the application would create an intolerable risk of disclosing sensitive government secrets.

That stands in contrast to how wiretapping works in ordinary criminal law. Targets are usually told when the surveillance ends. If they are prosecuted based on evidence gathered from the wiretap, they get to see what was in the application so their defense lawyers can argue that the government made a mistake and the evidence should be suppressed.

The prospect of that adversarial second-guessing gives criminal investigators a reason to be scrupulous about what they put into their requests for wiretaps. In the absence of that disciplining factor, the government has developed heightened internal oversight about what goes into FISA applications.

But that system demonstrably failed in the Page wiretap.

The report should call into question the legitimacy of the FISA system “whether you like Trump, hate Trump, don’t care about Trump,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said at the hearing on Wednesday.

“I’d hate to lose the ability of the FISA court to operate at a time probably when we need it the most,” Mr. Graham told Mr. Horowitz. “But after your report, I have serious concerns about whether the FISA court can continue unless there’s fundamental reform.”

— New York Times

[ciathyzareposts]

Revisiting: The Game of Dungeons (1975)

Hey, look who’s at the top of the list!

           The Game of Dungeons

United States

Independently developed in 1975 on the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois

PLATO lesson name dnd is sometimes given as the name of the game

Date Started: 24 February 2012

Date Ended: 25 January 2019

Total Hours: 44

Difficulty: Medium (3/5), with a lot of variance depending on playing style

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

In preparation for taking another look at the Daniel Lawrence DND series, including Telengard, I wanted to revisit another very early PLATO RPG: The Game of Dungeons, more commonly known by its file name, dnd. It was among the first two or three computer RPGs ever created, after The Dungeon (which we just reviewed) and perhaps Orthanc and the mysterious m199h.

The primary authors of The Game of Dungeons were Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood. The history file available on PLATO says they were inspired by The Dungeon, but other sources–including the recollections of The Dungeon‘s author, Reginald Rutherford–say that Rutherford created The Dungeon after programming on The Game of Dungeons had already started. Rutherford’s simpler game helped fill the students’ RPG cravings until The Game of Dungeons was finished later that year. The two games share a number of features, but it’s not clear whether that’s because The Game of Dungeons developers shared their plans with the faster Rutherford, or if Rutherford came up with the elements and inspired the later game.

Shortly after the first version of The Game of Dungeons was released, Dirk Pellett transferred from Caltech to Iowa State University, which was connected to PLATO. He became instantly addicted to The Game of Dungeons and sent so many suggestions for improvements to its authors that they gave him editing privileges. Later, Dirk’s brother, Flint Pellett also contributed to the game. The earliest extant version on PLATO, 5.4, bears the names of Whisenhunt, Wood, and both Pellett brothers, and is dated 1977. A later version, 8.0, dates to 1978. Most of what I will discuss below relates to version 5.4, although I’ll look at the other versions towards the end.            

An overview, written much later, by one of the original authors.

         I covered the game only briefly back in February 2012, ultimately doubting that it was functionally possible to win it. On that point, I was later proven wrong, first by Nathan at “CRPG Adventures,” who won in 2014 (coverage starts here), then later by Ahab at “Data-Driven Gamer,” who won in 2018 (coverage starts here). In winning, both of them unearthed important facts about the game that I overlooked, and I particularly want to commend Ahab, who–in the true spirit of his blog’s name–recorded hundreds of trials to determine the best spell to use against each monster and also created a full set of maps for the dungeon’s 20 levels.

In fact, between the two of them, Nathan and Ahab described the game so exhaustively that this entire entry is mostly for internal comprehensiveness; I can only control and guarantee the continued availability of my own material. There’s also a vanity element to it. I wanted to be able to say that I won The Game of Dungeons despite that winning taking many hours I could have spent on other games.

In basic concept, The Game of Dungeons isn’t much different from The Dungeon. The character–a multi-classed fighter/magic-user/cleric, with a set of D&D-derived attributes–enters a dungeon and starts encountering randomly-placed monsters and treasures. Against the monsters, his primary weapons are spells, and when he exhausts his spell slots, he must return to the entrance to recharge them. Returning to the entrance also converts gold to experience (in a way). Combat is generally resolved instantly, with no consideration of “rounds,” and with no feedback on hits or damage. The dungeon layout is fixed, but treasure positions are randomized every time you enter (or, in the case of The Game, change levels). There are doors and secret doors. Dungeon layout affects the chances of evading enemies in combat. Both games feature permadeath.            

I’m doing well here. I just arrived in the square to find a $197,291 and a Level 374 demon (a “pushover” at my level). I’m above Level 1,000 and have over 12,000 hit points and a full set of magical gear. Unfortunately, this character got careless and died.

           Beyond that, there are a few differences. The Game of Dungeons is larger, offering 20 levels of 9 x 9 to The Dungeon‘s single level of 30 x 30. It has more magical objects to find (The Dungeon just had a magic sword), but oddly fewer monsters. In the whole game, you only encounter seven of them (aside from the one dragon): deaths, demons, ghouls, men, specters, wizards, and “glass,” which looks like a guy with glasses. There must have been some in-joke there. The Dungeon capped character development very quickly, and even monsters never got higher than Level 6, while The Game has essentially endless leveling for both monsters and the character.

The Game offers four attributes for the character–strength, dexterity, intelligence, and wisdom–and (unlike The Dungeon) lets you re-roll if you don’t like the starting values. This is worth taking some time to do because during gameplay, only strength can reliably be improved. Where The Dungeon was often cruel in its randomization of numbers, The Game will generally offer four values above 12 within half a dozen rolls, and within a couple of dozen, you can get all variables above 15.             

Attribute rolls are generous during character creation.

           Perhaps most important, The Game is far easier than The Dungeon, although it lasts far longer. When you play The Dungeon, you’re playing a game of luck, hoping that you can amass 20,000 experience points (probably from treasure) before something like a Level 6 ghoul shrugs off your spell and kills you in melee combat. In The Game, by contrast, the level of monsters you encounter and their response to your attacks is almost 100% deterministic and, thus, controllable. Among your advantages:             

On Level 1 of the dungeon, you never encounter monsters higher than Level 1 themselves.

Unless you’re carrying gold, monsters will have a maximum level of roughly that dungeon level x 2.

If you are carrying gold, monsters will have a maximum level of roughly the dungeon level x 2 plus your gold / 5000. Once you start collecting large amounts of gold, the dungeon level becomes essentially irrelevant to the difficulty of combat.

You can drop, cache, and stop picking up gold at any time.

Each monster has an empirically-determinable weakness to at least one cleric spell and one mage spell.

If the monster is of equal or lower level than you, your spell will kill it almost 100% of the time.

              “Fight all below” is a useful command that has you automatically attack trivially-easy monsters.

            Other variables at play in the game are less sure, such as the damage you’re likely to take if you fight instead of casting a spell, or the consequences of opening a treasure chest. But just with the six points above, you can carefully control your progress through the game, making it long and boring–excruciatingly so at times–but fundamentally easy. Until I figured out these rules and settled in to my final character, the number one thing to kill me was greed and impatience, usually manifested by opening treasure chests when I wasn’t sure they were safe, or refusing to drop gold once acquired.             

Killing monsters results in a victory message like “Zzapp!,” or “Swiss cheese!,” or “Eat ’em alive!”

             As with The Dungeon, gold is the primary mechanism of character development here. For every 4,000 gold pieces that you take out of the dungeon, you get one more maximum hit point. Naturally, this grows slowly at first, but by the tenth hour, a single trip might add a couple thousand hit points at a time. You get another magic user spell slot for every 10,000 gold and another cleric spell slot for every 16,000, although these both cap at 25 slots, which you hit relatively early–within an hour, once you know what you’re doing.

You can’t ignore experience from monsters, however. It’s treated separately from gold. Your experience level–which is the most important variable in combat–is defined as your current experience total divided by 10,000.

Here’s where treasure chests make things insidious. When opened, they can offer both gold and direct experience, and the values they offer are high multiples of the current dungeon level. On Level 1, for instance, loose piles of gold rarely top 50 each. Running through all 81 squares might give you 1,000 gold pieces on average. But opening a chest on Level 1 could easily give you 20,000 gold pieces, plus an equal number of experience points. Opening chests saves hours—days, potentially. Except that 1 in 4 will blow up and kill you, forcing you to lose all your progress.           

When you die, the game tells you what killed you. “The Dungeon” means that a trap killed you.

         At some point, chests stop being deadly on their levels. For instance, by about character Level 10, no chest on dungeon Level 1, even if booby-trapped, was capable of killing me outright. But because the consequences are so severe, I didn’t test how this formula developed for chests below Level 1. (My best guess is that maximum damage from treasure chests is roughly the level squared x 25.) When you encounter a chest, you have an option to examine it for traps, and at least 95% of the time, your attempt is unsuccessful (the game says that it’s too dark). To have any chance of reaching the end, you have to simply adopt a policy not to open such chests, as infuriating as it is to leave so much treasure and experience behind.

That’s true for anything beyond the first hour, anyway. When your character is new, you might as well just open every chest you encounter and hope for the best, because a few chests can save you from going mad trying to build the character 50 gold pieces at a time. After you hit a certain level, you can still open chests on Level 1 without worry–and Level 1 chests continue to be relevant until late in the game. Even when you have 10,000 hit points and are at Level 2,000, you’re not going to turn down an easy boost to either of those variables.

In fact, there’s a good argument to be made for staying on Level 1 for a long time. The other magic items that you hope to find have an equal chance of appearing on any square in any level (they can also be trapped, but there’s a more-reliable cleric spell to determine that), so you might as well find them in a low-risk place. Level 1 has multiple exits, the shortest only five steps from the entrance. Spending about two hours simply entering, walking down this corridor, exiting, and repeating will probably gift you with most of the game’s magic items and enough treasure chests to max your spell slots and put you over Level 100. That’s enough to defeat any enemy in the game as long as you’re not carrying treasure.          

Finding a magic helm in a Level 1 corridor. Unfortunately, it’s trapped.

         But you can’t stay there forever. The ultimate goal of the game is to find a dragon on Level 17-20, kill it, and get its Orb. (This dragon is the first “boss” monster in any computer RPG.) That means building your character to the point that he’s capable of defeating the dragon and then getting out with the Orb. When you carry the Orb, you encounter enemies in the 7-8000s; you can drop it if you’re overwhelmed. We don’t have enough data to know the minimum level at which success is possible or the minimum level in which it is assured, but Nathan did it at Level 6,174, Ahab did it at Level 12,440 (curiously, Ahab’s maximum hit points were a lot less than Nathan’s), and I did it somewhere in between at Level 8,645.            

This is the highest-level creature I faced in the game.

          You’re not going to get to those levels by opening chests on Level 1, at least not in a reasonable lifetime, so at some point you have to start exploring downwards. This is facilitated by an “Excelsior” transport on the first level that will drop you off anywhere between Levels 2 and 20 (for a small cost in hit points). There’s no similar transport on the lower levels, so you have to find your way back up. There are no stairs in the game; instead there are “transporters” that move you to a random location on a higher or lower level. These transporters, confusingly, exist between squares, not within them, and some of them are uni-directional, meaning you might move from Square 2 to Square 1 and have nothing happen, but then get transported to the next level when moving back again.

Accurate maps at this point are crucial. You always want to know the fastest way to the next “up” transporter, including places where it might be better to use a “Passwall” spell, which costs one mage slot, rather than burn six mage slots on the monsters in between. But this whole experience is only risky as long as you’re carrying gold (or if you started exploring down too fast). If you just drop your gold, enemies fall to a trivial level of difficulty for a Level 100+ player.             

Retrieving gold from a stash.

            You thus spend most of the game heading down to a low level, gathering millions of gold pieces, and then walking back to the entrance, occasionally dumping the gold if you collect too much too fast. When you get back to Level 2, if you still have magic slots to expend, you pass time right next to the exit so that you can attract enemies and end the expedition with as much experience as possible. (Late in the game, I discovered that a good way to grind levels was to stockpile gold on Level 2 so I could attract high-level monsters there, without having to go all the way down to the bottom of the dungeon.) You do this until you feel comfortable taking on the dragon. For me, that was over a dozen hours for the final character. Two characters that preceded him, I had above Level 3,000, but I got stupid and careless in my explorations and got them killed.

(On one character, I got careless with the command that lets you automatically fight creatures below a certain level, speeding up exploration time. This command is very dangerous. For 9/10 of the game, if you set it to about 1/10 of your current level, you’ll be fine. Level 1 creatures are incapable of damaging you at all once you’re Level 10. The same goes for Level 10 creatures once you’re Level 100. The same is not true of Level 100 creatures when you’re Level 1000. I didn’t realize that all of those so-called “low-level” combats were actually sapping my hit points because the ratio had always held up before.)         

Here I am, one step from the transporter to Level 1, burning the rest of my mage and cleric spell slots on random encounters.

       Let’s quickly cover the other items that you find in the dungeon, because they’re important to understand how this game influenced the Daniel Lawrence DND line and perhaps even Rogue. As you explore, you can randomly encounter or find:

               Potions, which are sometimes poison, but this can be determined with the expenditure of a cleric spell slot. Otherwise, they’re almost always beneficial, sometimes healing, sometimes restoring spell slots, sometimes granting experience, levitation, or invisibility, sometimes increasing strength by a point. One special potion, Astral Form, lets you move up and down and through walls without costing any spell points, but you can’t carry gold or the Orb, so it’s rarely useful except for mapping.

Books. Reading them can increase or decrease an attribute or increase or decrease experience. They can also blow up in your face. The odds of a bad outcome seem about equal to those of a good outcome, maybe even more, and I found it was rarely worth the risk. The developers must have thought so, too, because they offered a command (SHIFT-B) to turn off book encounters; the same command doesn’t exist for other types of encounters.

Magic Swords, Helmets, Armor, and Shields, and Rings of Protection, all of which let you come out of melee combats in better shape than without them. You find the first at +1, and from there subsequent findings increase the value up to +3.

           Clerically examining a magic item and finding it “harmless” is one of the best things that can happen in this game.

           Rings of Regeneration, which restore a hit point for every movement. This is useful early on, but less so later in the game when you have thousands of hit points.

Rings of Luck, which increase your chances of finding magic items.

Rings of Power, which add to spell power.

Elven Boots, which reduce random encounters.

Rings of Invisibility and Rings of Swiftness, both of which make it easier to flee random encounters.

Rings of Levitation, which lets you walk over pits. Not a huge deal if you’ve been mapping carefully. 

Magic Amulets, which give you a textual assessment of the likelihood of defeating any monster you encounter, including the dragon. The assessment is based only on physical combat, however, and thus considers only your hit points and level relative to the enemy’s. It does not seem to consider use of spells. Amulets also alert you when you’re adjacent to a transporter.

            The amulet tells me “Farewell!” even though I’m almost certain to destroy him with a spell.

          Magic Lanterns, which reveal secret doors. This treasure must be rare because only my last character found it (untrapped), and it was when he was within an hour of winning the game.

Bags of Holding, which increase the amount of gold you can carry. Without one, you can only carry 100,000 gold pieces per point of strength; with the bag, you can carry 100 times that many. This is naturally only an issue late in the game, by which point you’ve almost certainly found the bag.

                       Once found, magic items remain with you permanently except for one case: Sometimes when a monster is about to kill you, he’ll offer to spare your life in exchange for all your magic items and all your gold. Obviously, careful planning avoids such situations. But it’s still better than starting over.

It’s also worth looking at the spells. Unlike The Dungeon, you have access to all of them at the outset, and all of them require a single spell slot. (The one exception is the non-combat “Teleport” spell, which moves you up a level for 2 mage slots and 1 cleric slot. It fails 10% of the time, so it’s best not to rely on it.) Most of them are derived from Dungeons & Dragons and were featured in The Dungeon. (It’s also worth noting, if only for later reference, that the command used in both games is “Throw Spell.”) They include the mage spells “Fireball,” “Lightning,” “Flaming Arrow,” “Sleep,” and “Charm,” and the cleric spells “Holy Water,” “Exorcise,” “Pray,” and “Dispell.”

Casting a spell against a wizard. “Lightning Bolt” almost always kills them, but it can ricochet and hit you, too.

A couple of them are oddly named, including mage spells called “Kitchen Sink” and “Eye of Newt” and a humorous clerical counterpart to “Dispell” called “Datspell.” None of these spells are described, so you simply have to imagine how they’re affecting the enemies.

As I mentioned earlier, the weaknesses and resistances of the seven enemies to these spells are so stark that they’re almost deterministic. Ahab did an excellent job analyzing it on his site, including a few variables I’m glossing over. Each enemy has at least one mage spell and one cleric spell that works 100% of the time. This doesn’t mean that it will necessarily kill the enemy, and if it doesn’t, you have to follow up with a melee round. But it will kill an enemy of equal level (not counting modifiers based on equipment) about 100% of the time, and the enemy level, as above, is essentially a variable that you can control.           

“Flaming Arrow” inevitably works on spectres, but they’re immune to “Lightning Bolt.”

          On top of the 6 hours I spent on the game in 2012, it took me another 6 to internalize all the above. I burned 20 hours on two characters who ultimately died (and nearly gave up this whole enterprise), and another 12 on my final character. Once I crossed experience Level 8,000, I decided I was strong enough for the dragon plus all the enemies who attack you when you have the Orb. (The dragon moves around Levels 17-20 during the course of the game. If you encounter him before you’re ready, you can evade with 100% success.) There’s a spell that destroys the dragon, but it costs almost all of your spell slots and is thus not worth it. Like Nathan and Ahab before me, I depleted him with “Lightning Bolt” and finished him off in melee combat.               

Just after I killed the dragon.

                       After that, I just had to make my way back to Level 1 and then the exit. My name finally appeared on the list of “Finders of the Orb,” another element that we’ll want to preserve in memory for later.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s silly to emphasize the GIMLET on these early games. I gave it a 15 when I first played it in 2012. Reviewing the categories now, I think I was too stingy on combat, equipment, and the economy, and I bumped each of those up a point for a new final score of 18.              

Getting this screen was quite a relief.

           I played version 5.4, which dates from 1977, after the Pelletts’ influence. I haven’t been able to find much information on version 1, but it apparently only had two magic items–a shield and sword. It also had so few character slots that the developers had to create an algorithm for prioritizing what active characters to purge to make room for new ones.

Version 6.0, dating from the same year, had mostly minor updates. Attributes govern more than they did in 5.4; for instance, intelligence and wisdom affect both starting and maximum magic-user and cleric spell slots, respectively. Additional monsters appear–including rust monsters, mind flayers, vampires, and balrogs–and many of them have special attack and effects. There are also new magic items, including gauntlets, wands, and horns. There’s a new option in combat to use some of these items. The most important difference is that gold adds directly to experience, which governs spell acquisition, leveling, and hit points; you no longer earn experience separately from gold.

There’s no documentation on Version 7, but Version 8 (1978) has some significant changes. (Nathan has excellent coverage of Version 8, starting here. It took him a year of on-and-off playing to win.) First, there are three dungeons to choose from: the original Whisenwood, The Caverns, and the Tomb of Doom. The same character can bounce among them. At the top, there’s a couple of shops. Whisenwood no longer has a main quest; it exists just for character development, plus a healing fountain at the bottom level that can raise attributes. The Caverns have the Orb and the dragon. The Tomb of Doom has the Grail, guarded by a vampire. Players have to find both the Orb and the Grail to enter the Hall of Fame–or simply achieve character level 1000. There are now four races–human, elf, dwarf, and gnome–to choose, as well as 20 Orders to join. Endurance appears as an attribute. Experience rewards and leveling are significantly scaled back. New monsters include Eyes of Thieving, which steal your stuff, and various types of slimes, which have all kinds of interesting effects. You can charm monsters to follow and fight for you. Robes, crosses, books, and lamps join the equipment list, and potion effects are expanded to include improvements to all attributes, Treasure Finding, Hallucination, and Fire Resistance. Each character begins with a random “inheritance,” which is usually a magic item. We’re only half a step from roguelikes at this point.

As we’ve seen previous postings, The Game of Dungeons directly influenced Daniel Lawrence and his DND/Telengard line (no matter what Lawrence himself may have said), and from there a number of other descendants like Bill Knight’s DND (1984) and Caverns of Zoarre (1984). There are also a couple of games that sprout directly from The Game without going through Lawrence, including Dungeon of Death (1979) and The Standing Stones (1983). I’d also suspect that version 8 influenced Rogue except that I can’t find any evidence that Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman had any exposure to PLATO way out in California.

Tracing the elements of each game can help us determine the appropriate family tree, and to that end, we’re indebted to a table that Ahab began in an attempt to track these elements. For instance, it’s pretty absurd for Lawrence to say that he wasn’t influenced by The Game when his original DND has an “Excelsior” transport, a spell called “Kitchen Sink,” and a list of winners titled “Finders of the Orb” (as well as the same basic gameplay, of course). Similarly, separate options to “open” and “carefully open” treasure chests help trace a line directly between The Game and Gordon Walton’s Dungeon of Death.

Based on evidence so far, I’m pretty sure this is the correct family tree. But I’ll edit as necessary. The one major problem is that the 1976/1977 “DND” is actually several versions on several platforms across several years.

           Thanks to Nathan and Ahab prompting me to spend more time with The Game of Dungeons, I feel that I understand this early, seminal RPG a lot better. Later, we’ll take a closer look at Daniel Lawrence’s original DND and the debit it owes to The Game.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/revisiting-the-game-of-dungeons-1975/

[dianner72205589-blog]

Give Me A Break!

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[heather-lyyn]

I’m going to be real with you guys. I don’t watch many modern mainland Chinese dramas, which is why this list is so short. I adore historical Chinese dramas, but modern ones are very hit or miss for me. I don’t know if this will sound insensitive, but I hate hate hate the way characters treat one another in these dramas. I understand and accept the cattiness of women in harem dramas because they are literally fighting for the lives of themselves and their families. What excuse do these people have nowadays? I find that too many modern dramas rely heavily on the characters destroying one another—for dumb and vapid reasons—to move the plot along.

Title: Love O2O Synopsis: Xiao Nai is a gaming expert who, courtesy of his basketball skills, academic excellence, swimming talent and game company presidency, also happens to be the most popular student on campus. When he first comes across the gorgeous computer science major Bei Wei Wei, the infinitely talented wunderkind immediately falls in love. But it’s not Bei’s looks that he notices; it’s the ridiculous mastery with which she is commanding her guild and owning everyone in an online multiplayer game that makes her impossible to forget. Now, Xiao Nai must use his skills both in real life and online to capture the adorable but dorky Bei’s heart. But does their love have the XP to succeed, or will this relationship never level up? Stats: 30 Episodes / 2016 Thoughts: Love O2O is probably one of the better modern Chinese dramas. The overall story is sweet and well realized. I had some problems here or there(FULL Review Here), but Yang Yang was especially well cast and pretty much carried this drama to the top of this list. Score: 8.5/10

Title: Fiancee Synopsis: Lan Xiao Yi left her job in Nanjing to follow her boyfriend Tian Fei to Shanghai. In Shanghai, Xiao Yi struggles with her low-paying job but is happy to be with Tian Fei. At the same time, Tian Fei's colleague Xiao Lu, a new college graduate, has fallen in love with Tian Fei and is determined to snatch him. As emotions become more tangled, Tian Fei cheats and Xiao Lu fakes a pregnancy to force Tian Fei to marry her. He leaves Xiao Yi, not knowing that she is actually pregnant. Stats: 20 Episodes / 2013 Thoughts: The synopsis doesn’t mention Dennis Oh’s character, Hou Zi, at all, but believe me, we’re all here for him. Hou Zi pretty much fell for Xiao Yi at first sight, and after she disappears because of the pregnancy, he’s still holding a torch for her years later when he finds her again. The nice thing is that even though we as the audience know that he fully intends to be marry her(he’s says so himself to his sister), he’s never pushy with her or overbearing. He’s her best friend until she needs him to be something else. The only downside of this drama is the second lead couple, Tian Fei and Lulu. Their scenes are just them fighting constantly. Tian Fei’s mother is also a gross human being so fast forward through their scenes and you’re golden. Score: 8.0/10

Title: Boss and Me Synopsis: Big conglomerate president Feng Teng has a younger sister, with a very rare blood type, who needs a transfusion. He finds an employee at his company named Xue Shan Shan and asks her for a blood donation. Afterwards brother and sister are rather indebted to Shan Shan, but rather than using Feng Teng's typical method of paying her off, his sister suggests sending her nutritious packed lunches so Shan Shan can recover from the blood loss and to make the thank you more personal. Shan Shan loves to eat and her enjoyment of the lunches, along with her general bright and sunny personality, slowly start melting cold Feng Teng's heart.... Stats: 33 Episodes / 2014 Thoughts: This was a cute drama, though it suffers from the cliche of the ‘poor girl isn’t accepted by the rich guy’s family’. I’m sorry the 21st century began almost two decades ago and that idea is so played out. :/ Score: 7.5/10

Title: Let’s Go Watch the Meteor Shower Synopsis: Chu Yu Xun is a very clever and smart high school girl. Her dream is to get into the prestigious Aliston University, in which she managed to get in with her uncle's help. Murong Yun Hai, Duanmu Lei, Shangguan Rui Qian, and Ye Shuo are the four richest students in the university, and they became the idol of all the girls there. These guys are not happy with their lives their parents planned for them. They perform a series of pranks to get attention from the headmistress to expel them from the university. Yu Xun fights for justice for the victims of the group and she becomes their instant target, trying all sorts of methods to expel her. Meanwhile, Yu Xun gets protection from Duanmu Lei, who was her childhood friend. Through fighting and arguing, Yun Hai starts to fall in love with Yu Xun but faces numerous rejections. H4 and Yu Xun eventually become friends. Through hardship, they all grew up and learned to control their own lives, chose their own futures, and to strive for their dreams. Stats: 36 Episodes / 2009 Thoughts: Alright, let’s be real. This is a total rip off of Hana Yori Dango/Boys over Flowers. Allegedly the production company didn’t want to shell out for the rights, so they just made this drama, which is similar but different enough to stave off a lawsuit. I remember watching this a few years ago and actually enjoying it, but I recently went to revisit it and I wasn’t as enamoured. I’d recommend this for new drama watchers, but not necessarily for seasoned drama fans. Score: 7.2/10

Title: Pretty Li Hui Zhen Synopsis: Li Hui Zhen used to be gorgeous, but years of declining family fortune added much pain to her life, and her looks slowly drifted away. Her friend Bai Hao Yu, on the other hand, was once an ordinary looking guy and grew up to be suave, successful, and immensely likable. So when she comes across him years later and witnesses their reversal of fortune, Li Hui Zhen is too embarrassed to even meet him and instead asks her stylish friend and roommate Xia Qiao to assume her identity. Stats: 40 Episodes / 2017 Thoughts: So let’s skip over the fact that Dilreba Dilmurat is probably one of the prettiest peeps on the planet and that the producers apparently think that putting freckles on her and making her hair curly somehow makes her ‘ugly’ . . . This drama was way too freaking long. That being said, I really did enjoy the interactions between Hui Zhen and her bff as well as enjoying Zhang Bin Bin’s acting as always. Score: 7.0/10

Title: Scarlet Heart 2 Synopsis: Zhang Xiao is a southerner, who moved to Beijing working as an OL, with dreams of romance and a stable job. By coincidence, she gets a job at a conglomerate ‘Zhen Tian'. Like all newbie, she’s bullied and stepped on, the saving grace is her boss Yin Zheng. As she gets the hang of it, she and Yin Zheng develops mutual feelings for each other, when a gentle, considerate guy Kang Xi Hang steps into Zhang’s world. Yin Zheng, Kang Xi Hang both are fore-runners in next in line inheriting the firm. Zhang is twirled into the eye of the corporate battles. After twists and turns, Zhang finally realizes where her heart is at, and bravely chooses to spend her future with her true love. Stats: 35 Episodes / 2014 Thoughts: This is the sequel to the time-travel drama Scarlet Heart(which is on my historical master list), but the drama literally throws that all away in the first couple of episodes by making the lead character forget that ever happened. This is a really crazy drama that is totally all over the place, and the only reason i would recommend it is that the two leads, Cecilia Liu and Nicky Wu, are actually married IRL so their chemistry is totally real. Score: 6.8/10

Title: I Love My President Though He is a Psycho Synopsis: Shi Xiao Nian is a third-rate cartoonist living an ordinary life. Until one day Gong Ou, a rich CEO of an IT company, suffering from paranoid personality disorder, captures her and asks her to return their child, which she “supposedly” gave birth to 3 years before. He utilizes every mean to force an answer and to pursue her, including low-EQ techniques. But as he faces her gentleness and courage, they fall in love… Stats: 10 Episodes / 2017 Thoughts: I tried watching this, but the subs were very poor and so while I could get the gist, it was hard to enjoy . . . well that and the fact that the male lead is literally a psycho. The guy is straight up disturbed—I mean padded walls and pills in a cup disturbed. His family is rich so he’s able to do illegal things like kidnapping and torturing women without consequences. He can act normal when he needs to but underneath that, he’s completely unhinged. He ends up falling for the girl he kidnapped, but of course we have to throw in the cliche of his family not accepting her like ‘wtf, your son is crazy! Take what you can get!’ Score: 6.0/10

Title: Stay With Me Synopsis: Li Wei Wei is a 30-year-old successful fashion designer. But a near-drowning makes her lose the memory of the past seven years of her life. In her current life, Wei Wei is surprised to learn that she had broken up with her boyfriend, Chen Yi Du, and is now engaged to a man she does not remember, Qi Cheng. Unable to believe her life choices, Wei Wei tries to find out whatcaused her to break up with Yi Du while Qi Cheng tries to win back his fiancée’s heart. Which man is Wei Wei’s one true love? Stats: 38 Episodes / 2017 Thoughts: I went into this drama expecting to like it because it has Wang Kai starring and I loved him in Nirvana in Fire, but after this drama and ‘When a Snail Falls in Love’, I’ve discovered that the man has no range. He was perfectly cast in Nirvana in Fire, but now he’s just doing the same thing over and over. Joe Chen on the other hand, used to be one of my favorite actresses, but whoever is picking her scripts the last couple of years isn’t doing her any favors. Her character here is whiny, manipulative, and just straight up unlikeable. This drama was boring and I quit it after like five episodes. Score: 2.0/10