say
Latest
How to pronounce ASUS (video)
A-suh-ss? Ah-sue-ss? As-ses? Nope, all wrong. We've been informed by ASUS that its head honcho has recently set a new rule in an attempt to rid our frustration, so what used to be "Ah-seuss" is now "A-seuss" (or "Eh-SUS" according to Taiwanese phonetics, as pictured). The logic behind this? Apparently it's a direct chop from the pronunciation of "pegasus" -- the origin of the company's name -- which ironically seems to favor the former diction. Anyhow, let's not confuse ourselves any further and just study this lovely lady's video demo after the break.
Castcounting macro counts your spellcasts
Xalit is entertaining himself before the expansion by crafting some macros, and he's come up with a pretty clever one that will count the number of times you cast a certain spell. He's got a few different versions (including one that pushes the total out to "say" occasionally), but here's probably the most helpful:/cast Water Shield/run i="Water Shield" if ws==nil then ws=0 end t=GetSpellCooldown(i) if t==b then else c=0 end b=GetSpellCooldown(i) if b==t and c==0 then ws=ws+1 c=1 endWhich will both cast Water Shield for you (obviously, you'll have to change the name if you want to count casts of a different spell), and then use:/run SendChatMessage(ws,"SAY")To kick the count out to the Say chat channel. Naysayers among you may say "well that's pointless," and they're kind of right -- it doesn't really matter how many times you cast something, and the macro doesn't do anything else for you besides update a variable to keep track of that number.But it is interesting to see just how many times, say, you pressed the Fireball button during the raid last night, and maybe there is some use for this information somewhere (maybe checking the frequency of use or viability of certain spells or trinkets?). Might be a good macro to have when you want to know more about what you're casting.
All the World's a Stage: WTF is IC - OOC? WTB RP! OK THX, CU L8R
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.While many online gamers are famous for using "leetspeak," there's a certain portion of the community that places a great deal of importance on complete sentences and good spelling. Roleplayers, as a whole, are friendly and communicative, but nonetheless have special ways of interacting that other gamers may not understand. As a new roleplayer, I remember having to figure a lot of these things out, although I was blessed to befriend many people who kindly explained things to me as well. The first and most important concept I had to get a grasp of was the idea of "in-character" versus "out-of-character" communication (usually abbreviated to IC and OOC), and in what situations the use of either sort would be appropriate.It's fair to say that on an RP server where roleplaying is still the rule rather than the exception, anything in the /say or /yell channels should be "in character." That's to say, it should be phrased with good spelling and proper punctuation, and should only refer to happenings within the WoW universe. In situations where one must say something out-of-character in these channels, it is polite to at least couch your OOC words in double parentheses to clarify your meaning.
The spammers new (old) methods
While poking around the World of Warcraft LJ, I couldn't help but notice that the spammers are back at it again, and apparently using some of the old tactics that they used to use. Well, tactics that they used to use before they figured out how to script spamming hundreds of people in a split second from a level one character. For those of you who either don't remember them, or who aren't familiar, I thought it might be best to relay the information. There are a couple of main tactics that they seem to have started employing since the new patch is squelching their ability to get to us. The first one involves random group or raid invites where the spammers invite a massive amount of people and just repeat the same text over and over in party or raid chat. While many people will not fall for this, these blind invites may prove problematic for those people who are using the LFG tool. The best suggestion I saw was to /who anyone who sends you an invitation to make sure that you aren't getting invites from level one characters.
"Now rezzing %t... stand back, this could get ugly."
Some people say "Liiiiiive agaiiiin!" Some people make jokes. Some people, as they're rezzing me, just say "Rezzing %t in 10 seconds" (useful, but boring). Invidiously over on LJ is looking around for a rezzing text macro. It's a little /say that you stick on the casting of a rez spell to let other people know they're about to come back to life.There's an art to writing stuff like that, really. A few mods do it automatically (I believe Castparty will send a /party chat for you, and Serenity is mentioned in the threat), but the best ones are homegrown and customized. Invidiously has some good answers to choose from: "%t, your subscription to Life has expired. Would you like to renew?", "Warriors now have a Feign death. It just requires a Priest reagent, right %t?", and "Now ressing %t. Please don't anyone else try because we could end up with half each, and that would just be awfully messy" (for the noobs, the "%t" in a macro just substitutes the target of your spell; in this case, the person you're rezzing).But some of the best text macros aren't even for rezzing-- tonight I had a mage in the party that cast Polymorph: Pig with the simple "Water into wine, enemies into swine." And warlocks go crazy whenever they summon people-- I've seen paragraphs of text coming from them, everything about who to call if this summon goes bad (a lawyer, obviously) to "Click on this portal to summon someone to do your job for you!" (that one comes from a mod, I believe, but not one I've used). Some warriors (I used to do this, in a previous MMORPG) even shout out a macro when they're pulling something, just to make sure the party is ready.For my characters, a normal "Sheeping %t..." or "Rezzing %t..." seems to work just fine-- it's quick, utilitarian, and to the point. But some people go all out, and I do chuckle when I see the good ones. What do you think-- waste of screen space or fun way to keep other players informed? And of course, what are the best ones you've seen?
Terminal Tips: Say
Have you ever wanted to have your Mac convert a document / news story into an audio file so that you can listen to it on your iPod, but didn't want to spend the money on a high cost program to do it? Well, it just so happens that OS X has a very powerful text to speech engine that is easily accessible via the command line. Simply launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/) and type say -f pathtotextfile -o ~/Desktop/convertedfile.aiff, substituting the path to the text file you want to convert for pathtotextfile and the name you want for the resulting audio file for convertedfile, and hit return. Your Mac will read the file into an AIFF audio file on your Desktop using the Default Voice and reading-speed settings you have set up in your Speech control panel in the System Preferences. It may take a while to write the file, as it reads in real time. Once it is done you will be returned to the shell prompt.
