Allamorph

Jason restored—and went immediately alert. For the first time in his life, he could feel nothing about his surroundings. His incoming environmental image made no sense. It wasn’t simply one or two informational oddities, or even a lack of existing data to interpret. The data itself defied interpretation. Which was impossible. A retrograde analysis of his passive sensory log indicated no hostile presence nearby—in fact, it indicated no presence of any kind whatsoever, anywhere in range—so Jason opened his eyes. The addition of visual input provided him little more than he had known already. He was in a … place, he decided to call it. He could see no identifying features through his entire field of vision. It was lit, at least, but there was no discernable light source. Nor were there any shadows, he noted, glancing down the length of his body. He tried to determine the kind of light he was seeing, but that, too defied analysis. The most he could conclude was that it seemed to be somewhere between off-white and a soft yellow, but the exact hue remained elusive. It wasn’t gaseous, he decided, as there were no detectable particulates in the atmosphere. If there even was an atmosphere at all. There was something, he knew, since he was still breathing normally, and all the appropriate chemical reactions were still occurring, but beyond the boundary of his body, any sense of air motion in the Place simply stopped. Annoyed, he abandoned the exercise. Maybe exploration would provide him with something useful. He sat up pitched forward hung down lifted “–augh.” The groan escaped him unbidden. An empty cough followed, threatening to become a gag, and he froze, forcibly controlling his breathing until his stomach stopped attempting somersaults. This was a new sensation. It had overwhelmed him in a fraction of a second, and it was unbearably unpleasant. He examined it for a long moment and realised with surprise that it was nausea. Motion-induced nausea. He was the first Nephilim to experience vertigo. Jason sighed. In keeping with the Place’s ubiquitous lack of everything else, he could detect no gravitational trends at all. He wasn’t weightless; or rather, he still felt heavy. But he couldn’t feel any direction to his weight, and combined with the absence of a fixed point of reference, he had no idea if he was standing, reclining, lying, suspended, inverted, sideways, tipped, twisting, rotating, spinning “Guh.” He turned off his gyro synapse. No more of that. Deciding for the moment to assume he initially had been vertical, Jason straightened and, pacing forwards, attempted an exploration of his surroundings. Almost at once, however, he was tempted to abandon the idea as futile, for the frustratingly ambiguous landscape lay unmarred and uniform in every direction. Only his ability to precisely track his footsteps lent Jason any sense of direction; otherwise he might have wandered the Place aimlessly for hours. This thought led Jason to the discovery of yet another oddity: his internal clock was faulted. It was still running, and a quick battery of diagnostic checksums returned true, but its outputs made even less sense than the Place in which he now found himself. Or, more accurately, it wasn’t outputting anything. It was executing exactly as scripted, but when it incremented, it simply … didn’t. It even registered the increment as successful, but the flagged data target wasn’t there. Jason checked the timestamps on his previous observations and found himself baffled even further. All of the markers passed checksum, but every single one decoded to garbage data. Which was impossible; data couldn’t be junk and still verified true. It was as if reality no longer supported the concept of time. Exasperated, Jason sighed again and tossed his arms. His hands flopped up and back down to smack against his legs, the clap echoing faintly behind him. He stopped. An echo? There had been no echoes before. There had been nothing for the sound to bounce off; he wasn’t even sure there had been an atmosphere to transmit the wave. Quirking his head, he snapped his fingers once. Sure enough, the snap returned: the faintest whisper of a click, barely even a few decibels, but loud against the prevailing silence. And with the time delay, he even had a precise distance. Intrigued, he turned to face it, and was met with…. …a rock. A boulder, judging by size and distance. Jason’s eyebrows scrunched together. That hadn’t been there. He was certain. He had surveyed every direction. Thoroughness was second nature to the Nephilim; even his blinks had been corrected by precisely localised muscle seizures. He had seen everything, everywhere, and his entire sphere of awareness had been uniform in its bewildering blandness. There wasn’t a way possible for him to have overlooked the rock; and yet there it was, defying what little reason this Place had left to it, and at a location that matched his aural calculations. He took a careful step towards it. It appeared to be a careful step closer. He took another step. A step closer again. Jason chewed on his tongue. The rock seemed to be an ordinary rock, and the fact that its adherence to normalcy conflicted so strongly with the inherent abnormality of the Place bothered him tremendously. He refused to let the staggering amount of nonsense get to him and, leaving the unresolved processes to hang in the background, set out for his newfound bastion of sanity. He covered the dozen and a half meters easily—although precisely what ground he was covering remained inscrutable—and, after rapping his knuckles against it, was pleased to find that it was, in fact, a real rock. A little over a meter tall and with a blocky, tri-leveled top, it appeared to have broken off from some larger face and fallen, partially burying itself in the nonexistent ground. A pass of his fingers and a quick data analysis determined the stone to be marble, and suggested it had lain here for a few years, judging by the weathering and assuming wherever it had come from possessed recognisable weather. (Jason decided the best approach was to assume anything real came from somewhere Not Here. The idea was still nonsense, but the degree of nonsense was welcomingly less.) And now that he was standing over it, he could see a second, smaller rock a couple of meters past it, also buried in the … whatever, and similarly weathered. Satisfied and relieved at his discovery, and having nothing better to do, Jason decided to experiment. The boulder had appeared when he wasn’t looking at it, and it had remained relative while his attention was fixed on it. What would happen if he stopped observing it? Ignoring the noise-solutions attempting to submit themselves, he strode around the marble block and past it, walking steadily and directly away from it and snapping his fingers sharply in precise one-second intervals. With each click, he listened for the corresponding report and matched the distance to his distance traveled, marking the rock’s location as he left it behind. He was almost two kilometers away, and the echoes so faint even his ears strained to hear them, when the data failed to sequence properly. His next snap didn’t echo. He turned around. Sure enough, the rock seemed to be gone. He magnified his vision so that it should have been clearly visible, but the result was the same: there was no longer anything in the Place but him. Jason nodded, shoving aside his disappointment at once more being the sole connection to reality. At least it had behaved somewhat reasonably. It was a start. He merely had to take things as they came, and more bits would fall into place. His spirit somewhat bolstered, he turned back to continue on. There was the rock. Not a different rock. The same rock, exactly the same distance away as when he had first seen it, but on the exact opposite side. Jason sucked his teeth.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is amazing and I want everyone to know. I may have someone you should get to know.

I am a master of tact.

That wallpaper is giving me flashbacks to Timmonsville, SC. Props to you for putting up with it. Also AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH TINY HUMANS

Hey, and welcome. As you can probably tell, there isn't a whole lot goes on on these boards any longer. Its heydey was about a decade ago now, and all the old active people have gone on to newer and brighter futures—but none as shiny or fun. Also I went ahead and merged your thread with the general intro thread.

This is what he should be apologizing for. Oh. My god. Ew.

That is incredibly precious. ...and gross. I mean, it's not their fault they look gross. That just comes with the territory. But it's definitely the most precious gross thing I've seen in a while. Or ... most gross precious thing? Most ... grossest preciousest thing? I'm really happy for you and I'm going to end the post now. Edit: Also two hundred people at a baby shower how even the crap

...oh. Oh that's really racist

Oh God, don't let him do that. I had a friend in the NUC pipeline who had to deal with those shenanigans. His parents came over from Vietnam, and when the licensing people asked his father what his name should be, and to cut a long and bumbling story short, they went with his dad's favorite drink: tea. So his father's English name is Tea Tran. They named their son (my friend) Timothy, so he'd fit in better in American schools, but realised almost immediately that that was a silly idea, so my buddy's siblings are named Teague Tran and Teagan Tran.

If you named them Goku and Vegeta, though, which one is the girl? I also spent the other night looking at twin names, but it was hard coming up with a good boy/girl pair. Most of them were either Kaoru/Hikaru or some version of the harem twins trope, and I don't want to set you up for failure lol. That, and I'm assuming Hansel/Gretel (Black Lagoon) is right out.... It's a conundrum.

We should start deciding baby names. It takes a villageboards, as they say....

All right, Beedle. Very well.

For what? For sharing your opinion? Was your opinion not a valid opinion before she echoed it? I fail to understand the jubilation.

Right, and I didn't mean to imply that you did. I just couldn't find another way to say I didn't think the game's popularity was amazing without a ridiculous amount of words. =P I absolutely agree that it's fascinating, but it's Pokémon. The game has never not been popular. And all those extras that got picked up? Those are your Candy Crush Saga people (you know, the homebodies who frown at the Kids Playing Their Gamestation but spend countless hours on silly match-3 games and Farmville knockoffs while lurking Facebook and liking every picture and comment their friends make), and your people bored on the public transit system, and your people who are just curious what the big attraction is. And given how common game discussions in the workplace are nowadays, and again adding in the sheer popularity of the game, the fact that there are publicly-organised events for critter-hunting and gym battling and such no longer strikes me as out of the ordinary. So, no, to me the massive reception and popularity aren't really that amazing. Even the stories of community outreach using the game as a springboard aren't amazing as much as they are just cool. Kind of the Faith In Humanity Restored, you know? Really just all-around neat. Really, the only thing that caught me totally off-guard was the random Valor/Mystic hate. I have no idea where that came from. I'm at a complete loss. Good to know. So it's definitely that the game requires more than the platforms are capable of sustaining for the amount of time the game is intended to be played. I think most of it is just the constant geo-positioning queries between the game, the phone, and the nearby cell towers. I've noticed that those updates happen fairly frequently, which makes me wonder if Niantic is making their servers decide when a player sees a new critter, instead of letting the game software make that decision locally. A possible solution would be to have the software load a larger map area and leave it static for a longer time period (say, five to ten minutes, or after a player has traveled 75% of the distance between their previous query point and the map edge), with a slightly increased creature density or spawn rate to allow highly active players to catch stuff without running out. Granted, it might make the game a little larger on the device, but I think our slabphones can handle the memory storage demand. It's not like we're still stuck thinking 125MB is a lot of RAM. Well. That's goofy. There are Growlithe somewhere around me, but never in the same spot and never reliable. I needs dem.

I also like the concept, and would love the game if it had been executed properly. I do have to disagree with you, though. Pokémon Go isn't Niantic's first foray into the Augmented Reality gaming world, or even the mobile world at all. They knowingly took on converting one of the most popular, iconic games in modern history, one with a nigh-cult following, to a mobile platform. If they had tried to build the entire game from scratch, I'd understand a bit more, but they used their initial AR game Ingress as a model for Go—which is an intelligent decision, really, since doing so meant they should have had a fair amount of the software bugs already eliminated, and all they'd have to account for was the massive demand on their systems that running a game with the Pokémon name was bound to bring. With that in mind, the fact that their servers are being continually DDoSed by their own player base is incomprehensible to me. Maybe once or twice a day during peak hours, depending on the region, sure. But not continuously. Niantic already knows how often their game will send requests to their hardware, and should have been able to estimate the incoming demand, based off of that hard number, a rough concept of what a normal time period of playthrough will entail, and the potential player base. On top of that, Forbes has already berated Niantic (and Nintendo as the parent company) for what has amounted to an almost complete communication blackout from the companies to the players: As much as I like the game and want to continue playing it when possible, I can't in good conscience say that Niantic has done a good job with this game. Certainly nearly worldwide releases are impressive; but, then again, with a mobile game based on a globally-renowned franchise, the scope of their releases isn't so much amazing as it is ... expected, if I'm going to be honest. It certainly doesn't counter the rampant access and gameplay issues Pokémon Go has experienced since launch. To get off their case a little bit, I have a couple of other comments. When I can get reliable access to the game, I find the most limiting factors for me are battery life and heat generation, both of which are hardware issues. I'm currently using a Samsung Galaxy S4. Nothing brand-spanking-new or currently top-of-the-line, so I would love to hear some feedback from people with both similar, older, and newer devices. Comments: Battery Life – When I have the game open and active, I lose about 1% of my current charge per minute; the discharge rate is faster if I have other apps running, such as Amazon Cloud Music or Pandora, or if I'm in a call. As stated above, my phone isn't new (in fact it's two years old and was being replaced by the S5 when I bought it), so I have no illusions that my battery is mint condition. The only remark here is that the game places almost a tenfold increase in strain on the battery, so expect to have to recharge frequently when you're out and about.Internal Heat – Hand-in-hand with increased charge usage is increase heat generation. I frequently get notices that my device is cooling down, and a couple of times the phone has actually closed my apps for me in an effort to cool off. When I'm in a car, I can solve this by holding my phone directly over the AC vent (also DO NOT PLAY POKÉMON GO WHILE DRIVING), but when I'm just walking around I either have to kill the game or ... well, basically I have to kill the game.Again, both of these comments are personal device issues, and not directed at Niantic. They have no control over what hardware their player base is using, so they can't be held accountable for it. I'd very much like to see how the game plays on a brand new top Samsung model, though, for a good comparison, or even a brand new S4 (or at least one with a brand new battery). Positive comments: I very much like the egg system. I know several previously sedentary people who go on regular, extended walks now solely to hatch eggs, and I also know of an animal shelter that began offering its dogs for rent for people who wanted to have a reason to walk around besides hatching/catching critters. Said shelter ended up placing all of their dogs in homes, due to both the word-of-mouth from basically having walking adverts for their shelter and the dog renters suddenly realising they wanted to keep the dog they had, and had to start getting dogs sent in from other shelters to fill the demand. (Which, let's be honest, is just ******* cool.)I feel pretty good about the PokéStops. I'm curious how Niantic went about deciding on what to make into a stop and what to exclude from the list. I've seen anything from a mattress resale store, to a city park, to a boarded-up skating rink, to a bus stop bench simply labelled "concrete art". In one town, the downtown shopping area is a Stop-palooza, and in the next one over there's a complete dearth of anything at all, except for the aforementioned skating rink and a biker tavern—which, the image of school-age children walking into a pub full of leather-clad biker gangs while chasing after a Diglett is unbelievably silly.There are a bunch of male and female Nidoran around where I live, which makes me quite happy, since the NidoRoyalty are two of my favorite Gen1 evolutions. Just gotta get out and get 125 of each candy, man.So far as I've seen, there are zero critters on any of the Naval bases out here. Some people might be miffed about that, but I respect Niantic's decision (I'm assuming they made that decision) to keep military installations exempt from the fun and games. There have been several alerts put out around the bases up here for us to be vigilant about people trying to access secure areas while chasing critters, but since there aren't any on base, the temptation to trespass has been removed. That's good, from both a security headache angle and a people-are-less-likely-to-shoot-me-for-being-where-I'm-not-supposed-to-be angle.I don't like only being able to turn off AR from the capture screen. The software is nifty, though.This post is now very long, so I'll stop for a bit.