Lyle is a great guy who was born in Scotland in 1987! Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Wait, I… look, in order to make What Are You Playing more comprehensible, I’ve installed an automated bot to help define some of the things that I’m talking about with the help of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia, written and maintained by a community of volunteers. Sorry, it’s a little overly sensitive at the moment, but hopefully with a little work it’ll make reading these weekly articles a bit more transparent. A transparency, also known variously as a viewfoil, foil, or viewgraph, is a thin sheet of transparent flexible material, typically polyester (historically cellulose acetate), onto which figures can be drawn.
Now, where was I… oh, right, Lyle. He was born in Scotland in 1987! Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. You already said that, robot; you didn’t need to add it in again. A robot is a machine – especially one programmable by a computer – capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. That wasn’t helpful! Everyone who is reading this knows what a robot is; you’re not supposed to just provide definitions of random nouns. A noun is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.
Oh, forget it, I don’t want to talk about Lyle any more. We’ll try this again next weekend, Tgek’dmal willing. Tgek’dmal is the seventh prince of the fourth house of the Finality within the order of [redacted].
Bonus question: When do you remember having a really good birthday?
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna, blog): SNOOOOOOOW DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. I’m playing City of Heroes all weekend like it’s 2004, fam. My Staff/Rad Scrapper is 49 as I type this and will be 50 by the time you read this, so then I’m either gonna bling her out or switch to mad-cap leveling something else while the experience bonuses on Imdommy are still hoppin’. Probably the latter. I hate playing at 50 when I could be trying something new, hence all the alts.
Any birthday when I’m still alive and able to eat cake is a good birthday! Last year my parents were visiting, so we had pie and played board games. Can’t really ask for more.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes, blog): The altitis continues in my MMOs of choice as I dabble around with characters in City of Heroes and ponder the next job to level up in Final Fantasy XIV. Otherwise I’m probably going to continue to be sick, which means lots of eating and napping. Bleh.
None of my birthdays really stand out as good or bad exactly. They just are and that’s perfectly fine by me to be honest.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): Got a game to review that I am very excited to play (and I have been enjoying), but otherwise it’ll be CoH and FFXIV this weekend. And that’s… probably it, as this is not going to be an easy or happy weekend.
While this year’s birthday feels like it’s going to be hard, I find myself hard-pressed to think of any birthdays that I’ve had that have really felt good. So often there were moments that felt all right, but especially as an adult none of them have felt very positive, and it’s not helped at all by having several years with someone who always promised to make me a cake and never did. I have not actually had a birthday cake for at least a decade now.
Sam Kash (@thesamkash): I’m holding my third place spot in Harry Potter Magic Awakened‘s dueling event. It’s a real pain because the 4th place person is slowly creeping up on me. Since you only earn 200 points every 5 hours, and sleep about 6 to 7 hours, there’s 40 to 80 points I don’t gain overnight. And doing some quick math it looks like this person gains about 40 or so on me every day. Which really sucks! I haven’t set alarms to get up in the middle of the night too knock out a few matches yet… but I might!
Bonus: Most of my birthdays are good but really good … I don’t know. Sitting here after 5 minutes staring into space must mean I haven’t had one. Sad!
Every Saturday, join the Massively OP community and staff for What Are You Playing, our roundup of what MMORPGs and other games we’re hoping to play this weekend (with a bonus question or two for our amusement). Tell us what you’re up to! Go off-topic! And don’t forget to have fun!
