Tag Archives: game manuals

Internetese as a Second Language

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I was checking out the World of Warcraft Forum for Absolute Beginners, Welcome to WoW, because noobs are always chuckle-worthy. There’s a sticky post of WoW Lingo translations — you’ll know all of those — but I noticed that the most famous internet acronym of all isn’t included.

You know the one … W T F.

A gaming nubling would see WTF about 23,904 times per gaming session, they NEED to know what we’re screaming at them!

And that reminded me of a real life story.

Some family holiday, maybe was Thanksgiving, dunno, but my extended family was in full force … brother, sister, their spouses, children, their in-laws and their children … and we get to talking about the venacular of txt messaging and the internet. My sibling’s sister-in-law asked what “p-own” means. (Actually, “pwn”, but she had only heard it, never seen it in print.)

My nephew (level 62 druid on another server because I don’t want him witnessing any Uncle Foton hate in the general chat channels) and I started laughing and explained what pwning is and how much we, personally, pwn. We would have further explained how much we’d pwn her if she ever dared step inside Warcraft, but she asked about other acronyms and we answered. (Don’t worry, we didn’t give away all the internet secrets.)

Let me briefly pause to explain that this woman has been a thorn in my side since the day I met her. I barely acknowledge her existence, and she mine, ever since a family tussle that we now refer to as “That First Communion Incident”. Now, I never miss an opportunity to passive-aggressively torment her. And it’s remarkably easy to do.

Anyways, she started going on about gaming and how borderline satanic, evil it is (y’know, blow me) with its speaking in tongues and all, and then she fake apologized for asking all those questions.

“No prob”, said me, “as long as you don’t ask what W T F is.”

My nephew snorted soda out of his nose.

“W T F?” asked she. (Didn’t I just tell her not to ask?)

I leaned in conspiratorially, “What. The. Fuck.” and took my leave.

Asked and answered, baby, asked and answered.

I can hardly wait ’til she asks about “mofo”.

How to Juice Your Game Screenshots, Part II

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Yesterday, I went over how to use Photoshop and other advanced image editors to juice up your game screenshots to brilliant, enviable images. (Part I) The same can be accomplished with intermediate-level editors too, although not as quickly.

The four steps of my quick juice job are: Correct the color, adjust brightness, boost the contrast, and sharpen.

Here again is the unaltered screenshot from World of Warcraft’s Blade’s Edge Mountains, our starting point:

Painful Deaths (unaltered)

Almost every editor, including the freebies, has an Auto Correct Color or some such function. Usually, the auto color correction is too harsh for game shots and with a lot of the freebies, there’s no adjustment slider or option to to take away some of the correction … ala Photoshop’s opacity slider. Trial and error, aka Edit » Undo, will be your friend here.

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How to Juice Your Game Screenshots, Part I

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If your game screenshots aren’t everything you’d want them to be — brilliant and sharp — I’m going to share a few tweaks on how to juice them up.

I use Photoshop, but the tweaks are easily translated to almost any other intermediate or advanced image editing software. I’ll explain exactly what my adjustments do so you can hunt around in your chosen program to do the same.

A caveat: Photoshop and other advanced editors (e.g. Paint Shop Pro) allow the use of layers to perform image adjustments. You can play around with your adjustments to get a desired effect and if worse comes to worse, you can delete the layer and try again. This isn’t possible with most intermediate-type editors (e.g. IrfanView). If you’re using an editor without layer-capability, try out your adjustments incrementally and Edit » Undo adjustments that don’t work well.

We’ll talk about IrfanView and other intermediate editors tomorrow, Photoshop/advanced editors today.

Here’s an example to work with, from World of Warcraft’s Blade’s Edge Mountains, a couple of dragonkin met their untimely deaths on the side of the mountain.

Painful Deaths (unaltered)

And here’s the juiced version of the same shot, after I applied my usual Photoshop adjustments.

Painful Deaths

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