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"Otherwheres" by Lake of Tears

Much thanks for yet another good Mittens, with special thanks to organizers and drivers!!

I had planned to buy y'all a round, as apology for wasting time and money on the car rental; since we never got out to a pub, I had to settle for a batch o' "Cold Begone" back home instead (The recipe of which is: 1 tsp of brown sugar, 3 freedoms of pear/apple cognac and 1,5 dl of holy water*.)

Great personal memories from this years installment include, but are not limited to:

• Making an involuntary blood sacrifice in the ruins of a Norse pagan temple
• Being snuck up on by the North Atlantic Ocean
• Learning to enjoy FMV games
• Being pleasantly surprised by buttsex

I also managed to spend ALL of (mine and other's) remaining coins at the airport, down to a single Icelandic crown! There was a large jar by the shops that allowed you to donate Icelandic currency to charity before departure, which frankly is a great idea - petition your nation's airports today!

*you boil the hell out of it

No, the bank has decided to be fuck me over. My initial application was turned down, so I asked them to confirm my savings and reconsider the application. Not a word, so I hunted them down by phone today, only to be told that they haven't even touched my ticket. I'm fucking livid.

Tamara can do the booking. You may put me up as an extra driver, so we at least can share the driving duty. PM or messenger me if you need additional personal information. I can cover the cost of an additional driver myself. Feel free to shop around for better deals as well, the rental price at Budget has ballooned during this pointless, miserable fucking delay.

Still awaiting confirmation that I've been approved for credit. It's true that you don't need to give card details until pick-up, but I'd rather know for sure I'll be having one before booking. (I freelance so I have a wonky income flow, yet a fair amount of savings, so I hope the bank are rational about it. On the other hand, there's been a mid-week holiday in Sweden, perhaps they just haven't got around to it yet. Annoying none the less.)

SADly, they had no 8+-seaters...

I've talked with my bank and will apply for credit instead of messing around with debit workarounds. Budget looks good, I'll most likely apply for the second smallest, a "VW Polo or similar" at â,¬309 (34 200 ISK), which gives is a bit of leg room, luggage space an additional inch of reinforced steel between our fleshy shells and whatever may stray into the road*. Scandinavia is stick-shift country, so nemas problemas Manuél for me.

In conclusion, I will book the following as soon as possible:
- A group "N" car from "Budget" at Keflavik Airport
- From the 15th of July 11:00 to the 22nd of July 11:00.
- At an estimated cost of â,¬309

*There's fuck all in regards to trees and large wildlife, so my main concern is other vehicles and elves.

The money is not the issue as much as where it's kept. Still, it appears as most vendors require a credit rather than debit card upon retrieval. I'll look into attaching credit to my card to see if it is worth the hassle visavi the hassle of NOT having it... In the meantime, SADCars offers a â,¬370 Toyota Yaris rental with debit card but:

• You must buy the insurance bundle of â,¬28/day (â,¬196) - which I'm fine with, I'm not keen on replacing rock-shot windshields and whatnot.
• You deposit â,¬1000 (refundable) - which is much less worrisome to have sitting on your debit account.
• You pay â,¬50 (non-refundable) - kinda annoying, so I'll weigh it against the banks fees for a year of attached credit.

They also have a 9-seater in their fleet, but it didn't show up in my quotes, so I'm mailing to see if it's available at the 15th to 22nd.

Car rental is fairly expensive overall in Europe, mainly because regulations require recently released rides (alliteration a-hoy!); hence my like of Rent-a-wreck here in Sweden, they're perfectly good cars, around 5-10 years on the road, and much more affordable.

WOW have a bad rep here, probably equivalent to Ryanair and their ilk. There's of course a bias towards negative reviews since happy/content consumers rarely voice their opinion. The main issue seems to be that if anything DOES go wrong, like a delay with missed connections, damage or lost luggage etc., you'll have to bitch and hassle with an outsourced customer service that just dgaf. Amusingly enough, our organization for customer protection (Råd & Rön) has a "black list" of companies in different sectors that advice you against using Icelandair but not WOW - the former refused to reimburse a lost tent, claiming it was packed inappropriately. Make of that what you will

$260 is an excellent fee for a week. Almost suspiciously low. Either way, it appears to have been booked full at the moment of writing We've got 4-5 seaters from â,¬410-460. I looked through the rental agreements for Firefly and Greenmotion. Both offer unrestricted distance with full-out full-in fuel policy, all good. There's a deposit of â,¬2200-2500 upon retrieval, though, which is fully reimbursable of course, but reeeaaally effin' hefty. I'll mail a couple of rental firms to ask how this works in practice. It's all and well if you use a credit card, but I'm not entirely comfortable waltzing around with â,¬2000+ on my debit card

Been checking up on the car rental. There's a couple of brands that offer 8- and 9-seater vehicles, but the fee matches two smaller 4- or 5-seaters, so we might as well go for two and the additional mobility. I found no good offers along with my air fare, so I can post a couple of rental suggestions in this thread. I initially thought about going with Rent-a-wreck, since I've had perfectly good experience with the franchise back home, but an emailed query return an answer with a redirection URL of www.wowcarrental.is - and since WOW is regarded as a shite company overall, I feel less inclined to try that rental service; I really don't want to hassle with a non-existent customer rep if something goes south

EDIT: Me and Yamipanda will arrive at 09:10 local time on the 15th.

I haven't bought my airfare yet, so I'll be sure to look for promising combos of flight and car-rental. If not, I'll just book a car separately.

If available, we'll still go with two 5-seaters instead of one 9-seater, correct?

...yes. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Yup.

In honesty, I never re-calibrated my inner calendar from Snarky's initial suggestion. An understandable mistake to be sure, could've happen to anyone, it's not like the correct dates ARE PRESENT IN THE SUBJECT LINE OF THIS VERY THREAD.

Even though the works of Lovecraft is in the public domain, the name "Masks of Nyarlathotep" is probably a registered trademark so Chaosium must enforce it. But don't sweat it BESTIEunlmt, you should DEFINITELY rewrite story and characters into your own thing - use what's been done thus far as the stepping stone into something new. Reinventing and retooling the mythos is a time-honored tradition by writers and designers alike - it was made to be an ever-changing web of occult reference and correspondence that simply cannot be charted, collected and ultimately understood. As mentioned above, an adventure game is different from a tabletop roleplaying campaign. Someone complimented your puzzles earlier in this thread, and those are all of your design. Adventure game puzzles can't really be used in tabletop roleplaying: you must allow for any character to solve your problem "Gordian knot"-style; a locked door may be surpassed by a key but lock-picks should do as well, and so should a well-placed kick.

I get that you are disappointed in people you respect and admire, but their hands might very well be forced by the intricacies of copyright law. Let it rest for a while, catch a couple of movies or partake in an ol' fashioned dungeon crawl - revisit this project later with well-rested eyes and a well-rested mind. Ask a mod to move this thread to "AGS Games in Production" and I will eagerly await its triumphant return to "Completed Game Announcements" - a little less "Masks of Nyarlathotep" to be sure, but a whole lot more BESTIEunlmt!

Unless there's a large influx of Mitteneres that plan to arrive late at night on Sunday the 16th, I and Yamipanda* will arrive around 15:30 on Sunday at Keflavik.

*which of course is enslaved by blasphemous magick and follow my every logistical whim, be it by road, air or sea (but not across running water or out of Swindon by car, which I'm told to believe is beyond the ken of any mortal man, woman or sentient polyp...)

edit: so I've just learned these guys are infringing Chaosium's Masks of Nyarlathotep copyright and are boasting with it "-With a story 'stolen' from Chaosium". That's illegal, guys. This thread should be locked/deleted and their link too.

They wouldn't be the first to make a fan-game out of an existing property. To be fair, The Masks of Nyarlathotep is a tabletop roleplaying campaign, and using the story straight out could very well spoil the campaign. But it doesn't appear to use artwork from the tabletop release, nor Chaosium related logotypes or pictograms. I don't know if text has been lifted from within the books, if that is the case, it would be a much more damning case. As it stands, I find it rather harmless. I can agree that "with a story stolen from Chaosium" is in bad taste, but we don't condemn fan-projects offered for free right out'a the gate, do we?

And isn't it amazing that I'm taking all these risks for the sake of your entertainment?

No need to be sassy, now. The download is disabled by the author on the AGS archives, btw.

I'm not sure what a tech-subforum is but if it helps someone resolve the error, here is a screenshot of the problem.

Yup, it's scripting alright. The tech sub-forums are found under "AGS support" here. But you need not worry about that, the dev'll need to use the information posted to debug the script him-/herself. (Looks like Null was passed as an argument against an array.)

The download have been removed. A pity, this looks really interesting! File sharing sites are probably unwilling to host a file for perpetual download, preferring their files to be uploaded by a unique user and downloaded by just a couple of unique users. If you have problem finding a suitable host, there's a couple of ways you could try.

- I haven't tried Game Jolt, but it appears pretty lenient for hobbyists to distribute their freeware: https://gamejolt.com/
- Torrents are not merely for piracy! If your machine is on anyway, why not seed your game straight from disk. As more users get (and host!) the data, the average bitrate increases manifold. Torrent downloads are used to distribute Linux distros, among other things.
- Google Drive is lenient with storage and publicly accessed files. It might even be indexed for search results. (I dunno about Dropbox, I think they have a much smaller server infrastructure to work with, affecting download times negatively. But I'm just speculating.)
- Perhaps another member of the community have server space to spare? Make your query in the appropriate sub-forum and see if anyone may help you out. You may share the file through one of these file sending services, since it'll only be a single unique download by them, and they'll upload it to a proper server for public distribution.

Shadow: I assume the dev can't replicate the crash. Do you get a print-out of the scripting error? Try posting it at one of the tech-subforums, just to make sure it's related to the actual script and not unique to your machine.

I'm not sure, but the entirety of Iceland might be an hour's drive from Reykjavik

Renting a van might be a good idea overall. There appears to be a Rent-a-wreck at Keflavik. I've got good experience from the franchise home in Falun, Sweden. Perfectly sound cars of an older make, because rentals cycle their vehicles ridiculously often. They didn't appear to have a 9-seater, though Also, there's a couple of things to consider if one would drive into the highlands, but I doubt we'd want to venture there without a guide or thorough planning anyway.

I've got a driver license. Who else are eligible?

I'm available at the dates mentioned, but need to renew my passport. It shouldn't be a problem, I've got three months until due for travel.

Been looking through the possibility of taking a ferry from Norway or Denmark, but it's proven difficult. As sad as it seems, air travel appear not only faster, but easier and cheaper all around

Can't make heads or tails of AGA's estimates. The second link appears cheaper, not more expensive ($445 and $333 daily respectively). Disco's confused me at first, but it had a couple of hidden fees buried in the details. As for choice of location, I guess that anything but within walking distance of RVK will be Andail's cottage level of isolation with Nordic levels of public transportation. I dug up this treat that might aid our selection of locale: http://www.publictransport.is/

I've wanted to visit Iceland for a very long time. Nothing like a good excuse to pull the thumb out of my idea-repository.

But I guess we must just admit that AGS does not support Linux. ...

Would the "official" unofficial stance be 'better run it with Wine' instead of 'run it natively with the Linux port'? (I'm not speaking as a dev but as a user.)

(This is a rollcall in regards to a workgroup within the Swedish organisation Sverok (http://www.sverok.se/english/) to swedish-speaking members of the AGS community. These forums was used because I could quickly reach a large selection of people that 1) have experience of game development and 2) have experience of a genre of games relient on narration and theme rather than arcade gameplay. Feel free to ask me questions, in the thread or through PM, but actual participation requires you have a thorough knowledge of the Swedish language, unfortunately.)

Kulturrådet är en arbetsgrupp i Sverok som jag agerar sammankallande för. Gruppen skapades för ett par år sedan och syftet var att utreda hur Sverok kan arbeta för att främja spelkultur. (Vi snackar alltså spel som kulturyttring, inte som det sociala klimatet i relation till spelande.) Vi har i huvudsak två uppgifter: som tankesmedja utarbetar vi egna förslag; som utskott mottar och bearbetar vi specifika frågeställningar. Arbetet rör de flesta former av spel, digitala likväl som analoga - och vi vill rekrytera nya rådsmedlemmar.

Vill du veta mer eller anmäla ditt intresse? Mejla kulturradet snabel-a sverok punkt se. Det går också bra att ställa frågor här i tråden

I'll be there. I've bought my train tickets already, so changes in length would be a tiny inconvenience, but I would've cut Mittens short by a day anyway since I'll attend a wedding at the 6th.