User blog:Hashimashadoo/An Update and a Commentary

Hello all. I've been writing edit summaries for my larger edits over the last couple of months complaining about how difficult making edits is with a tablet device. This is because, currently, a tablet is my only resource for making any. I used to use my local library to make edits but at some point in the past...six months I think, Wikia has made the page editor impossible to load on Internet Explorer 6 - a browser my local library refuses to upgrade from.

Editing on a tablet makes it practically impossible to copy/paste text meaning I have to type out everything myself and as I mentioned in an earlier post, my long absences have meant that I've forgotten a lot of the templates, etc. that I used to know off by heart and therefore have to keep referring to other pages that contain the templates I want to use. This presents another problem - time consumption.

The mobile version of Chrome the tablet uses reloads a tab every time you switch between them. I find that the Wikia software is frequently slow at what I, as a British person would consider peak times (presumably because in the States, that time is first thing in the morning and they figure it's the least intrusive time to perform maintenance). Now, I have to share this tablet with two other people so I can't hog it and common courtesy demands that I not let the battery drain below 20% (something that doesn't take all that long to do considering the battery drain that connection to a wireless router causes). This wouldn't be an issue if I had access to the charger but I don't. So when I get on I have to rush to get anything done even if I have an hour or so to work. With the aforementioned copy/paste problem this can cause a 2 minute editing task to instead last half an hour.

Not only that but unless I have the tablet in portrait mode (which presents several formatting challenges itself) the keyboard will cut off the bottom line of the editor and it also has the odd habit of freezing the cursor in place after deleting preexisting words in text fields, requiring a reload of the page to fix. Unless I'm paying very close attention, this can ruin an entire page and make it necessary to start from scratch. Occasionally, it will also delete all information entered into a field if you switch tabs. Periods of insensitivity or oversensitivity with the touchscreen also cause issues.

Now, I know, when it comes to in-text citations I can be very annoying for not making them. Often, this is because of time constraints - I tend to believe adding content is more important than sourcing it if it's a choice between one and the other (as long as it comes from a trusted editor, not an unregistered one or a first-timer for example). This is especially true in my year articles. I have compiled all of the year information that I've found which didn't make it into the Grand History into an 80-page Word file. The centralised location for all that lore is great but I didn't source every entry and so if I were to source an entry taken from that file, I'd need to re-research it first.

As for my adventures in DMing, I have two Pathfinder games going at the moment. Both are full of players new to the game and are therefore set in Golarion as I'm trying to avoid bombarding my players with lore (which frequently happens in my FR games) in lieu of actually teaching them how to play - an issue especially important for one player as he's taking what I'm teaching him and passing it on to his children (who wouldn't have the attention span for the level of detail I like). Everybody is having a lot of fun with my pirate-themed game which is based on the Skull & Shackles AP. The other game is only just restarting after a hiatus caused by a falling out with the person who'd drive me to the game back in November. In my neck of the woods, public transport is atrocious and I don't drive so being on good terms with someone who can drive is essential.