I wanted to send a follow-up to my letter about '-ize' words. It pays to keep your high school grammar textbook handy! When 'except' is a preposition, as it is in your example, it takes an object - 'me.' When except is a conjunction - as in, 'except I didn't want to' - it's followed by the subject of a new clause. How can I determine which is correct? 'Everyone has read the book except me.' 'Everyone has read the book except I.'Ī. You could also call it giving a legal headache to the squads of lawyers charged with guarding trademarks. You could call it making a proper noun (a capitalized name) into a common noun (a lowercase word for an object). This word is a delightful bit of etymological trivia, but most English speakers have never heard of it.

She defines it as 'the practice, abhorred by lawyers, of using a trademark (like Kleenex or Xerox) as a generic term,' noting that the word's Greek roots mean 'against' and 'to name.' Chicago-based lexicographer Erin McKean includes the word 'antonomasia' in her eclectic collection 'More Weird and Wonderful Words' (Oxford University Press, $16.95). It might be 'realistic', but keep in mind that you are trying to entertain people here and useless timesinks tend to do the opposite of entertain.A. Casual games are often expected to have less in the way of time sinks, and hardcore games to have more, though this is not a hard and fast rule.Ī good timesink has you interacting with the game on some level, earning some level of enjoyment or moving the story along. What is considered a good balance depends in part on the type of game in question. The Canadian government has pegged the social cost of carbon at 50 a tonne in 2019 dollars, using what it says is a monetary measure of the global damage expected from an additional tonne of. A number of criteria can be used to evaluate use of time sinks, such as frequency, length, and variety (both of the nature of the time sink and the actions taken to overcome it). However, if not enough time sinks are implemented, players may feel the game is too short or too easy, causing them to abandon the game much sooner out of boredom. El tiempo pasa rápido cuando se es mayor. If you are left to sink or swim, you are given no help so that you succeed or fail completely by your own efforts: My employer gave me no help when I started my new job - I was just left to sink or swim. Excessive use of time sinks may cause players to stop playing. time n (concept) (concepto) tiempo nm : Time passes quickly when you are older. Implementing time sinks in a video game is a delicate balancing act. Time sinks are often associated with hardcore games, though whether this is a positive or negative association depends on the context. Game designers must be prudent in balancing efforts to produce both involving gameplay and the length of content that players expect. In most games, boring and lengthy parts of gameplay are merely an annoyance, but when used in subscription-based MMORPGs, where players are paying recurring fees for access to the game, they become a much more inflammatory issue. For example, one Slashdot article describes time sinks as 'gameplay traps intended to waste your time and keep you playing longer'. Time sink bears an indefinite article and is normally understood as a single, definable act or imposition that detracts from efforts to finish the job.

Many players consider time sinks to be an inherently poor design decision, only included so that game companies can increase profits. The phrase reminds us, in Franklinesque fashion, that we may have sunk time as well as sunk costs. The video game is a notorious time sink, with players often spending hundreds of hours. Time sinks can also be used for other gameplay reasons, such as to help regenerate resources or monsters in the game world. Some task, activity, or endeavor that consumes a lot of ones time. Players may use the term disparagingly to describe a simplistic and time-consuming aspect of gameplay, possibly designed to keep players playing longer without significant benefit. This means just what it sounds like - try, or use, or carry off everything you see, except the kitchen sink. ISOdatetime: Date-time Conversion Functions from Numeric Representations isR: Are we. There is an expression - Everything but the kitchen sink. In massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), time sinks are a method of increasing the time needed by players to do certain tasks, hopefully causing them to subscribe for longer periods of time. sink diverts R output to a connection (and stops such diversions).

Time sink phrase