Calax

Spent the evening being harassed by 15 year old girls (as mentioned before), met my cousin from the Congo, went to bed at 5pm and woke up at 7am. It is really weird to have three girls stare at you, two write on notes that they pass, read, then giggle, stare repeat...

So you can't sell them back once they're used. You pretty much can't sell any PC games used these days. The Steam only games are sold in retail boxes to make you realize that you should have bought it on Steam in the first place, kind of an encouragement. Well, they do that unless you've got a discount right off the bat *smurfy smile* I personally am a proponent of steam because not only does it let you have a digital inventory of your games and stupidly good deals (60% off Mass Effect 2 last week) but they also intigrated the social aspect of gaming into the system that allows you to pull up an overlay and chat with people when you're waiting for something to happen. And annoy the crap out of Dereladin by spamming him L4D invites along with 7 other people.

Given the 1500 page thread on their forums that appeard within 3 days, I kinda expected they'd drop it.

Uh, in answer to both: An idiot? :D Well, today is the day where we have the huge party (114 people) followed by a slightly smaller part back here at the house (about 40 people... I don't know where they'll put all the diners). The oddest part for me of all this is being the 4th youngest (two cousins and a girlfriend of one of the two cousins) at the party with only two other people within 5 years of me beyond that it'll probably be old codgers talking about long winded stories (which my grandfather has turned into unfortunatly... no I'm not kidding, he launched off into a story about how he almost failed the 4th grade and got most improved for the year because he managed to get back up to passing grades last night). Oh, and the girlfriend? Apparently she's got a crush on me that my aunt had FANTASTIC fun needling me about when they first told me (a year ago now), and that "hey, you've got a wife if you wait 4 years!" >.< Although to hear Tom (my cousin who's junior to me, and his sister Emily is the youngest of us cousins) tell it, this girl apparently crushes on ANYONE who is male so *shrugs* still feels a bit awkward. Also ventured into the bedroom my parents use when they're here (always), and found several pictures of my great grandfather (who used to own this house before he died) during his WWI time. Well, not him exactly, more like his unit (the 313th Arty). In the past we've dug through ancient pictures and found one of him when he was my age (at the time, still a teen), and apparently I'm growing up in his spitting image. Not entirely sure I want that. Gah, I should just get a frigging blog to post all this on.

Yesterday: Spent the day flying from SMF to Islip airport on Long Island and got to my grandparents house. Never really thought about how old this place is but it's pushing well past the 100 mark. 20 years ago they did a remodel/expansion on it doubling it's size and adding a new garage because my great grandfather couldn't get around the house from upstairs any more. It's hot and humid, hot I"m used to, humid I'm not, but right now I'm inside and playing shepard/chauffer to my grandmother (who's half blind so everyone's scared about her driving. I'm probably gonna be the one who takes her anywhere if she needs to go alone or with me and my cousins, while I'm here). Gonna be here for a few days and tommarow will be the first time where the extended family on this side is all in one place for about 20 years. I've got a cousin flying in from the Congo (where he delivered Mosquito nets) tommarow morning so things will be intersting (we're having a party for my grandparents 60th wedding anniversary which is driving their daughters nuts trying to organize). Overall this is an interesting and depressing trip. Interesting because people are actually acting like I'm an adult who's taking care (for the most part) of himself, and depressing because I'm realizing just how old my parents and aunts are, as well as my grandparents. And on top of all this one of my aunts (The youngest one) has breast cancer and is going through Chemo... I'm not sure if I want to see her so I can remember her when she was healthy rather than without hair and tired etc. Her kids are in good spirits but *shrugs* I'm not sure she'll survive much longer than 5 years (which she has an 80% chance to hit that point according to her doctor. I'm always amazed to be out here simply because of the history/family. The house I'm in I kinda glossed over previously but my grandfather grew up here and tells us stories about having to walk to the first school in the area when he was 6. You know the one room schoolhouse? That was him. And then there's the oyster business that they used to own that still carries their name, along with like a dozen other charities (the family is kind of a troupe of philanthropists), and I think an oyster harvesting equipment is named after my great grandfather (who's dead) becuase he's the one with the patent on it. Hell, I once found a civil war sabre in the bacement here when I was 8. Ah well, I'll stop boring you and run of to find something to do.

*waits for the inevitable rage spewing machine that is the internet vs kotick*

Big thing about that is that it eliminates the Real-ID functionality within the game, but also denies posting on the new boards (blizzard has said as much). So basically it does nothing except force a choice on you via a different manner. According to a friend, the Starcraft 2 beta now has friend number strings rather than Real-ID so they may be backing off of this in general.

Exactly. It's up to each person to protect their own privacy. This much should be obvious, no? *WOOOSH* So, that makes two names. If I'm doing my math right, then according to you, 2 = ∞, right? Nope, but so far 2 people posted their real names on Blizz forums... so 2 out of 2 is 100% success of abusement Now do your math One of the community relations department said that all of the blizz posters will be using their real names.

That's taken from one of the lead developers on City Of Heroes/Villians.

I think that blizzard may end up recinding this change given the publicity and the stupidly large amounts of negative reactions to it. http://kotaku.com/5581209/blizzards-real-n...ns-in-an-uproar I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, This is the Internet. Facebook and Myspace etc let you CHOOSE to release your name (and most people do) which helps when you're showing off your pictures etc. However, WoW's forums are not a location where you want real life to interfere with what is (ultimately) an escapist activity. You don't want to go onto your realms forums and see your boss crying out because your character stole something from him in the game, and (as has been pointed out in the gigantic thread on their boards) if people post on the forums, then they open themselves up to prospective employers saying "We won't hire you because of your online habits." I understand their original intent for this, but removing the "wretches" when you could just ban their account from the forums for constant trolling (but not the game) by forcing people to release what many consider to be personal information on the internet and thus open themselves up to real life consequences for playing something that has such negative stigma is not the way to go. IMO blizzard has basically just singlehandedly killed their forums, and probably angered the ESRB a TINY bit given the amount of complaints they're receiving at this point.

From the Euro forums we have a string of blue posts that give a LOT more info than the ones in the US forums http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/13816838128...-forum-changes/ That just links to the developers posts, you can get to the actual thread there, but I'm not sure you want to sift through that many pages of stuff to find anything good

uh, a while ago now... that said, I should check the "blue tracker" to see if they've responded anymore

Thing is if you need tech or customer support that a GM in game can't handle, they say "go to the official boards" so that the tech crew can work on it, meaning that if you want GOOD tech support you HAVE to let your name be seen.

When you first sign up for an account it asks you for a name. Most people put in their real ones just in case they needed to talk to blizzard for whatever reason and didn't want to be "Twatty mcTardhatch". Now people have been grumping but were generally ok with the Real id initially because only those whow were within your friend circle could see it (like facebook) but with this change EVERYONE can see it, including the infamous forum trolls and those nutjobs who hunt you down and kill you for reference on "hunt you down and kill you":http://www.digitalbattle.com/2008/01/20/lineage-2-kill-leads-to-real-life-death/

Ok, this is BS... I'm guessing the official WoW boards are up in arms about it (they've been up in arms about the whole "real id is your name" stuff rather than letting you pick a handle). Particularly given that stalking is a pasttime over there

Actually the Project Origin thing was mainly due to how the rights were handled. Monolith had the rights to the world and characters, Their publishers had the rights to the FEAR name. Also, MOST of your sales on a game are going to be within the first month. Sometimes there's a bit of a sleeper hit where a game sticks around for a while selling new copies for LONG after it's been produced, or becomes a bit of an underground hit like Deus Ex where it isn't really picked up by the mainstream but the geek culture becomes "IT WAS AWESOME!" in 3 years.

There was nothing random about it. You were press ganged into joining after someone on my team left. Only last night, there have been more times in the past month that we've been teamed together than in the previous 3... I'll give you that, but only because I can't remember beyond the last session except for the big moments. Like the double takedown at the sewer in the third level of Parish. You mean when I charged somebody to right where Brue had somebody else in his smoker? Still, Tank pwns Boomer was the funniest thing I've seen in a while.

There was nothing random about it. You were press ganged into joining after someone on my team left. Only last night, there have been more times in the past month that we've been teamed together than in the previous 3...

And I really didn't think we'd ever see a return of this franchise (Or could it be for some sort of re-release...?) I donno... reminds me of the fact that they keep spitting out DragonBall Z games even though the show has been off the air for about 5-6 years now. Also: http://kotaku.com/5580412/average-reviews-...-alpha-protocol NOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!

I remember one posted in one of these threads a while ago where the bottom of the email had a skillion random words (relating to porn/sex acts) just to pick up more hits in the google so more people saw it. Also there's the odd adbot that we find on the boards.

It would be an audacious farudster who'd claim they'd been around since last Tuesday! I'm not blaming you, mate. The only people I blame for fraud are those who commit fraud. I wasn't taken in don't worry, and I didn't think you were blaming me. I found it funny how stupid the guys were to send me that and post that fake website. Although how they were intending to defraud me is odd because their website had jack squat on it (of course, I didn't have scripts running so meh)

Hey, at least now it's randomly putting me on your team for once given that I'm the one who dragged you into that group.

According to their site they've been around since 1986! And *grumbling* I can't seem to have a solid sleep schedule!

What? No mentions of our awesome L4D2 games where I kill people with tanks and completely miss an entire team while steaming across a downed player with a charger?