Raithe

I've been bouncing between Shadow of War (which has hit a very grindy stage), and Borderlands 2 lately in free time between lectures and studies, I'm pondering on re-installing Saints Row 2 for the sheer hell of it.

The university is putting on a coach to take anyone with a relevant background who might be interested up to the Cyber-Security Expo in London this week, so I decided to sign up for that and register out of curiousity.

Do you remember the other year when a research group asked facebook to let them run a research experiment? They spent one week using the news feeds of over 600,000 people worldwide. They divided them into groups, and slanted their news feeds to provide positive or negative news and then saw how people responded. Amazingly they discovered that if people only get negative news feeds, they start to post in a negative/down manner themselves, while people who get a majority of positive news feeds tend to post in a more up-beat and happy manner. The thing of course, is that no-one asked any of the people on FB if they wanted to take part. Apparently it's an automatic agreement to let Facebook do whatever they want when you click accept on those terms and conditions.

BBC - Pole Dancing is a Sport

Heh, I had a lecture in the week about Privacy and Internet Ethics. The lecturer showed us how easy it is to access Facebook API and developer and just how much information FB will provide to anyone using them. He then did a "Yeah, I stopped using FB 11 months ago when I found this" but he did amuse everyone present by whipping up a quick thing with the developer and then setting it on his own facebook to show what it extracts.

https://youtu.be/kB15UFO5ebA It can be strangely interesting to see how things got made...

Where on earth did you find it for £22? I keep seeing it for £34-39.

Sen. Klobuchar Questions Sen. Sessions on Media Protections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppBGvOeIcNE (at the 54:00 mark)

And it's all natural, all recycled...

Just be wary of Solyent Green...

For a fairly easy read explaining the changes occuring in the ACA What it means for you : The administration's "cost sharing" reduction funding cuts

Let's put it this way, the central setting is a small country in Africa that happens to have had ultra-advanced super-science beyond the rest of the planet, but no-one else is really aware of that fact. They have giant holographic shields to fake out modern day satellites, and closed / protected borders that don't allow outsiders easy access.. But at the same time of haviing all this advanced technology, they manage to successfully combine it with the supposed best parts of tribal, clost to nature lifestyle and attitudes, while also having good ethics, morality and human rights.

Roy Dotrice has passed on...

I was having a few frustrations last week, so decided to say what the heck and picked up Shadow of War to vent some of it by killing large amounts of orcs. Its enjoyable enough. Pretty much Shadow of Mordor once more. The first act is purely getting back into the swing of things in Mordor and re-learning all those skills,wile the scene is set in Minas Ithil (later to be Minas Morgul). Act 2 reintroduces the domination side and building up your own forces, but I have to admit, the much touted "leading your armies to war" is rather minimal and not that deep. Selecting different types of orc (tribe or class) has absolutely no real effect beyond the visual, and then you choose which of them are part of your "assault force", spend in-game money to tweak them from the same set of seige upgrades, and then run through a set of "capture the flag" points. Story side starts wandering even further afield from the points known, and is entertaining, but it gets distracted by the huge amount of grind involved in taking on all the orc captains, getting the intel, setting them at each others throats and all that. Still, fun in its own way but I do see how this could get a wee bit tiresome after x point. Ignoring the loot box thingy. So yes, if you enjoyed the first game, you'll likely enjoy this because there really isn't that much different to it - Just the skill tree has been changed some.