Humodour

At least in Australia. http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/11/australia...rows-8-in-2009/ This breaks 2008's previous growth record. Gaming is a $2 billion industry here now, apparently as large as the wine industry. I'm nothing but pleased. I'd be interested in the figures for Europe, Canada, America, Japan, etc, because even though these places all went into actual recessions, I suspect they might still have experienced growth in the games sector.

Torchlight is better.

So I finally started seriously playing Torchlight. I'm a level 10-ish Vanquisher and it's loads of fun. I like how there are portals and levels available that provide access to creeps far above your own level, in case the main dungeon gets boring. But so far the main dungeon has also been refreshingly challenging, requiring tactics and the avoidance of pain (bosses can one-hit kill, creep mobs swiftly overwhelm). I imagine it'd be painful playing as the warrior class. (Playing on Very Hard for reference.) Definitely two thumbs up for this game. Recommended it to all my friends, gave them a bit of a demo, and now they're planning to buy it. Does anybody know how many levels are available in the Torchlight demo?

I fully expect no less than 5 outrageously drunken posts.

But you're trying to tell me that acetaldehyde is not the main cause of hangovers. That's just absolutely silly. Sure, lack of water will make it worse - that's called dehydration (not hangover) and it impairs kidney and liver function. But even with full hydration you'll still get a damned hangover because what ethanol has to be converted into - acetaldehyde - is about 20 times more toxic than plain ethanol as well as carcinogenic and mutagenic. Case in point: lots of Asians have acetaldehyde dehydrogenase mutations which cause them to process ethanol into acetaldehyde either slower or faster, with predictable results. TBH it sounds like your professor wanted to emphasise the point that dehydration while drinking is a superbly bad idea. Bah, whatever. We both think we're right and it's immaterial because both dehydration and toxins play large roles in the severity of a hangover. Edit: Also, the small (and I do mean small) amounts of methanol in alcohol will be almost entirely passed out of the body as methanol rather than converted to the toxic formate because they compete for the same dehydrogenase enzymes.

I've felt the same way for a long time now. I don't buy many games per year anymore. When I do, I try to give them at least several hours of my time to see if I'll get sucked in...but usually not so much. Lots of games on my shelf practically untouched. Torchlight is fun & simple, but I can see how it's not mentally obsessive, if that makes sense. I found Fate the same way. Enjoyable monster hacking fluff for a while, but not something to be replayed repeatedly. Too many years, too many of the same types of games. The first few hours of Borderlands I was ho-hum up in the air about it...but it grabbed me at some point. It'll probably get dull before I get thru the entire game w/all 4 chrs...but good enough. Same. It's a sad feeling. And I'm only ****ing 21. What is this ****.

Um, ethanol is largely non-toxic, but what it always gets converted into in our stomachs is a highly toxic known carcinogen, so I suspect that is actually what causes hangovers. Water likely just helps your liver process it faster. It sure does help though. I'm pretty sure methanol is not involved in the process unless you're a metho drinker.

Yeah they've been at it for years trying to write this horrible little infringement on civil liberties. I'm thoroughly disgusted that Australia is participating. And what's worse, the ****ing thing is being developed in secret. How democratic.

I would definitely pay $1 to $2 to download songs if they were lossless quality. In a heartbeat. But none of this MP3 bull****, ESPECIALLY not if it is DRM locked. Uhg. So I often end up buying my CDs just so I can rip them to lossless FLAC.

The CD itself only stores a collection of ones and zeroes. It's just about storage media. I prefer my storage media to be solid state memory or hard drives because it's much easier to propagate copies that way, thus significantly decreasing the risk of losing your product. Of course, online DRM tends to fly complete in the face of this.

It's actually amazing how much a joint helps a hangover. I always stayed clear because I figured it'd make it worse, make me puke. Quite the opposite. And btw Wals, that's called alcohol poisoning.

Alexander Brandon is awesome.

You are lame.

I know you're joking, but I'm pretty sure I'm older than you are. *Coughing with laughter* I hope for your sake that you're not. It's a common affliction, not much I can do about it. Mushrooms are really good fried with potatoes, yummy. Why anyone would intentionally eat poisonous ones is beyond me. They're not poisonous at all. In fact they're far less toxic than alcohol (or specifically acetaldehyde).

LK, read these threads we've had on Ubuntu in the past: http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showt...2&hl=ubuntu http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showt...3&hl=ubuntu

You seem really angry for some reason. Eh, no. I didn't mean to imply you were against Linux. I just felt you were making him scared of the switch. I was going to add a note clarifying that but forgot. Goot article, Fio, but it's from the perspective of an advanced user who has used other distros before. I guess LK falls somewhere in between, since he's advanced with computers and knows about things like partitioning and such but has not used Linux before.

Smoking marijuana is worse for your lungs than smoking cigarettes. Luckily people don't smoke marijuana as often as cigarettes, usually. Still really bad. Vapourising is 100 times safer for your lungs. Problem is that it's easier to smoke, or find somebody else smoking who'll share with you. LK: MDMA/esctasy is basically just speed that feels nice as well as fast. It's semi-fun, and pretty non-addictive, but the comedown can be nasty. Not worth it, IMHO. It's also a really bad idea to mix it with alcohol because while it's more fun, it's way worse for your body and can kill you three ways by dehydration, removing all the salts from your body, or heat death. I'd avoid shrooms in case they accidentally picked the poisonous ones (which look identical and grow in the same areas), and I'd avoid LSD in case it's actually PCP instead or something. If they could guarantee it was what they said I'd be willing but how can you confirm? But medically speaking LSD and shrooms are harmless and the only reason they remain banned seems to be the fact that it's physically dangerous to hallucinate without a sitter. Also conservative prudes of course. Because you could easily remove the arguments of "you don't know what's in it" by regulating the substance like they do alcohol, cigarettes, prescription amphetamines, etc.

Is that Wubi? I couldn't get Wubi to work but I seem to be the odd one out. I'd much more recommend defragmenting your windows partition and then resizing it into two separate partitions with the user-friendly Ubuntu installer. That enables you to install Ubuntu to the newly created partition and dual-boot. Wubi cops about a 20% performance penalty because it runs on the ****ty Windows filesystem (which lacks so many things it's sad) and so has to emulate a Linux one. You probably won't notice the performance hit on the rig you have. Peronsally though I'd ignore the Purkake and co trying to scare you off Ubuntu. I found it more ****ing user-friendly than Windows for christ's sake, and I had never used a command line before (1 line in DOS doesn't count) nor have I really had to use one since. I'd be leaning towards 32-bit because I can guarantee that the drivers on it all work well in almost all cases. 64-bit should be really well supported by now but I don't want you to try it and have a bum experience. I use 32-bit still. I challenge you to install Ubuntu 9.10 and XP on the same machine. Come back and tell me which one can't find the drivers. Hint: XP does not support ethernet, sound, or video drivers out of the box. Ubuntu does, and Ubuntu supports a larger number of devices than XP because Microsoft and hardware manufcaturers tend to be horrid at supporting things older than a couple of years.

Uh, don't bother. I tried installing two versions of Ubuntu once and they both installed, but in the boot loader, only the most recently installed one was functional. On another note, I tried to install KDE after I'd installed Ubuntu (with Gnome) once and it made the system unstable. So yeah I don't recommend it. Choose one and stick with it until you've got some Linux tinkering experience under your belt.

Yep, ATI drivers are up to date. Excellent, I didn't know that. Cheers! Yes. Please torrent it if you can, as bandwidth is not free and Canonical gets pounded every month with Ubuntu download requests that would be free if people transferred it P2P. This bill adds up, since Canonical makes money by selling services to businesses, not by selling Ubuntu. So yeah, enough lecturing, here is the link: http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/download Note: that's the KDE version. Regarding installing to a thumb drive: it did have an option to do that. I'll look up a guide. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick Sheesh. Um, the answer is: I think so. Pretty sure, in fact. Ubuntu has an excellent partition manager which will lead you through it anyway.

Good Linux games: Free: Wormux (worms clone) Heroes of Wesnoth (Civ 3 clone? Something like that. Never played Civ or this but apparently both are good) Lots of the games listed under games in the add/remove programs bit are fun to pass the time. There's a Mario clone which is well-made if you're into that. Also a few racing car games. Buy: Heroes of Newerth (DotA clone but way better and with a Linux client). Quake 1 to 4 - all run on Linux. Lots of ports to Linux, such as Jagged Alliance 2. But you'd need to buy them again even if you had Windows versions. Shame. You'll want to install WINE so that you can try playing some of your Windows games. For example, Divine Divinity works perfectly under WINE. Check the WINE db for tips playing a game under WINE (google: wine <game name here>)

Ubuntu. If you go with anything other than Ubuntu you'll start suffering problems - if only due to the low install base. Ubuntu is the most widely used Linux distribution. It's well-known for: - Being user friendly - Being easy to use - Being simple - Having everything out of the box (and working) - Having the best update system of any operating system Coincidentally, Ubuntu 9.10 just came out. Grab it while it's hot. You can request a free live CD from Canonical (the company that builds Ubuntu) anywhere in the world. Use this to install Ubuntu. You can use the CD to either dual-boot Windows and Linux, or reformat and install Ubuntu from scratch. I recommend the KDE desktop environment over the default Gnome version. The KDE version is prettier, flashier, and more powerful, IMHO - more like Windows while Gnome is more like OS X, roughly speaking. Linux users have little flame wars about which desktop environment is better. Canonical offers both. Things to install once you've set up Ubuntu: Amarok if you go with KDE VLC (for those movies which nothing else plays) Media codecs (to play wma, mp3, mpg, avi, etc - interestingly you'd need this for a new Windows install, too) nVidia graphics drivers - they're proprietary, but at the moment they're superior to the community's open source ones which are installed by default (note: if you use ATI, you might try theirs, but the community's ones might actually be better from memory) That's just off the top of my head. Others can fill in the gaps.

That's awesome! Mainly the patch fixing all those bugs, but the fact that it's on GOG is good too.

Is it because you're not getting a physical copy? You can download content purchased on Steam on any computer where you have an account. If every computer you owned were annihilated by a freak bolt of lightning, you could get a new computer, log on to Steam, and re-download pretty much everything you had ever purchased. Yeah, it's certainly the least retarded form of online activation around, but it's still online activation. Can you expand on the bolded? Does that mean there is no limit to the number of PC's that simultaneously have the same game installed? For exapmle, could I have at the same time the same game installed on my home desktop, work desktop and a laptop? Or did you mean there is no limit to the number of times you could download the same game, but only on one PC at a time? Correct. No limit, but only one computer can be logged into a specific Steam account at any one time.

Definitely try VH. You're fault for picking passives instead of skills. Pick at least 2 skills. On a Vanquisher, try that freezing knockback skill for when you get surrounded, as well as perhaps explosive shot and the lower armour + stun trap. For example, the armour draining trap seems far better than the passives that boost damage since the armour drained is a much bigger damage boost IIRC. The critical strike passive seems like it might be worth it. Finally, remember this isn't left-click/right-click like Diablo 2. You now have hotkeys (by default keys 1 to 9) that cast at the cursor location. VERY helpful, and allows for far more tactical gameplay.