Enoch

I love 'em I'll admit I can do without the hot & humid Jersey summers. And the freezing winters. And the rainy fall. And then pollen full spring. I love NJ but we have some wacky weather Eh, NJ weather ain't so bad. After a few years living in Virginia, I started remembering NJ's "hot & humid" summers fondly. And sometimes I'd prefer a nice freeze to the consistent "cold, grey, and often rainy" winters that prevail in the DC area (the 2009-10 winter being a notable exception). The worst winter weather, to me, is temps just over the freezing point combined with wind and rain. Anyhow, today I had a pretty satisfying workday. Got to deal directly with an attorney in a rather senior position at a different agency, and I feel like I made a good showing of it. We disagreed about the meaning of a particular statute, but I came up with a way to avoid confronting that particular issue. It wasn't central to the project we were working on, and a disagreement probably would've just gotten in the way of our deadline. I don't know if it's a change in style, increased confidence in me, or the fact that I hadn't really filled him in on this issue in advance, but my boss has been curtailing his tendency to micromanage lately. It's really my only criticism of the guy as a supervisor-- he's very understanding about scheduling stuff (basically a "so long as your work gets done, I don't much care when and where you do it" attitude) and I have enormous amounts of respect for his intelligence and work ethic. The respect is key-- I can take a little micromanaging when it results in an obvious improvement in the quality of the work because the boss happens to be a genius with a 10-year experience advantage. But working for someone who isn't as smart or as dedicated as you are is hell. So now I'm playing some Civ4 and sipping some bourbon & ginger ale. For mixing bourbon, I really like 2 brands-- Elijah Craig (about $16 for .75L in my local jurisdiction) and Old Forester ($13!). I think they rival Makers Mark in flavor (which is more heavily marketed) and are available for 2/3rds the price or less. (I found the Old Forester on sale for $10.50 last week.) And, really, for sippin' whisky, I'd rather go with a Scotch, so these are the bourbons I buy.

That man's enthusiasm was disturbing. (And I couldn't help but notice that most of the hunks of meat had been boned.)

It's not underlying chemistry, it's energy balance. Energy spent by body, energy must go into body. Hell, you can even make it more basic than that and have it be a mass balance problem - unless he's no longer exhaling carbon dioxide, there has to be some carbon going into his body to replace the carbon going out. I was thinking more about water. Human cells use H2O, and the body loses a non-negligible amount of it through skin and by breathing. If more isn't provided, organs will start to fail.

Yeah, I gotta agree with Grom. Fraud is still a much more plausible explanation than this guy somehow affecting a total change in the underlying chemistry of the human body.

Read this, then post here or here. And know that there's pretty much nothing that the fanbase can do about the production schedule. It was set at the beginning of the project, and a significant investment has already been sunk into the stated release timeframe.

Good idea. Someone should start photoshopping from here.

The PC version is only $50 in the US.

There is some evidence to suggest that we spend some time somewhere in Texas.

Silly Hurlie! He told us what he's going to do now: Pay attention!

The mods have cleaned this one up a bit, haven't they?

Tangentially related and entertaining: Grading the flags of the world.

And what the retail stores don't get is that they are living on borrowed time. As soon as the publisher controlled content becomes accepted and embraced by the consumer, BOOM!, the retail stores are going to get cut out and die. Publishers aren't sharing their cash with anyone they don't have to. But for the moment, they need the retail stores to enable the transition. I don't think the retailers are stupid-- they probably know better than anyone else the competitive pressures that their business model faces. The end may well be in sight for brick-and-mortar game specialty shops regardless of any deals they make with publishers. Download services like Steam and XBLA, online retailers like Amazon and publisher-run stores, and big-box retailers like Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target are all competing for their market share. The current advantage that the Gamestops of the world have in this market is that the public sees them as the place to go to trade in old games for credit to buy new ones. This new EA policy is a direct strike at that advantage, but they agreed to this because they know that there's little they can do to stop it, and getting a tiny cut for themselves is probably the best way to preserve their business for the time being.

Harold had Bob only from 2 onwards though. Forgot about that; My mistake. I think my point still stands, though.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I see a pretty significant difference between humor attempted via entertaingly over-the-top characters who nonetheless have some thematic consistency with the gameworld (which appears to be what Obsidz is going for here) and humor based on reciting quotes from contemporary movies (i.e., most of Fallout 2). The former is fun if it can be pulled off (I'd argue that Harold and Bob in FO1 is a good example); the latter should generally be avoided.

This isn't the test-- as Nepenthe pointed out, the day-one DLC for Dragon Age and ME2 were the tests. The biggest effect will be that people trying to sell used games won't be able to get as much money for them. The interesting part is that EA has managed to get retailers like Gamespot on-board by cutting them into the distribution of these activation codes. (That is, they'll be able to sell the codes in-store to people who buy second-hand games.) That's imporatnt for EA because in-store promotions are still a part of their marketing efforts. If the policy remained a simple "FU" to used-game retailers, they risked losing window displays, advantageous shelf placement, employees pestering customers about pre-ordering, etc.

Depends on the distance between your router and your PC, and how easy/hard it is to run cables between the two. Our router is currently in the master bedroom-- the house was built in the '30s and doesn't have a whole lot of coaxial or phone jacks built in, and since our cable company is our ISP and our phone provider, the router needed to be somewhere that had both. So rather than run a new T1 line through the (plaster) walls, we went wireless. My desktop has an internal netgear PCI wireless card. I'm not happy with the driver, though-- the program hangs roughly 20% of the time I wake the machine from sleep mode, requiring a full reboot to get working. Once it's connected properly, though, it works fine.

This evening I will be participating in my first tabletop RPG session in over a decade. Any good ideas for character foibles in a mythic Greek setting?

Pffft. Let me know when they've really gone amok.

He's JE. To save anyone else the trouble of scrounging around, here is the thread. The poster with the preview build starts posting about it on page 66 (using forum defaults). Bonus quote:

Wait a minute-- since when was Tali competent? Everything she has ever accomplished in her life has been because Shepard was holding her hand (or outright rescuing her).

I generally don't buy collectors' editions of games as a rule. But I am so getting that one.

One tiny point: If it were just T-shirts, I doubt anybody would have noticed or cared. The additional obnoxiousness of wearing flag-patterned bandanas on their heads is probably what brought the attention of the powers-that-be. Hell, when I was in high school, I recall that wearing the any kind of bandana one one's head in the building was a violation of school rules.

It's a minor Mexican holiday celebrating a victory against a French army (I think) back in the 1860s. It has been heavily promoted in the U.S.-- mostly by companies that sell Mexican booze-- as a day for Mexican-style partying. Sort of like St. Patricks' day with tequila and Corona in place of Guinness and Jameson's.

Then things would be different. But the fact remains that everybody doesn't think that way. And if there were such a dramatic shift in public feeling, it wouldn't go unnoticed, and I'd have sufficient warning to adjust my thinking appropriately.

"Racially divided" meaning the recent history of the school in question. The Vice Principal cracked down on this because he thought it would exacerbate existing tension and mistrust between the latinos and the gringos in the school, possibly leading to fights. And he was probably right-- I'm sure that the students in question did this specifically because they knew it would piss people off. (That said, yes, the Vice Principal was an idiot, and everything would've worked out much better if, as Monte said, everyone was big enough to be cool with it.)