http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilvish,_the_Damned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changeling_(novel)
I love Amber, but as far as "forgotten" Fantasy goes, I'd recommend Dilvish and the sequel, The Changing Land.
The Changeling and Madwand duo of novels is also good, but I haven't read them in a decade. As soon as I finish Stephenson's REAMDE and Richard K. Morgan's latest, I think it is time to visit the local used book store!
The cynic in me can't help but agree with you, but this is the first "evidence" I've seen that such a thing can even work consistently. Given, these are all "staged" successes, but I have to admit that I am now a little more convinced that someday the USA could shoot down a few of those Chinese / Russian / Pakistani(?) nukes in an incoming ICBM attack.
Also, WarGames was being shown on the big screen for it's 25th anniversary here recently, which reminded me that "close" only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and global thermonuclear war.
The Zap electric scooters and skateboards are much less annoying than the gas-powered, noise-polluting versions.
Also, I am given to understand that the Sparrow 3-wheeled EV is making a comeback.
In this particular story at least, no one was killed. Considering just how often SWAT teams kill innocents with their no-knock, shoot-first tactics, this kid is lucky he hasn't been implicated in a wrongful death (yet).
It seems to me that there is a big difference between phone phreaking to get free long-distance calls and spoofing phone numbers to bring SWAT down on an innocent family.
...lets me play violent games on the Internet, yet I haven't become a sociopath. I think it is more likely that the Internet "creates" sensationalist vigilante groups by giving them an outlet and a high-profile target simultaneously.
"Tech Headaches"? TFA reads more like a list of pet peeves, and I have a pet peeve with sites that take an article only a few paragraphs long and break it up into *three pages* so that they can artificially increase pageviews and serve more ads.
...even though the lawyers will take the lion's share of the money awarded in such a lawsuit, I hope that the sum awarded the plaintiffs is large enough to deter the MAFIAA from prosecuting under such dubious "John Doe" discoveries in the future.
Well, if you have the new Pokemon Diamond / Pearl games for the DS and Pokemon Battle Revolution for the Wii, the DS works as a wireless controller for the Wii game. You can fight with your own stable of Pokemon against another player in 3D with an annoying announcer calling the play-by-play.
Given that I care about Pokemon a lot less than Wikipedia does, this has hardly been an earth-shattering use of the devices' compatibility for me. I would love to see greater integration between these excellent platforms; my (very recent) conversion to the Dark Side of Nintendo fanboy-ism will be complete as soon as I have a game worth playing from the DS on the Wii.
Does this mean that we're going to get "Reality Gaming"? Are we going to have that insulting canned laughter exported to games along with TV's awful hack writing? Can you imagine how terrible Portal would have been with a laugh-track?!?
I still have floppy discs with my (old-school) Diablo characters saved to them. I loved the hell out of that game and used to bring a 3.5" with me to play on LAN with friends. It's a shame that storing characters offline made it so easy for cheaters to dupe and hack them for online play.
What's the last online multiplayer game you played where you really "owned" your character, instead of leasing the bits stored on someone else's server?
One thing that improved my perception of Valve as a company was their handling of Orange Box purchases for users who already had HL2 and HL2 Episode 1. I bought the Orange Box online through Steam, and it allowed me to give away full, downloadable copies of the games I already had to friends on Steam Community. Being able to send the HL2 games as a gift with just a click made me feel like a portion of my $50 was not being "wasted" on games I already owned.
Portal is the kind of game that you can play through a second time, even after solving all the puzzles once, and still enjoy immensely. Innovative, quirky, and just exactly the game that more cerebral players have been hoping for, Portal has an edge and an ending worth playing towards. Oh, and it's *fun* -- which seems to be something that's missing in many other big-budget games produced these days.
If you don't have the hottest video card(s) in your rig, just turn off the "High Dynamic Lighting Effects" and the game will run even smoother than HL2 or Counter-Strike:Source (same advice applies for HL2 episodes 1 & 2).
My prayers be answered, mateys! An' as surely as the Pirates o' tha Carribean game be flawed an' misguided, truly this will lead ya scurvy Wii-dogs to the promised land o' riches!
PAX is awesome, and the 40,000 people who were at this year's event is "mind-boggling" when you consider that it started as just friends and supporters of a gaming webcomic. However, even the old E3 pales in comparison to the Games Conference at Leipzig, which saw 183,000 people this year.
I
Also, a lot of Windows apps were much smaller and had less bloat (and sometimes more useful features! WinAmp 2.666 ID tagging and WAV capture, anyone?) before they were "improved". Check out OldVersion.com.
One of the frustrating things for me was that it was almost impossible to make money from the game itself in FFXI. The quest "rewards" never grant significant amounts of gil, and the goblins drop a pathetic amount even at high levels. Only a couple of jobs (BST and BLU) are even capable of soloing even the mid-level content/monsters, so you're constantly splitting whatever loot you do get with other players.
Still, I really loved the game, though I think that WoW has spoiled me forever against playing a "real" MMO. Let's face it, fellow WoW players, the game is *too easy*. I know of 6 and 7 year olds who've solo'ed and played their way to level 70 in WoW without any serious difficulties. By contrast, in FFXI, getting to level 75 in even one job is a real challenge and beating Maat for the last limit break on levels is something your linkshell friends really cheer you on for.
I ran campaigns on the TSR Original D&D from 1984 to 1994, and there has never been a richer, more developed world than Mystara, IMNSHO. I still have old friends asking me if I will ever run another D&D campaign again. Finding people to play with has never been a problem; making the time commitment to craft a good story is the only real issue. A good DM can always find people to play a role in his stories.
I like the version 3/3.5 rules well enough, but I didn't buy AD&D books and I sure as hell don't need to buy another version. If my friends ever talk me into running another campaign, they are smart enough to figure out how THAC0 and negative AC works.
Ultimately, it's the quality of the story and the storyteller that counts, not the individual ruleset.
"Course I think most people see the maximum fine and think the worst, doesn't mean the judge will give than, more often than not they don't," This is exactly why mandatory minimum sentencing laws are a bad idea; they remove the ability of the Judge to apply common sense to sentencing in cases such as this one. It also seems to me to be a bad idea to make camcording movies a felony as it's hardly in the same class of crime as auto theft and murder.
And who watches cams anyway? You can almost always find a high-quality screener on the torrent sites. The "90% of piracy" figure
in TFA is asinine.
Slashdot Mirror
Article doesn't mention the power draw from PAX and Guild Wars 2 launching on the same weekend?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilvish,_the_Damned
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changeling_(novel)
I love Amber, but as far as "forgotten" Fantasy goes, I'd recommend Dilvish and the sequel, The Changing Land.
The Changeling and Madwand duo of novels is also good, but I haven't read them in a decade. As soon as I finish Stephenson's REAMDE and Richard K. Morgan's latest, I think it is time to visit the local used book store!
The cynic in me can't help but agree with you, but this is the first "evidence" I've seen that such a thing can even work consistently. Given, these are all "staged" successes, but I have to admit that I am now a little more convinced that someday the USA could shoot down a few of those Chinese / Russian / Pakistani(?) nukes in an incoming ICBM attack.
Also, WarGames was being shown on the big screen for it's 25th anniversary here recently, which reminded me that "close" only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and global thermonuclear war.
The Zap electric scooters and skateboards are much less annoying than the gas-powered, noise-polluting versions. Also, I am given to understand that the Sparrow 3-wheeled EV is making a comeback.
In this particular story at least, no one was killed. Considering just how often SWAT teams kill innocents with their no-knock, shoot-first tactics, this kid is lucky he hasn't been implicated in a wrongful death (yet).
It seems to me that there is a big difference between phone phreaking to get free long-distance calls and spoofing phone numbers to bring SWAT down on an innocent family.
"(If you think those [NSA] taps will only be used to identify terrorists, you're living in a fantasy world.)"
Why is it that this kind of common sense doesn't often penetrate the mainstream media? Because they create said "fantasy world"?
...lets me play violent games on the Internet, yet I haven't become a sociopath. I think it is more likely that the Internet "creates" sensationalist vigilante groups by giving them an outlet and a high-profile target simultaneously.
"Tech Headaches"? TFA reads more like a list of pet peeves, and I have a pet peeve with sites that take an article only a few paragraphs long and break it up into *three pages* so that they can artificially increase pageviews and serve more ads.
...even though the lawyers will take the lion's share of the money awarded in such a lawsuit, I hope that the sum awarded the plaintiffs is large enough to deter the MAFIAA from prosecuting under such dubious "John Doe" discoveries in the future.
"The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand."
I am glad that I am not the only one who saw IDENT1 as just another name for ECHELON.
Well, if you have the new Pokemon Diamond / Pearl games for the DS and Pokemon Battle Revolution for the Wii, the DS works as a wireless controller for the Wii game. You can fight with your own stable of Pokemon against another player in 3D with an annoying announcer calling the play-by-play.
Given that I care about Pokemon a lot less than Wikipedia does, this has hardly been an earth-shattering use of the devices' compatibility for me. I would love to see greater integration between these excellent platforms; my (very recent) conversion to the Dark Side of Nintendo fanboy-ism will be complete as soon as I have a game worth playing from the DS on the Wii.
You brought a PSP to camp out for your Wii? Not the Nintendo DS?!?
Traitor.
Does this mean that we're going to get "Reality Gaming"? Are we going to have that insulting canned laughter exported to games along with TV's awful hack writing? Can you imagine how terrible Portal would have been with a laugh-track?!?
I still have floppy discs with my (old-school) Diablo characters saved to them. I loved the hell out of that game and used to bring a 3.5" with me to play on LAN with friends. It's a shame that storing characters offline made it so easy for cheaters to dupe and hack them for online play.
What's the last online multiplayer game you played where you really "owned" your character, instead of leasing the bits stored on someone else's server?
One thing that improved my perception of Valve as a company was their handling of Orange Box purchases for users who already had HL2 and HL2 Episode 1. I bought the Orange Box online through Steam, and it allowed me to give away full, downloadable copies of the games I already had to friends on Steam Community. Being able to send the HL2 games as a gift with just a click made me feel like a portion of my $50 was not being "wasted" on games I already owned.
Portal is the kind of game that you can play through a second time, even after solving all the puzzles once, and still enjoy immensely. Innovative, quirky, and just exactly the game that more cerebral players have been hoping for, Portal has an edge and an ending worth playing towards. Oh, and it's *fun* -- which seems to be something that's missing in many other big-budget games produced these days.
If you don't have the hottest video card(s) in your rig, just turn off the "High Dynamic Lighting Effects" and the game will run even smoother than HL2 or Counter-Strike:Source (same advice applies for HL2 episodes 1 & 2).
The poll on that page has a great "Cowboy Neal" option.
I believe that the Government is doing all it can to ensure that toys are 100% safe
Strongly agree
Agree
Dont know
Disagree
Strongly disagree
They should all come with a free set of steak knives
My prayers be answered, mateys! An' as surely as the Pirates o' tha Carribean game be flawed an' misguided, truly this will lead ya scurvy Wii-dogs to the promised land o' riches!
PAX is awesome, and the 40,000 people who were at this year's event is "mind-boggling" when you consider that it started as just friends and supporters of a gaming webcomic. However, even the old E3 pales in comparison to the Games Conference at Leipzig, which saw 183,000 people this year.
meh.
... Google Sky.
I
Also, a lot of Windows apps were much smaller and had less bloat (and sometimes more useful features! WinAmp 2.666 ID tagging and WAV capture, anyone?) before they were "improved". Check out OldVersion.com.
One of the frustrating things for me was that it was almost impossible to make money from the game itself in FFXI. The quest "rewards" never grant significant amounts of gil, and the goblins drop a pathetic amount even at high levels. Only a couple of jobs (BST and BLU) are even capable of soloing even the mid-level content/monsters, so you're constantly splitting whatever loot you do get with other players.
Still, I really loved the game, though I think that WoW has spoiled me forever against playing a "real" MMO. Let's face it, fellow WoW players, the game is *too easy*. I know of 6 and 7 year olds who've solo'ed and played their way to level 70 in WoW without any serious difficulties. By contrast, in FFXI, getting to level 75 in even one job is a real challenge and beating Maat for the last limit break on levels is something your linkshell friends really cheer you on for.
-Former FFXI WHM
I ran campaigns on the TSR Original D&D from 1984 to 1994, and there has never been a richer, more developed world than Mystara, IMNSHO. I still have old friends asking me if I will ever run another D&D campaign again. Finding people to play with has never been a problem; making the time commitment to craft a good story is the only real issue. A good DM can always find people to play a role in his stories.
I like the version 3/3.5 rules well enough, but I didn't buy AD&D books and I sure as hell don't need to buy another version. If my friends ever talk me into running another campaign, they are smart enough to figure out how THAC0 and negative AC works.
Ultimately, it's the quality of the story and the storyteller that counts, not the individual ruleset.
And who watches cams anyway? You can almost always find a high-quality screener on the torrent sites. The "90% of piracy" figure in TFA is asinine.