I have gone to the hospital, but they best they can tell me is "inconclusive". I might have it, I might not, and unless I spend something like 72 hours hooked up to an EEG and deprived of sleep, they won't be able to tell for sure, and even if they get a positive hit, the medication sounds worse than the condition.
As someone who is epileptic, has spent a good deal of time reading up on it, and has spent a good deal of time talking to his neurologist about it, I'm very serious when I say to go find a new neurologist, preferably yesterday. You might be right about what's happening. You might not. Either way, though, you deserve to be taken seriously, have it properly looked into, and given a straight answer about it.
A surprisingly large number of people who do end up getting diagnosed and treated for seizure disorders don't have anything conclusive show up on either an EEG or an MRI, so a bunch of the time it comes down to going by symptoms.
I've personally been very lucky with dealing with doctors like that, but neurologists as a whole do have a reputation for sometimes acting like gods of their domain even more than doctors in general, as if they're all-knowing about brain functions. If you do run into someone like that, don't tell them what you think is wrong with you or what you've been looking up on your own; tell them what's been happening, and let them come to their own conclusion, whether it's some type of seizure disorder, migraines (most people would be surprised to learn just how weird they can be; they can cause a lot of the same things to happen as many kinds of seizures, only for a different reason), psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, or something else totally unrelated. That is their job, after all, and if you're paying them, they should be doing it for you.
As far as the bit about the medication sounding worse than the condition, if you're on the right medication (for you; everyone reacts differently), that's absolutely not true. Some of the older medications have a higher rate of annoying side effects, although they tend to be extremely effective, and a bunch of people tolerate them just fine. The newer ones, though, are a lot more benign on average. It took me a few tries to find one that both worked well and didn't cause any other problems, but we've come up with one now that I basically have no side effects from, as long as I don't miss doses.
As for why taking them is important, even if it involves a couple failed med trials with weird side effects or having to tolerate side effects with what you do eventually settle on, seizures are kind of a Big Deal. If that is what's actually going on, leaving them untreated is a Bad Idea, because they have a tendency to get progressively worse over time if you don't do anything about it. For a lot of people, they start to happen more often and are more unpleasant the longer they're not under control, and that also makes them harder to get under control in the first place.
Not to scare you or anything, since I have no way of knowing what's really happening to you, and there are in most cases multiple possible causes for things like that. That there's a reasonable possibility that it's something like that is a good reason to get a straight answer about it, though, and to not settle for them beating around the bush. Even if the doctors are a pain in the ass, and the treatment seems potentially like a pain in the ass. It's worth getting sorted out one way or the other.
AMD also went for forward and backward compatibility in a big way, a BIOS update (and sometimes not even that) is all that is needed to make the oldest socket 939 boards work with the newest AMD cpus. You lose out on a few features (e.g. faster HT and ram), but it makes upgrading an AMD machine much cheaper.
Err, really? How's that? I know AM2(+) and AM3 are supposed to be relatively interchangeable, but Socket 939 doesn't have the same number of pins or layout as them, last time I checked. I would be totally thrilled if that were possible, since I still have a Socket 939 board, and my CPU is the only thing that's really not fast enough right now, but unless I'm missing something, I don't see how that would work. It seems like you'd just end up with some bent pins and a broken computer.
Is there some good reason/. keeps linking to stories on Gameplayer lately? People complain on every single one of them about the articles being split over several dozen pages, with a paragraph or two of text on each, but this one is a new low. It reads like it was written by a twelve year old. "Sly" it under the table? Last time I checked, they speak English in Australia, but I guess the writers for this site (and editors, if they even have any) didn't get the memo...
Mathcounts is the first thing that came to mind for me, too. I participated in it for a couple years, way back when in middle school, and I read the newsletter and followed results for a few years after that and sort of kept up with the person coaching it, since I stayed involved with math team-related stuff in high school, too. I went all the way to the national level, and my anecdotal evidence agrees exactly with yours.
At the school/regional level, there was always a good mix of boys and girls, and my school in particular usually had more girls than boys involved in things like that. Moving up to the state level, though, which only the highest-scorers advance to, it became noticeably more skewed towards the boys, and the vast majority of the top ten (or even all ten of them) would be boys here (Massachusetts, specifically Boston-area), too. At the national level, only a handful of girls were there the year I went, and that seems to be pretty typical. Again, the top ones are usually almost exclusively male.
I also noticed the same thing with other math competitions like that in high school. At the local level, there was always a good mix, but the higher up it goes, the more the gender ratio shifts, until there are basically no girls left, and I'm sure plenty of people on here can attest to that continuing with the gender distribution of men and women in college math departments, whether among those teaching or the students themselves.
A lot of the girls I knew back then grew up to go to top schools and did very well for themselves, some of them even sticking with science-related fields, although generally not pure math (or even engineering or CS...a bunch of them wandered off into things like biology/medicine or geology). They certainly were and are quite smart and capable overall, so I don't know what it is that seems to filter them out from pure math and hard sciences.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who want to spend a few hundred dollars on an operating system. If you asked the average person on the street, they'd probably tell you that they didn't even have to buy an operating system, it came for free on their computer.
I think you vastly overestimate the technical knowledge of the average person on the street. They'd probably tell you that they have no idea what you're talking about or what an operating system is.
No, you can't play sports because you're a girl. You're too fragile
There was a very interesting article in the NY Times magazine a couple months ago about just that. Since Title IX came about, the number of girls participating in sports at a competitive level has increased substantially, and one of the unexpected/unintended results of that has been that a lot of girls (not women, but girls even in middle school/high school) have been having a lot more traumatic injuries, both at very young ages and at higher rates than their male counterparts. I don't remember the exact numbers, but girls have severe injuries like ACL tears and concussions significantly more often than boys do while playing soccer, and girls' soccer is comparable to or possibly even more injury prone than guys playing football.
Yes, a lot more of them are getting into it, but they're also getting permanently taken out of it by injuries as teenagers or in college that affect them for the rest of their lives, much more than boys are, which is a kind of distressing trend. I don't mean to suggest that they should be discouraged from doing it (my girlfriend used to swim competitively, and one of my best (female) friends since childhood used to be nationally ranked in tennis, and they both took positive things away from the experience), but it certainly hasn't been all love, luck, and lollipops since things started changing, and the new problems caused by trying to fix the old ones are difficult to address.
SC3 was not made by Toys for Bob and is not considered canon in the Star Control series/universe. Toys for Bob and fans of the original games have actually been trying for years to convince their publishers to let them make a true sequel to SC2. There have been rumors of people at Activision showing interest more recently, and there have been fan letter-writing campaigns and petitions to show support and that people will buy such a thing if it exists, but as far as I know/remember, there hasn't been anything beyond someone at Activision asking for a presentation of a concept for what the game would be. So, no official work or progress at the moment, but it does seem like there's some hope that there will be something at some point to make up for the atrocity that SC3 was.
In general, I'm fine with and even enjoy those kinds of themes in movies/books/TV shows/games. I actually really liked the Shinto/respect for nature themes in My Neighbor Totoro, for example, and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil is one of my favorite new characters in the past few years. Something about how it was presented in Mononoke felt forced and overbearing to me, though. I wish I could explain it better, but it's been a while since I saw it. I'm still hopeful about some of the other movies, since people I know with similar tastes to mine have liked them, but I guess I won't know for sure until I get through all the other stuff I already have sitting around to watch/read/play.
Princess Mononoke was the first one I saw, and it annoyed me so much that I didn't bother watching anything else of his until this year. It took My Neighbor Totoro to convince me that I actually do like some of his stuff. Mononoke came across as a bunch of hippie-dippie, femi-nazi, Luddite bullshit to me and just irritated me more and more as it went on. Visually it was well done, although not really my preferred style, but the characters mostly annoyed me, and the plot was ridiculous. I enjoyed Totoro enough to convince me to put more of his other stuff on my list, though, so we'll see how that goes. So far, Howl's Moving Castle was fun, but not very deep. I should really go watch Spirited Away one of these days.
None of the people I watched it with even liked it or thought it was any good, much less were moved to tears by it. We all had very high hopes for it but ended up mostly being bored by it and not really drawn into the story. The reviews and summaries made it sound so good, but something about the actual presentation of it just didn't do it for us. I guess we're all soulless. Oh well.
Ugh. Don't remind me. I had to replace multiple hard drives in multiple iBooks last year. I did it enough times that I got under 20 minutes from start to finish (removing the first screw to replacing the last one). I think my record was almost down to 15 after memorizing the screw layout. The first couple times were brutal, hour-long affairs, though.
Although plenty of American comics are crap, and the superhero ones tend to have a somewhat narrow audience they appeal to, there have been great things done even within the specific genre of American superhero comics. My particular favorite stuff to recommend to people is some of what Kurt Busiek's done. He manages to take the broad setting of "American superhero comic" but use people's fascination with them to tell stories about the people in a world like that and how it affects their daily lives, not just the good guys and the bad guys beating each other up, and he does it without requiring the reader to be familiar with a decades-long, convoluted backstory (although if you do have a bit of familiarity with the history of the genre, there are a lot of references and in-jokes to be caught as a bonus that aren't at all necessary to the stories). Go pick up the first volume of the Astro City trade paperback and read the first story in it. It's only a few pages long, but it gives a good sense of his writing style and approach to telling stories (and then read the rest of the book, because the other stories are pretty good, too).
While you're at it, get the TPB of Superman: Secret Identiy that he wrote and read the several-page introduction he wrote at the front of the book. It's very appropriate for the current discussion, all about how comics, particularly superhero comics, are often not used to express "true" art or explore very significant issues but are certainly very capable as a medium for doing it, and it has some interesting comments on the idea.
As I'm lucky enough to have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, I can relate (although at least mine seems to finally be under control now, through a combination of medication and diet changes). Having your brain fry itself like that, particularly your temporal lobes, does all sorts of weird stuff to memory. I've had similar stuff happen, like having an important discussion about something, making decisions about it, and a few days later having no idea it happened until someone starts looking at me funny for not knowing what's going on. Then I go check my logs and find out that it really did happen, and there's the record of me talking about it to prove it. It was particularly weird when it first started happening and I wasn't used to it, because my memory for stuff like that used to be rather good.
I also know what it's like having it cause a sudden case of the stupids. That was already described well enough, so I'll just add a little anecdote. I tend to pick up useless facts really easily for some reason, and I was good at trivia when I was younger, so a couple years ago, I joined an online trivia league. This was coincidentally right when I was having more seizures than I'd ever had before or have since then. I did not do particularly well compared to how I expected. After getting the seizures mostly under control, I rather suddenly started doing substantially better, and there's a convenient statistical record showing that. Looking at the average number of questions I got right per "season", I got pretty close to one number every time before finding a working treatment, and then it suddenly jumps to consistently 50% higher than that afterwards. I didn't notice the connection for a few months, but it was pretty obvious once I looked at the dates: "This month is when I started having a brain again."
The "fugue" bit reminds me of a couple other things, too. That happens to me once in a while. There are a few days here and there that I'm missing chunks of a few hours from and have no idea at all what happened other than what people have told me. Not just fuzzy, but completely gone. For example, one time a few years ago, my mom was helping me move some furniture I'd been keeping in my parents' basement into my new apartment. I had a particularly bizarre seizure while she was on her way over and remember nothing else after her saying she was coming. Apparently I carried a bunch of stuff upstairs to the third floor all by myself, she went home, and I spent the rest of the night asking my roommates when she was going to get there, because I couldn't remember that she'd already come, I'd already brought everything inside, or that I'd already asked them several times.
Similarly, I one time spontaneously had a seizure while I was downtown. Again, I have no memory of what happened afterwards, but I apparently went on auto-pilot and put myself on the subway (conveniently in the direction of home). When I came out of it, I didn't even know what city I was in for a few minutes, but I was pleasantly surprised when I realized I was already halfway to my house. Could be worse. I have a friend who, when she has seizures like that, has a tendency to blank out for a couple hours and take public transportation in arbitrary directions, ending up in places she doesn't even recognize afterwards and has never been before. What it is about her brain that thinks it's a good idea to get on and off buses at random, we may never know.
I've heard enough stories/read enough stuff in the news about things like that happening that I've really been meaning to get one of these for a while, but I keep slacking. Really should do something about that, though. I'm sure it beats getting tased.
I haven't noticed anything about either of those things in particular affecting my seizures, but it's still interesting that diet came up, because that's what I've found to have the biggest affect for me. In my case, I found out completely accidentally. I had been having various GI problems, but no tests showed anything physically wrong, so my doctor and I decided to see if any of it was possibly due to food allergies/intolerances.
After eliminating the most likely suspects, I noticed that aside from it helping with that, the number of seizures I was having (which had previously been improved but not at all stopped by medication) dropped substantially, to the degree that I have fewer while unmedicated at this point than I did while heavily medicated before, and with a much more moderate/tolerable amount of medication, they've stopped completely. As an added bonus, I eat much better now that most junk food and a lot of processed stuff in general is out of my diet and feel more healthy overall.
I'm sure it's not the cause or solution for everyone, but I agree that stuff like that is definitely worth looking into for people who are running out of ideas. It's a bit of a pain in the ass trying to find something ok for me to eat when I go out with people, but it's been worth the effort.
The storybook probably solidified Galaxy as my favorite Mario game... it just brought everything together, from an emotional standpoint, even if the rest of the game wasn't so dramatic, the storybook supplied that side of it, and that was enough. Not to mention, it was an amazing storybook. It seems like a story written for adults to feel like a children's story, but with all the depth of emotion required for adult enjoyment. Now that I've "finished" the game (seen the entire storybook and ending, but don't have quite 2/3 of the stars yet), I definitely agree with that. When I first started playing, the first real level in space made me feel like I was playing a cross between The Little Prince and a Mario game, just because of the setting and the feel of running around tiny planets with regular-sized objects on them. After going through the whole storybook, though, I think making that connection is even more accurate, since, as you put it, they're both children's stories for adults. That was not something I expected, but it was definitely something I appreciated; it's one of my favorite books, and it was neat to see something reminiscent of it in a video game, of all places. It's little stuff like that that keeps a lot of Nintendo's first-party stuff near the top of my list of favorites, even with so much high-quality competition out there.
That's exactly the first thing I thought, too. That taught me and several other people I know how to type much better in a hurry. When you can either have high speed/accuracy or lose the game, you suddenly have a lot of motivation to do it right.
There's really just no reason to live in the city unless you're one of those Starbucks-drinking, suit-wearing corporate tools. I can think of plenty of other reasons. For example: As nice as it is in the middle of nowhere, and as much as I like it, I could never live there. I can't legally get a driver's license for medical reasons (which is a good thing; I wouldn't trust myself driving, and neither should anyone else), so when I'm visiting someone outside the city, I'm completely dependent on everyone. I'm basically stuck in the house until someone else feels like going out. It's nice being a few hundred feet from a bus stop and a few minutes from the subway, and within walking/biking distance of a lot of things. Mine's kind of an extreme case, but general convenience of things has its rewards.
We need to deal with the drunk driving problem responsibly: provide good public transportation options (Boston, extend trains until after 2am, you listening?), encourage designated drivers, and provide massive roaming police enforcement, looking for erratic driving and dangerous behavior (substantially more effective than roadblocks). As someone living in Boston, I can fully support that. I can't legally get a license, so I can't drive. That means I have to take the subway and the bus. That means I have to go home fairly early from some things or take a cab. It's not a big deal during the day on weekdays, but it can get obnoxious at night or on the weekends sometimes. On the drunk driving side of things, I remember one night riding in a friend's car from Kendall Square to Quincy just after the trains had stopped, entirely along the path of the red line, and in the 20 minutes or however long it took us to get there, we saw at least eight people pulled over. It's pretty ridiculous.
Unfortunately, they have a hard time extending the hours, because no one uses it that late, and everything runs so infrequently at that time of night that most people use more convenient ways of getting places. That makes it cost an absurd amount per rider. I think I read somewhere that the Night Owl bus service they tried out briefly ended up costing over $7.50 per rider instead of under $1.50 like it did during the day at that point. So, they can't extend the hours because no one uses it, which makes it too expensive to, and no one uses it because it doesn't have later hours and is too infrequent at night in the first place, especially if you have to take a bus.
Speaking as someone who's lucky enough to have photosensitive epilepsy, yeah, that could potentially suck. I have it mostly but not entirely under control at the moment, but there have been times when a wide variety of flashing or flickering things made me either feel pretty funny or have seizures: the stereotypical strobe lights, riding in a car on the highway with the sun low in the sky and flickering through the trees, hanging around in Times Square, and so on. That last one was quite an adventure, and not a terribly fun one; I had to turn towards a wall with my eyes closed while waiting to meet someone who was running a bit late.
Anyway, I'm not really looking forward to ever finding out what one of these things would do to me. It's already enough fun having your brain flip out on you without throwing up all over yourself at the same time.
Coincidentally, I was just reading articles a few days ago about inappropriate use by police of force/tasers/etc. on people either in the middle of seizures or shortly after, while they were disoriented or irritable. It doesn't happen too often, but it's just often enough to make me uncomfortable and a little worried.
Consolas is pretty decent. I don't know why they're comparing it to Proggy Clean, though. It's hideous and makes my eyes hurt trying to read it in the screenshot of actual code; it makes Courier New look pretty. I still have a soft spot for 9-point Monaco, although comparing it on OS X and XP, it looks kind of weird on Windows.
Verdana is just Geneva with a very slightly wider spacing (a few pixels' worth over an entire sentence). Neither one is particularly easier or harder to read than the other, and the characters look nearly identical at relatively small sizes.
Supposedly the replays are stored not as a rendered movie file, but rather as the actual movements and events in the sequence that they happened. Bungie already did that with the Marathon games a decade ago. You could basically save a playthrough of the entire game in a fairly small amount of space, and you could trade the files around to watch how other people did things and see ridiculously skillful runs by particularly good people, all without having to download enormous movie files like with most games. Being able to fit a substantial amount of that in a few hundred k was nice when almost everyone was still using fairly slow dialup. They didn't have any of the other features you mentioned, though. I could see that being pretty fun.
Slashdot Mirror
I have gone to the hospital, but they best they can tell me is "inconclusive". I might have it, I might not, and unless I spend something like 72 hours hooked up to an EEG and deprived of sleep, they won't be able to tell for sure, and even if they get a positive hit, the medication sounds worse than the condition.
As someone who is epileptic, has spent a good deal of time reading up on it, and has spent a good deal of time talking to his neurologist about it, I'm very serious when I say to go find a new neurologist, preferably yesterday. You might be right about what's happening. You might not. Either way, though, you deserve to be taken seriously, have it properly looked into, and given a straight answer about it.
A surprisingly large number of people who do end up getting diagnosed and treated for seizure disorders don't have anything conclusive show up on either an EEG or an MRI, so a bunch of the time it comes down to going by symptoms.
I've personally been very lucky with dealing with doctors like that, but neurologists as a whole do have a reputation for sometimes acting like gods of their domain even more than doctors in general, as if they're all-knowing about brain functions. If you do run into someone like that, don't tell them what you think is wrong with you or what you've been looking up on your own; tell them what's been happening, and let them come to their own conclusion, whether it's some type of seizure disorder, migraines (most people would be surprised to learn just how weird they can be; they can cause a lot of the same things to happen as many kinds of seizures, only for a different reason), psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, or something else totally unrelated. That is their job, after all, and if you're paying them, they should be doing it for you.
As far as the bit about the medication sounding worse than the condition, if you're on the right medication (for you; everyone reacts differently), that's absolutely not true. Some of the older medications have a higher rate of annoying side effects, although they tend to be extremely effective, and a bunch of people tolerate them just fine. The newer ones, though, are a lot more benign on average. It took me a few tries to find one that both worked well and didn't cause any other problems, but we've come up with one now that I basically have no side effects from, as long as I don't miss doses.
As for why taking them is important, even if it involves a couple failed med trials with weird side effects or having to tolerate side effects with what you do eventually settle on, seizures are kind of a Big Deal. If that is what's actually going on, leaving them untreated is a Bad Idea, because they have a tendency to get progressively worse over time if you don't do anything about it. For a lot of people, they start to happen more often and are more unpleasant the longer they're not under control, and that also makes them harder to get under control in the first place.
Not to scare you or anything, since I have no way of knowing what's really happening to you, and there are in most cases multiple possible causes for things like that. That there's a reasonable possibility that it's something like that is a good reason to get a straight answer about it, though, and to not settle for them beating around the bush. Even if the doctors are a pain in the ass, and the treatment seems potentially like a pain in the ass. It's worth getting sorted out one way or the other.
Hey, I have some great beachfront property in Arizona I'd like to sell you.
Like on Lake Havasu? That may have worked out better if you'd gone for something like oceanfront instead. Heh.
AMD also went for forward and backward compatibility in a big way, a BIOS update (and sometimes not even that) is all that is needed to make the oldest socket 939 boards work with the newest AMD cpus. You lose out on a few features (e.g. faster HT and ram), but it makes upgrading an AMD machine much cheaper.
Err, really? How's that? I know AM2(+) and AM3 are supposed to be relatively interchangeable, but Socket 939 doesn't have the same number of pins or layout as them, last time I checked. I would be totally thrilled if that were possible, since I still have a Socket 939 board, and my CPU is the only thing that's really not fast enough right now, but unless I'm missing something, I don't see how that would work. It seems like you'd just end up with some bent pins and a broken computer.
Is there some good reason /. keeps linking to stories on Gameplayer lately? People complain on every single one of them about the articles being split over several dozen pages, with a paragraph or two of text on each, but this one is a new low. It reads like it was written by a twelve year old. "Sly" it under the table? Last time I checked, they speak English in Australia, but I guess the writers for this site (and editors, if they even have any) didn't get the memo...
Mathcounts is the first thing that came to mind for me, too. I participated in it for a couple years, way back when in middle school, and I read the newsletter and followed results for a few years after that and sort of kept up with the person coaching it, since I stayed involved with math team-related stuff in high school, too. I went all the way to the national level, and my anecdotal evidence agrees exactly with yours.
At the school/regional level, there was always a good mix of boys and girls, and my school in particular usually had more girls than boys involved in things like that. Moving up to the state level, though, which only the highest-scorers advance to, it became noticeably more skewed towards the boys, and the vast majority of the top ten (or even all ten of them) would be boys here (Massachusetts, specifically Boston-area), too. At the national level, only a handful of girls were there the year I went, and that seems to be pretty typical. Again, the top ones are usually almost exclusively male.
I also noticed the same thing with other math competitions like that in high school. At the local level, there was always a good mix, but the higher up it goes, the more the gender ratio shifts, until there are basically no girls left, and I'm sure plenty of people on here can attest to that continuing with the gender distribution of men and women in college math departments, whether among those teaching or the students themselves.
A lot of the girls I knew back then grew up to go to top schools and did very well for themselves, some of them even sticking with science-related fields, although generally not pure math (or even engineering or CS...a bunch of them wandered off into things like biology/medicine or geology). They certainly were and are quite smart and capable overall, so I don't know what it is that seems to filter them out from pure math and hard sciences.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who want to spend a few hundred dollars on an operating system. If you asked the average person on the street, they'd probably tell you that they didn't even have to buy an operating system, it came for free on their computer.
I think you vastly overestimate the technical knowledge of the average person on the street. They'd probably tell you that they have no idea what you're talking about or what an operating system is.
No, you can't play sports because you're a girl. You're too fragile
There was a very interesting article in the NY Times magazine a couple months ago about just that. Since Title IX came about, the number of girls participating in sports at a competitive level has increased substantially, and one of the unexpected/unintended results of that has been that a lot of girls (not women, but girls even in middle school/high school) have been having a lot more traumatic injuries, both at very young ages and at higher rates than their male counterparts. I don't remember the exact numbers, but girls have severe injuries like ACL tears and concussions significantly more often than boys do while playing soccer, and girls' soccer is comparable to or possibly even more injury prone than guys playing football.
Yes, a lot more of them are getting into it, but they're also getting permanently taken out of it by injuries as teenagers or in college that affect them for the rest of their lives, much more than boys are, which is a kind of distressing trend. I don't mean to suggest that they should be discouraged from doing it (my girlfriend used to swim competitively, and one of my best (female) friends since childhood used to be nationally ranked in tennis, and they both took positive things away from the experience), but it certainly hasn't been all love, luck, and lollipops since things started changing, and the new problems caused by trying to fix the old ones are difficult to address.
"Go Kill 10 Spathi Eluders, then see Commander Ivanova at Vega II. Take this cool, refereshing Pepsi to rejuvenate yourself on the long flight"
That is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying and hurts my brain. Someone make it stop.
SC3 was not made by Toys for Bob and is not considered canon in the Star Control series/universe. Toys for Bob and fans of the original games have actually been trying for years to convince their publishers to let them make a true sequel to SC2. There have been rumors of people at Activision showing interest more recently, and there have been fan letter-writing campaigns and petitions to show support and that people will buy such a thing if it exists, but as far as I know/remember, there hasn't been anything beyond someone at Activision asking for a presentation of a concept for what the game would be. So, no official work or progress at the moment, but it does seem like there's some hope that there will be something at some point to make up for the atrocity that SC3 was.
In general, I'm fine with and even enjoy those kinds of themes in movies/books/TV shows/games. I actually really liked the Shinto/respect for nature themes in My Neighbor Totoro, for example, and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil is one of my favorite new characters in the past few years. Something about how it was presented in Mononoke felt forced and overbearing to me, though. I wish I could explain it better, but it's been a while since I saw it. I'm still hopeful about some of the other movies, since people I know with similar tastes to mine have liked them, but I guess I won't know for sure until I get through all the other stuff I already have sitting around to watch/read/play.
Princess Mononoke was the first one I saw, and it annoyed me so much that I didn't bother watching anything else of his until this year. It took My Neighbor Totoro to convince me that I actually do like some of his stuff. Mononoke came across as a bunch of hippie-dippie, femi-nazi, Luddite bullshit to me and just irritated me more and more as it went on. Visually it was well done, although not really my preferred style, but the characters mostly annoyed me, and the plot was ridiculous. I enjoyed Totoro enough to convince me to put more of his other stuff on my list, though, so we'll see how that goes. So far, Howl's Moving Castle was fun, but not very deep. I should really go watch Spirited Away one of these days.
None of the people I watched it with even liked it or thought it was any good, much less were moved to tears by it. We all had very high hopes for it but ended up mostly being bored by it and not really drawn into the story. The reviews and summaries made it sound so good, but something about the actual presentation of it just didn't do it for us. I guess we're all soulless. Oh well.
Ugh. Don't remind me. I had to replace multiple hard drives in multiple iBooks last year. I did it enough times that I got under 20 minutes from start to finish (removing the first screw to replacing the last one). I think my record was almost down to 15 after memorizing the screw layout. The first couple times were brutal, hour-long affairs, though.
Although plenty of American comics are crap, and the superhero ones tend to have a somewhat narrow audience they appeal to, there have been great things done even within the specific genre of American superhero comics. My particular favorite stuff to recommend to people is some of what Kurt Busiek's done. He manages to take the broad setting of "American superhero comic" but use people's fascination with them to tell stories about the people in a world like that and how it affects their daily lives, not just the good guys and the bad guys beating each other up, and he does it without requiring the reader to be familiar with a decades-long, convoluted backstory (although if you do have a bit of familiarity with the history of the genre, there are a lot of references and in-jokes to be caught as a bonus that aren't at all necessary to the stories). Go pick up the first volume of the Astro City trade paperback and read the first story in it. It's only a few pages long, but it gives a good sense of his writing style and approach to telling stories (and then read the rest of the book, because the other stories are pretty good, too).
While you're at it, get the TPB of Superman: Secret Identiy that he wrote and read the several-page introduction he wrote at the front of the book. It's very appropriate for the current discussion, all about how comics, particularly superhero comics, are often not used to express "true" art or explore very significant issues but are certainly very capable as a medium for doing it, and it has some interesting comments on the idea.
As I'm lucky enough to have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, I can relate (although at least mine seems to finally be under control now, through a combination of medication and diet changes). Having your brain fry itself like that, particularly your temporal lobes, does all sorts of weird stuff to memory. I've had similar stuff happen, like having an important discussion about something, making decisions about it, and a few days later having no idea it happened until someone starts looking at me funny for not knowing what's going on. Then I go check my logs and find out that it really did happen, and there's the record of me talking about it to prove it. It was particularly weird when it first started happening and I wasn't used to it, because my memory for stuff like that used to be rather good.
I also know what it's like having it cause a sudden case of the stupids. That was already described well enough, so I'll just add a little anecdote. I tend to pick up useless facts really easily for some reason, and I was good at trivia when I was younger, so a couple years ago, I joined an online trivia league. This was coincidentally right when I was having more seizures than I'd ever had before or have since then. I did not do particularly well compared to how I expected. After getting the seizures mostly under control, I rather suddenly started doing substantially better, and there's a convenient statistical record showing that. Looking at the average number of questions I got right per "season", I got pretty close to one number every time before finding a working treatment, and then it suddenly jumps to consistently 50% higher than that afterwards. I didn't notice the connection for a few months, but it was pretty obvious once I looked at the dates: "This month is when I started having a brain again."
The "fugue" bit reminds me of a couple other things, too. That happens to me once in a while. There are a few days here and there that I'm missing chunks of a few hours from and have no idea at all what happened other than what people have told me. Not just fuzzy, but completely gone. For example, one time a few years ago, my mom was helping me move some furniture I'd been keeping in my parents' basement into my new apartment. I had a particularly bizarre seizure while she was on her way over and remember nothing else after her saying she was coming. Apparently I carried a bunch of stuff upstairs to the third floor all by myself, she went home, and I spent the rest of the night asking my roommates when she was going to get there, because I couldn't remember that she'd already come, I'd already brought everything inside, or that I'd already asked them several times.
Similarly, I one time spontaneously had a seizure while I was downtown. Again, I have no memory of what happened afterwards, but I apparently went on auto-pilot and put myself on the subway (conveniently in the direction of home). When I came out of it, I didn't even know what city I was in for a few minutes, but I was pleasantly surprised when I realized I was already halfway to my house. Could be worse. I have a friend who, when she has seizures like that, has a tendency to blank out for a couple hours and take public transportation in arbitrary directions, ending up in places she doesn't even recognize afterwards and has never been before. What it is about her brain that thinks it's a good idea to get on and off buses at random, we may never know.
I've heard enough stories/read enough stuff in the news about things like that happening that I've really been meaning to get one of these for a while, but I keep slacking. Really should do something about that, though. I'm sure it beats getting tased.
I haven't noticed anything about either of those things in particular affecting my seizures, but it's still interesting that diet came up, because that's what I've found to have the biggest affect for me. In my case, I found out completely accidentally. I had been having various GI problems, but no tests showed anything physically wrong, so my doctor and I decided to see if any of it was possibly due to food allergies/intolerances.
After eliminating the most likely suspects, I noticed that aside from it helping with that, the number of seizures I was having (which had previously been improved but not at all stopped by medication) dropped substantially, to the degree that I have fewer while unmedicated at this point than I did while heavily medicated before, and with a much more moderate/tolerable amount of medication, they've stopped completely. As an added bonus, I eat much better now that most junk food and a lot of processed stuff in general is out of my diet and feel more healthy overall.
I'm sure it's not the cause or solution for everyone, but I agree that stuff like that is definitely worth looking into for people who are running out of ideas. It's a bit of a pain in the ass trying to find something ok for me to eat when I go out with people, but it's been worth the effort.
That's exactly the first thing I thought, too. That taught me and several other people I know how to type much better in a hurry. When you can either have high speed/accuracy or lose the game, you suddenly have a lot of motivation to do it right.
Unfortunately, they have a hard time extending the hours, because no one uses it that late, and everything runs so infrequently at that time of night that most people use more convenient ways of getting places. That makes it cost an absurd amount per rider. I think I read somewhere that the Night Owl bus service they tried out briefly ended up costing over $7.50 per rider instead of under $1.50 like it did during the day at that point. So, they can't extend the hours because no one uses it, which makes it too expensive to, and no one uses it because it doesn't have later hours and is too infrequent at night in the first place, especially if you have to take a bus.
Speaking as someone who's lucky enough to have photosensitive epilepsy, yeah, that could potentially suck. I have it mostly but not entirely under control at the moment, but there have been times when a wide variety of flashing or flickering things made me either feel pretty funny or have seizures: the stereotypical strobe lights, riding in a car on the highway with the sun low in the sky and flickering through the trees, hanging around in Times Square, and so on. That last one was quite an adventure, and not a terribly fun one; I had to turn towards a wall with my eyes closed while waiting to meet someone who was running a bit late.
Anyway, I'm not really looking forward to ever finding out what one of these things would do to me. It's already enough fun having your brain flip out on you without throwing up all over yourself at the same time.
Coincidentally, I was just reading articles a few days ago about inappropriate use by police of force/tasers/etc. on people either in the middle of seizures or shortly after, while they were disoriented or irritable. It doesn't happen too often, but it's just often enough to make me uncomfortable and a little worried.
Consolas is pretty decent. I don't know why they're comparing it to Proggy Clean, though. It's hideous and makes my eyes hurt trying to read it in the screenshot of actual code; it makes Courier New look pretty. I still have a soft spot for 9-point Monaco, although comparing it on OS X and XP, it looks kind of weird on Windows.
Verdana is just Geneva with a very slightly wider spacing (a few pixels' worth over an entire sentence). Neither one is particularly easier or harder to read than the other, and the characters look nearly identical at relatively small sizes.