About 5-6 years back, a friend of mine shared an apartment with a Muslim guy and decided, one time, to go to mosque with his aparmtent-mate on account of curiosity. Later, he was telling me about it and mentioned how the men and women were separated, so I asked why. The Muslim guy told me that it was so that the people of the opposite sex would not be a distraction during the service, so I asked, "well, what about gay guys?" He got this look on his face that sort of said, "what the... ?" and replied, "there are no gay Muslims."
In WoW there's a whole side to the game that I wouldn't really consider fun, but it needs to be done in order to enjoy some of the other parts. I play a healing spec'd raid priest, so when I log on during a raid night I'm expected to have plenty of reagents, potions, elixirs or flasks, and then to pay for my repair bill at the end of the night. All of this costs gold and/or time. So in between raid nights, I have the pleasure of grinding out some gold so that I can afford to raid. It's not very entertaining to just kill the same mobs over and over again (especially since I am spec'd to heal/support, not damage); I only do it because it's necessary if I wish to continue raiding. I've almost quit raiding a time or two simply because I was having trouble finding the time to grind in addition to having a life.
Toshiba is currently running a special where at participating retailers, the HD-A2 unit is given a $100 instant rebate. That drops the HD-A2, admittedly their entry-level hd-dvd unit, to $299. It's possible to find it cheaper than that too. Of course, if one hunts around it's easy to find deals that beat the $299 price tag without any "special" rebates. The rebate runs until June 16, and in the last week it applies to any Toshiba hd-dvd unit. Oh, and until July 31, I think, Toshiba is also running a special where you get five free hd-dvds (from a given selection) when you purchase any of their hd-dvd players. I'm not trying to plug for them, but I was considering getting the hd-a2 and both of these offers were swaying my decision. (I ended up spending 200 bucks more and getting the HD-XA2, higher quality player and it also outputs in 1080p--the HD-A2 outputs in 1080i but not 1080p. Oh, and getting the matrix trilogy on hd-dvd for 20 bucks due to a Circuit City screwup certainly didn't hurt!)
I took my Wii to my sister's for Thanksgiving and it was a smash hit with my family. My sister plays the occasional video game, but it's usually stuff like The Sims or even sometimes WoW. My parents haven't played video games, on the other hand, since the Atari 2600. We had a ton of fun playing bowling and tennis and, later in the evening, my dad stood there playing golf for a good hour. My sister has already gone out and gotten one (an xmas gift to herself) and I know my dad wants one too. And my mom wouldn't mind, and she's a bit leery of technology--she literally does not know how to use a PC at all, they intimidate her. When my mom, who doesn't understand how to even use a mouse, is playing the Wii and enjoying herself, then Nintendo has done something right.
Okay, I know this is retarded but AvP was crap. Just crap. Uwe Boll's movies, on the other hand, are so bad that they make me laugh. I wouldn't go to see one of his movies in the theaters, but they're worth renting and watching with some buds and brews imo. So we've got "this is crap, what a waste of my money" vs "this is crap, but at least I'm laughing".
Does anyone remember how difficult it was to get a collector's edition of WoW pretty soon after the game went release?... Then months later, hey whaddya know, EB found a "misplaced" box of CE games and sold them on their website for hugely inflated amounts.
Runes also gain experience during play that can be used to upgrade or learn new attributes and abilities, meaning that as your play style evolves, so do your Runes.
Runes gain experience during play that can be used to upgrade or learn new attributes and abilities, meaning that as your play style evolves, so do your Runes.
The only "varied" part about the ony chain is the story behind it. The quests themselves fall easily into the few quest archetypes.
If you look at the entire ony chain, it's composed of kill quests (both killing numbers of creatures and killing specific creatures to get specific quest items), and running around talking to NPCs. The only "twists" in the chain are 1) after you initially track down Windsor, you have to go back into BRD and find the crumpled note (there is no other indication that you have to complete other quests to make the note available, but this quest mechanism is by no means unique); and 2) knowing before-hand that you aren't supposed try to help when the guards turn into wyrmkin.
You're painting with a very broad brush here... take, for example, the guild I am in.
We have three official raiding nights. Each raiding night lasts approximately 3-4 hours. The raid leaders like to keep it down to three, but if we're having trouble reaching our objectives they'll extend it out to 4 at the most. So right there, we're looking at 9 to 12 hours a week for the raiders. We use a raid scheduler where people can sign up, then a day in advance the raid leaders select their team from those signed up. We're not super large, so generally signing up well in advance means you're in. You don't really have to re-arrange your entire schedule because you already have a good idea of whether you'll be attending on any specific night. Oh, and attendance (assuming you didn't sign up) isn't mandatory. In fact, if you did sign up and need to withdraw--simply remove yourself from the raid in the scheduler. If you can't give more than 24-hr's notice, do the same and then post in a specific thread on our forums. That's it. No real penalties besides maybe having trouble getting into the raid if it becomes habitual. We have three ranks for the "normal" members: CWALer, Raid Initiate, and Raider. Raider just means you have at least 50% attendance and have proved you are capable of showing up on-time prepared (pots, resist gear, reagents, gear is fully repaired, basic knowledge of the encounters, know how to play your class). So, if you want "preferred status" as a Raider, you need to come to 3 raids every 2 weeks. Assuming a 3.5 hour raid night, that's only 10.5 hours over 2 weeks, or under 6 hours in a single week. Granted we're not running naxx, but we manage to raid, have fun, and lead passingly normal lives.
We use a zero-sum DKP system, which means people new to the system tend to come in around the middle. I, for example, have somewhere around -9.5 dkp. If a new-comer comes in and kills a single boss, he will already have positive dkp. If only he and I were rolling on a piece of gear, he would automatically win since he's in the positive. There's no weeks or months of hording up DKP just to able to afford your first item. In the case of tier 1 & 2 gear that everyone else already has, it can be defaulted to a new-comer, allowing them to go lower than our standard -10 dkp limit.
And probably a third of our active members are female. Adult females, and a good portion of them are professionals with degrees. We never see any sort of favoritism. YMMV of course, on another server I am in a guild where there isn't favoritism per se (because there's no raid loot to show favoritism over) but all the boys stumble over eachother to appease and impress the few girls (and I use "girls" here purposely) in the guild.
The old strategy of suing 800 people at once is gone. Instead the RIAA is looking to be more localized, focused and personal with its new strategy. More...
I bought a refurbed PS1 in '97 to play Final Fantasy VII. I ended up buying a lot more games and using it, without any problems, until 2002. The PS1 was only retired because I finally bought a refurbed PS2; I gave the old PS1 to my roommate's girlfriend. I don't think she uses it anymore, but it was in working condition when I gave it to her. Until late last year, that PS2 served as my console and also as a dvd player and cd player--I had a decent set of speakers but had never invested in separate players. (Finally went out and bought a dvd player that could read divx files so I could watch fansubs on the tv.) In fact, my roommate still uses the PS2 to play dvds because (for whatever reason) he can't be bothered to "figure out" the dvd player.
Just wanted to share... for every horror story, I'm sure there's another person who had a positive experience with little to no complaints. Oh, one of my good friends also has a PS2 from when they first came out and his works perfectly fine still. Just lucky, I guess.
Re:What are the entry requirements?
on
Hacker Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
You've all forgotten that the computer needs a massively powerful video card to display the 3D Internet! Letters, numbers, fractals--these things, in hi-res, are the backbone of today's communication infrastructure. Bet none of you realized Al Gore could be so hip!
People should just leave if they don't like the service? That's a horrible stance to take, especially since many people enjoy the game and are only griping about the servers' performance. I play WoW, and I expect there to be lag and I expect there to be issues with the game, but mostly because I don't expect too much from the blizz team handling WoW. By no means am I "fine" with it. Rolling over and saying, "oh well, it's an MMO!" doesn't even begin to help solve anything.
Even beyond the frustration of trying to play the game when it's lagging, there is a real issue when you reach the higher levels and start doing 40-mans. My friend has a 4g repair bill every time he dies with his warrior and he's not even an off-tank for our guild's raids (meaning there are people with better, more expensive gear). He doesn't even have any gear from BWL or AQ20/40. Lag in a raid leads to deaths and that leads to repair bills. I guess everyone should just suck it up and be okay with dying multiple times and then having to grind for gold during their non-raiding time?
I understand you're sick of hearing people whine, but generally they have valid complaints. Large queues in combination with lag that makes the game unplayable is not acceptable.
I don't know if it's just rumor or what, but I always heard that at the school I graduated from, students were allowed to have some input when a professor came up for tenure. When I first started attending there, my academic advisor was a professor who had just come up for tenure and been denied. From what I understood, she was the best computer science (programming especially) professor at the school. Her classes, I heard, were difficult but very educational. So essentially what I think happened was a lot of people went in and got mediocre or bad grades and then complained when she came up for tenure. My friend, who I consider to be a good programmer, got a C in her class but (looking back) says it was the best programming class he had taken there.
I remember talking with her the first time we met and she was mentioned that she got turned down for tenure. She had three different offers from other schools, and the lowest offer had her at over double what my school had been paying her. Frankly, it pissed me off a bit. Here we had what I understood to be an excellent teacher and she essentially lost a popularity contest and was leaving.
Hehe I agree. My schedule isn't as busy as yours, but I manage to raid pretty regularly with my guild. Onyxia we usually do on Monday or Friday, and then go right to another instance afterwards. ZG is typically a two-night affair with half the bosses Wednesday night, and the rest on Thursday. MC usually we start Friday then wrap up Monday. AQ20 we do pretty much whenever there's a strong interest. I don't go to every raid, I don't play every night, but when you know the strats then it's not too difficult to set aside an hour for ony or 2-3 to run part of MC... assuming you can get on and aren't lagged to hell and back, that is.
Last night I got back home and went to log on, figuring I could catch the end parts of my guild's MC run. I connect to the server and get put in a queue of 303. 10 seconds later, it becomes a queue of 300. Ef that. I canceled it and went to go play an alt on a different server. No phat lewts for me:(. What really takes the cake is that even though there was a queue, apparently the entire server was lagged badly. We get put into queues so we have to wait to play the characters we've spent months and months developing, and then when we finally get in it's lagged so much that the playing experience becomes frustrating?
Cool, I had heard comments that 12 was like 11 (the online one), which I had played briefly but gave up on pretty quickly... and I *like* MMOs hehe! The thing that's so great about 6, imo, is the storyline and the fact that I actually cared about the characters. That's the big difference for me between 6/4 and all the others. The characters either just didn't grab me emotionally, or they downright annoyed me (*cough*tidus*cough*).
8's battle system was kind of fun, but horribly broken:). Once you figured out how everything benefitted you, it became too easy to abuse it. 9 I really enjoyed at first--I saw it as a throwback to the "medieval"-style FFs. 10 was really enjoyable and probably comes the closest to 6/4 in storytelling. Tidus is so annoying though, and there's something about the later parts that just... create a sort of mental dischord, I guess, if that makes any sense. I think it's the way the church of Yevon is sort of evil and everyone seems oblivious to the fact.
Btw, I don't know if you like the music in FF, but check out Fantasy Reborn. This guy is a professional musician/composer and makes up piano arrangements of FF music and puts up recordings on his site. You'll probably recognize a lot of it:).
Slashdot Mirror
About 5-6 years back, a friend of mine shared an apartment with a Muslim guy and decided, one time, to go to mosque with his aparmtent-mate on account of curiosity. Later, he was telling me about it and mentioned how the men and women were separated, so I asked why. The Muslim guy told me that it was so that the people of the opposite sex would not be a distraction during the service, so I asked, "well, what about gay guys?" He got this look on his face that sort of said, "what the... ?" and replied, "there are no gay Muslims."
Errr, not quite.
In WoW there's a whole side to the game that I wouldn't really consider fun, but it needs to be done in order to enjoy some of the other parts. I play a healing spec'd raid priest, so when I log on during a raid night I'm expected to have plenty of reagents, potions, elixirs or flasks, and then to pay for my repair bill at the end of the night. All of this costs gold and/or time. So in between raid nights, I have the pleasure of grinding out some gold so that I can afford to raid. It's not very entertaining to just kill the same mobs over and over again (especially since I am spec'd to heal/support, not damage); I only do it because it's necessary if I wish to continue raiding. I've almost quit raiding a time or two simply because I was having trouble finding the time to grind in addition to having a life.
Toshiba is currently running a special where at participating retailers, the HD-A2 unit is given a $100 instant rebate. That drops the HD-A2, admittedly their entry-level hd-dvd unit, to $299. It's possible to find it cheaper than that too. Of course, if one hunts around it's easy to find deals that beat the $299 price tag without any "special" rebates. The rebate runs until June 16, and in the last week it applies to any Toshiba hd-dvd unit. Oh, and until July 31, I think, Toshiba is also running a special where you get five free hd-dvds (from a given selection) when you purchase any of their hd-dvd players. I'm not trying to plug for them, but I was considering getting the hd-a2 and both of these offers were swaying my decision. (I ended up spending 200 bucks more and getting the HD-XA2, higher quality player and it also outputs in 1080p--the HD-A2 outputs in 1080i but not 1080p. Oh, and getting the matrix trilogy on hd-dvd for 20 bucks due to a Circuit City screwup certainly didn't hurt!)
you'll get used to it
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/11/japanese-kids-s upergluing-wii-remote.html
Online pokemon is going to be serious business.
I took my Wii to my sister's for Thanksgiving and it was a smash hit with my family. My sister plays the occasional video game, but it's usually stuff like The Sims or even sometimes WoW. My parents haven't played video games, on the other hand, since the Atari 2600. We had a ton of fun playing bowling and tennis and, later in the evening, my dad stood there playing golf for a good hour. My sister has already gone out and gotten one (an xmas gift to herself) and I know my dad wants one too. And my mom wouldn't mind, and she's a bit leery of technology--she literally does not know how to use a PC at all, they intimidate her. When my mom, who doesn't understand how to even use a mouse, is playing the Wii and enjoying herself, then Nintendo has done something right.
I'd rather vote for Jack Thomps... wait, what the fuck am I saying?!! *shoots self*
too many videogames, imo.
Okay, I know this is retarded but AvP was crap. Just crap. Uwe Boll's movies, on the other hand, are so bad that they make me laugh. I wouldn't go to see one of his movies in the theaters, but they're worth renting and watching with some buds and brews imo. So we've got "this is crap, what a waste of my money" vs "this is crap, but at least I'm laughing".
Does anyone remember how difficult it was to get a collector's edition of WoW pretty soon after the game went release?... Then months later, hey whaddya know, EB found a "misplaced" box of CE games and sold them on their website for hugely inflated amounts.
Runes also gain experience during play that can be used to upgrade or learn new attributes and abilities, meaning that as your play style evolves, so do your Runes.
Runes gain experience during play that can be used to upgrade or learn new attributes and abilities, meaning that as your play style evolves, so do your Runes.
Now we can get dupes in the summaries!
The only "varied" part about the ony chain is the story behind it. The quests themselves fall easily into the few quest archetypes.
If you look at the entire ony chain, it's composed of kill quests (both killing numbers of creatures and killing specific creatures to get specific quest items), and running around talking to NPCs. The only "twists" in the chain are 1) after you initially track down Windsor, you have to go back into BRD and find the crumpled note (there is no other indication that you have to complete other quests to make the note available, but this quest mechanism is by no means unique); and 2) knowing before-hand that you aren't supposed try to help when the guards turn into wyrmkin.
You're painting with a very broad brush here... take, for example, the guild I am in.
We have three official raiding nights. Each raiding night lasts approximately 3-4 hours. The raid leaders like to keep it down to three, but if we're having trouble reaching our objectives they'll extend it out to 4 at the most. So right there, we're looking at 9 to 12 hours a week for the raiders. We use a raid scheduler where people can sign up, then a day in advance the raid leaders select their team from those signed up. We're not super large, so generally signing up well in advance means you're in. You don't really have to re-arrange your entire schedule because you already have a good idea of whether you'll be attending on any specific night. Oh, and attendance (assuming you didn't sign up) isn't mandatory. In fact, if you did sign up and need to withdraw--simply remove yourself from the raid in the scheduler. If you can't give more than 24-hr's notice, do the same and then post in a specific thread on our forums. That's it. No real penalties besides maybe having trouble getting into the raid if it becomes habitual. We have three ranks for the "normal" members: CWALer, Raid Initiate, and Raider. Raider just means you have at least 50% attendance and have proved you are capable of showing up on-time prepared (pots, resist gear, reagents, gear is fully repaired, basic knowledge of the encounters, know how to play your class). So, if you want "preferred status" as a Raider, you need to come to 3 raids every 2 weeks. Assuming a 3.5 hour raid night, that's only 10.5 hours over 2 weeks, or under 6 hours in a single week. Granted we're not running naxx, but we manage to raid, have fun, and lead passingly normal lives.
We use a zero-sum DKP system, which means people new to the system tend to come in around the middle. I, for example, have somewhere around -9.5 dkp. If a new-comer comes in and kills a single boss, he will already have positive dkp. If only he and I were rolling on a piece of gear, he would automatically win since he's in the positive. There's no weeks or months of hording up DKP just to able to afford your first item. In the case of tier 1 & 2 gear that everyone else already has, it can be defaulted to a new-comer, allowing them to go lower than our standard -10 dkp limit.
And probably a third of our active members are female. Adult females, and a good portion of them are professionals with degrees. We never see any sort of favoritism. YMMV of course, on another server I am in a guild where there isn't favoritism per se (because there's no raid loot to show favoritism over) but all the boys stumble over eachother to appease and impress the few girls (and I use "girls" here purposely) in the guild.
And I was a fucking fry cook!
:)
Well, on the up-side at least you were fucking
from digg:
RIAA Shifts Lawsuit Strategy
Tatter submitted by Tatter 23 hours 1 minute ago (via http://www.slyck.com/news.php?...)
The old strategy of suing 800 people at once is gone. Instead the RIAA is looking to be more localized, focused and personal with its new strategy. More...
Hey, I mean, it moves packages...
Indeed...
That anecdote sounded interesting, but I have to admit I thought it smelled a little of BS.
Anyway, found a reference to it here (it's a ways down the page, like 4/5 of the way down)... Hofstadter 1986, page 156:
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas: Questing for Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.
I bought a refurbed PS1 in '97 to play Final Fantasy VII. I ended up buying a lot more games and using it, without any problems, until 2002. The PS1 was only retired because I finally bought a refurbed PS2; I gave the old PS1 to my roommate's girlfriend. I don't think she uses it anymore, but it was in working condition when I gave it to her. Until late last year, that PS2 served as my console and also as a dvd player and cd player--I had a decent set of speakers but had never invested in separate players. (Finally went out and bought a dvd player that could read divx files so I could watch fansubs on the tv.) In fact, my roommate still uses the PS2 to play dvds because (for whatever reason) he can't be bothered to "figure out" the dvd player.
Just wanted to share... for every horror story, I'm sure there's another person who had a positive experience with little to no complaints. Oh, one of my good friends also has a PS2 from when they first came out and his works perfectly fine still. Just lucky, I guess.
You've all forgotten that the computer needs a massively powerful video card to display the 3D Internet! Letters, numbers, fractals--these things, in hi-res, are the backbone of today's communication infrastructure. Bet none of you realized Al Gore could be so hip!
People should just leave if they don't like the service? That's a horrible stance to take, especially since many people enjoy the game and are only griping about the servers' performance. I play WoW, and I expect there to be lag and I expect there to be issues with the game, but mostly because I don't expect too much from the blizz team handling WoW. By no means am I "fine" with it. Rolling over and saying, "oh well, it's an MMO!" doesn't even begin to help solve anything.
Even beyond the frustration of trying to play the game when it's lagging, there is a real issue when you reach the higher levels and start doing 40-mans. My friend has a 4g repair bill every time he dies with his warrior and he's not even an off-tank for our guild's raids (meaning there are people with better, more expensive gear). He doesn't even have any gear from BWL or AQ20/40. Lag in a raid leads to deaths and that leads to repair bills. I guess everyone should just suck it up and be okay with dying multiple times and then having to grind for gold during their non-raiding time?
I understand you're sick of hearing people whine, but generally they have valid complaints. Large queues in combination with lag that makes the game unplayable is not acceptable.
I don't know if it's just rumor or what, but I always heard that at the school I graduated from, students were allowed to have some input when a professor came up for tenure. When I first started attending there, my academic advisor was a professor who had just come up for tenure and been denied. From what I understood, she was the best computer science (programming especially) professor at the school. Her classes, I heard, were difficult but very educational. So essentially what I think happened was a lot of people went in and got mediocre or bad grades and then complained when she came up for tenure. My friend, who I consider to be a good programmer, got a C in her class but (looking back) says it was the best programming class he had taken there.
I remember talking with her the first time we met and she was mentioned that she got turned down for tenure. She had three different offers from other schools, and the lowest offer had her at over double what my school had been paying her. Frankly, it pissed me off a bit. Here we had what I understood to be an excellent teacher and she essentially lost a popularity contest and was leaving.
You shouldn't think for yourself. From now on, either repost what I post, or just look for my posts and reply with "MOD PARENT UP!".
Hehe I agree. My schedule isn't as busy as yours, but I manage to raid pretty regularly with my guild. Onyxia we usually do on Monday or Friday, and then go right to another instance afterwards. ZG is typically a two-night affair with half the bosses Wednesday night, and the rest on Thursday. MC usually we start Friday then wrap up Monday. AQ20 we do pretty much whenever there's a strong interest. I don't go to every raid, I don't play every night, but when you know the strats then it's not too difficult to set aside an hour for ony or 2-3 to run part of MC... assuming you can get on and aren't lagged to hell and back, that is.
Last night I got back home and went to log on, figuring I could catch the end parts of my guild's MC run. I connect to the server and get put in a queue of 303. 10 seconds later, it becomes a queue of 300. Ef that. I canceled it and went to go play an alt on a different server. No phat lewts for me :(. What really takes the cake is that even though there was a queue, apparently the entire server was lagged badly. We get put into queues so we have to wait to play the characters we've spent months and months developing, and then when we finally get in it's lagged so much that the playing experience becomes frustrating?
Blizz: "gg no re"
Cool, I had heard comments that 12 was like 11 (the online one), which I had played briefly but gave up on pretty quickly... and I *like* MMOs hehe! The thing that's so great about 6, imo, is the storyline and the fact that I actually cared about the characters. That's the big difference for me between 6/4 and all the others. The characters either just didn't grab me emotionally, or they downright annoyed me (*cough*tidus*cough*).
:). Once you figured out how everything benefitted you, it became too easy to abuse it. 9 I really enjoyed at first--I saw it as a throwback to the "medieval"-style FFs. 10 was really enjoyable and probably comes the closest to 6/4 in storytelling. Tidus is so annoying though, and there's something about the later parts that just... create a sort of mental dischord, I guess, if that makes any sense. I think it's the way the church of Yevon is sort of evil and everyone seems oblivious to the fact.
:).
8's battle system was kind of fun, but horribly broken
Btw, I don't know if you like the music in FF, but check out Fantasy Reborn. This guy is a professional musician/composer and makes up piano arrangements of FF music and puts up recordings on his site. You'll probably recognize a lot of it
See you around!