Those DVD boxes cost so much, not to mention the miniature model of the Enterprise(s) and the captain Kirk figurine (with matching blue chick action figurine).
If you take their collection, and ebay it, I'm pretty sure it'll cover the cost.
Okay, so what are the psychological differences caused by the fact that I can't see things lying on a desk as clearly as I could thirty years ago?
Subject gets irritable when taking notes every time he picks up a card. Blames bad eyesight for irritability. I suspect the subject might have IED, and should probably get my tranquilizer gun.
Those are called murlocks, or as I used to call them "annoying fish things that are goddamned everywhere". When TBC came out I resubscribed, and cheered in guildchat that I was finally free of the abominations, only to discover that the third creature I was going to run into was a murlock.
It wasn't just the look, nor was it their abundant presence in the world, but the annoying sound they made without fail whenever you aggro'd one.
You can not come up with a website complicated enough to justify an $18 million price tag!
Give me a week, and you will have it. It will be the biggest, most badass "Under Construction" sign you've ever seen, 2 billion pixels wide, 1.5 billion pixels high. The traffic from the banner alone will bring routers to their knees, have network admins screaming at their traffic statistics, and mere mortals shall weep in the magnificent glory of 18 million dollars worth of under_construction.png.
FYI, this most excellent sign will also require a broadband stimulus package, complete with a massive infrastructure upgrade on the governments serverfarm and job certainty for hundreds of admins who'll have to toil in slave labor to be able to serve up that monstrosity.
It isn't particularly hard to do things like put a flash fallback inside of a video tag, so people that want to use the standard but still have wide reach have lots of options (flash is the de facto way to play 'web' video today, so I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that this may continue).
Then why even bother at all and let's keep on using flash. Currently as a host you only need to host a flash app and either encode your content to flv or h.264. Most of your target audience already has flash installed, and those who want to view your content will probably install flash. Since now it's undefined in the standard, that would mean that you'd have to host an h.264 for the ogg-impaired browsers, an ogg for the h.264 impaired, and then fall back to ye olde tried and tested method of the abominable flash app (optionally reusing h.264, but for backwards compatibility let's assume flv format).
If you're currently hosting 20GB in videos, all of a sudden you'll find yourself hosting 60GB in video with no real benefit except that some users can get rid of adobe flash. A gigabyte here, a gigabyte there and soon you'll have real storage. Just scale those 20G up to a couple of TB, which starts adding up to real money. As much as I dislike flash, when you start adding the numbers flash is the least expensive solution if you're going to be forced to fall back on it anyway.
And there's a number of things content providers will want to do with the player: add commercials, add a logo in the player, change the user interface to match up with their website, add suggestions at the end of the video, etc etc etc. Some browsers will support feature X and Y, some will not but instead have feature Z. At the moment I'd just buy a license for some player or if I'm crafty enough with flash make one myself (from what I hear it's not that hard, I just don't know how to do that), and get the features I need and know that it'll work on any browser that supports flash. With an in-browser player unless it's clearly defined in a standard what you can do, you're going to end up with an enormous mess (read: gobs and gobs of javascript code, doing all sorts of things, probably working on some browsers, and not on other).
You can't get the "players" in the field to agree what codec they want, and I'm sure that that has more to do with ulterior motivations than "patent concerns" or whatever the excuse of the day is. Microsoft has nothing to gain since they're trying to gain momentum for Silverlight (and last time I checked, aren't getting anywhere). Apple is clearly not interested in ogg citing patent concerns for VP6 in ogg (if I'm not mistaken, please correct me if I am). Mozilla and opera don't want to deal with the MPEG-LA (and I can't really say I blame them). With the standard being undefined, I personally will stick to flash. I think for the time being it's going to give me less of a headache than jumping in head first to support <video>, and we'll see how things play out in the near future.
This is all of course from the perspective of someone hosting a few videofiles on a website, and not from the viewpoint of an end-user.
Isn't the idea of a game to escape reality, not have it mimic so flawlessly the errors that exist in reality so heavily?
That, or the fact that you can be a bastard as much as you like. I no longer play Eve, but it was great fun camping at a gate waiting for a good mark to blackmail. Oh, I could tell you stories of people that came after me with a bigger ship, and how I'd blackmail them again, or how they would bring more friends than I could bring and I'd have to run and wait until they got bored with chasing me around the nearby systems.I could tell you about how I once infiltrated a small corp with an alt and cleaned out their hangars, and the smile on my face as I sold some of it back to them without them realizing. Oh, I escaped reality alright. I got to be that very person you should never trust, and I've had so many insults thrown at me that it still makes me smile whenever I fondly reminisce those days;
That was the fun in Eve for me. Some like to build large empires to wage war and play politics, others like to spend their time gambling on the markets, and some just like the idea of wearing an eyepatch shouting "ARRRRRRRR".
Eve is one of the few games where I often reconsider playing it again, but it just wouldn't be the same without the gang of friends I used to annoy people with. That, and the considerable amount of time it would take away from other hobbies I've picked up since.
There's still no way sitting at home alone in your basement playing with friends online and yelling at them over teamspeak compares to packing 12-15 friends into same basement and duking it out all night long.
True, but most of us aren't 15 anymore and have a family, a job, very little downtime, and often the desire not to sit in front of our monitors for 10 hours a day when we're not working. Let's not forget the logistics, moving the equipment, setting up, etc etc etc. By the time the network-challenged in the group has resolved his issues, someone else has an hour of patching to do, at which point someone spills the contents of his soda over the switch resulting in the experiment if soda can be blowdried out of a switch. (yes it can, no it didn't come back to life and soon suffered the wrath of an angry nerd armed with a hammer)
So, while I, with a family job schedule etc, have fond memories of setting up LANs in basements, these days I prefer a quick game over ye olde Internets whenever one of us is in the mood for shooting the other with weaponry that for the safety of the general populace should never be handed to us outside of a videogame. You're up and running in less than 15 minutes, and we'll have our face-to-face contact over a cold beer while discussing work/family/other with our other "meh, I don't feel like gaming anymore"-friends.
Did I mention the part where I don't have to come home with a car full of gear that needs to be set up again? Or the part where the hard disk doesn't die in transport and not ending up in quickly driving to the nearest hardware shop followed by a rather lengthy install?
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning : To copy paste selective parts of the description - We all know how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware-our own brains? -snip- you'll see how to become more expert. -snip- You'll learn about different brain functions -snip- including the one simple habit that separates the geniuses from the "wanna-bes."
I predict in the next 5 years O'Reilly will release the following quality books:
Mathematics Cookbook : 100 simple recipes for additions and subtractions
Javascript Popup Programming : learn how to use jquery or prototype in exciting new ways to market your products
Editing Config Files : a book about config files, with endless lists of config file examples and how to best approach editing them
Brownnosing cookbook : 100 original ways to make your boss uncomfortable
The definitive guide on server maintenance : 200 pages of lore dealing with removing dust from fans
Moral of the story, don't judge a book by it's cover, but not by it's publisher either.
Its funny how Doom3 is universally hated on the internet, yet managed to sell 8 million copies or whatever.
Tickets sold in a movie theatre don't make the movie great either. FWIW, I really liked the sound of the plasma gun in Doom 3. The charging sound it made when you inserted new ammo was one of the better sound effects in videogames in a while. Other than that, the game didn't leave the same impression as its predecessors did at the time. I guess it's mostly disappointment with the game as the expectations were so high (especially if you consider the hardware requirements for the time).
which is a bit like assuming that your average serial killer will be content with GTA.
Well, I can attest firsthand that I haven't had the urge to drive over some of my co-workers recently. If I were more skilled in making textures for 3D games, I'm pretty sure that some people would suddenly find their likeliness spawned in a town with an amazing count of pedestrian shaped bloodstrains on the sidewalk.
That being said, I'd say "rape simulator" rates right up there with "torture for dummies" as something that really doesn't need to exist. On the other hand, I'm loath to suggest censorship in even such an extreme case - I'm of the opinion that the act of censorship is generally worse than the thing being censored.
Tasteless, agreed. Then again, we've already had our share of tasteless videogames. I believe it was "Postal" (or was it the sequel) that offered the player the possibility to shoot people and urinate on their corpses. Slap an 18+ sticker on it (or whatever rating system you have), and put a big warning label on it saying "If you buy this for your child, you're an idiot" as to prevent parents from missing the 18+ sticker, and let retailers decide if they want to carry it our not. I personally don't feel the need to judge how people entertain themselves, as long as they don't take those actions out in the streets.
Having said that, I think that the paying target audience for a game like this is a really small group of people. Parents screaming "think of the children" probably didn't stop to realize that they're basicly advertising the game to their underage offspring who most likely are well-versed in the sacred ways of the.torrent . The women going on about how this game objectifies women should probably have a look at the adult section in a videostore (or just surf the internet for a while).
Finally, I'd like to point out that there are things in the world that I personally find much more appalling and outrageous than having a few pixels change color involuntarily.
If you think it sucks don't buy the game. I will gladly shell out the money when the game is released (fully expecting it to sell for half the price 6 months later).
I don't think it sucks, I just think it's a quick grab for money. There's hardly been any updates to the game other than bugfixes, and I even though I've played this game quite a bit if you compare it to all the attention TF2 has been getting I'm a bit disappointed.
I will probably be waiting for a long while until L4D2 gets a decent discount before I'll be buying, if I'm not distracted by something new and exciting by then. (Although by the looks of E3, I probably won't be)
If you don't see what the appeal is of a game that lets you do whatever you want, I'm not sure I can help you.
Can you kill your family? Can you fuck your dog? Can you construct an atomic bomb and detonate it?
Not really. but the sims 2 did allow for a lot entertaining sadism. In all honesty, comparing it to an RPG is going a bit too far. I like to think of it as a micro-management less-god-game, where you don't really have a lot of freedom (because you're stuck with the "dialogue" options/careers/whatnot the programmers made for you), but it has a lot of a meta-game aspect to it.
A woman I once dated for a while really enjoyed the sims 2. She probably had a dozen or so families in her own little town, with meticulously designed houses and carefully balanced schedules heading for that maximum on the career ladder. She was quite the control freak when it came to the game, making sure that most sims stayed the same age as other sims, so she would switch families every time she played for a while. At some point I found myself alone at home with her laptop and the irresistable urge to introduce a little chaos into that perfectly ordered world.
After taking a backup of the savegames I created a character named Eugene Frankensausage, carefully crafted to be a bald bearded fat man wearing worn out jeans and what looked to be a dirty shirt. His house was a concrete square block adorned only by the mailbox in front of it and a single pink flamingo ornament in the yard. In the first few hours he got to know the neighbours, had sex with them which resulted in a fight, asked one of them to move in, then set the house on fire. This unfortunate process repeated itself quite a few times until he finally learned how to cook at which point the game became a lot more dull. By the end of a boring evening the neatly and carefully organized world had a lot of separated families, widowers, and people generally being in distress. There were also 3 people maneuvering through a small labyrinth in the yard with the end point being aforementioned pink flamingo lawn ornament.
Now, waiting for her to discover that Eugene Frankensausage had moved into town and not mentioning you had a backup, that was the fun part.
Weak? You jest! Why when the specter of genocide appears on the Earth, the UN rushes in an observer who stridently and immediately issues a report! Take that, evil doers!
The fact that I laughed at this probably makes me a very bad person.
For some reason I had this vision of the bureaucratic version of Rambo. Sent into hostile territory only with a clipboard, a pencil and several sheets of paper. His mission: to file reports and give his adversaries papercuts. You know things just got serious when he has to straighten his tie.
Alas, I was at the mercy of the fickle nature of her interpretation of my carefully chosen words one too many times to have deduced a answer with 100% success rate.
Statistically speaking, compliments usually work, but there seems to be a threshold in the amount of compliments per day you can use. Beyond that point, she becomes wary of your intentions and avoiding the subject in its entirety no longer is an option.
My personal favourite is yelling "Aaaah, a bee!" and flaying my arms into thin air pretending to chase it off, and then making a quick exit. This may or may not leave the impression that you are a deranged lunatic, but it never resulted in sleeping on the couch for me.
takes attention away from your hair
This will devolve into a conversation about her hair, at which point I recommend you start padding your couch with some soft pillows.
They might get the current build of the game, though.
2 DVDs filled with videos of strippers for reference material, 1 CD-ROM containing training for weapons and explosives, 20 sci-fi magazines about aliens, 1 small "cheezy phrase" booklet, 30 artist sketches of what the monsters would look like, and 1 bag of tepid air to be used for marketing.
I sure know which out of the two I'd want if I was Take Two!
Those two DVDs seem to be interesting, and you never know when you need a bag of tepid air.
Slashdot Mirror
Trekkies rarely have tons of cash.
Those DVD boxes cost so much, not to mention the miniature model of the Enterprise(s) and the captain Kirk figurine (with matching blue chick action figurine).
If you take their collection, and ebay it, I'm pretty sure it'll cover the cost.
The.Black.Hole.1979.dvdrip.xvid.torrent -> goatse.png
goatse.png->The.Black.Hole.1979.dvdrip.xvid.torrent
Well, that explains why in the UK piracy is down.
Okay, so what are the psychological differences caused by the fact that I can't see things lying on a desk as clearly as I could thirty years ago?
Subject gets irritable when taking notes every time he picks up a card. Blames bad eyesight for irritability. I suspect the subject might have IED, and should probably get my tranquilizer gun.
one of the shittiest creatures in-game
Those are called murlocks, or as I used to call them "annoying fish things that are goddamned everywhere". When TBC came out I resubscribed, and cheered in guildchat that I was finally free of the abominations, only to discover that the third creature I was going to run into was a murlock.
It wasn't just the look, nor was it their abundant presence in the world, but the annoying sound they made without fail whenever you aggro'd one.
I'll take naga over murlocks any day.
You can not come up with a website complicated enough to justify an $18 million price tag!
Give me a week, and you will have it. It will be the biggest, most badass "Under Construction" sign you've ever seen, 2 billion pixels wide, 1.5 billion pixels high. The traffic from the banner alone will bring routers to their knees, have network admins screaming at their traffic statistics, and mere mortals shall weep in the magnificent glory of 18 million dollars worth of under_construction.png .
FYI, this most excellent sign will also require a broadband stimulus package, complete with a massive infrastructure upgrade on the governments serverfarm and job certainty for hundreds of admins who'll have to toil in slave labor to be able to serve up that monstrosity.
Can I have my check now please?
It isn't particularly hard to do things like put a flash fallback inside of a video tag, so people that want to use the standard but still have wide reach have lots of options (flash is the de facto way to play 'web' video today, so I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that this may continue).
Then why even bother at all and let's keep on using flash. Currently as a host you only need to host a flash app and either encode your content to flv or h.264. Most of your target audience already has flash installed, and those who want to view your content will probably install flash. Since now it's undefined in the standard, that would mean that you'd have to host an h.264 for the ogg-impaired browsers, an ogg for the h.264 impaired, and then fall back to ye olde tried and tested method of the abominable flash app (optionally reusing h.264, but for backwards compatibility let's assume flv format).
If you're currently hosting 20GB in videos, all of a sudden you'll find yourself hosting 60GB in video with no real benefit except that some users can get rid of adobe flash. A gigabyte here, a gigabyte there and soon you'll have real storage. Just scale those 20G up to a couple of TB, which starts adding up to real money. As much as I dislike flash, when you start adding the numbers flash is the least expensive solution if you're going to be forced to fall back on it anyway.
And there's a number of things content providers will want to do with the player: add commercials, add a logo in the player, change the user interface to match up with their website, add suggestions at the end of the video, etc etc etc. Some browsers will support feature X and Y, some will not but instead have feature Z. At the moment I'd just buy a license for some player or if I'm crafty enough with flash make one myself (from what I hear it's not that hard, I just don't know how to do that), and get the features I need and know that it'll work on any browser that supports flash. With an in-browser player unless it's clearly defined in a standard what you can do, you're going to end up with an enormous mess (read: gobs and gobs of javascript code, doing all sorts of things, probably working on some browsers, and not on other).
You can't get the "players" in the field to agree what codec they want, and I'm sure that that has more to do with ulterior motivations than "patent concerns" or whatever the excuse of the day is. Microsoft has nothing to gain since they're trying to gain momentum for Silverlight (and last time I checked, aren't getting anywhere). Apple is clearly not interested in ogg citing patent concerns for VP6 in ogg (if I'm not mistaken, please correct me if I am). Mozilla and opera don't want to deal with the MPEG-LA (and I can't really say I blame them). With the standard being undefined, I personally will stick to flash. I think for the time being it's going to give me less of a headache than jumping in head first to support <video>, and we'll see how things play out in the near future.
This is all of course from the perspective of someone hosting a few videofiles on a website, and not from the viewpoint of an end-user.
The only reason I can see him doing this is because he believes in the open-source cause
That, or he's just curious what will happen if people start tinkering with it.
Isn't the idea of a game to escape reality, not have it mimic so flawlessly the errors that exist in reality so heavily?
That, or the fact that you can be a bastard as much as you like. I no longer play Eve, but it was great fun camping at a gate waiting for a good mark to blackmail. Oh, I could tell you stories of people that came after me with a bigger ship, and how I'd blackmail them again, or how they would bring more friends than I could bring and I'd have to run and wait until they got bored with chasing me around the nearby systems.I could tell you about how I once infiltrated a small corp with an alt and cleaned out their hangars, and the smile on my face as I sold some of it back to them without them realizing. Oh, I escaped reality alright. I got to be that very person you should never trust, and I've had so many insults thrown at me that it still makes me smile whenever I fondly reminisce those days;
That was the fun in Eve for me. Some like to build large empires to wage war and play politics, others like to spend their time gambling on the markets, and some just like the idea of wearing an eyepatch shouting "ARRRRRRRR".
Eve is one of the few games where I often reconsider playing it again, but it just wouldn't be the same without the gang of friends I used to annoy people with. That, and the considerable amount of time it would take away from other hobbies I've picked up since.
There's still no way sitting at home alone in your basement playing with friends online and yelling at them over teamspeak compares to packing 12-15 friends into same basement and duking it out all night long.
True, but most of us aren't 15 anymore and have a family, a job, very little downtime, and often the desire not to sit in front of our monitors for 10 hours a day when we're not working. Let's not forget the logistics, moving the equipment, setting up, etc etc etc. By the time the network-challenged in the group has resolved his issues, someone else has an hour of patching to do, at which point someone spills the contents of his soda over the switch resulting in the experiment if soda can be blowdried out of a switch. (yes it can, no it didn't come back to life and soon suffered the wrath of an angry nerd armed with a hammer)
So, while I, with a family job schedule etc, have fond memories of setting up LANs in basements, these days I prefer a quick game over ye olde Internets whenever one of us is in the mood for shooting the other with weaponry that for the safety of the general populace should never be handed to us outside of a videogame. You're up and running in less than 15 minutes, and we'll have our face-to-face contact over a cold beer while discussing work/family/other with our other "meh, I don't feel like gaming anymore"-friends.
Did I mention the part where I don't have to come home with a car full of gear that needs to be set up again? Or the part where the hard disk doesn't die in transport and not ending up in quickly driving to the nearest hardware shop followed by a rather lengthy install?
"Oh, I'll get an O'Reilly book - they're never shit!"
Those days have long passed. For example:
I predict in the next 5 years O'Reilly will release the following quality books:
Moral of the story, don't judge a book by it's cover, but not by it's publisher either.
In the meantime, howsabout an official version of Morroblivion? I'd pay good money for that!
Oh god no... no! NOOOOOOOO! Brb, reinstalling
Doom 3 is largely considered a disappointment.
Its funny how Doom3 is universally hated on the internet, yet managed to sell 8 million copies or whatever.
Tickets sold in a movie theatre don't make the movie great either. FWIW, I really liked the sound of the plasma gun in Doom 3. The charging sound it made when you inserted new ammo was one of the better sound effects in videogames in a while. Other than that, the game didn't leave the same impression as its predecessors did at the time. I guess it's mostly disappointment with the game as the expectations were so high (especially if you consider the hardware requirements for the time).
which is a bit like assuming that your average serial killer will be content with GTA.
Well, I can attest firsthand that I haven't had the urge to drive over some of my co-workers recently. If I were more skilled in making textures for 3D games, I'm pretty sure that some people would suddenly find their likeliness spawned in a town with an amazing count of pedestrian shaped bloodstrains on the sidewalk.
That being said, I'd say "rape simulator" rates right up there with "torture for dummies" as something that really doesn't need to exist. On the other hand, I'm loath to suggest censorship in even such an extreme case - I'm of the opinion that the act of censorship is generally worse than the thing being censored.
Tasteless, agreed. Then again, we've already had our share of tasteless videogames. I believe it was "Postal" (or was it the sequel) that offered the player the possibility to shoot people and urinate on their corpses. Slap an 18+ sticker on it (or whatever rating system you have), and put a big warning label on it saying "If you buy this for your child, you're an idiot" as to prevent parents from missing the 18+ sticker, and let retailers decide if they want to carry it our not. I personally don't feel the need to judge how people entertain themselves, as long as they don't take those actions out in the streets.
Having said that, I think that the paying target audience for a game like this is a really small group of people. Parents screaming "think of the children" probably didn't stop to realize that they're basicly advertising the game to their underage offspring who most likely are well-versed in the sacred ways of the .torrent . The women going on about how this game objectifies women should probably have a look at the adult section in a videostore (or just surf the internet for a while).
Finally, I'd like to point out that there are things in the world that I personally find much more appalling and outrageous than having a few pixels change color involuntarily.
Yeah, because god forbid you have someone intelligent and competent running your country.
I think it's the fact that he's not been walking on water yet that has upset some people.
If Valve were to add an additional year to the development cycle
Knowing Valve, it'll be delayed by at least that much.
If you think it sucks don't buy the game. I will gladly shell out the money when the game is released (fully expecting it to sell for half the price 6 months later).
I don't think it sucks, I just think it's a quick grab for money. There's hardly been any updates to the game other than bugfixes, and I even though I've played this game quite a bit if you compare it to all the attention TF2 has been getting I'm a bit disappointed.
I will probably be waiting for a long while until L4D2 gets a decent discount before I'll be buying, if I'm not distracted by something new and exciting by then. (Although by the looks of E3, I probably won't be)
1 million Americans pay for the New York Times, and many more than that read it for free. 2.5 million Americans *pay* for WoW.
Demographically speaking, those groups don't often overlap.
My wife likes to make me and her in the game and then make them have like eight children together...
RUN!
If you don't see what the appeal is of a game that lets you do whatever you want, I'm not sure I can help you.
Can you kill your family? Can you fuck your dog? Can you construct an atomic bomb and detonate it?
Not really. but the sims 2 did allow for a lot entertaining sadism. In all honesty, comparing it to an RPG is going a bit too far. I like to think of it as a micro-management less-god-game, where you don't really have a lot of freedom (because you're stuck with the "dialogue" options/careers/whatnot the programmers made for you), but it has a lot of a meta-game aspect to it.
A woman I once dated for a while really enjoyed the sims 2. She probably had a dozen or so families in her own little town, with meticulously designed houses and carefully balanced schedules heading for that maximum on the career ladder. She was quite the control freak when it came to the game, making sure that most sims stayed the same age as other sims, so she would switch families every time she played for a while. At some point I found myself alone at home with her laptop and the irresistable urge to introduce a little chaos into that perfectly ordered world.
After taking a backup of the savegames I created a character named Eugene Frankensausage, carefully crafted to be a bald bearded fat man wearing worn out jeans and what looked to be a dirty shirt. His house was a concrete square block adorned only by the mailbox in front of it and a single pink flamingo ornament in the yard. In the first few hours he got to know the neighbours, had sex with them which resulted in a fight, asked one of them to move in, then set the house on fire. This unfortunate process repeated itself quite a few times until he finally learned how to cook at which point the game became a lot more dull. By the end of a boring evening the neatly and carefully organized world had a lot of separated families, widowers, and people generally being in distress. There were also 3 people maneuvering through a small labyrinth in the yard with the end point being aforementioned pink flamingo lawn ornament.
Now, waiting for her to discover that Eugene Frankensausage had moved into town and not mentioning you had a backup, that was the fun part.
Weak? You jest! Why when the specter of genocide appears on the Earth, the UN rushes in an observer who stridently and immediately issues a report! Take that, evil doers!
The fact that I laughed at this probably makes me a very bad person.
For some reason I had this vision of the bureaucratic version of Rambo. Sent into hostile territory only with a clipboard, a pencil and several sheets of paper. His mission: to file reports and give his adversaries papercuts. You know things just got serious when he has to straighten his tie.
But, no, it shouldn't hurt creativity--they're introducing a memcpy_s, which is the same aside from taking a size parameter for the destination.
Well, that and you can still use it if you really want to, which is what a lot of C programmers will be doing regardlessly.
So what's the correct answer?
Alas, I was at the mercy of the fickle nature of her interpretation of my carefully chosen words one too many times to have deduced a answer with 100% success rate.
Statistically speaking, compliments usually work, but there seems to be a threshold in the amount of compliments per day you can use. Beyond that point, she becomes wary of your intentions and avoiding the subject in its entirety no longer is an option.
My personal favourite is yelling "Aaaah, a bee!" and flaying my arms into thin air pretending to chase it off, and then making a quick exit. This may or may not leave the impression that you are a deranged lunatic, but it never resulted in sleeping on the couch for me.
takes attention away from your hair
This will devolve into a conversation about her hair, at which point I recommend you start padding your couch with some soft pillows.
It's like telling that girlfriend she should go on a diet, or that she looks fat in those jeans.
Here's a tip that might save you of an evening of sleeping on the couch:
The correct answer to "Do these pants make me look big?" is NOT "There's nothing wrong with those pants."
Talk about having picture but no sound for an entire day.
I am not some bitter FreeBSD user hiding out in his mother's basement.
Goddamnit, for the last time, it's not a basement, it's my command centre.
They might get the current build of the game, though.
2 DVDs filled with videos of strippers for reference material, 1 CD-ROM containing training for weapons and explosives, 20 sci-fi magazines about aliens, 1 small "cheezy phrase" booklet, 30 artist sketches of what the monsters would look like, and 1 bag of tepid air to be used for marketing.
I sure know which out of the two I'd want if I was Take Two!
Those two DVDs seem to be interesting, and you never know when you need a bag of tepid air.