vogon

you could probably do something with a flywheel or gyroscope that throws itself off balance when the virtual sword is hit, but I'm not sure that's physically feasible to do in something that's designed to be a game controller you use in a living room.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6018173/Game_Design_Update-5_28_2012 they're fixing (probably reducing) gold/page costs for crafting recipes, and gems below Flawless Square will only require 2 lower-level gems to make rather than 3.

don't forget the firefighting cisterns, which are responsible for the mysterious brick circles in a lot of intersections downtown. http://sfappeal.com/news/2010/11/there-are-brick-circles-at.php

if you pronounce helicopter as 'elicopter, it's "an." otherwise, you're a pretentious douchebag. grammatically speaking.

I'm gonna argue that they're both valuable, and they're both necessary, for different reasons. traditional game jams are a shotgun; they are many, many groups of people throwing ideas against a wall to see what sticks -- or, even, just to see if they can fully realize them and at least get something interesting done. the Depth Jam is a sniper rifle; it's a few, very small groups frantically iterating on ideas they already know (or at least think strongly) are good, to try and get a solid chunk of gameplay out of it for their "real" game designs. people who want ideas and a creative spark should participate in traditional game jams. people who have ideas but don't know how to make them into a game that they actually want to sell should go to a Depth Jam.

for comparison: 2nd and Folsom: 2nd and Fulton:

similarly, there is a set of numbered streets and a set of numbered avenues, which are arrayed on opposite sides of a central street, and never/almost never meet. as a result, living in the Mission, it confuses the hell out of me whenever I get an address for anything in the Sunset or the Richmond.

the worst example of this is when Emperor Hakan II warps in and tells you that he knows the true identity of Belial.

presumably the market is seeking sustainable prices right now, which means you're going to see a lot of things which are way too cheap, and a lot of things which are way too expensive.

you're not alone. I got to the end of the first act yesterday afternoon, and I had really bad sporadic lag for the entire . that fight is super latency sensitive, and I died three times because of the bursts of lag. I suddenly don't want to play Hardcore, like, at all.

tried this. it seems to work OK, but the worst part is that it looks like Elective Mode doesn't unlock all of your skill slots right away; at least for me, slots unlocked with level progression as normal. (that is, until you level up to the point where you'd normally unlock the category, you won't be able to assign skills to 1/2/3/4.)

vogon#1915 stemming the tide of wizards by playing a demon hunter.

for what it's worth, the behavior of the physical disc described by Gwardinen is identical to the digital download copy. I wouldn't be surprised to find that -- if Blizzard is planning a day-1 patch -- they punted it out of both the disc and the initial digital download, and it'll be downloaded through the WoW-style installer we saw in the beta, which we don't even have access to yet.

LAKE FISH: THE SERIES

incidentally, if you want to read some of David Foster Wallace's stuff but don't want to jump into Infinite Jest right away, you could do worse than to start with The Broom of the System or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. to some extent I think they're the The Crying of Lot 49 to David Foster Wallace's Gravity's Rainbow -- it feels like they have as much, if not more, of his voice despite not being as intimidating as Infinite Jest. Brief Interviews, in particular, features one of my favorite pieces of writing ever, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life": also, on a side note: I want to put in another vote for doing The Pale King one of these months. I haven't read it past the first half-chapter or so yet.