rohlfinator

In high school a friend and I (both white) hid a 2-way radio in the school library to prank a friend. A librarian found it and thought it was a bomb (this was not too long after the 2004 Madrid train bombings that were suspected to have been detonated via cell phone). We had to go see the principal for like, ten minutes, with no other discipline. I don't think they even talked to our parents.

I think it reopens some of your old side ops in order to keep a certain number on the map. It seems to maintain the original stats of the "highly skilled soldiers" and such, so they can be pretty mediocre rewards later in the game. I wish there was a way to play more of the missions like that. The oil refinery on total stealth is wrecking me though.

I think I hit the final story mission last night... I have been hitting the main missions pretty hard to finish before I run into spoilers, so I still have a ton of side content left. Ending stuff:

Yeah, the non-sneaking sections are certainly the weakest parts of the game. I get the impression they are somewhat intentionally annoying to drive home the narrative impact, but that doesn't really excuse them. Fortunately the game doesn't lean on them nearly as much as it could have. I've been pleasantly surprised at the number and variety of normal infiltration-style missions.

Yep, I'll second the Pike Place recommendation. There's a ton of stuff there and it's far enough from the convention center that you can avoid most of the PAX crowds. A few of my faves are Mee Sum Pastry (Chinese bakery stand), Crepe De France (great fruit/savory crepes), and Biscuit Bitch (awesome biscuits and gravy, open for breakfast and late night). Also, Monster Dogs in Belltown is good late-night drunk food.

The PAX Parties Twitter account is usually good about aggregating events: https://twitter.com/paxparties There's not a lot there yet but they'll keep updating throughout PAX weekend.

There's a lot of good PSN stuff -- Flower, Journey, Noby Noby Boy, Tokyo Jungle, etc. They've had some pretty good sales on PS3 games lately also.

Yeah, I can't imagine any good coming of this... If anything, the image of armed black activists on the news will be one more way for people to convince themselves that the Ferguson police have been justified in their tactics. I could see Fox falling back on it as stock footage of "scary violent activists" for years. The hypocrisy will be completely lost on a lot of people.

I wish the game had more opportunity for emergent narratives, but I feel like the design pushes against that quite a bit. It's hard for me to get interested in individual character interactions when there are so many characters, and I'm only at 50-some population.

Improved version: http://crossfade.io/#!/ap5xp1cjvp

My biggest pet peeve with Win 10 so far is that it seems terrible at lining up windows when I want to snap them to half of the screen. It'll work fine at first, but somehow they inevitably drift away from the edge of the screen or down under the taskbar. It's a minor thing, but it's baffling that it even happens (I never had this problem with 7 or 8).

I've found Backblaze's hard drive study to be a helpful resource if you're concerned about reliability: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/ I take it with a grain of salt, but it makes it easy to avoid the drives with double-digit annual failure rates.

New Vegas is working for me too, although I don't run ENB. Windows 10 did hose up my graphics driver which was causing the game to crash, but a reinstall of the drivers fixed it.

Apart from the occasional out-of-place jokes (and the Twitch chat which is just constant garbage), I really enjoy the vibe of these. There's a great sense of camaraderie in the community -- even the runners that are competing for world-record times seem to still collaborate on strategies with their peers. It's one of the few big gaming events that's free of the AAA hype machines, pandering "gamer" stereotypes, Doritos/Mountain Dew, etc. It's just all about the fans and the games. And it's seriously impressive that they can pull off a full week of nearly non-stop streaming with so few hitches. Highlights for me so far have been the Yoshi's Island run by Trihex and the Super Monkey Ball run by Geoff.

Not that I've seen, it sounded like it will go out as their normal episode for this week though. I'm not familiar with how Hitbox's archiving works -- it may show up there eventually too.

Justice Points is streaming a live episode right now as part of the Alternative Digital Art Festival: http://www.hitbox.tv/ADAF2

PSA: Steer clear of WD Green hard drives for games. I just found out the hard way that they're configured to park the drive head after 8 seconds of inactivity, which has been causing weird stuttering problems in almost all of my games for the last several months. There was a fairly straightforward fix, but I think I'm just going to avoid them in the future.

I just installed the Insider Preview yesterday and I'm liking it pretty well so far. Kinda feels like a blend between 7 and 8, with a few things taken from mobile OSes but in a way that makes sense on a desktop. The upgrade process from 8.1 was slick and painless. I'm curious to see how Cortana and the other accessibility features turn out -- my dad's vision is declining so he uses the Narrator pretty heavily in Win 8. Wonder if it will be viable to use Cortana exclusively without a keyboard.

Geez, such a tragic and unexpected loss. He always came across as such a genuinely great guy. Rest in peace.

Lately I've been deep into Dungeon of the Endless with a couple of friends. The co-op mode really amplifies the moments of tension and chaos, but in a way it's a little more forgiving since each player can focus on managing one or two heroes (instead of up to four in the single player game). Only downside is that permadeath can take a player fully out of the game until the team discovers a new hero, which can be pretty brutal (especially for new players).

A buddy of mine has been following the subreddit shenanigans and I joined him in one of their rooms this afternoon. Someone discovered a glitch where coordinated use of the wormhole powerup will jump thousands of levels at a time -- we passed level 300k in about an hour, and we're on pace to pass 4 million levels by the end of the day. I picked up Talos Principle today as I've been watching it for a while. Also still considering picking up the Dishonored DLC, but it sorta bugs me that it's cheaper to rebuy the game as part of the GOTY version than to just buy the DLC.

It's weird how aside from the server issues, other basic stuff with the game seems to be broken. A few of the powerups don't seem to do anything, and a lot of people aren't getting card drops at all even though that seems to be the main reward. I do like how Valve handled the community deals this time around -- they seem to be taking the opportunity to promote quite a few overlooked/obscure indie games. It's a big improvement over the voting system they've done in the past, where most of the choices were standard Steam sale fare and were usually in other daily/flash deals anyway.

Certainly Valve (and really the whole industry) have cultivated a culture of devaluing games, but on the other hand, I wonder if the industry's caveat emptor approach is one of the contributors to that. I often wait for price drops because I know there's some degree of risk involved with buying a PC game. As for abuse -- it seems like a bit of a hassle to: - buy a game from Steam for full price - play it less than 2 hours, or concoct a reason for a refund - email Steam support - wait for up to a week to get your money back - risk getting your account flagged if you do this too often It's still probably simpler for the unscrupulous customer to pirate and avoid all that stuff entirely.

I can understand why some devs are concerned -- Valve's stated plan to counter abuse is basically just "we'll address it when we see it" and they don't have the best track record on these sorts of things. Still, I think this is overall a good thing, and it may even encourage Steam users to take more risks on their game purchases, now that there's some recourse if you get stuck with a broken game.

Really psyched to hear more from Austin at GB -- I've enjoyed his work elsewhere and he already seems like a great fit with the group. Have to admit, I was kind of skeptical about how the whole east/west split would work out, but it's been a lot of fun seeing the Beast side get into full swing.