Bjorn

Nope, that looks an awful lot like a real "men's rights" site. It's kind of a terrifying subculture that's developed in the last 10 years or so that is built on misogyny, a martyr complex and blaming women for everything wrong with the world. Even if the site itself wasn't serious, the commenters sure as hell are. I'm a huge proponent of free speech, even defending the rights of people like the KKK, neo-nazis and Sarah Palin to have their say. But some of the articles on that site are about as dangerous as speech can get. They verge on encouraging rape by telling men how to identify a slut who wants sex, and then reinforcing the idea that what women really want is for a dominating man to ravish them, no matter what they say.

So that's cool, and not something I knew about! I'm new to PS+, just subscribed finally thanks to the $30 deal over Black Friday. I will eventually get a PS4, and it will be awesome to have a bunch of games ready to download and play when that happens.

The same way I buy underwear.

So I've been really cynical and jaded about a lot of AAA games released over the last couple of years, but I finally started playing The Last of Us. Holy crap is this a good game. It restores some of my faith in the big studios.

Looks like you can still buy the genuine MS controller and dongle kit on eBay for about the price of a wireless controller alone ($40-$50), so that's not a bad deal. That said, companies always tell you not to buy 3rd party stuff. Not sure if it's still true or not, but MS even said not to use rechargeable batteries in the controllers. If I would have believed the instructions on that, I would have spent as much in batteries over the last few years as I did on the 360!

Silly double post.

In a lot of ways, I agree, though the idea that you always have an ultimate goal (reach the center) could be a great hook to maintain interest with this. Skyrim got boring very, very quickly for me. Mostly because I just didn't feel very invested in the world or the main story. But, what if Skyrim had simply said, "Make it across the continent, whatever it takes." I would have dug that. There would have been a constant sense of progression, instead of just constantly faffing about bouncing around the map.

HL3: The Ghost of Gordon Freeman

That looks awesome. It honestly looks as nice as most of the fixed frame screens you can go out and buy. Nice job! Great news on my screen, within an hour of contacting the company they got back to me and said they were in the process of building me a new screen and would have it shipped out tomorrow, so I should have the replacement by Monday. I had a custom size made, as the size I wanted was between two of their standard sizes, and the next size up was literally too big for the room. It's probably some of the best customer service I've ever seen in a company. It's a Da-Lite screen that I bought through AV Science. It's the first time I've bought anything from AVS. I've used their forums for years and always read good things about their customer service, and they have totally lived up to their reputation. Here are a couple of pics of the screen. The first one is the temp screen I had hung up, and the walls that were textured but not painted yet. Second picture is with the new retractable screen and painted walls. I'd pull back and show the whole room, but behind me it's an absolute disaster from all the tools and supplies laying around from mounting the projector, mounting the screen and painting. Edit: I spoilered the pictures as they are showing up HUGE.

A few people have posted that they got the email in a thread on Steam, and any account that got into the beta gets a new, unique badge, which is publicly visible, so you can verify if someone claims they got in. And those people have the new badge.

Congrats! on your emptiness.

On spoilers, I think that sometimes it's hard to know what will be a spoiler for a game. Like I wouldn't have really thought that you could spoil Spelunky, it's not like it's got complex and deep narrative, and an awful lot of it is discoverable very quickly. But then... That said, I think it's the onus of the player to avoid spoilers rather than on podcasters/writers to avoid talking about them. Just warn people you're about to go into spoiler land and let them decide to hang around or not.

Less than 30 minutes to go until the lottery winners beta participants are notified!

Okay, maybe I'm a terrible person, but I saw the US only announcement and immediately thought "Wooo! Now it's like a 1 in a thousand chance of getting one instead of a 1 in 1500 chance!"

Or maybe it's a farming/beer drinking simulator. I CAN RELIVE MY CHILDHOOD!

The magnets are actually a rather brilliant idea! My retractable screen showed up this afternoon, and the whole evening was spent getting it hung up and wired in. Rolled it down for the first time, which was awesome, and my wife says, "Something about it doesn't look right." I try to be an optimist, and insisted it was just because it was different than the other screen we had up. NOPE! The screen is too short. It's the right width, but it's 4.5 inches too short, which means that the aspect ratio is off. I went with this company in part because they are supposed to have legendary customer service. I guess I get to find out in the morning.

Slightly off topic, but I have a family member who designs and lays out high end restaurants and bars. He's explained some of his design documents to me and the logic/philosophy behind why he sets up a restaurant in a particular manner. It's kind of nuts the amount of thought that goes into some places. And now that he's pointed out a bunch of little things to me, I can always tell walking into a restaurant if someone thought about what they were doing, or if they just put up a bunch of crap where it felt right. Also, mostly posting here to thank the OP for that link to "Thou Shall Not Commit Logical Fallacies". That's the most useful thing on the Internet I've seen all week.

I used to read a bunch, but have really fallen behind over the last few months. Order of the Stick is the only one that I'm routinely keeping up with now. I did devour the entirety of Oglaf over the course of a couple of nights a few months ago. Oglaf is...well, NSFW is an understatement. It's kind of like hardcore porn meets an old-school D&D campaign, but with more humor and less arguing about the rules.

How did the screen mounting end up going? My living room is almost done. We repainted it this weekend, went from white to a reddish/purplish/brown color. It's a lot more attractive in person than that sounds. I don't know if it made a difference in blacks/contrast the way some guys insist. I was too tired after everything else to make a real judgement. The projector is ceiling mounted, power run to ceiling, hdmi cables run through the ceiling/wall, so it's all nice and clean looking. The retractable screen is supposed to be in on Tuesday, will probably get it installed on Wednesday after work. Feels like I need a vacation from my hobby though, all we did this weekend was work on that room. My wife is a badass though. She did all the work in the attic running wires, as it's a bit of a nightmare up there moving around and she's a lot lighter and more nimble than I am. It would have taken me twice as long to do it, as I'm always terrified of plummeting through the ceiling, and so move super slow and careful when I do have to go up there.

I couldn't stop myself from looking through the Steam reviews on this. You would think that at this point, the proliferation of Early Access, Beta and Alpha releases would have given people some concept of how this process works. This gem is in the negative reviews: "● Even though Starbound is labeled as a 'Beta' there are still many missing features such as: ○ Total and complete lack of a tutorial. It is possible to figure things out as you go but searching forums and YouTube for answers does not make for a very good first impression of the game. ○ You are unable to delete your character unless you manually delete a few files in Windows Explorer or Finder. ○ There is no in-game help leaving many questions that force you to visit a forum. Even then you may not be guarenteed an answer."

But doesn't it make sense in a thread about Far Cry 2 that something else should naturally emerge from the conversation, leading you to somewhere you didn't expect? In this case, an enforced native boarding school is our grenade rolling down a hill.

Samath Aran has to fight the Mathroids by identifying prime numbers using her powered Varia suit and its morph ball ability, which one might call a powered Varia-ball... You know what, I'm sorry...I'll let my self out.

So I finally replaced my dead PS3 (an original BC 60GB model ) thanks to the awesome Black Friday sale on them, plus subscribed to PS+ for the first time. I have to say that's a hell of a deal, and much better than I remembered PS+ being back when it launched. Getting Uncharted 3, Ico, and SotC immediately was well worth the sale price for subscribing. Makes it affordable and easy to jump back into some of the PS3 exclusives.

That sounds like some core balancing that needs to be addressed, but that's not too difficult. This does raise one of my concerns about the flow of Starbound. Given the infinite size of the universe, I've wondered if it will have a dramatically different or overwhelming feel to it, compared to the very fixed confines of Terraria. Or what the difficulty/grind curve will be like. Or whether it will be hard to become particularly invested in one world when there is always more to explore.