Marek

Oh man super lame. I will light a candle for your harddisk and hope for speedy recovery.

Smooth Moves is extremely enjoyable as a singleplayer game. Haven't tried multiplayer yet but I expect that's where the game's longevity is. The screens instructing you the different stances / movements are the most hilarious tutorial screens I have ever seen. I was playing Smooth Moves alone in my house and laughed out loud quite a bit.

I tracteerde kroketten at Woedend! actually. Holy shit I just had the weirdest birthday. It was just me and my family and I decided to go to a Greek restaurant around the block that I'd never been to and holy shit they went all out. Plates were thrown, I had to dance with the owner's daughter and also on top of a table, grandpa (who was also the cook, and drunk) performed an amazing trick with a shot glass, his son sat at our table and told weird stories about the maffia harassing their restaurant, and shit I don't even remember. Wha' happen???!!!@ 1

!!!!!!!!!!!!!! happy birthday

Thank you, thank you. Now, as for my presents...

We need a thread about coffee. The coffee here at work is amazing. We have a great expresso machine. I don't make expressos with it, just regular coffees, because expressos are always gone before you know it. You need a full cup, right? I just had a cup so I still have the taste in my mouth. About a year ago we had a different coffee bean each week for five weeks and everyone could vote on them. The beans we have now are the ones I rated the highest, so I'm very happy. I drink 2 or 3 cups of coffee a day. Sometimes, I have to be at our other department a five minutes walk away from here. They've got a nice quiet airconditioned office there (as opposed to the noisy and wood floored office I regularly work at) but I hate it because their coffee is terrible.

According to this blog post. And this is a podcast with Eno and Wright, though I haven't listened to it yet. All I know about Eno these days is that he keeps talking about procedurally generated music. So it's nice he's, you know, actually making some. Another reason for the NYTimes to spend some words on Spore.

The original image was presumably a photo taken directly from a non-LCD television.

In fact, after the landscape in Oblivion was generated, level designers went in and changed the details to fit the game.

Rodi... blow your nose.

Whoah loony, that's the most extreme coffee addiction war story I've ever heard. How much did you drink on average?

Season finale!

I don't like the smell of IGN's new green tinted headwear.

Nice, congrats!

In a town... where everyone is your neighbour... one girl must face her DESTINY. Which is to pay off Tom Nook's loan, settle down in a nice house, talk to some people and maybe catch some butterflies. Coming to a theatre near you!

O rly???????

I don't care much about MMOs not having an ending or the issues with storytelling in an MMO universe. There's games in other genres without a well-defined ending and I enjoy those too. However, I played WoW for a short time and I also played it pretty much as a single player game. The fact that the same quests are done over and over and over again for all eternity by thousands of heroes weakens any connection I might have with the story. That said, the story isn't really the point. It's the world of warcraft not the legend or saga of warcraft. Also I never reached the point where I would team up with guild members or go on huge raids, and I believe they are really the added value once you reach a certain level. I also agree with Rodi as far as the "everyone has to be equal" part goes. However, I don't think an MMO where everyone is not equal is necesserily a bad idea. Eve Online seems to do this and from what I understand, it works because people are needed at every level of the pyramid. In a battle you need noobs to take supporting roles as much as the uber players at the top to have a good strategy. While it might take ages to become the guy at the top, something that's probably unattainable for most, the other side of that tradeoff is that you do feel your actions matter in the universe. Oh, and Rusalka, Kroms was referring to the current QotM and disagrees with it. I think you missed that.

I have to say that even when coffee is shit I live knowing that it could be much worse. When I was a younger and we went to visit my family in Poland, they'd put coffee in a cup and pour hot water over it. Not instant coffee. I don't know what to call it. The coffee didn't all dissolve into the water. The point was that somehow most of it stayed at the bottom of the cup. But if you drank too much you'd hit that layer of crap and be really sad.

Isn't Quarter to Three where the PR and marketing people from the industry hang out? At least I got that impression since a popular developer forum started redirecting those people there.

It appears your fueled uprising failed.

I suspect the antioxidants thing is a huge load of crap. You know, my mom keeps talking about it and I don't trust what she reads in women's magazines. Don't bother linking to information saying it's true because I already looked it up in my gut. However I often drink rooibos tea before sleeping, which contains no theine and tons of the magical HP increasing substance known as antioxidants. I like drinking coffee in the morning and after lunch, but switch to tea after 4pm or so.

Haha oh shit!!! I use expresso all the time in an "ironic" "fashion" but obviously I didn't want to here because no one would know. A French press is pretty fancy.

Sigh. Idle Thumbs was pretty cool back in the day. It's really cool that everyone who stuck around did so because of the quality of the articles. We always had very high quality standards, which really did amazing things for us in the beginning, but I think it also became our downfall in the end (along with everyone getting new jobs). This thread moves me to say that we've got a plan to bring the site back to life but it will be taking a less ambitious direction. It depends on whether we can ever get the coding/design together.

The thing with iPhone is that my current slightly old Sony Ericsson does everything it does except for video playback. A lot of people talk about features exclusively (e.g. 90% of the commentors on Ron Gilbert's blog) and most of the time they are right. But the point is that iPhone actually makes the features easy to use. It makes it so easy and inviting that you'll actually use all those features. There's things on my phone that I haven't used since the first month I had it because it's hidden behind countless menus which in turn are hidden behind a completely broken interface. For instance, I have NEVER made a conference call, even though I could. The reason is that it's super uncomfortable to set up on a regular phone. And I'm not a technology noob, so know-how has nothing to do with it. A collegue of mine put it this way: when people intend to buy a car, some of them will get all the lists of specs they can get and pick the one with the most features for the least money. Others imagine themselves driving the cars. The same is true for phones and for computers.

I don't have any actual insider knowledge like others have, but I'd count on all episodes being made. I'd be surprised if season 2 was already a done deal though. See also: http://forums.idlethumbs.net/showthread.php?t=4759