MrHoatzin

Only admins can do that stuff, Mr. Poo.

There is always a bit of a disconnect when I see these. I think I live in a democracy, but every time there is a meeting of the rich and the powerful states, some punk kids get flattened in the name of security, regardless of the party in power. Whoever wins the presidency goes on to have the same exact foreign policy as the previous guy. Nothing substantial has changed in the US use of force in the international stage since Kennedy. The only difference is that Republicans are unabashed and earnest in their exploitation of everything for gain, whereas the Democrats put on a more humane, likable face on the same ordeal. Now I remember why Nader managed to take so much of the vote: eight years of Clinton compromises and courting of the middle were very disappointing to the lefter flanks of the party. Note also that there were no real violent altercations with the police in front of the UN, by all metrics a more democratic world body, but there were quite extreme shows of force at the G20, which is a plutocrat get-together. My girlfriend has a friend in Pittsburgh. She says at some point a few nights ago, the police decided to empty the downtown, going as far as entering bars and night clubs and teargassing the people doing their usual people-chilling-out thing inside.

Grim Fandango had higher res models in the cutscenes. At least the hand models were completely different. I didn't play the demo on a particularly fancy TV, but I didn't notice any difference between cutscene and gameworld, whereas the Psychonauts cutscenes more often than not seemed lower quality than the game itself. Maybe they bought a better compression method this time around.

This sounds like a religion invented by someone with obscene amounts of complex time-keeping machinery at his disposal. A few years ago I missed an anniversary and then argued that our anniversary date falls at a different time altogether, relative to some weird maths: we actually had two "getting together" dates, because we got together, broke up a couple of months later, then got together again a half a year after that, and have been together ever since—I argued that we should have a moving anniversary date that is the average of our two anniversaries, weighed against how long we've been together following each getting-together date. So, the longer we're together, the more the Official Anniversary Date By Kingz Reckoning approaches our second Proper Getting-Together Date, but will likely not reach it any time soon. This ridiculous mathematical flailing on my part made up for the gross crime of missing an anniversary.

You adverbed the pre-order?

Actually, no. That is pretty much spot on.

I tend to be wary of hacks, generally. Sometimes they are the best solution, tho, when they effectively save time and drudgery in a special case situation. Yesterday I had to queue up something to go live this morning at seven thirty. To make the thing live, I had to run two lines of sql. I could've changed the way the frontend works, inserted some timestampes into the tables and made a robust queuing mechanism—which would be overkill. Alternatively I could've, made a cron job, but I had never messed with cron so I would've had to learn to cron, test it and spend a bit of time playing with it, and I didn't have the time, so I inserted this bit of PHP into the head of the site's template: $fancySqlTimerHack = mktime(7,30,0,9,15,2009); if(time() > $fancySqlTimerHack && time() < $fancySqlTimerHack + 18000){ //give it a five hour window for a stray visitor to trigger stuff mysql_query ("UPDATE `spot_location` SET `retired` = 1 WHERE `id` IN (522,523)"); mysql_query ("UPDATE `spot_location` SET `retired` = 0 WHERE `id` IN (525,526,527,528,524,533)"); } And then I cleaned it up this morning when I got to work, so that it would stop rewriting the database every time someone came to the site. I think this proves that the tree falling in the jungle in fact does not make a sound if no one is around to hear it. Or, um, that it doesn't fall until someone comes around to listen to it fall. Or something like that. So, share your fun hack anecdotes!

Man, I'm starting to feel like BacardiJim around all these younguns.

I suggest "ananas".

Maybe there is a place for this crap, but if it were all posted into encyclopedia dramatica or somewhere like that out of sight, rather than here...

That is a shockingly clean bathroom considering you're a revolting icky person who easily sacrifices hygiene to technology addiction, apparently. Every time I have to edit someone else's ASP site or a yahoo store, or any other platform that I don't care to learn about, I will invariably have to resort to those kinds of solutions. They can get quite crazy.Working in what is essentially marketing can be wearying. I get to do so much patchwork on so many weird ancient sites (initially built sloppily, to impossible deadlines) that no one wants to spend money on to properly rebuild. I wish I worked on more sites that were the end product, rather than a single tool of many available tools for hocking crap.

Yeah, I generally don't care about stupid caching of IE. Google Maps api, however, simply refuses to refresh an xml file of geocodes more than once a day no matter what. I had to do some .htaccess trickery there and while testing I had it throw out a random huge number every time the page is refreshed. RewriteRule ^geomarkers([0-9]+).xml$ lego/_executeMapXml.php?junkyTimeyStampyVar=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [PT,L] But there is only a fixed number of unique queries google lets your site have per day or something, so I changed that huge mystery number to default to the timestamp of the last db edit, and presto! Now it will only refresh when needed, and let google keep its cache without it messing up my end.

My favorite is the indefinite, definite: A THE <BLANK>.

Ah, prehistory.

I think I am to blame for them missing now. When I made them the first time, I made them for a weird home page widget where we got to rate random things. When I inserted them into the forum smilies I vaguely remember linking outside of the designated smilies folder and into their whereabouts as the site template images proper, reasoning that there was no point in having duplicate images on the server. And then they deleted the front end of the site and took the images folder with them. Yoke is on me, so much for the initially rational-seeming web design practices. No but srsly, fix the smilies. K, thx, bye.

Is censorship for humanitarian reasons really justified, tho?

Personally, I remain continually flummoxed by the persistence of the Wizard. I am starting to wonder if there is some important subtext that I am not getting here. I even went back and listened to some of those early episodes I had initially skipped (I started listening around episode ten and didn't feel like backtracking), hoping doing that would make the wizard a more coherent meme, but alas.

http://www.offworld.com/2009/07/gallery-the-broke-down-steampu.html Damn.

I keep hearing that phrase in the context of the new purchased of Marvel by Disney. Apparently no one is unnerved by the word choice there. I, in turn, am imagining Spiderman with a Mickey Mouse hat in a sweatshop somewhere in Fictitiousland. What, if anything, do you think will this mean for Slave Labor Graphics? The universe as we know it?

It freaks me out a bit that for some of you peeps the earliest memories of games fall in the late nineties. For me, the earliest game I remember seeing played by my father is Manic Miner on the Spectrum... never played it though. The earliest game I do clearly remember playing was tetris on a 286. It even had a color monitor and everything! It took me a long time to figure out, pathetic as this may be, what the point of the game was. I don't remember how I realized how to start this game without knowing what the point of it was. I think I heard my father talk about tetris, and then when he was not home I fired the computer up and typed tetris in the dos prompt and it just launched. I spent a long time just making weird abstract compositions, until I accidentally cleared a line and got the hang of it. The first games I remember pwning joyously were the first three Commander Keen games and Indiana Jones 3. I basically learned English with the latter.

What kind of retard wears green socks? That is like asking for trouble. Don't you know they lynched Rachel Ray for sporting a paisley scarf? Green socks are like that, only worse.

Only potentially if the pacemakers are of the old battery-powered kind, maybe?

This game is going to fail because spanking is not a mainstream game mechanic.

Definitely not safe for floppies tho.

I believe it may have been dubbed into Serbian. I don't really remember.