Thrik

Absolutely splendid. Often the backgrounds go over my head due to the action being so absorbing so it's nice to see them like this. Here's something similarly awesome that I saw a while ago (you need a HTML5-compatible browser): http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ Apparently this guy did a lot of the illustrations for LucasArts' older games including SOMI and pretty much perfected the 'colour cycling' method of getting nice effects with relatively limited colour palettes. Pretty much a technical marvel as well as an artistic one. Check this variation out for added 'holy shit' (open the options and use the day/night slider, try different scenes too): http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

Great shots, Brown. The RX100 really does capture incredible amounts of detail, even though I'm happy with my HX20V I do wish it had the per-pixel clarity of the RX100 because it limits how much I can do in terms of cropping smaller parts of my photo out and blowing them up, etc. Maybe in future years they'll finally figure out how to combine the bigger sensor with the bigger zoom! If anyone's interested I regularly put new photos up here: http://thrik.deviantart.com/gallery/38547318 I'm currently mirroring them on Flickr and 500px too, but I'm not really getting any views or comments so I'm thinking I just won't bother as almost every time I put something up on deviantART I get comments and favourites even though I have like no friends. I guess if I submitted my photos to groups too I'd get even more attention. Facebook is of course the #1 place for friends and family, though. Maybe we should have a photo thread? Other forums I use have one and it's nice.

Haha, Doggles. What a name.

I've been putting some of my photos online somewhere other than Facebook for a change, and I've noticed that unless you actually know a lot of people on Flickr you might as well just stick them in a folder on your hard drive somewhere because you'll get no views and no comments. Then I put the same photos on Deviant Art and I literally had a handful of comments and people favouriting my photos within ten minutes. So if your motivation for putting them online is getting feedback or simply just giving someone a nice photo to discover, Deviant Art seems to get results.

Probably the first wasp I've ever been able to get behind.

I can imagine nothing worse than having a swarm of bees living in my garden.

Haha, I do like them. There was a very real need for them, though: you get outrageous amounts of sun in your eyes at my local swimming pool during the evening while the sun's setting, which is when I always go. Of course, my 'friends' on Facebook wasted no time pulling comparison pictures out left, right, and center (none of which I was trying to ape):

I know. I am beautiful.

I think the issue is you're reading it as two separate complaints.

Haha, sure it's a quaint little blend of really old buildings and pretty new ones. Someone said it reminds them of City 17 — not sure what to make of that!

And here we are at the end of July...

Good choice. I was torn between that and the HX20V myself, and opted for the latter because although it's not quite got the same picture quality (although still leaps and bounds ahead of most other portable cameras and definitely phones) it does of course have the zoom which I find very useful for the kind of photos I tend to take. It's been performing very well, and if you're inclined towards post-processing its photos can look downright splendid. For sharing, I think it's really all about Flickr and Facebook nowadays. Facebook obviously gives you that direct personal sharing with people you care about so they actually see all these lovely photos you're taking, and Flickr is good for tapping into the wider anonymous audience of the web and maybe even getting feedback if you take good photos. If you take videos too (considering the unbelievable quality of these cameras' video output you'd be mad not to) Vimeo is a great place for it. YouTube is good too, but the audience is colder and harder to penetrate — Vimeo seems to have a really good community of hipster types who love home-made videos and stuff. Shame the site doesn't do photos too, really.

Chillin' at Wayne Manor.

Hahahahaha.

At least know we know what the deal is rather than a 'this is not a feature' type response. Bit of a pain in the arse, but something to look forward to I guess?

Not that I find this discussion particularly riveting, but the photos above were looking weirdly inconsistent to me so for what it's worth, here are the actual widths of the devices based on Wikipedia and a CNET review from the time : Zune30: 0.58 inches iPod 5G 30GB: 0.4 inches So the actual difference is 0.18 inches, or to put it another way 31%. Details and specifications aside, I personally think the Zune looked less ergonomic and attractive than the iPod. I won't deny that the attractiveness of a gadget factors into my purchasing decisions, because if I'm going to be using something on a daily basis I want it to look and feel great in my hand. I think if the Zune had looked a bit better it'd probably have found its way into more peoples' pockets.

Yeah, the way it's gone is really sad because the whole point of TF2 was kind of to simplify some of the things that made TFC borderline inaccessible after its earlier days. Taking grenades out was a brave but wise decision, as was repurposing beloved classes like the Medic. But that's kind of rendered null and void now they've added about 50,000 variations of each weapon and countless distractions to what was once an elegant and really fun game. It wasn't too great on launch, though. I played right from the initial beta and the map selection was fairly weak. In fact I don't think TF2 really hit its stride until they introduced Payload, which to this day has probably given me more fun than I've exerienced in any multiplayer ever — an absolutely splendid game mode that worked to all of TF2's strengths and didn't really highlight any of its weaknesses like CTF.

There's that classic ThunderPeel charm we all know and love.

I actually had that same reaction Sno, mainly because some fundamental facts about the game were changed (ie: Medic was no longer an all-purpose killing machine, grenades were restricted, countless other things). I played the beta, put up a , then didn't really touch it again for a few weeks.But I decided to deliberate a little, and I got totally hooked. Must have put at least 600 hours into the fucker and wasted more evenings than I care to remember. I think overall it was definitely as good as TFC, albeit in different ways. Playing as classes like Engineer and Spy was far more fulfilling, whereas the others had a lot more depth than you might think after a short amount of play — I originally wrote the skill ceiling off as a fraction of TFC's, but it's actually just as deep (grenade acrobatics aside, which is limited to Demoman). That all said, the game was getting increasingly over-complicated and I stopped playing after several of the class packs came out because I felt the large number of extra weapons was starting to take away from the beautiful simplicity of the game. Then I tried to give it more one last go a few months ago and it was so unbelievably saturated with crazy weapons and tools I just felt completely alienated and will likely never touch it again.

I was always pretty interested in the Zune, but it was never released in the UK and I'm not a fan of buying international electronics. It's a shame it didn't survive long enough to get the chance the make an impact worldwide as the quality did actually seem to be there. That said, I'm guessing most of what it did right will be incorporated into Windows Phone (which I personally think is going to be quite a success story given a few more years like Android) — which reflects the increasing trend of people simply using their phones for music playback.

Isn't the tilt and pressure on Wacoms governed by the pen? It certainly was on the last one I owned years ago. I see no reason why a pen for this — or any tablet really — couldn't be developed that works with software to communicate what the current tilt/pressure is. There's definitely a market here waiting to be tapped (ho ho).

That's weird, should all appear in those. Tried fiddling with the options on the side? By default it shows followed posts but not forums, for example. Other than that, no idea. Must be some kind of database weirdness going on.

Browsers can be very finicky about them, the safest approach is to just get rid of the HTML and use whatever's in the domain's main folder as that'll show right in all browsers.

Chrome shows the traditional one for me. Looks like there's another one in the /forums/ folder though which is probably being picked up sometimes, should delete that.