Nachimir

Ah! Never realised that was David Elsewhere, but it makes sense. cvNOwfAnWQQ

Argh, actually there's a good chance I will be working instead of at home. X48 is eating massive amounts of time and there's other work to do too.

When is and isn't sensitisation useful? And why? Not simple questions and I'm not sure I have any answers, but it's related to discussion of the word rape in the IGN thread.

Should be.

Heh, pretty much the same here. Dudes in front of me, looking right at me and not reacting, another time snipers shot me at night, while I was concealed by bushes, wearing stealth suit, hadn't fired a shot yet, and they weren't even being rendered yet (I may be mistaken on this, possible that nearby hills were masking their silhouettes, though couldn't see any muzzle flashes either). Got pretty much addicted to the dart rifle followed by destructive mop up with flamer/explosives.

Just because something is sick, that does not mean it isn't clever. Some of the best, most well written comedy is black humour and social horror. Gerbil: Yes, to an extent, but there's way more to it than disenfranchised teens trying to shock. People aged 30+ liking black humour isn't necessarily regressive or immature.

Sick jokes and the internet are something I've thought about a bit. I don't know if it's about desensitisation so much as a revealing of tastes that were already there. I've always had a sick sense of humour and known plenty of people to swap dead baby jokes before they could access the internet. Just never to the point of HEY LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME I'M BEING TRANSGRESSIVE GUYS HAY GUYS LOOK AT ME. Having an audience at a safe distance is pretty new and some people become dicks for it. The value of sick jokes seems to have gone down since internet access became widespread. Normal social mores don't apply so much to asynchronous communication, not just because of the lack of body language but because we often don't have to deal with the reaction. Being able to find them archived all over the place has deflated their social value among fans. Finding someone to share a sick joke with used to feel like finding a member of a secret association, which was kind of cool because they were harder to come by. People wouldn't tell them so much because of the social risk, and similar tastes in acquaintances would remain hidden because of those risks. There would be this awkward shuffle of an exchange when telling someone new, i.e. "I heard a really sick joke the other day but don't know if I should tell you". I don't think people can bond so much over them now. I think there have always been sick jokes and they aren't an indicator of pathologically disturbed personalities. If anything, I find constant consumption of information the internet allows more pathological and every bit as dulling as a TV binge, regardless of how healthy or unhealthy popular opinion holds the content of such a binge to be. It's too easy to sit on the net spouting meconium at all comers, so nowadays I at least try to make what I'm creating and posting anywhere interesting in some way, and think twice about what I'm reading.

Tell me about it. I'm running a continuous 32 hour event, then I'll get about four hours sleep, then fly out

Endorsed by TIGA? I'm having a little trouble believing that...

Graham Annable rules. He also did The Last Duet On Earth: L6RSD8m_QOQ

Man this thread is bringing memories back I can't remember if it was a Thumb who told me this one or my old housemate. Basically a guy had bought a 0.8v AGP card for his system, but his board was made for older 1.5v cards, so the notch was on the opposite 3rd of the card to his AGP slot. Solution? Cut off most of the backplate, put the card in upside down and pass the VGA cable through the back of the machine... did not end well. My brother also had someone try to return a desktop system to the shop he was working in, because it had apparently "just stopped working". Turned out he'd kept it on a tiny shelf, teetering high above the floor, and it had fallen off, dragging all the peripherals with it

Featuring bonus wizards: XanjZw5hPvE Edit: It's also a little known fact that I'm a part time Wizard and can cast hair removal spells:

6, unquestioningly. My job and friends keep me so busy I don't generally have time to play through long games (Fallout 3 being the latest, halfway through I've stopped playing, not because I don't want to play it, but because I don't have time). I say this as someone young and single. Getting married or having children greatly compounds lack of time for games; fathers I know were kind of happy when the DS was first around, saying "At last, I can play games again". Long games get tedious for me, ending up in the uncompleted pile if not the dreaded to play one, aka the unwise purchases pile.

Ouch. They had stacks of old, broken PC hardware at the college where I learned to build them. The best was a motherboard with a rounded chunk missing from one corner, charred on the edge. Apparently a student had put an old style power connector in it the wrong way around and turned it on, resulting in a big bang That's happened to me too, crack a disc in the centre and it will get pulled apart and shatter (Some DVD cases can do this to discs, happened to me once with a copy of UT2004). Luckily, once I'd dismantled the burner and plucked all the bits of CD out, it still worked.

Excellent There's a lot of talk of ARGs being rubbish due to low numbers of people actually participating in them, but I think the main thing is because cocks think they're a magic road to money hats. Having one done on a tiny budget with a party at the end is an excellent idea. Dan is definitely morning TV Jesus here.

Chris is right, it's no use thinking fast without training to back it up. Drilling, training, roleplaying situations, etc. feeds your brain the elements it needs to call upon in any related stressful situations. Likewise, animals play at hunting and learn from their parents rather than just having a go. There's even a martial art based around improvisation, and they get new students to practice in slow motion in order to pick up decision making, anatomy and combat. Being able to think fast is as much about knowledge and practice as it is intelligence. Edit: I played quite a lot of Dawn of War online, mainly in teams with friends. We found that offline play against AI taught very little except basic unit counters and efficient build orders, which are vital, but real players tend to be a great deal more creative than AI (to the point of it being a flaw in DoW: Good strats spread and become boring. Overpowered ones even more so). Even without a pause button, it didn't take us long to start recognising typical situations, expecting certain units to show up, etc. The best way of learning RTS games is getting your ass kicked, watching replays of it if possible, and having people to discuss individual games with. We built repertoires of strategies, like being able to specialise in a certain unit quickly to back up a team mate, turtling behind team-mates to race to a powerful late game unit, etc., and quickly figured out complimentary team strategies. (My favorites stand alone for Eldar. 1: Bonesinger teleports behind enemy base, builds webway gate in the fog of war. When enemy starts attack, dump infantry straight into their base, watch enemy panic and run all the way back across the map while you destroy his base. For maximum annoyance, make sure to get all your troops back into the gate before he arrives. 2: Grav tanks full of fire dragons. Team mate and/or other units engage to bait enemy, grav tanks jump right over battle, unload, FDs take down vehicles, while the tanks strafe infantry. They either die or messily retreat through grav tank fire). Being able to download replays from tournament games and send them to friends was also a really excellent feature; it's a massive pity that new patches tended to make them unplayable.

Not announced yet, but here are some tweets from Jonathan Ross: http://twitter.com/Wossy/status/1308386483 http://twitter.com/Wossy/status/1308394651 http://twitter.com/Wossy/status/1309853562 http://twitter.com/Wossy/status/1309862578 http://twitter.com/Wossy/status/1309864044 Whoops.

That's happened to me too, right after building a brand new PC. Terrifying.

Holy shit I can't believe I've had that account knocking around for four years. There was almost a whole one of those I didn't scrobble in.

Whoops, sorry Signor.

Absolutely Rodi, a few of us said the same thing above, Heh, at the beginning of the Mars scene, I thought "This sounds a bit like Koyaanisqatsi, I wonder if they've used music by Phillip Glass" then the more strident part used also in GTA IV kicked in

Should be there.

"Comes with a pile of real human skulls to sit on" - IGN.com

Soooo then...

Angry Marines.