Nachimir

Very nice work. I haven't designed a level in years; really miss it sometimes.

Thanks for all the recommendations, especially Murdoc! I've made them into a map: https://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?msid=205592103042162482186.0004d562fbf751ddd4904&msa=0&ll=37.779263,-122.428379&spn=0.11614,0.222988

.

I posted Delayed Gratification before, and this is a similar but more effective thing for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crackbook/nbgjmohekjolcgemlolblankocjlgalf You define hours during which it works. Each successive visit to a time-wasting site causes the delay timer to climb by a defined amount, and it only counts down if the tab is in focus, i.e. if you swap to another program, it'll reset the timer. It can even be set to do the same to links opened from a time-wasting site. It thwarts a lot of the workarounds that Delayed Gratification had (i.e. it'd block Twitter for 30 seconds, but not twitter.com/i/connect ).

(This thread: What a collection!) Recently, my favourite has been this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIhWiL7ns8I

Oh man, I'd just managed to forget about the Kickstarter campaign. So many indie developers could have made cool and interesting stuff with that money. http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/penny-arcade-kickstarter.php

Same, and I think it's one of the worst aspects of many games now: It's nice to have a few more challenges that let you linger in a world, but too often the addictive design of the challenges that build up to that 100% just kept me thrashing at it until all joy was gone and I was just frittering away time. Tick avatar:

Source

Unfortunately, this would be illegal in the UK. The bit where they actually propel a table-tennis ball into a table-tennis bat at supersonic velocity is at 5:50: Also:

I_smell, I have an ex who becomes faint at the sight of blood. She's never found a way to really manage it, other than avoiding triggers. Did the gore in Django Unchained affect you at all? I'm fairly skinny, and can get light-headed if I stay still for a long time then suddenly get up. It's only made me faint once ever, where I was in a bathroom and probably lucky not to hit my head on something. It never happens randomly though; getting up fast is always the specific and discernible cause. I actually quite enjoy the sensation of being lightheaded, and do a few things to make it safer: I straighten and tense my legs when it happens, bear down with my core muscles to push blood toward my brain, and generally make sure I'll fall back onto something soft if I do lose consciousness.

Yeah, I kind of went off Brooker for a while, the new year review just felt like a retread of loads of his previous stuff. This episode of Wipe was really excellent though

My advice is be ready to throw stuff out and start something new. When I was first learning UnrealEd, I made it scream by doing weird curved levels it wasn't meant to do at all. Up to a point, that taught me excellent stuff about UnrealEd, but mostly it involved wasting time on the perfection of bad projects. The best game designers I know generally learned by making one flawed thing a week for a couple of years rather than spending the same amount of time on two or three projects.

Hey pabosher! I found out Speedy Desiato is going to GDC too Somewhat related to coffee assholes: One of my housemates is an insanely talkative morning person, and I'm decidedly not. I get more animated in the evening when she's tired. The only way it works well is if we cross paths midday to early evening, and outside of that it's all about the quote above.

Sorry, I couldn't resist teasing you a little, and didn't mean anything by it What sort of size is your boat? Regardless, it sounds like an amazing project to get to the end of.

Agh! I've run into that on a client project before. I sent them this: http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ It didn't help much Especially during the Reagan/Thatcher era in the 80's, it was preached that wealth trickles down (which means I can understand "Greed is good" etc. as more than just savagery or lies; people sincerely believed it, and still do, and to a yuppie that's a great way to get rid of any societal guilt you might carry. You're taking now, but you tell yourself it's for everyone's good in the long run). I think we're now finding definitively that it's untrue, especially when even the IMF are telling the Tories austerity is a failure. When they then carry on like this and we're entering a third downturn in this recession, I think it's pretty obvious that's it's ideological rather than sound economic policy. Oh no Luftmensch is going to start posting things he doen't quite believe to poke at my brain now.

Now I finally understand why I've been misattributed as a Proteus developer twice: http://www.youtube.c...h0ifdql8#t=337s (<-- Not me on the right, but my name. His real name is David Kanaga and he's the composer who worked with Ed). http://www.flickr.co.../in/photostream (<-- An unflattering photo of me, labelled as Ed) Both a part of that cunning Ed Key's devious plan! I've been verbally and physically attacked in the street 18 times so far today. Edit: The Game Police have been doing good work today.

That's right. I'm pretty upset to see the "OMG WHERE IS TUH GAEM?" user reviews topping the Steam page, but Ed and David seem to be having a good day. I also think it's important to preserve these kind of reactions; they're clearly growing pains of an entire medium, and will be more laugh-worthy the more years pass. Source.

This has been… a week. Someone in a community I help run had an extremely severe manic episode, during which he became dogmatic and persistently antagonistic. A bunch of us understand his illness and had dealt with less severe episodes before. Another bunch of people don't understand it at all, and effectively started bullying him (without meaning to, but it was the effect of their actions). By that time, pretty much every other person who takes any kind of leadership there had become exhausted, and me and a couple of others were the only ones left standing. Between us, we managed to shut down the bullying, look after the manic guy's welfare, look after each other, and get his family involved. There were times we thought he'd committed suicide, and times where each of us couldn't think straight and had to step away from it all for an hour or two. The manic guy has been sectioned and is now in a psychiatric ward, which in his case is not a desirable outcome, but under the circumstances is probably the best possible. At one point, the manic guy recognised he needed help and phoned the NHS crisis line. He was told: "Sorry, our funding's been cut and we can't help you with this sort of thing out of hours". Fucking austerity policies. I am really, really looking forward to getting some sleep.

The Onion: Teenage Girl Blossoming Into Beautiful Object.

That guy does excellent electrical safety videos:

Yes, local drives only I think, and yes, you can tell it which folders to exclude. Yes, you can log in to retrieve files; it gives you the option of a zip archive, flash drive (60GB $99) or a hard disk (3TB $189). Actually, come to think of it, those prices probably aren't that bad. Not sure how complete the incremental backups are, but it does allow you to select a window of "from the beginning until X time ago".

toblix is very correct about data never really being safe. If you want to keep it, multiply it and keep it moving. I use cloud based backup and an external disk. The former is Backblaze, which is pretty cheap, and constantly makes incremental backups of everything when connected to the net. They have (somewhat expensive) options for retrieving a lot of lost data as on a USB key or HDD by post, but you can also log in to retrieve files, which has saved me from repeating a couple of hours of design work once so far. I was glad I went with them when I read of the lengths they'd go to to maintain the service as they'd started it. With an external drive on OS X, I use Carbon Copy Cloner (not sure what a Windows equivalent is), and it automatically makes an incremental backup whenever I plug that particular one in.

Woo! Congrats subbes

Sorry! Does this mean I have to buy you two lunches?