Nachimir

I've finally found some time for it. Unfortunately, I've also just made the fatal mistake of logging in to Minecraft before cooking dinner...

Really good book Would not recommend the sequels, especially Xenocide ( ). I was about 14 when I read them, and they just seemed to have this kind of indulgent bollocks in while being nowhere near as pointed as Ender's Game.

Sorry, quote restored. I meant the Mad Catz thing, not the Fender.

Sounds awful. dFUlAQZB9Ng

Ah, indeed. I was impressed at the amount of switches they could cram into it, but yes, it's a bit tacky. It's like a toy trying really hard to be a real guitar. Yeah, this really interests me too. Rock Band 3 is "Yes, but not yet" for me.

This is the first I've heard of this. It sounds like 90s multimedia CD ROM, hypertext fiction levels of awfulness.

The first series was shit. Apparently it gets better. I tried the fourth season, and there was a marked improvement, but I haven't seen anything that came inbetween.

Could be a number of reasons: Greater expense. They didn't leave it long enough between the last game and this one (Imagine the excitement and hype if it had been five years since Rock Band 2 or something) People sick of storing huge peripherals. People waiting for Christmas. As I recall, DJ Hero had the same problem.

It sounds like Ysbreker made the right decision in nerfing fire on the last server :/

Plenty of eye contact, smiling and attention can do the trick. Obviously, overdoing or faking them makes people look like psychos though. Touching people too, but learning to do it in the right and appropriate ways can be very difficult. Watching people in nightclubs (I worked in one once), I've seen them hesitating at just the wrong moment, turning it into something awkward and/or creepy. PiratePoo is right about confidence. Most people are attracted to it, and again, that's something that goes well beyond your romantic life.

Don't hang it up. I was still struggling massively with the same thing at that age. Miffy's advice is the best, and you're right, guys who are just trying to get in someone's pants tend to be really obvious. There's always the dark side of pickup artists, but that stuff is really squicky and you don't need to trick or manipulate people to connect with them. Some bits of advice I'd like to add: Attraction is a simple and easily provoked emotion that can lead to bigger feelings, but doesn't necessarily. If you're inexperienced with it, it can lead to either getting hung up on one person who isn't interested, or getting so tense when you're in a potentially romantic situation that you destroy any chance of it. It's impossible to do all of this perfectly. Leave your failures behind you. Learn from them but don't let them define you. Confidence will not come overnight, it will build very slowly over time. Don't let any failures or disasters destroy you. People may suddenly go off you, you'll discover major differences in values, and so on. It happens no matter how well you think you're doing. If you're not meeting enough women, meet more people. It can be hard to find members of the opposite sex when you specifically have romantic/sexual intent, but meeting more people opens opportunities, and you can end up with an a very good social life too. Also, try new stuff. Classes, groups, etc., can be great ways to meet new people, especially with similar interests, and you can visit them for just a session or two if they're not right. Related to that, encountering people romantically uses all of the same social skills as the rest of your social life. Granted, it has differences and there are extra bits of interpretation, but all of your social skills are useful. There's a lot you can do outside of dating to become better at talking to women. Oh, also: Women have filthy thoughts too. Often overlooked. If you're careful enough when weighing people up, then by the time you get into an intimate situation with anyone, any insecurities you might have over yourself or your body will probably be irrelevant. Try to smile more. Not a fake one, just approach people with a welcoming attitude. So, so so many interactions between people fuck up or never happen because people make eye contact without smiling.

Tanukitsune, it came over as much of your rage directed at him, rather than blogs. You don't have to diminish his 200 sprites to slag off the blogs who lazily copy paste stuff from each other. I totally agree with you on those.

Pretty sure Patrick Fitzsimmons was interviewed over his Star Wars Unreal mod. That was a pretty special case though, given that he was basically justifying it as sophisticated fan art rather than copyright infringement. Oh, here we go: http://greywardens.com/2010/03/dragon-age-fan-art-interview/ There's a pretty high chance that if not Henry Jenkins himself, then at least his students have interviewed people about fanart too. Once more: This means it shouldn't have happened? Or should never happen again? There is the world, and there are your personal tastes. You seem to desire that forces in the world (random people, their tastes, intentions, artistic and journalistic output) should operate in harmony with your tastes. Whenever they do, it will be a coincidence. I suggest: Find stuff you like, just ignore the stuff you don't unless it's hurting people.

Having such a set also piques something similar to the urge to collect.

http://ourvaluedcustomers.blogspot.com/2010/10/to-his-friend-on-subject-of-ironman-2.html http://students.ou.edu/M/Eric.C.Mai-1/DE.htm

Eliss is truly excellent, and automatically accommodates multiplayer by being on an ipad. Carcassonne, though for iPhone, has art that scales up to ipad resolutions. Feelforit is interesting and weird. Envirobear 2000 is hilarious. Again, low-fi enough visuals that scaling it up probably won't hurt it.

Kingz, John Robb is worth reading on resilient communities (Parallel currencies are an interesting form of local strength and economic insulation). I think he can cherry pick things to match his ideas sometimes, but has a lot of insight into how cultures and institutions work when set against each other. He started out with a very compelling theory about warfare in Iraq (How loosely aligned militias were producing, refining and deploying new hardware in a matter of months when U.S. armed forces run 15 year procurement cycles), which was basically that they operate in an open-source, grass roots way. He's fairly technology and business focussed, but is now trying to apply those insights to the ideas of resilient communities and virtual (i.e. globally distributed) economies. I'm very interested in these things; I always found it inspiring that, when everyone was getting paranoid about the Y2K bug, and survivalists were stocking up on bullets, barbed wire and tinned food, one woman went around knocking on doors, telling people about it and starting a discussion on how they could survive it as a town rather than struggling, isolated units rubbing up against each other and likely to fight over diminishing resources. Starting this kind of thing up seems to require a very strange mix of practical skills, business skills and social skills. There are a lot of hippies out there setting up talking shops instead. Benefiting from global structures is fine, but when they go wrong it pays to know how to generate wealth* locally. * By "wealth" I do not mean "personal fortune".

I used to listen to other kids problems at primary school. Friday night underlined to me that occasionally doing it for friends is ok, but hearing a story that harrowing and fucked up really affected me for a while, to the point that running through bogs felt like the right thing to do. I don't think I could hack being a counsellor. Photo. I hadn't just pushed her, honest. That was the man made bit, complete with hidden shin height log to trip us over. Photographers didn't go anywhere near the natural bogs made of mud, but they were like rice pudding and deeper.

Really NSFW. Via Eddie Campbell's daughter, who summed it up thus: EhwXVDi496E

I did something similar with the exact same result on a mapping forum once. I was mostly embarrassed, but also slightly gratified that the most offended people were fundie right wing Christians that spent most of their time there arguing about religion and politics. I think in terms of level design, that image above was always going to be a generalisation. I thought of Doom 3 and some levels in F.E.A.R. on seeing the right hand side. Some games still have quite complex locations though. Oh hey, I'm supposed to post a funny image. I'm going to hotlink it. I really hope this doesn't turn into a gaping anus. Apologies if it does:

At least it's a nice one, rather than shemale porn or something. URL for image: http://narf-archive.com/pix/5d1ff7a27c553f24a59c257802343115facf05d6.jpeg

Ah. There's loads of context missing for that. She has a brutal sense of humour, but would never mean it.

It's been a harrowing weekend. Some of it self inflicted. On Friday I went to a party and it turned into an impromptu counseling session for someone very troubled and self-harming. She seemed relieved to find someone who understood it wasn't just attention seeking, and I was relieved to find that she's getting professional help. The details of the awful situation that brought her to this were really distressing, and made me angry at the people who've victimised her. If people need it, I can be a good listener, but I've never had it be so emotionally draining. (A female friend jokingly said to me: "What? You didn't even snog her at the end of all that? You could have proper taken advantage of her you fool"). Today, I did a thing called hellrunner. It's basically a little shorter than a half marathon, but with very steep hills to scramble up and down, stream crossings, and bogs. The last is a long, long waist deep section with some chest deep patches. When I say bogs, I don't mean poxy little patches of mud; they were exactly like the kind of wooded bogs in 80s fantasy films or the empire strikes back. I was with a friend who realised at the first bog that she'd bitten off more than she could chew, and had to stay with her to make sure she was ok. The going was slow and as a result got very cold, but we did it. We were among the last over the line, but I feel happier at that time than I would at being in the top 10. I expected to get really fucked at a party, sleep Saturday then run a race alone rather than help people, but all in all, I think this was probably a better weekend than I planned.

We still update the twitter account from time to time. People don't seem to think of many though.

At a guess, this may be related to the way broken boats spewed wood and twigs, but I couldn't pick them up in SMP. Ooh, renders. Thanks. Your cow is excellent.