JonCole

This just feels like an emotional/nostalgic cash grab for people who managed to collect 4 Wavebirds back in the day and get off when accessories like this are released.

Versailles is more because my family wants to do a day trip and I'm throwing my weight behind Versailles rather than Monet's House. Great tips! I would suppose that getting pickpocketed would be a gaming-activity where the pickpocketer is Ezio or something and I'm some poor schmuck that realizes I lost my 26 bucks exactly 120 seconds ago.

"Smash Bros. supports it." is a bit of an odd way to say it. From all accounts thus far, Smash Bros is the only game that uses it and there's no particular indication that it'll work for anything else. I'd say it's a 50-50 split that this accessory is basically the Wii Speak or 3DS Circle Pad Pro.

I recently finished Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, which I quite enjoyed for fantasy genre fare. The first book in the series, Wizard's First Rule, is included in the latest Humble eBook Bundle DRM-free (though, you have to beat the average for it) - https://www.humblebundle.com/books Highly recommended! Also heard good things about The Alchemist in that bundle, might buy it mostly for that with the rest as a bonus.

I'm flying to Paris next week with my family and wife. Any suggestions of what to do there? Already plan on doing some of the normal stuff that you'd expect - Louvre, Notre Dame, Versailles, etc. Anything gaming-related worth seeing/doing around there?

Sly Cooper and Terraria for me, decent month. I need to re-up soon and I think I won't regret it one bit.

I associate an "energy system" with the F2P system where you pay more to play more. That wasn't really the case with adventures, it was more of an equalizing currency among all players that leveled the playing field to some extent so that the amount of days and/or number of turns to actually complete an ascension actually had meaning. Can't disagree with you about the loading thing.

God I feel like a tool, but it's "Bonerdagon". It's meant to be a misspelling of Bonedragon. All the KOL newbs called it "Bonerdragon".

I thought KOL was successful in that when I was playing it as a teenager, I was constantly driven to look up the meaning behind jokes I didn't understand. It's super weird to think that a text-based game I was playing like 10 years ago actually widened my cultural perspective in a notable way. That said, any time I found myself explaining elements of the game in a more strict gameplay sense I'm 100% sure I sounded like a total idiot. You really just can't say "Bonerdagon" out loud and have anyone take that seriously.

I took a brief FLSA seminar about a year ago. The main stuff is this: If you're exempt, FLSA doesn't apply to you. This is basically a "salary" employee, where you get paid the same amount every pay period no matter what. This is defined by the employer and you basically have to agree to being exempt. It's common for management and IT to be exempt. Also, if you're doing contracted work the rules are different. The 1.5x hourly rate applies to every hour over 40 in a standard work week. A work week is defined by 7 consecutive 24-hour days, no necessarily bound by a calendar week. This is defined by whatever the history is - your employer can't change the work week to split time between two periods for their convenience. In the case of an audit, a labor officer would look at previous workweek as defined on your paychecks. Regardless of the pay scale, FLSA applies to non-exempt employees. What does that mean? Well, if you're paid based on non-time based measures such as commission or piece-rate (like if you're in housekeeping, being paid on a per-room-serviced basis), FLSA means that your wage is still calculated by the amount you're paid during the workweek period. So, you can't be doing a disproportionate amount of work for pay, basically. Overtime would then be calculated from whatever wage was determined by the amount of work performed in that period per the time spent. Without knowing more about your specfic situation, it's hard to answer your question. Also, the DOL is wildly understaffed (something like 2 or 3 officers per state on average) so labor disputes on an individual basis are usually put on the backburner. If you're one of many employees that have an overtime issue, it'd be much easier for the DOL to get involved because their mission is to serve as many people as possible in each case. Edit: Wow yeah, the DOL's site is pretty bad. I did manage to find this handy fact sheet that I received in the seminar last year, might be helpful for you - http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/wh1282.pdf

I haven't done this in a long time and I'm not personally familiar with Bluehost/the unnamed domain registrar, but I think you need to change the nameservers rather than use it as a forwarding URL (the latter of which you seemed to do in the part I bolded). You change the nameservers on the domain registrar's site and in your Wordpress hosting site you update your "Primary Domain" to what you bought. Those changes usually take a couple days to actually work out and propagate to DNS servers. Sometimes nameserver mapping incurs an additional charge by the domain registrar, which is why I used to buy the domain and hosting from the same place whenever possible to minimize fees like that.

Yeah, you can rip the HDD out of one of those My Passport drives but it doesn't have a SATA assembly so there's no way to interface it with a different enclosure or directly in your PC. The upside is that these more integrated drives tend to be a bit smaller and generally quieter than what you'd get if you bought a 2.5" hdd and slammed it in a cheap enclosure. I bought an enclosure for my PS3's old drive after I upgraded it and it sounds probably twice as loud as the My Passport Ultra (that may point to the quality of the stock PS3's drive, but still).

I'd probably just get a $60 1TB WD Ultra if I was trying to pinch pennies. I bought a used 500GB model a while ago for around $45 for my Wii and it's been running like a charm for almost 12 months now with sporadic use (that I'd consider to be similar to portable laptop HDD usage patterns).

Undoubtedly. Though I'd say just about anything that wasn't obscene or broken would be worth that little, to be frank.

I've never heard of anything like that. Is there any particular reason you're set on not simply buying a portable HDD instead of a 3.5" HDD + enclosure?

No. From what I know, USB ports provide up to 10 watts of power. Most 3.5" HDDs require anywhere from 15-30 watts of power, usually on the upper end while under load.

Heavy Bullets looks pretty interesting, though it's yet another early access game that makes me feel a little wary about buying it -

I beat Max Payne 3 this long weekend. Oh boy was that a video game. I honestly don't know what to make of it, really strikes me as similar to Kane & Lynch 2. Both games had better than average gameplay, bonkers stories that depended on you giving a shit about the main character's fucked up history, and weirdly exact atmospheric touches. Max is just a wildly unrealistic character in what is otherwise a strangely realistic world, if you ignore the literal hundreds of bodies that Max leaves in his wake. It seemed like at every turn, Rockstar was trying to remind you that he is a cartoon character - example, for the first half of the game after every single mission there's a two or three minute cutscene where Max drinks, pills, and smokes himself to being passed out in his apartment. Also, every time he picks up a bottle of pills in his environment he has a unique pithy remark about why he needs them. So... yeah. I don't know. I don't really regret my time with it, it had some real moments that I enjoyed surrounded by weird moments of "goddamn this is a video game". My only real, direct criticism is that it seemed pretty long. Probably a good 10+ hours, which is really unnecessary for a linear shooter. Honestly, the main reason I wanted to play it is because I've had it installed forever and it takes like 30 GB on my hard drive.

Beat Halo: ODST with Zeus co-op last night, it was great going back to that game. Kind of disappointed that it's not going to be remade as part of that Halo Xbox One collection, because the atmosphere/lighting stuff could look really great in a modern iteration of that engine. The pacing of that game actually really reminds me of Halo 4, with lots of periods of quiet and exploration punctuated with short combat encounters. Also, weird uncanny valley stuff with Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer! In an unprecedented feat of game completion, I also beat Steamworld Dig (2 games in one day WTF!!!) last night. That game is really good, not exactly what I expected from outward appearances. In some ways it really is rooted in that Terraria-style digging thing, but it relies far more on RPG elements than I anticipated. It's just about as long as I'd hoped too, about five hours. I ended up buying every single upgrade and mining just about every mineral in the environment. Good stuff!

I haven't seen any data. My intuition is that there's a niche in the middle of that interest spectrum where Early Access rules. Too little interest, Early Access saps all the attention before real release. Too much interest, Early Access can burn out people who really want the real game, get disappointed, and kill that word of mouth. In the middle, you can get people invested, give them some influence on the end product, and get them to fuel that word of mouth that can give you multiple waves of attention.

I need more local game-playing friends. I feel like any scenario where I play games with friends is when they come over and we just happen to play games rather than board games or go out to eat. Last time a friend was over, she just played some co-op Kirby's Epic Yarn with the wife while I sat around watching the whole time. Not nearly as cool as it could have been in this dreamworld where I actually buy 3+ controllers.

That helps a lot for me, though not for sizing. I used to buy t-shirts online all the time, but the quality was so wildly inconsistent that I actually ended up wearing only about 50% of them. American Apparel is comfy, nice shit. Might actually buy one now!

I feel like Halo 4 was practically impossible to understand if you didn't read the related Forerunner books (Cryptum, Primordium, Silentium). I didn't think the books were amazing, but they at least added needed context to that otherwise baffling game (especially the Terminals).

Local co-op on my PC will unfortunately not really happen until I retire the 360 and can really commit those controllers to the PC's wireless adapter. Controllers are always the worst part about multiplayer. I've pretty much never owned more than two controllers per console I have, do people really pony up the extra $50 a piece for two more that barely ever get used?

I've always liked the Gears of War books. They're all written by Karen Traviss, who's also well known for Star Wars books in the Republic Commando series. She even went on to be a writer for Gears of War 3, and there were pretty significant tie-ins between the books and that game in particular since there was a back-and-forth relationship between them (unlike most game novelizations; I doubt we'll really be seeing Spartans from the Halo novels in Halo 5).