Forbin

Also, is there a group for Idle thumbs on battle net yet, or should we create one?

*bump* Who's up for some fooling around with Heart of the Swarm. I've totally forgotten all my timings, so i'm terrible, but it'll be fun.

The only thing I don't get is that you bite into the kinder surprise eggs. Most people break them with their hands then eat the shells.

Totally uninterested in auto-downloading games that the system believes I will buy. I'd rather my internet wasn't pegged, or bandwidth used up on waste like that. Never going to use the "share" feature ever, but I'm sure there will be some interesting clips from other people. If they don't fully integrate with youtube at launch there's a huge missed opportunity. I'm glad they seem to be going for a somewhat standard architecture, and the sleep mode method of dismissing a game seems like it'll be similar to iOS. Meaning that developers hopefully won't have to jump through hoops to get the functionality. I think if Xbox's architecture and specs are similar, there will be a huge amount of 3rd party development on the PC in the next 5-6 years as it'll all be fairly portable. I won't buy a PS Vita, but if they can use my iPhone to do cool stuff that'd be nice. I didn't get to see too much of the interoperability stuff, but if they can make a simplified remote control then I think my relatives could finally figure out how to use the thing to play DVDs/netflix. That amount of GDDR Ram may be excessive, which is good, but may also make the thing fairly expensive. I think that people may be right that it may have a cheaper bundle with a Playstation Plus subscription that subsidizes, but without that discount the console could be somewhere around $800. I think we'll have to wait until E3 to know for sure though.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/01/28/170272582/do-we-treat-our-gadgets-like-they-re-human

I played a bit this morning. At first I thought it would be like maniac mansion, then I got a bit of a lost vikings vibe. But after playing through one of the sections I'm a bit worried that player selection won't have the kind of dynamic impact I was hoping for. It seems like the main puzzles are designed around each of the character's story lines. Which means that rather than being a mix of 3 special abilities, the puzzles are designed around using that one character's special ability in combination with 2 other warm bodies. Hopefully it gets a bit more dynamic later, but I'm afraid that might be the extent of the puzzling relating to characters. I like the aesthetic more than I thought I would. For some reason that trailer made me think it'd be a lot more like one of those cross-section books or a diorama, but it feels pretty much like any other sidescrolling platformer. And while the narrator is quickly getting on my nerves, the NPCs seem entertaining. I get a bit of a muppet vibe from them. so far

sure

I forget where I heard it, but I think laughter and grinning are supposed to be used to communicate that while something is unexpected things are still OK. Maybe that's why grinning is so unsatisfying and terrifying in simulation and fear/sadness reads so well on that plastic boys face.

That's solid advice. I also like this Ira Glass video that gets linked all the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY

I like Flickchart.com's approach over criticker. It uses the hot-or-not rating system to organize "your best movies" list. But rather than having to think about score on a 100 point scale, I just say I prefer ghost busters to beetlejuice. It doesn't give you very good predictions based on what you've liked, but it does build up lists like "the best movies you haven't seen". And you can browse a bunch of lists generated by other users input. Like saying "best anime movie released in the 90s".

I love this thread is now 101 disk usage utilities. Something I use every day is this simple OS X app to keep my laptop from going to sleep: http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

Relating to hard disk usage, I like using JDiskReport. I haven't tried tried WinDirStat, but from screenshots it looks a bit cluttered. JDiskReport also is in java so it works pretty much everywhere. I've also been using mytvrss.com for a while, and they've switched over to a more robust followshows.com. Whenever I'm interested in a show I just follow it, and it'll keep me up to date when new episodes are going to air. I use the RSS feed primarily, but the tracker is pretty good at showing me how many episodes I'm behind on shows that I used to watch. I guess it's not new to people who used PVRs this way, but it's completely altered the way I watch TV. I spend almost no time watching shows I don't want to, and catch up on them when I do have free time. Meaning I watch less TV, but what I watch is better. A cool site I use to find software: http://www.alternativeto.net Search for programs you want to find an alternative, how many people like it compared to the one you were searching for, as well as pictures, comments and reviews. Techzilla daily tips are a gold mine for this kind of stuff. http://www.youtube.com/user/TEKHD/

I'm going to give that a try. It reminds me a bit of spaceteam from the promo image.It's stupid, but I'm impressed by the polish in their audio. iOS can be a bit shitty about layering sounds like that.

That drummer is pretty amazing.

I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that your existence is justification for everything in the past. It's very self-centered. If someone could have prevented the holocaust and World War 2 with no other meaningful impacts other than my non-existence (and that of millions of others), I think that it would be the correct thing to do. If we're supposed to be okay with potential people not existing, then we should be just as okay with ourselves not existing.

That guy seemed like he wanted to say religion wasn't important, but I think that prosperity factor is also representative of people being less orthodox. Access to "family planning" as he calls it, and women joining the workforce are both significant factors that are limited by religions.

What I was saying is that traditionally having children is the opposite of immoral. I think a lot of the things that are considered immoral by religions (like homosexuality) are rooted in the idea that people are shirking off their duty to procreate.And that I think that's an outdated philosophy.

I wish I could remember where I saw this before. But a group of people were trying to study the principles and morals of different societies and try to tie them to large scale data to see their impact. The goal was to come up with objective answers to what seemed like subjective opinions. It was interesting, but a bit like Freakanomics in the way that they would probably never be able to definitively prove something, but they could wave their hands at some interesting correlations.

Some people are fairly convinced it's immoral: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement And this subreddit is a bit off the charts: http://www.reddit.com/r/childfree Pretty much every religion considers it the opposite of immoral, but my personal opinion is that's a preservation system. Ensuring that you breed as much as possible to give the population of that religion a better chance at thriving, and displacing other religions. And though I think that's a terrible way to basically use breeding as a weapon, it's hard to not think that other people are already using it and it may be the right thing to join in. If you want the future of our species to follow your beliefs more than those of other people, then one way to do that is to breed and train as many disciples as you can. Personally I'm comfortable not having kids for a long time. They're an insane amount of work, and I'm not sure it's actually possible to prepare for the experience.

I think physical and emotional harm both have thresholds for what is allowed. Physical is pretty severely limited, slapping someone is technically enough to get charged for assault. Emotional harm is a bit harder to see where the line is, but you can definitely cross it. People have been convicted for crimes relating to causing other people to do something like hurt themselves or other people. For example, that woman that cyber-bullied the neighbors daughter to the point that she committed suicide. I'm not sure if there's a proper definition of rights outside a legal system. I guess they also fit into moral or religious systems as well, but those are different for everyone. "Basic human rights" aren't even universally accepted. The Golden Rule is accepted by most cultures, and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" I think suggests that most people don't believe you have the moral right to purposefully harm someone, physically or emotionally.

I started playing around with ComputerCraft, making turtle programs in LUA. It made me want to dig up some old Turtle Graphics examples and build crazy things. After watching a few people stumble around with them on Youtube i figured they'd make a good interview question for junior developers. If Minecraft wasn't 30 bucks, I probably would make a challenge based on them. Something like this would be a bit extreme:

Nah that's the way to do it.

I just discovered /r/youtubehaiku http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGwwJEE7k48

That Alan Moore interview was great.

So what you're saying is the people that keep drawing pixel art penises are shaping the prize at the center?