RockyRan

I'm pretty sure it is, but yeah. Another thing to throw on my list. People were complaining left and right and I was wondering what colleges in general usually do.

I hope it's nothing like Borderlands, because I thought that game was awful beyond belief.

Do other colleges ignore Labor Day or is mine just being an asshole?

Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day. At least on the 360, you're already paying on online multiplayer in general because the vast majority of online titles are handled by Xbox Live, which has a subscription fee. You're already paying for that and buying it used doesn't incur any additional costs on their part. On the PS3 and PC it's a bit more of a grey area, especially on the PC since a lot of titles have dedicated servers that cost the developer $0 to run while some have GFWL, Steamworks, etc. It would only be true on the PS3, and even then it's a stretch because when a game is sold to someone else the developer still has to cater only to that one user, not additional users.

Ah yes, the wonderful "required" textbook that the professor NEVER uses. I've had a couple of those. Nothing better than wasting students' money for absolutely no reason. That just reminded me of the class I dropped yesterday. My Poli Sci professor not only wrote his own textbook, he also ensured gigantic profit margins by selling you just its pages by themselves exclusively at the college bookstore. I'm dead serious. You go to the "book" on the shelf and it's literally a stack of like 300 papers shrinkwrapped. For $70. And it's nonrefundable. And of course the first day he insisted on how he made it his biggest priority to sell it as cheap as humanly possible, which is why there was no cover, no binding, and no colored ink. Just a stack of 300 photocopies sold as is. And $70 was the absolute cheapest that he could possibly make it. Anyone with a half a brain would realize the guy was pooting out his ass. First of all, if he was really that concerned with making it as "cheap as possible" he wouldn't be re-writing/re-arranging the textbook every year so as to kill off used sales. If he wasn't in it for the money he would have absolutely no reason to do so, but he is. Second of all, I can go to the local copy joint and get 300 pages done for $20, and get the exact same product. The quality of paper and ink from regular copies and the "textbook" are exactly the same. It most likely costs the university press even less than that considering the whole "printing in bulk using their own resources" thing. Needless to say, I dropped the class like an ugly baby.

Sophomore-ish? Started in this college in the Spring of 2010, my previous college credits wouldn't carry over. Why do you ask? Just wanted to give a warning that Financial Aid offices become less and less "friendly" the closer you are to graduation. See, the exact same thing happened to both me and my brother. We both got serenaded by our corresponding colleges of choice and showered with generous financial aid, then as you're a junior/senior both our F.A. offices became assholes. It was worse with my brother, seeing as they found completely random excuses to take away his aid as early as sophomore year, but as for me they started pulling shit out of their ass this semester (my senior year). We both suspect it is to entice incoming freshmen the way they enticed us, and the only way they can afford it is to take away aid from the upperclassmen.

That's definitely true. It's going to be a bit of an uphill battle for public companies to convince stockholders that invasive, draconian DRM is counterproductive. Still, there's something definitely strange about Ubisoft's approach. While companies Activision and EA still have to respond to stockholders, their DRM is nowhere near as invasive as Ubisoft. If EA and Activision have a back-and-forth occasionally with their stockholders regarding DRM, it seems like Ubi just says "OK SURE!" at anything they say.

Very simple answer: give incentives to new buyers. And no, not "let's take out multiplayer from the game and add that as the 'incentive' " incentive, I'm talking REAL incentives. Steam is Valve's perfect DRM because it provides a very large amount of features that make it very convenient for users. It's about providing a seamless service between client and game and, especially in their games like L4D and TF2, Steam and the games have convenient features embedded right in the client. That's the proper way to do DRM without hurting the end user. The fact that Ubi is at a complete loss as to how to "protect" their IPs other than by using really shitty authentication-requirement DRM isn't really the result of a "problem without a good answer" situation.

Today Ubisoft defended their horrible DRM: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/02/driver-san-francisco-studio-head-defends-ubisoft-drm-system/ Their argument essentially boils down to "for absolutely no reason we believe we absolutely HAVE to do something about piracy, and our idea of doing that is by doing this DRM. Can't be helped that PC gamers are all filthy pirates" I'm starting to seriously consider rounding up a mass of people and bombard them with e-mails. Could be a fun project, and Ubi definitely deserves it. Hmmm...that may not be such a bad idea after all.

They certainly have some serious entitlement issues. Video games are finally shaking off the stigma that they are immature, if only the industry itself could follow suit. Indeed. Everyone always goes on about how gamers have entitlement issues, but to be perfectly honest publishers are just as guilty over this, if not more. They always whine about something eating away at their precious profit that they feel for SURE they're entitled to, and make up random excuses to throw specific markets they don't like under the bus. The worst case of this by far was when some guy from Silicon Knights blamed the used games market for generic FPSs. Just...yeah. Let that sink in.

Just curious, what year are you?

To this day I haven't heard any of my professors ever suggest sharing.

Not so much pessimistic as it is realistic. The game has been completely broken with updates that are a fraction of the size.

In-fucking-deed. I love how professors say you absolutely NEED the latest (read: most expensive) edition because they pull all the homework questions from the book that are exclusive to that edition. Nevermind the fact that most of the time, the questions are the same, just scrambled in order from the previous editions. Or how about the professors who write and pimp their own textbook?

There are good people, just not an abundant amount of them. Like with my old apartment, while my roommates may have been less than desirable, I got along well with my neighbors. I figure the same will be true where I am since I've talked with a few really friendly people. Besides that, I have way too much crap to be shuffling around. The large factor in why I'm heading out is because my new room is only two floors down. Also, it happens to have been my original room. I figure why not take back what was designated as mine in the beginning. I see. Well hopefully your luck will stop being crap and you'll finally find roommates who aren't terrible.

One of these days, I'll make a tl;dr summary that turns out longer than the actual post. Just for you

Now that I have a netbook I'm wondering if they'll bring along a modified version of their tablet stuff into it. Or rather, I'm hoping for a special version of Windows 8 that works specifically for netbooks. Windows 7 Starter Edition is just pure ass. All the good stuff taken out with none of the advantages. I'd install Ultimate on my netbook but apparently it has higher system reqs and netbooks barely handle Starter Ed. as it is. Indeed. I've had and used Vista, XP, and 7 and will use 8 when it comes out, but only because my university offers them for dirt cheap or flat out gives them away and it gives me an excuse to re-format and get rid of all the shit I refuse to/forget to delete for some reason. My experience is that they're all very similar and if you don't have cheap/free access to them all you really don't need to upgrade anything unless you're buying/building a new PC, in which case you might as well just upgrade.

Rage rage indeed. TheRevanchist is completely correct. Gawker Media IS a tabloid. I'm not presenting it as opinion, I'm presenting it as fact. That was actually the entire reason why they did the shitty redesign in the first place, because Mr. McDouchy CEO (I forget his name, but it's close enough) wanted to "class it up" a little by having the redesign not be so tabloid-y. I do believe his exact words were something along the lines of him wanting people to take "Gawker more seriously now". It was a "turning over a new leaf" of sorts, but clearly they stopped that shortly after the redesign happened. In my time at the big K I never really put two-and-two together. The reality is this: All the Gawker blogs ARE the original Gawker, just in different flavors. Gawker is a tabloid, ergo, all their others are the same. Some are slightly more respectable than others, but overall they're all styled practically around the same approach. Kotaku is the tabloid blog of the video game industry, and while it wasn't too terribly evident in its first few years it's extremely obvious now. And I don't know about you, but when I see tabloids of any kind (the ones in print, etc.) they simply turn me off completely. The gossip-y tone of every single thing they write, the attention-whore headlines, the purposefully provocative content, the lack of writer dignity (they'll write something grossly ignorant so long as more people will read in disgust, only caring about the "more people will read" part), it's all there. That entire charade of OMG JENNIFER ANISTON HAS CELLULITE! LOOK AT THIS CLEARLY PHOTOSHOPPED PIC OF HER AT THE BEACH! SHE'S ALSO SNEEZING BUT WE'LL SAY SHE'S HIGH just makes me gag. Treating Kotaku and those celebrity gossip tabloids as one as the same has everything fall into place. It all made sense very quickly when I first realized it.

So why not just tell that to your dad so you can move somewhere else? I've never had roommates, but if your complex has that many shitty people I'd just pack up and leave.

Yeah, I go to Joystiq now for news reading (the only place I actively comment anymore is here anyway) but I can't remember the last time I laughed at something witty they said. I did kinda like their Zumba hand mini-meme (wtf were those artists thinking?), but in terms of writing style RPS tops them all. I was laughing uncontrollably at that "PC 2" piece they did near E3.

Much, much easier said than done for many people. When someone links the newest shit article from Kotaku, 99% of the time I just read the headline and comment on that because 1) I'm not giving them the satisfaction of giving them pageviews for shit articles, and 2) the articles in question are always so shallow that you can extract the entire meaning through the purposefully provocative headline. Unfortunately, people go, read, rage, and pass on the link for others to do the same. Internet people like to rage, and Gawker sites (and many others) know it.