fuchikoma

Outside the UK and Ireland, I'd expect someone to know only if they were specifically curious about it and looked it up. I'll admit I probably wouldn't know if I didn't hang out here... but my god, I'd still know enough to look it up and get it right before sticking my foot in my mouth like that!

Thank you for not saying "literally" to mean "figuratively." I'm kind of in an aware but undisciplined thing: I ride my mountain bike around when I can, and like tackling big hills and dirt trails. Never was one to run long distances though... I like being able to coast a bit and recover on the go when I'm tired. (This summer's been really hot, so a few times I've stopped for a break and lost the air flow and just roasted - it actually got dangerous once!) As for eating, I've never had much faith in temporary diets, but I've started looking at the nutritional value of what I eat, and sometimes tracking it with MyFitnessPal on iPhone, at least for the meals where it's easily done. To me, this is "gamification" - getting quick concise feedback that naturally makes me lean toward having the ideal numbers. I still eat what I want, but I find knowing what I'm eating in more detail makes me want food that is better for me. I'll still buy junk food, pop and desserts but it's getting rarer now and I'm gradually getting in better shape for it.

The Japanese call that "chuu ni byou" or "8th grade syndrome". That mostly inevitable phase where kids try to find themselves and stand out from the rest, before growing up and realizing uniqueness actually means solitude, but is also phenomenally rare. (edit: Bigger article, partly translated from Wikipedia Japan)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwu5Umj3Eck Today I wanted to hear someone play the erhu.

That looks cool... I hadn't heard of it but it's on the watch list now. Datura is a PSN game by Plastic, the guys who made "Linger in Shadows." It's another interactive art title, where you explore an autumnal forest with a very realistic style (I thought "this is what they bragged the PS3 could do at launch!" when I saw the ground was covered in individual 3D leaves, especially on walking into an area with a small topiary maze, with individual leaves on it! ...though the framerate took some minor dives there.) It's a Move game, though I've read it (poorly) supports the Dualshock too. You play by reaching a virtual hand into the world and touching things directly - your fingers realistically catch, fold, and drag on things. Basically you wander around, mapping your way by touching white trees, and finding different things that pull you into short experience vignettes where you'll get a chance to do something altruistic or selfish before waking up in the forest again. There's also a little bit of coherent narrative around the game's namesake, a white flower you see all around the forest which is very poisonous and as a drug, gives people bizarre and indistinguishable hallucinations. (The same starts in an ambulance, for instance.) I don't recommend watching a lot of videos and trailers of it, because it's only a couple hours long and it's cool spontaneously discovering things in it. Also, be warned that they made the ridiculous choice of making you play most of the game with the controller up at your shoulder - but if you keep it relaxed when you calibrate it's not SO bad... The controls seem extremely weird at first, but they're actually really manageable: mainly, just lean the controller to one side to turn around, instead of trying to rotate it. Despite its flaws, I'd say it's great for fans of unique art games - but like a lot of avant-garde PSN games, it's very short.

I kind of like it when good/bad choices subtly alter the appearance of a game. The first one I remember was in Black & White, where your hand cursor would change if you seemed more good or evil. I've been playing Datura (PSN) for the last few days and if you make selfish choices, the world gets a bit colder and more sinister, and the music is more of a tense theme with synthesizers, while if you make altruistic choices, things look clearer and cleaner, and you get a light acoustic guitar theme. (Spoiler: Completed world maps are visible in the screenshots... IMO not a big deal if you don't over-analyze them.) It also has a nice form of gameplay semaphore in that when you're in an unmapped area and you walk up to a birch tree and touch it for a few seconds, you'll pull out your notepad and draw that area on the map. They're very easy to spot when you look for them, but they blend in perfectly if you're just wandering around.

I'm not talking about the upload or production date though. I mean the part where it says "Office of Naval Research Electromagnetic Railgun Program Commissioning Test of BAE built railgun at NSWC Dahlgren February 2012." I take that to mean that for all we know, they could have built it in the 70s (kinda doubtful though...) but the test firing was in Feb. 2012. So seeing that the other "recent" naval railgun test I'd seen was from 2010, I'd still stand by my statement that the railguns are looking much more compact now (assuming it's not an entirely different project... the older one seemed to be going for a kinetic energy output target, though it seemed to fire the same projectiles and I still haven't seen one in that range that small until now.)

Well, the date in the video puts it at several months ago. Before that, I'd mainly seen this one from 2010, though I don't really keep up on them.

Chicory maybe? I don't know how big that is outside North America...

Woah! That railgun is looking seriously svelte these days.

Really wouldn't want to live there, but it was a . I've been interested in it for many years. The person below me knows enough to get by in at least three languages.

Well, this is a weird one... Has anyone seen Win7 or Vista insist on fading to black several times when you unlock the PC? I had this problem before, but it went away for months... now it's back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyaq7Jmh-Kw Using an EVGA GeForce GTS 450. This doesn't seem like a hardware issue, though it's hard to tell if it's triggered by one - this card always had an issue where sometimes when using video overlays, especially on Youtube, I'd get a few errant green pixels on the screen, then the screen would go black, the desktop would return, saying the nVidia display driver kernel recovered from a crash, then the desktop and all windows would look like two triangles with distorted, flickering textures on them... if pushed for another few moments, this soon results in a BSOD involving NVLDDMKM.SYS (which on further research can be caused by just about anything, with nVidia blaming MS and MS blaming nVidia.) When that happens, the system has to be powered completely off and left to sit for at least a few seconds before cold booting, or it will surely happen again in the next hour or two. UPDATE: It was caused by my Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet driver of all things... My old driver had stopped working for some reason, so I grabbed the newest Vista/Win7 32-bit driver and put it on Win7 and... this happened. Took it off and everything went back to normal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=817PwlKYfW0 The vocal style and inflection sort of reminds me of Megumi Hayashibara...

*tests once* The Shooting Watch says I'm good for 11.9 times per second! It's short of the young Takahashi Meijin's "16 shot" but I'm still happy with it... The person below me knows how to use a slide rule.

Some... very innovative football technique displayed in this Reddit post...

So I had ca phe sua da today (Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk, on ice. And yeah, I don't have any accented character keys. ) I expected it to be sweet like Japanese canned coffees, being loaded with condensed milk... no! It was nicely balanced and VERY strong! Don't know if it had chicory or not, but that taste was like weapons-grade coffee. I think I need to get the equipment and start making this stuff at home.

Do you wear gauntlets when you milk the cat, or do they sell it in stores over there? (Also, the (Thai) Vietnamese .)

Is there an "everything" option? I mostly stay away from coffee, though it easily beats tea for popularity here. Still, when I do... I take hot coffee black. Or iced coffee black. Or canned coffee with lots of cream and sugar because that's how it comes, and I still love it. I want to try Vietnamese-style coffee some time. I have a squeeze bottle of iced coffee syrup that's great in milk like they recommend, but it's also awesome over ice cream or even on pie. Chocolate-covered espresso beans are great, though I mostly stay away from them now because I really don't NEED to stay up until 10am playing video games all the time... Coffee Crisp bars are good, though it's mostly sugar with some coffee flavouring and cheap chocolate. Kopiko candies are good if you want something stronger... Kasugai sumiyaki coffee candies take it to the next level - they're big and strong and full of caffeine. Trident cappuccino gum is... just weird, and best avoided... Usually though, I just stick with green tea or English breakfast tea - that stuff is awesomely strong, though way less common than green, orange pekoe, tisanes, or even rooibos tisanes. Also in a pinch, it's not so bad just chewing on roasted coffee beans or grounds, but that's kind of a rarity... I did it more as a teenager.

I was going to reply to this thread anyway... It's not like I did it for you or anything! /tsundere The person below me looked into a cardboard tube one time... only to find the tube looked back into them!

That Toonami robot reminds me of this Konami robot...