fuchikoma

But how do you explain that phishing attempt? There was not a single link in the whole message that did not lead to Valve's servers. The return address was also for Valve. There was nothing to gain by my reaction to it. Whoever sent it had some pretty obscure privileged info, and utterly neglected to include a vector for them to receive my personal information.

Oh. Yeah, of course that is a risk. I don't fault them at all for asking for a bunch of things to confirm my identity. I was just annoyed at how they did it in a roundabout way, sometimes asking for some info, then a day later asking for more things they could have asked for before. Also, the greatest mystery is in where that initial reset message came from. But mainly, the whole episode drove home the point of how dependent access to your purchased games is on Valve continuing to believe and cooperate with you - not that it's a surprise at all, but it's a bit more of an academic point until you're locked out and a rep is saying "nope, sorry, that's not your account. I can't help you. Have a nice day."

More that I'd discovered it appeared to be hijacked when they wouldn't handle the password reset for me. And really, does it make more sense to assume that if they send me an email about an account name that I use for gaming services (all URLs linking to real Valve servers), that I'd used that name for that service, or should I have assumed that either Valve hacked into Gravity LLC, Nexon, or Blizzard's servers and looked up my username or that one of those three thought it would be funny to send me a Steam password reset email for that account? Because really, it's not a name anyone would know about and nothing I could have done with that email would have exposed me to any kind of hijacking or exploitation. But no, FDS, it sucks because you could have somewhere from $1-1,000,000 worth of games on your Steam account, and if anything doesn't look right to them, at any time, for any reason, you can lose all of them. I don't like begging permission to borrow things I've bought. (And other things I've mentioned before in other threads. I'm holding back because I don't mean this overtly as an anti-Steam discussion, but just to relate that I like THQ, I'd like to see them make it out intact, I don't think it's ruining the vision or image of the Humble Bundle to do this, but if the copies they're offering are still tied to Steam, they can keep them even if it is a matter of life and death for the company that chose to distribute them that way. Basically, I've given Steam a bunch of chances since it first launched, and every time I do, they make me regret it, so I'm out.)

It was just after they got hacked a year ago. I'm sure I explained all the problems I've had with them somewhere on here, but in this instance, right after the hacking, I got an email from them to confirm a password reset. I tried to log into that account and I was locked out. I tried to reset the password, but I couldn't receive any more reset emails for it. Then I opened a ticket and for 2 weeks, I could only get one response per day from them. They'd ask for some identifying info, I'd give it... then they'd ask for more info, and I'd give it... Ultimately, they said I wasn't the owner of that account and they couldn't help me (though at the same time they got me into another account I had.) So I opened another ticket under a different pretext - account hijacking instead of password reset. And... within a few days, the support rep told me both of my account names and got my passwords reset - It turns out the account name they sent me the reset request for originally wasn't a Steam account I owned, but I didn't notice that because it was an obscure Latin word I actually used as a login to various game services like MMOs (though never character names or other public stuff,) and I hadn't had Steam installed for like 4 months before that. Ultimately, they said they'd look into why that would have happened and take appropriate action, but would not tell me any details of it. That's not my whole rationale for avoiding Steam, but it's the latest burn I got after I bought Portal 2.

I don't really buy into the level of hysteria shown in some posts on the Wolfire forums, but my position is that THQ is pretty cool nominally... They published the of all time eons ago. I'd like to see them stick around. I'd also like to try some of these games that I haven't bought on anything yet. But it doesn't matter if it's the best game in the world, I'm not buying anything else on Steam. If my purchase made or broke them somehow, it'd be sad to see them go, but wouldn't change my decision. I buy DRM-free PC games and I've been locked out of my Steam accounts for weeks before - no feature list is worth putting my game collection under the Sword of Damocles like that, and really, the only feature I want is to play the games I bought without additional baggage. But in any case... good luck, THQ! You guys have a good sense of cool stuff; it's surprising to see the company in such trouble.

One of my favourite game OSTs.

A Skrillex-themed "adver-game" apparently styled on Zelda 1... "Skrillex Quest". I've only loaded it and gone through the first couple areas so far, but I plan to come back and play it some more tonight once I finish some work I have to do.

That's what she said...

I'm not big on FPS anymore, but I've heard of cases of PC games where acceleration makes it feel wrong, and in some cases even if the menus don't offer a solution, there may be a line you can change in an INI file. Have you looked into that already?

That's alright... Don't know if I'd want it to be the default, but it'd be a cool option for Move controllers. The wand shape has its function too though - I kinda wish the nav controller worked with Rocksmith because I keep having to switch from holding the guitar to leaning over, picking up the controller, using it, and putting it down to go back to guitar. The Move nav controller fits right into my pocket, but doesn't work on some games.

omg.... this. Saw it on Bruce Schneier's blog.

It depends if you want to know things like... whether Win8 is being widely adopted, whether it's likely to continue to sell well, what the future of the platform looks like, etc. Also like the article says though, I agree that predictions at this point are sort of futile since there's so little data as of yet.

It seems like shipped vs sold video game numbers, it's a bit hard to tell what those 40M licenses really mean.

Cool. Well, I hope you can get your money's worth out of it at least! I love the idea of RS, I'm just surprised it appears to work as well as they'd hoped (and really surprised they have the original sound tracks for their licensed songs, where even Guitar Hero didn't!) I never learned to read tabs (though I flipped my in-game string display to prepare to learn them,) but sorta fiddled with my mom's acoustic guitar as a kid and learned a really simple song or two from a book, then put it away... but over the years, I've found when it comes to games that involve a concise challenge, mastering a technique with lots of depth to it, I can sink endless hours into it. When I had Raptr on here, some may have noticed I sink a sick number of hours into the Forza games - for that same reason - clear objective, but endless room to improve. So I figure dropping a console's worth of cash on guitar stuff should not go to waste, at least for me. I've always wanted to master an instrument, but have merely been a beginner in a handful of them so far.

Just started playing Rocksmith... Once I get good at guitar, I'd like to try bass guitar too since I love the sound. I can dream of some day getting as good as Flea (RHCP) or Les Claypool (Primus)...

Rocksmith! I got the guitar bundle, but the guitar was badly defective - it slipped out of tune every 3 minutes or so, and man it hurt my fingers using the frets, but that's normal for newbies, right? All the fret exercises were trial and error since it never accepted the one I was holding down. So I read up on it and did some troubleshooting - tune the intonation! ...can't really do that on this guitar... not per string anyway. Adjust the action - the strings should be about 5/64" over the 12th fret... mine are... 31/64"! Oh hey, what's this... the neck is leaning forward from the body and the screw holes that should hold it on are all slack! That's no good... So after letting my numb index finger heal for a couple days, I went and returned it, kept the software and got an Epiphone SG Special. Much better! Nice tone. More features. Significantly lighter too. It set me back about $210 (CAD), where the Rocksmith bundle was $200 - $80 for the software, leaving about $120 of that for the Epiphone Les Paul Jr that it came with. Still, it was the cheapest electric with humbucker pickups I could find, and really about as little as you could spend on an electric guitar with a straight face it seems. Reviews I've found roundly praise it as an entry-level unit and I'm certainly not advanced enough to take issue with it! The only advice I'd add for someone taking the same route is to get a leather, not nylon strap, since whenever I reach for my PS3 controller to navigate menus and skip prompts, my guitar twists down and the nylon strap rubs on my neck because it's so low friction. The game? Great so far! It doesn't allow a lot of room for fiddling with the basics (though you can specifically tell it to give you basic drills again and again, it prefers to run you through a bunch of simple versions of songs and ratchet up the difficulty as soon as you get the hang of it.) The difficulty creep is a good confidence builder at times and would be good to keep perfectionists from getting complacent with easy drills. My only problem so far is that I've received some really crappy scores for not doing things that it hasn't explained anywhere yet. I just played a song with 96% accuracy and got about 6000 points out of 100,000, probably because I didn't line-with-an-X-though-it enough. No promises, but when I get more proficient I might even try penning a more in depth review for the site. For some background, I figured investing in this wouldn't be a bad idea since I love rhythm games. I got into Pop'n Music 3 around 1999 and soon after, the early Beatmania (or technically, "beatmania") games, which I kinda hated until I found Beatmania: Best Hits. I played those pretty regularly up through about Beatmania IIDX: 14th style. I love Pentavision's DJ Max PSP games and have all 5 Korean releases (I once pulled off a 15,000 note combo across several songs...) I haven't totally beat, but have made it far in Gitaroo Man, and Hatsune Miku: Project Diva. Most other games like Space Channel 5 1&2, Bust A Move 1&2, Parappa the Rapper, Puyo Puyo DA! etc are all fun, but pretty easy with that background. More recently, I beat the great multi-DDR dungeon indie game "Sequence" in about a week on normal mode. So in other words, I'm a music game nut and not too likely to drop Rocksmith unless I master it - and if I do? Mission accomplished! (For now though, I'm quite the guitar noob... but still surprised how quickly I've progressed just trying what Rocksmith throws at me!)

S'gonna suck adapting all the courses and lesson plans to double length. Expect enough homework to kill someone? A semester system can be fine, but yeah, I wouldn't be optimistic about the transition period unless they've known about this for over a year.

That's horrible, but in games like GTA4 it's fine, because I can save a game, come back to it and forget what I'm doing, watch the cutscene again and play, or just skip the cutscene and get to it. (Though it is extremely annoying having the same conversation in the car at the start of a mission 10 times in a row...)

Same album as last time, one track earlier, different artist this time (めらみ, or "Merami"). I've been catching up on listening to サリー lately, mainly because I found them when looking for things Merami was in that wasn't metal (if you can imagine it...) This one's the title theme for Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires, the 13th game. Kinda strange to see someone cover the title theme, but this one really works. The lyrics are all original, but the instrumental is really close to the original game version.

Funny you should post that today - Reddit in various places has UN Says Access to Contraception a Human Right. (Yes, abortion isn't counted in that, but it ties into reproductive rights issues.)

I'd never have got that yogurt one... I didn't even know it could be spelled "yoghurt." Is that the British spelling? I've seen "yogourt" on occasion - I thought it would carry across, but apparently that's a Cdn thing.

Microsoft is researching what they call "Differential Privacy", which would be a technological solution to allow researchers to query large databases of personal or demographic information, but with a reduced chance of personally identifying anyone with the anonymous data that is returned by the queries.