fuchikoma

Skrillex is awesome. I went to high school in the late 90s, and it seemed like there was some kind of taboo against liking techno... but I think it's awesome that good hard electronic music is finally getting popular! I've always liked bassy, glitchy or just hard sounding stuff but never thought it'd get mainstream acceptance. Mostly stuff like Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, The End, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, KMFDM/Pig/MDFMK/Slick Idiot/Schwein, NIN, etc. These days there's still plenty to satisfy that taste, like Skrillex, TeddyLoid, Torqux, Shibayan, Syrufit, Alstroemeria Records, Justice, Doctor P, and the list goes on... I feel sorry for people who decide the only good music was from back when they were in school!

Many of us have probably seen the image or slogan "Guy Fawkes: The only man to enter parliament with honest intentions." I'm really curious how many celebrated his failure and how many subversively celebrated his attempt throughout the years in different areas. I get the feeling he's more celebrated than reviled now, even with relative ignorance of who he actually was, simply because he attacked the government (just guessing based on what I've seen though.) It's kind of a telling commentary on the perceived role of government if I'm right here - protector, or oppressor?

Someone else knows about Venetian Snares! Awesome. I'm not a huge fan, but I do like a lot of his work (Cricket Spine Bin for instance.)

That sounds pretty sparse, but not extremely large when put in perspective. In places like Edmonton, you could easily drive for a half hour to reach a place, or more than that to get out of the city, but things like churches, grocery stores, gas stations, and liquor stores are found nearby throughout the city in neighborhoods. Sometimes I go there to shop and it's about an hour and a half of driving past canola and wheat fields at 120kph, and about another half hour of navigating city at 50kph to reach my destination. (It's a metropolis, but while the city has almost 5x the population density of Somerset (and only 1/5 of London!) the greater metropolitan area has about 1/10th as much as the core.) Looking at world population density, I think of all of Great Britain as pretty populated, considering that much of the American midwest, and most of Canada is either wilderness, or a few minimal little outpost towns for survival every few hundred km. It's truly mind boggling how much unused space most large nations like Russia, China, Australia, or the Americas have - it's all about that prime land near the coast. In my province, there's arguably only 4-5 significant cities in over 660,000 sq km of land. (I'd say practically though, 2-3 worth seeing.) While Canada has restrictive gun laws, I got into handgun shooting for a few years. You're right - it's just their thing. What I quickly learned is that gun nuts are another kind of geek, like PC hobbyists or car tuners. They love their high performance machines and will happily talk your ear off about them. Sure, there's some fantasy about what would happen if someone robbed their houses, etc - like someone learning martial arts and imagining having to use it - but most of them would rather keep hunting paper targets.

The Wikipedia article on Mars bars says they were discontinued in the USA betwen 2002 and 2010, so that may explain why they seem rare? I think this is pretty interesting. I knew special versions of bars were offered in different regions, but I didn't know that the basic versions were different in some places.

Got it - so in the US, a Milky Way has caramel, and in Britain, it does not. I've never seen a Mars bar with nuts or peanuts in it though, so I guess Canadians get the British version too.

To throw in more confusion with Canada... An almond Snickers? That sounds awesome, but I've never seen one. Our Mars bars look exactly like a Milky Way though - nougat, caramel and sweetened milk chocolate; no nuts. I've heard some parts of the world mainly have dark chocolate bars... that would be awesome, though for more cash, bigger places like grocery stores have a selection of those here - largely Lindt. (Though we do have dark chocolate Kit-Kats. Not sure how prevalent those are since that bar has all sorts of regional mutations like the Japanese versions. It was a test run here, and went well so they kept it and started doing trials of other dark chocolate versions of bars.) Also, sussed is interesting. For all the BBC shows I've watched, I had no idea before today what that would mean. [edit: Careless bracket usage can change the meaning of what I'm saying...]

I think it's more an issue of the culture of marketing and distributing these games and how it's changed. I've played games on PC since the mid 80s, so it's not like I've never seen an expansion pack or official mods. In the 8-bit console era, the game was the game, and that's it. In the 16-bit era, it got semi-common that you'd have access to a sound test menu or maybe some neat easter eggs. Some games had unlockable characters, particularly fighters. In the "32-bit" era, some developers seemed eager to make better use of the vast expanse of a CD, so they started throwing on extra stuff like concept art, extra videos, CD audio easter eggs, and things like unlockable characters or weapons and so on. Games like Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo were absolutely gratuitous with bonus content. Then the next era ("128 bit? PS2/Dreamcast/XBox) this tradition kept on fairly well, but it seems there was less experimentation and bonuses seemed less common to me. This generation... now that all the consoles are Internet-enabled, it seems bonus content doesn't really happen anymore. Even in fighting games like Street Fighter, you don't unlock extra costumes or colors - you buy them. In games like Blazblue, you buy the extra characters, announcer voices, avatars, wallpaper, etc. Games with soundtracks? Buy them on the online store. So I think that fuelled a sentiment of being ripped off for what always used to just be on the disc since before, having little good way to sell the consumer these things, they were just in the game to make the game better. There are good and bad cases of handling modern DLC, but I really don't think it's as simple as not having experienced add ons on PC. I think a lot of it is more like how in WoW, you don't get an XP penalty for playing too much - you get a bonus for taking a break. Or, to pull a positive experience from Forza, how you win added cash for using fewer assists instead of being penalized for using more. I think some of these companies just need to find a way that it looks like they're offering an addition to a complete game instead of selling the last pieces of an incomplete one, and while modules come out so close to the launch of a game (or consist of just a paid unlock code), or the game reminds you while you're playing that you could have another feature if you buy it separately, it's going to look like they're selling a partial game then selling the rest of it regardless of what goes on behind the scenes.

Yes, that's how I took it. I was just trying to clarify that I wouldn't do something like that just for the publisher, so just as a normal customer, I'd tend not to buy the first edition. I wouldn't necessarily say buying it at launch is taking it - obviously if all your friends buy it, you'd want to get in on the online play window, or maybe the extra content just doesn't seem worth the wait. Something may still surprise me and change my mind; I just find that the way they handled the extra content for the previous game creates a reason (~$90 savings!) not to buy the sequel, which seems ill planned, at least not seeing the actual sales stats for the different editions.

Exactly, Johnny. That's the thing - with what I've learned of the industry, I've tried to proactively make sure the studios I like get meaningful returns for making products I like by buying new games when they're fresh. Still, ultimately I come at this as a consumer, and when they make it worse for me as a consumer for buying the first edition of the game, obviously I'm going to think twice before falling for that again. So if I want all the content, should I buy the core game for $60, then - I have no idea what the real total DLC cost is, so I'll use a season pass price - $30, then the Ultimate Edition for another $40, totalling $130? Or should I chill for a year or two and pay $40 for everything? That's not a very hard choice when there are so many awesome games available all the time anyway, especially when part of that $40 is rebuying my $60 game. [edit: I like redundancy so I use it because I like it... derp]

The trend of games coming out again a year or two later with the DLC included creates an interesting dilemma. I know that sales around launch time are the most important, and I've argued against waiting until a game has been on the market long enough to get it cheaply or used, but when early buyers obviously aren't getting the whole package, and could have more for the same cost if they wait, it creates a huge incentive to just wait. You can't even guarantee a game will get an edition like this, so maybe waiting even means not even buying it if that version never comes? I can only guess that they are selling enough copies of both editions to justify doing it this way, but personally I'm seeing what happened with certain movie trilogies - you can never get the complete, full edition because there's always another slightly different version coming out... so just wait... forever, basically, to make sure they're not just trying to sell you another more complete copy of the product you already have. I've already decided it's going to take a major incentive to get me to upgrade to Forza 4 because I want the "Ultimate Edition," whenever that comes out - not a full price edition that is not allowed to even buy all the extra game content. These random experiments in selling pieces of games are a mess. They look at the commodity, not the consumer. Not fun - monetization.

Whenever a discussion gets into the "best" artist, there's no consensus... For good male vocalists, I don't notice many, but I'd say springs to mind. I'd recognize him right away. For uniqueness though, I have to give it to from MSI.'course that's just the American music industry. If we opened it up globally I'd have to consider guys like Kiyoshi Hikawa...

This thread's getting awesome lately... Let's see if I can keep it going or break the combo!

That does suck, but I don't see what alternative they have as "journalists." I mean, of course it's not pre-alpha at this point, but he could no more prove that than I could prove that Razer bought Joel (for instance...) Call them on BS and you're wrong: You look like a tool. Call them on BS and you're right: At best, they get flustered and deny it. Still no proof, so you'll probably look like a tool. Parrot the PR line: "I'm just relaying what the guy told me. Take it up with the studio..."

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Paradise Now (In English, just can't find the trailer)[edit:] Good Night, and Good Luck

I always remember when he suggested Dance Central could be the "most important game of E3."

I kind of liked Crecente. Early on he did the immature/insecure banhammer thing, but loosened up in time. I think he was just kind of green and feeling his way around this blog thing, but I got the feeling he spent a lot of time on it and wanted to do it well. I've even criticized him and how the site was run on occasion, but didn't even get a warning since I always explained my point (did get him to reply a few times though.) One of the reasons I left was that I kind of felt like he'd just given the keys to the site to Johnson, who'd appeared one day out of nowhere and started calling the shots, and the site started sliding downhill faster than ever before. Eventually I figured "I'm not getting much out of this, and I may even be hurting my reputation by posting here..." and decided I should quit - which didn't really happen until Joel wrote his ridiculous Razer article. Then MasterDex warned me that the way I'd criticized him could get me banned and I thought "if this is what the site has come to... that's fine. A ban would help me kick this habit for good." But I think Brian was alright. Sometimes he had some bizarre viewpoints compared to the mainstream of gaming, but that stuff was interesting to consider too. It was interesting having one of the biggest gaming sites run, maybe not by a casual gamer, but by someone whose tastes seemed to center around "casual-focused" games. It was probably actually more mainstream than our usual "enthusiast mainstream" sources.

I have to say I'm taking it with a grain of salt. This tells me more that people who play a lot of video games don't totally forget about them - we need related media studies to act as a control, in my opinion. If you're going about your day and get a song stuck in your head, does that mean you can't tell the difference between real sound and a song you're recalling? Has anyone not thought similarly about a movie? "If I had a light saber, I could slice right through this..." "If I had Batman's grappling hook gun, I could zip right up there" etc. Then, I'm not faulting the researchers. A commenter, UKGamer, on the Metro site quoted one of them saying He also directs us to where the study is discussed, including the above quote.

I've read about Americans getting in fairly deep trouble for that one actually. It's rare in North American usage. It's kind of silly since the word has nothing to do with it, but they hear "nigger" and flip out because it sounds similar. The latter being very much taboo even to write it or say it in discussion, even if you're saying it's unacceptable - unless you are black and make hip hop, in which case it can be every other word in the song... "Niggle" on the other hand is perfectly acceptable...

Well, it does appear to still be a split here. (Mine looks like this.) Take your pick, or get a stacked unit... I just thought you were suggesting we rarely had the machines at all in countries that use 120V. (Like I said earlier, they DO tend to plug into range outlets going high as 60A, but there are outlets and space for them in pretty much every human dwelling as far as I've seen.)

Ok, so you're not saying washers and dryers are rare in North America, but that front loaders are rare? I have seen a lot more top-loading washers... though I think there are more high efficiency front loaders these days. Sorry, I'm not seeing the split, unless machines like that are really rare over there?

Ok, haha... a round front window and a bunch of settings on top - I didn't recognize the particular model, but my washer and dryer both look about like that. In Canada, I don't think I've ever seen a home without a washer and dryer - apartments tend to have them in a common room unless it's a large place (for a while I had a penthouse with them in-suite) but even the poor have them up north here since anything on the line would just freeze solid in November through April.

You don't have clothes dryers in England?

Awesome. I never knew of the might of Pojo before this.