Thursday Next

Playing Ni No Kuni. It is utterly gorgeous. I could quite happily just sit back and watch it being played (provided the person playing it wasn't rubbish). Getting into the combat a bit more, though I don't really "get" counters.

Discontinuing it.

@Dean

What line? (I've seen it. It was ace).

Who wrote that article? I'm very interested to see what will happen on Tuesday.

I agree re: stats. I'd have thought that most people would play a game as a "good" hero, at least first time out. Suckerpunch own the story in any event. Just like the ending of Mass Effect, the beginning of Infamous Second Son should be left up to the creators to decide, how they want to justify that decision is neither here nor there.

That I agree with. Of course they have to allow ALL religions the same freedom, so same goes for Quran t-shirts etc. no matter how much the parents might dislike other children doing that. The school should not allow religious postings on school owned property (e.g. walls etc) where it may be said to have editorial control. But if kids want to wear Bible-y t-shirts, that's their lookout. Unless it contravenes a specific uniform rule (I had to wear a white shirt, a black blazer and tie throughout my school career so a t-shirt bearing any slogan would be an issue).

Or indeed anything else really. I'd have preferred doing something for weapon upgrade parts rather than waiting for them to randomly drop. E.g. Finding all GPS caches reveal location of weapon part etc.

Shouldn't that be spoilered? Dunno. Feels like it should. Whatevs.

Finished Tomb Raider and Thomas was Alone (free on PS+!). Didn't realise till waaaay in that the odd little squares were things I should be collecting. Making me trip over one earlier in the game would have been nice. Might download the DLC since I feel bad for not directly supporting the developer (or publisher or whatever).

Finished this at the weekend. Thought the story was good enough. Traversal was more varied and as such, more fun than Uncharted, but it did also make me feel overpowered. That feeling is fine for a Batman game, but didn't really work for Tomb Raider so much. Indiana Jones, Die Hard and Uncharted always gave you a sense of being almost overwhelmed. The enemies were always better equipped, better armed and you were always scrabbling to keep up. In Tomb Raider I had a tonne of awesome tools and weapons and would often spend my time wondering which I should use to dispatch my foes, rather than having to scramble from cover to cover to reach that shotgun I needed because I was all out of ammo. That said, loved Tomb Raider enough to do all the annoying fetch quests and everything else. I really don't get why they would mark all the relics and documents on your map, but not the mushrooms, cairns, and other things you had to collect.

Yet the HTC One has been said to have better battery life than the S4 and has more options for increasing its battery life. What you don't get is that people's personal stories don't matter, W&S. They never have. Everyone uses their phones differently. Everyone installs different apps. Even different versions of Android allow for different levels of battery life saving. Some processors and screens are more battery efficient, some people use them in a way that's not efficient anyways, and there's different battery sizes. It's not as simple as listening to a bunch of your idiot friends. I'll take personal stories over manufacturer stats any day of the week. While there's nothing to say that HTC can't make a phone with good battery life, the examples myself and my friends, who all use our phones in similar ways, have experienced have all suffered from a short battery. I don't know anyone with an HTC One or an S4 so can't say which is better, but from my previous experience I would expect the S4 to have more longevity. Even if that's not the case, the S4 has a removable battery, and I always carry a spare so the HTC One would have to have twice the life of an S4 to really compete for the way I use my phone.

I just wish more emphasis were put on the justification. Personally, (and I know I'm retreading old ground here) I'd prefer to read that as a conditional, rather than a bit of waffly preamble. To complain about removing the right to bear arms seems as ridiculous to me (as a British citizen) as complaining when the law allowing Englishmen to kill Welshmen in Chester at night with a crossbow was repealed. It was a law made for a specific time for a specific situation. In the case of the second amendment that specific situation was immediately following the creation of the United States, while they had no established police force, or standing army, and were facing British and Spanish forts on US soil, so yes, at the time, having an armed populace was favourable compared with losing territory to British and/or Spanish forces. The US is pretty secure these days, so those weapons are not really needed and are currently doing more harm than good. That said. America loves it's guns. They've made the mistake of turning the gun into a symbol of freedom and so you can't take their gun without taking their freedom. I'm just really glad I don't live there.

I imagine he is stood up because his mate said "Try this standing up it's mental!"

My DHD was pitiful had two batteries for it and still barely survived 12hrs of moderate to high use.

I agree with W&S. HTC battery life is woeful compared to Samsung in my experience. Coupled with the fact that I can swap my battery in my S3 while I can't with the HTC battery life is demonstrably better with Sammy.

When I went to see the Hobbit, and Iron Man 3 (two separate occasions quite some time apart obvs) there was a special needs guy in the cinema (different cinemas and different guys). In the Hobbit the guy was sitting directly behind us and was grinding his teeth constantly and would let out a fairly loud sort of sigh every few minutes. In Iron Man the guy was I guess "whooping" is the best term every couple of minutes. Both were really irritating but it made me think, what's the appropriate solution? The cinema manager can't really be expected to refund everyone's ticket because one person was noisy. You can't really have a pop at the disabled guy either, and I don't think I can hold with segregating disabled people into their own screening... In the end I just held my tongue and accepted that I'd had a sub par experience.

Presumably a "theory" in the same way that evolution is a theory.

Most games can be moved to SD. Google music has a slightly bigger problem for me. The way it handles external storage is retarded. For some reason it creates a virtual drive so when you navigate your files you will see something like Ext_SD and Ext_SD_0 (something to do with the way the file system in Jelly Bean works or some nonsense). This is fine mostly except that when the SD card is unmounted and then remounted a new virtual drive is created that is slightly different. As a result your playlist gets emptied because none of the songs are where they are supposed to be. Very frustrating. Especially when it happened to me before a run and I had only 3 songs playing for an entire hour.

At least they are trying I guess..?

As anyone who follows me on twitter will know, I'm up to 10k these days. Every day, Monday to Friday before work. I've never felt so good. Lost over 2 stone in 6 months. That meal generator thing is a bit... random? A coconut smoothie for breakfast? Who has coconuts lying around ready to be smoothed?

Agreed! *doffs cap*.

Being forced to sell assets by your creditors to raise cash to pay off your loans isn't a takeover of any kind. You could, I suppose give an ultimatum of "Pay off your debt in shares or we will force you into bankruptcy." But I'm not 100% on the legality of such a move. All of this is a little off topic though as Ninty are nowhere near that. It does however explain how and why they are beholden to their shareholders and that they can't just ignore this stuff and make smaller profits and cooler games or whatever. They have to be commercially successful and they have to do it in a predictable, repeatable fashion.

Depends what you mean by "doesn't want to be bought". No one is forced to sell their shares at gunpoint. In a normal take over a business will go to the management of the company, make and offer and the management will accept or reject that offer on behalf of the shareholders. If the offer is rejected then the potential purchaser can go directly to shareholders and directly offer to buy their shares. The hostility of the takeover is directed at the managing board, not the company or the shareholders. As to why a falling stock is bad, it's basically because as others have stated, your company doesn't belong to you. Valve belongs to Gabe. He can do what he likes. As long as he is happy with what is going on, he can keep doing it. Take this line from Citizen Kane: "You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years." EA belongs to a bunch of anonymous shareholders. They won't let a company lose money for sixty years because they believe in it. Instead they will sack whoever is in charge and find someone else who promises they can fix it overnight.