Tag: humor

Desensitization

Video games are incredibly fun to play. There are those out there, however, that argue that game players are being de-sensitized to violence by playing these games. For a very long time, I’ve argued against this, citing games as a cathartic activity rather than a damaging one. My view has changed, however, due to this image that I stumbled across recently.

(via Wonderland Blog via Maneggs)

Hitchhiking With Doctor Who

I have to agree with scifiwire here… This is awesome, you must watch it.

I wish I was a writer because a Hitchhiker/Doctor Who crossover would be incredible… Interestingly enough, “Life, the Universe and Everything” originally began as some sort of Doctor Who story treatment.. So perhaps there is more than just room for a crossover… Maybe it’s inevitable!

Aperture Science Updates

E3 is in full swing and among the myriad of incredible announcements and demos, the fine folks over at Aperture Science demonstrated some of their new technology. Below are some absolutely incredible videos showing off all that is Portal 2. I am so incredibly excited about this game and cannot wait to get my hands on it.

Just look at the beauty of the environment they’ve designed for Portal 2… The bright white of the original Portal lab is marred by rust and wear as well as encroachment from the outside.

The new game mechanics are simply brilliant. I can’t wait to see how creative you can get with the various mechanics. I’m sure the achievements available will reflect this as well.

According to what I’ve read, Valve brought on the team from Digipen that came up with Tag and added that technology to Portal. The result is the gels you see being used to provide additional bounce or speed boosts.

2011 cannot get here fast enough.. Let’s just hope I have enough time to play before the world ends in 2012!

Lego Star Wars

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic and while I have a lot I’d like to write about, I just haven’t had the time. The logjam should be easing a bit this week, so I may be able to get to some of the topics I want to present later in the week. In the meantime, here’s another video you can check out. Quite a few spoilers, though, just in case you’re the only person to have never watch the original Star Wars trilogy.. :P

Happy belated US Democracy Server Patch Day!

Stumbled across a site with these patch notes…  They’re funny enough that I’m reposting them below.

US Democracy Server: Patch Day

Version 44.0

President

  • Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
  • A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
  • Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be
    transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends
    list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
  • Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
  • Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
  • A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.

Vice President

  • The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
  • No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
  • The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This
    bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
  • Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
  • Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
  • A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility,
    making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been
    addressed.

Cabinet

  • There was a bug in the last release that prevented the Cabinet from
    disagreeing with the President, which was the cause of a number of
    serious balance issues. This bug has been addressed, and we will
    continue to monitor the situation.

Judiciary

  • Many concerns have been raised regarding balance issues in the
    Supreme Court. This system is maintained on a different patch schedule,
    and will require longer to address.
  • A large number of NPCs in the Judiciary were incorrectly flagged
    “ideological.” We are trying to identify these cases and rectify this
    situation.

Homeland Security

  • Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this
    system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated
    (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been
    commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the
    next patch.
  • Torture: This debuff is being removed after a record number of complaints.
  • Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with
    TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
  • Asking questions about Homeland Security was incorrectly triggering the Chain-Jingoism debuff.

Economy

  • Serious on-going issues with server economy are still being
    addressed. We expect further roll-backs, and appreciate your help
    identifying and fixing bugs. We can’t make these fixes without your
    help.

PVP

  • Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated
    reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For
    Us/ Against Us flag.

Quests

  • The” Desert Storm” quest chain was displaying an erroneous “Mission Accomplished” message near the beginning of the chain.
  • The quest chain that begins with “There’s no Cake like Yellow Cake”
    and terminates  with “W-M-Denied” has been identified as uncompletable,
    and has been removed.

Reagents

  • Many recipes that currently call for Crude Oil can now be made with
    Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Ethanol reagents. We hope to roll out even
    more sweeping changes in the next patch.

Events

  • The “Axis of Evil” event is drawing to a close. Look forward to the “Rebuilding Bridges” event starting in January.

I can’t wait to see what Obama has in store for the technical side of things.  Too bad he has to start out with technology in the White House that has been compared to the Dark Ages…