Bahamut

Happy birthday!

I know what you mean - I've been pretty busy myself, I have almost no free time to myself now until the weekends. This should be the month where most of the wavs come in though. First in for December is looking like Hakstock, who has a solid Battle #2 mix finished and wav incoming to me! Edit: And the wav is good!

It's not - there's plenty of evidence to suggest that claims of being able to tell the difference are dubious. Double blind tests have been done comparing listeners' ability to tell the difference and convincingly debunks the hypothesis that self-proclaimed audiophiles can tell the difference (with at least one such test resulting in such audiophiles actually performing worse than others). It's not really personal preference so much as practicality & benefits being marginal, and if you asked most people, I'm pretty confident you would find that they would agree with me. If they weren't, you would not see such overwhelming popularity of mp3s at around the 192 kbps level or maybe a little higher and a huge clamor/migration towards FLACs. Mp3s on portable mp3 players have replaced the CD player for many people. There is too much evidence that the general public does not agree with your sentiment - if it did, there would be ample opportunity commercially, and it is just not there.

So you are right! Also everyone, I won't be around tomorrow night, so go start the server without me!

So...I have the excellent fortune of working a block away from a liquor store - are there any requests for spirits people would like me to pick up for them? Cash on receipt of the spirits!

Looks like it was Arrowshot who made the group - that was what we were talking about while we were playing last night and what Sombrero was confused over heh.

I should clarify - my music collection is ~900 GB of mostly mp3s - storage is still not cheap enough to justify lossless in general, and at some point I will delete all lossless copies I have since I quite frankly cannot tell the difference in quality from lossless and 192 kbps, and I would label myself as better qualified than most casual listeners. The arguments for lossless in the past decade have been weak at best for anything but archival/master copy purposes given the benefit/cost ratio and widely accepted solutions.

Wish you a speedy recovery for MAGFest! Glad to see you're doing ok in the pictures though!

That's pretty sweet - she should post it on the steam group for the server!

This is a bit of an offtopic discussion, but... I don't see mp3s disappearing so quickly - I'm quite satisfied with the quality of 192 kbps mp3s, and storage is still an issue these days. I have about 900 GB of music and it's always growing - I haven't even actively seeked out music much in the past 5-6 years or so. Sure, storage has gotten cheaper, but now the trend has been to move towards SSD for storage since a wall has been hit with SATA hard drives, and with that shift, storage is still incredibly expensive. Combine the quality being amenable to almost everyone, storage still not cheap enough, lossless files taking up too much space, and the music industry being highly resistant to file format changes, and you have mp3 likely to be the defacto standard for a long time, if not permanently (at least until quantum computing becomes commercial at the consumer level or something major like that). I'm not convinced that FLAC (or any lossless) will ever become mainstream due to those factors.

So I woke up this morning to find that I was gifted every game on my Steam wishlist! It's especially surprising since I haven't shared that wishlist with anyone, so Abadoss must have been sleuthing around. The games that were on there were: Battlefield: Bad Company Call of Duty: Black Ops Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Fallout: New Vegas Magic the Gathering: Duel of the Planeswalkers 2013 Peggle Nights R. U. S. E. Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods and Kings Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity Terraria My wishlist was a bit outdated, and more of a psuedo to-get list, but I'm pretty happy! I probably won't play them until I get my new computer in about a month or little more, but I'll be sure to play them once that happens . Thanks Abadoss!

That's a sweet shirt & keychain - nice!

Yeah, send them to me, and I'll act as a go-between...unless you don't mind contacting the person directly - that's your choice to make really, but Secret Santa is generally supposed to be a mystery.

Added! I also cut down on the list of maps on the server just now. Edit: Also added/adding a few more maps to the custom map list. Edit #2: WARNING - if the cp_pony_fortress_rc3 map is ever chosen, PLEASE download it in advance. It is 164 MB uncompressed. I put it on the server mostly for the bronies who do visit, although I'm a bit skeptical it'd be a map people really would want due to its size.

Alright so if you're not a part of the OCR TF2 server group, ask me for an invite! Also, there is a discussion thread on the group on whether to turn off tf_ctf_bonus_time, aka the bonus crits after each time an intel is capped, so go comment there! For custom maps - I recommend you grab them from http://bahamutwc.com/tf/maps/ . It will allow you to play custom maps with confidence without the download wait, and allow other people who haven't grabbed them to grab them at faster speeds. I would like to continue testing them so we can get down to a good core set of custom maps to add to the official list. To spice things up, every other week, I will set the starting map for the server as a different custom map to encourage downloads and to test them out - the current default map is ctf_crypt_rc1. I also have added cp_antiquity_rc1 and pl_repository_rc3 to the regular map voting list. Lastly, I added a vote scramble plugin to SourceMod. Just type !votescramble or votescramble in chat to activate it.

Sorry about that - that was my fault.

It's amazing that he even got a kill

The password for tonight is "eventnight"!

Happy Thanksgiving OCR! I hope you're all enjoying this festive day .

Aw, the server emptied out while I was doing last minute fixes on the Secret Santa code and PMing out the matches . Great to see people starting to have more initiative in starting up the server again though . Our community is a great one for TF2!

Alright, so the PMs are out! I'm so glad I coded a website to do all of the matching & displaying of handles, names, addresses, and suggestions people listed - this took a lot less time for me to send all of the PMs out than all of the previous years. Go come up with great things! Edit: If anyone wants to see how I did the matchings, I have a page up here - the one that appears for your loading of the page is different from what I got from it though so I'm not revealing any secrets here . Edit #2: Oh, I shouldn't actually reveal it - it has addresses on there.

Holy crap, it took me 10 hours to get the randomizer working - I learned the hard way a programming lesson about Javascript and equating arrays causing them to be equated by reference. But I got it working and it works magnificantly! Amusingly, when I ran the first correct randomizing, it originally matched kitty having diotrans - of course that doesn't fly!

djp did say Q4 release right?

We're playing TF2 just about every night these days! So we're bringing back Friday night TF2! Join us at 9 pm every Friday night for fun with friends. I also created a new TF2 group! Feel free to ask me for an invite!

Just a reminder, today is the last day of signups! Sometime past midnight, I will start PMing people their Secret Santa recipients - this year, my method of matching people up is done via custom randomizer in Javascript I built that creates a nicely formatted page for me with no missing or duplicate matchups. If people want, they can also trade their matchups to spice things up as well, although I'd only recommend doing so if they're truly stumped or if they happen to get matched with me. And for whoever happens to get me, here's my preferences: I love video games, mainly PC and 3DS these days. I am a huge metalhead, mostly heavy/power metal. I love to run, and in dire need of cold weather running gear. I wear men's Large, am not a fan of clothing with jokes or anything else that tries to be too fancy except through standard high class fashion. I also love food, especially sugary stuff. I like surprises and am generally appreciative of best efforts though!