zircon

Physical games are only full price for a short time - at release - and sometimes, not even then. For that reason I have to agree the eShop kinda sucks. You're basically guaranteed to be paying a higher price than what you could get the physical game for. Plus, with the physical game, you can always lend it to a friend or sell it. The only advantage is the convenience of downloading.

From KVRAudio:

I told my trainer about my hip pain and he suggested a different stance. Before my legs were a little wide, so I pulled them in more. That made a pretty big difference. I still had a little bit of pain on my final set, but 8x 3 plates is some heavy weight, so I figure that's to be expected.

A friend of mine (also a musician & composer) once explained it this way: we'd all like every song to be our absolute best work at any given time. Best composition, best production, etc. But it never is, for many reasons. Maybe you don't have the right samples, or the right players, maybe you're limited by time, by budget, by inspiration, distractions, or a million other things. So it ends up being say 90% as good as your best. BUT.. consider that we all strive to get better. My 90% now is better than my 100% last year. And even my 25% - rushed, massive deadline pressure - is way better than my 100% five years ago. The same can be said of any musician that constantly works to improve themselves.

I agree with most of what Skrypnyk said. I love making albums. I've done quite a few now and it was worth it every time. If you want to actually earn money from your music you need to start early and build up a body of work.

They're what my trainer recommends. He uses them for his (very large) squats as well. His perspective is that using them allows you to not worry about balance, and instead just focus on the lift itself with 100% of your concentration, rather than using part of your focus on balance etc. He also believes they minimize the risk of injury - he prioritizes not getting injured above most everything else, because an injury that prevents you from lifting for weeks or months is the most detrimental to progress (as opposed to doing a slightly sub-optimal exercise). Far be it from me to argue with the guy - he's probably the strongest, most fit person I've ever met, and he's 55 to boot. It's hard to argue with his insane results and lack of any injuries ever. That being said I'd be interested to ask him if we can try a bar squat on Friday (leg day) just as a point of comparison, to see if it affects my hip pain during the lift.

I'm running into an issue where my hip flexors (like literally right at the very top of my legs) get pretty sore on my heavier squats. They're not particularly sore the day after, but I notice that if I'm doing something like going up and down the stairs a lot, or playing badminton (lots of lunging), I feel that soreness again. I don't normally do stretches - should I maybe work that into my pre-workout routine? It's crazy because THAT feels like the "limiting" factor to me right now. My butt usually feels sore after leg day, but I'm not experiencing much quad muscle fatigue even on my heaviest (3 plate!!) set. It's just that pain at the hip - and yes my form IS good...

It's usually a good idea to get some kind of cardio in before you lift. You want your blood flowing. That being said, I'm not sure whether it's good or bad to do a significant amount of cardio (like more than 10 mins) beforehand...

I think Wes is right when it comes to a formal resume. But when you say music composition "jobs", what do you mean? My experience in music is that 99.99% of the time, unless you're in academia or applying for an inhouse composer job (of which there are like... 3 in the world), a resume is about as useful as toilet paper For example, when composers are brought on for film, TV, and game projects, nobody looks at or cares about resumes. It goes something like this, in order of preference: 1. Composer previously worked with (provided they did a good job) 2. Close friends + colleagues 3. Recommendations from within the team 4. Business connections / not-as-close friends 5. More open call for submissions, i.e. public job posting #5 is extraordinarily rare, especially for actual paying gigs. It hardly ever happens. Even when it does, it's usually a call for demo reels and portfolios, not formal resumes. While it's nice to be able to briefly discuss your previous experience if you have big credits, your actual music is what matters most in these situations. Now, writing music in academia is a little different. I think resume is still fairly unimportant - your PORTFOLIO above virtually everything else speaks volumes, along with things like awards, previous commissions/fellowships etc - but it's slightly more important than in composing for media. By far the best way to get work writing music or working in music is simply to network. Make friends, help people, be a good person, let people know who you are and what you do. Or simply make your own opportunities

Here's a no-brainer tip for creative jobs. Don't say "portfolio available on request" if it's the type of job that would obviously require a portfolio (art, music). Have a simple link to it. I get applications for ISW jobs (beta testing, demo writing) regularly and some people don't read the instructions - don't make me write back to ask for your portfolio when it's something that we *asked* for!

When a game ships with bugs, you can bet that the developers know about the majority of them. People look at a buggy game and ask, "Didn't anyone test this?" But that isn't the issue. The issues are actually development time, schedule, and money needed to fix those bugs. Developers have to constantly make choices: do we spend time to fix this obscure rendering error, or do we work on adding new features? Do we get this problem fixed 75%, or spend an extra week and get it fixed 100%? Almost no companies have the luxury of being able to develop a game indefinitely (see: Valve). The vast majority of other devs, from indies to AAAs, need to stick to a timetable. At some point, they need to release the game and start earning revenue from it. There's a cost-benefit to spending extra days, weeks, or months on fixing bugs. The benefit is obvious (fewer bugs), but the costs are numerous. Not only is the game not being improved in the sense of additional features, levels, etc., but the studio is also actively losing money (salaries of devs) *and* it's time spent that could be spent on other projects. So it's an ongoing balancing act. The decision to release a "buggy" game on day one may be a product of necessity. Some live bugs that we've seen with games like SimCity may also simply be due to factors that were impossible to test in production.

Yeah, some of the legendaries are pretty damn insane but I think they're not necessarily as game-changing as one might think. Like Ragnaros is undeniably awesome, maybe one of the best cards in the game when played right, but you can still polymorph/hex, shadow word: death, mind control, etc. My experience is that having a solid army of 3-5 cost creatures is more reliable than dropping that ONE huge guy that will almost definitely get owned somehow.

I think the weight is technically 295? But yes, back squats. Now I *am* doing them on a smith machine, which I know some people look down on.. however I'm doing them with proper form, not some weird/bad form that is enabled by the machine. My trainer makes sure of that. His philosophy is that if you're using a smith for the exercise, you can focus 100% on moving the weight, as opposed to being partially distracted by other factors like balance. For what it's worth, besides his pretty insane results, there are a lot of other huge guys at this gym - including some NFL players - and all of them use the same machine, so that's gotta count for something

10x rep 2plate+35lb squat today, next week is 3 plates

This game is fun on a bun! I'm not very good, though. Rank 20.

I'm not sure why you posted if you're just going to ignore everyone's advice. You SAY that burning more than you ate didn't work, but that's not physically possible. Forget nutritional science and think about basic math. If you eat 2500 calories and use 3000 calories, that means your body needed 500 calories worth of energy, which had to come from SOMEWHERE. There are three possibilities here: 1. You thought you were eating less than you actually were. 2. Your exercise didn't burn as many calories as you thought. 3. Both 1 & 2. For example, say you were jogging for 30 minutes straight. That's a lot of time, and I don't even know if you were doing it for that long, but let's make that assumption. That only burns a measly 300 calories or so. 300 calories could be a single double-chunk chocolate chip cookie, a couple drinks of soda throughout the day, a small donut, half a bagel with cream cheese, etc. I know when I used to jog, I got hungry after and most likely ate WAY more than I burned. You need to watch what you eat very carefully. Do you cook for yourself? Or do you eat out and get premade stuff? If you're eating meals prepared by other people, you most likely have little to no idea of the nutritional content. A "healthy" restaurant meal at a place like Denny's or Ihop can have 800 calories, whereas eating two grilled chicken breasts at home with some broccoli and cauliflower might be less than 400. A pasta dinner at Olive Garden could easily hit 1500 calories or more when you factor in the sauce, oil, and bread. I'm not in the business of telling you what diet will or will not work for you, but I WILL make some suggestions for keeping calories low: 1. Grilled chicken. This stuff is just awesome. Two small-medium chicken breasts have about 40g of protein and 220 calories total, and that WILL fill you up when you add some sides and a nice 16oz glass of water. 2. Broccoli and cauliflower. These have very few calories but immense nutritional benefits. You can cook practically an entire plate in 5 minutes using a steamer on the stove top. Add this to a protein source and you're good to go. 3. Lean grass-fed ground beef, or lean ground turkey. I like meat loaf because it's very easy to make. Throw the meat in a bowl, add spices, an egg, and some almond meal. Then bake it for 45 minutes. You can make a couple pounds at a time and have food for days. 4. If you must have carbs, brown rice is a good choice - cook it with extra water (sticky rice). Lots of fiber here, plus it's filling. 5. Eggs and ham. Nice breakfast food, but works any time of day. Try 4 eggs with a few slices of ham and maybe a little cheese on top if you like that sort of thing. One egg is only about 70 calories, so a big 4-egg omelette with ham will probably clock in under 400. 6. Sriracha. Put it on lots of things. It adds flavor and more importantly heat, which will make you thirsty. Thirsty = more water = more fullness and hydration. 7. Guacamole. Try it with basically any protein - chicken, eggs, beef, etc. It works surprisingly well. I get 100 calorie packs and use it with a little sriracha. 8. Apples are a great fruit to eat. They're filling, low-calorie, fibrous, and have lots of water weight. Plus they're sweet enough to serve in the place of a dessert. 9. Protein sponge cakes. I've been making these lately. Take a standard cereal bowl and add an egg, a bit of light olive oil, a tablespoon or so of almond milk (or whatever milk), and a splash of warm water. Mix that together. Then add a heaping tablespoon of almond butter (or if you can't stand that, peanut butter is OK) along with some baking powder, a scoop of protein powder, and enough almond meal or coconut flour to get the consistency of pancake batter. Put that in the microwave and cook it for 90-120 seconds. It comes out like a sponge cake. The protein powder and almond butter give it just enough sweetness and it's absolutely chock full of good stuff - especially as far as desserts go. Lastly, regarding the fat in your torso. I feel you. That's my one problem as well, I have a spare tire. But you have to understand, the body simply does not burn fat in specific areas just because you exercise them. It doesn't work that way - for anyone. Through vigorous exercise, you grow your muscles in a given area. But fat doesn't magically disappear because your muscles get bigger. It needs to be burned up, and that happens by having a deficit in calories (i.e. you didn't eat enough, and your body has to draw from your fat stores). The explanation for why you only have fat in your torso is because that's where the vast majority of men tend to store fat, plus our waists. Women tend to be more distributed, gaining more fat in their legs and arms. This isn't the case for ALL men of course - some have more even distribution - but it's a pretty common body type.

Good week at the gym Though I can't remember all of my numbers, I'm making improvements in almost every category. Most notably I squatted 280 today - a full set of 10, in fact! Considering I've only been training for about 1.5 months now, I'm pretty proud of that. I should be well over 300 by the end of the summer, and maybe even hitting 400 at the end of the year.

Yes, we actually have these already on the backend; we'll add them to the actual website soon on the album pages. Thanks for the reminder

I think "Arranger" probably makes the most sense for us, but Jill did write lyrics too...

I wonder if we're interpreting that stat properly. Let's say the legendary drop chance is normally... I don't know, 0.5%. By 25%, I don't think they mean it will now be 25.5%, but rather 0.5 * 1.25, or 0.625%. So you have a 25% higher chance of finding a legendary in a rift, compared to not-rifts.

That's the common one, because it drops anywhere. You need "Angelic Shards" to craft the new Hallowed set which I just found... I've killed Izual about 5 times on Torment1 and haven't found a single shard yet.

The exception is that you DO need to farm specific mobs for legendary materials, which is currently a pain. They should make the droprate for those WAY higher off those specific bosses. After all, you need quite a few of resources to craft a single legendary item, along with the plans themselves.

Ohh ok, yeah, that is a mistake. Malukah was not on Generations

Almost - tracks 6 and 8 have different composers. Generations: Koji Kondo (music) Kindred: Kenji Yamamoto (music) Thanks for doing that though!

Atlantis Awakening is officially released! Listen on Bandcamp and pick it up as a digital OR physical copy (+ bundle deals w/ Jill's other albums!) Get it on Bandcamp! A big THANK YOU to everyone who supported the album, through Kickstarter and otherwise. All KS backers now have their digital rewards and physicals are mailing out today. Cheers, glad you're enjoying the music The inspiration for "Daughter of the Rain" wasn't specifically Chrono Trigger but we both LOVE that soundtrack, so it could very well have worked its way through our subconscious. On the other hand, "Siren" was inspired by another Square Enix game... props to whoever figures it out!