zircon

I've been talking to OA and Ecto about this, but about 5 weeks ago I decided to get my act together and make some real changes to my body. I'm doing personal training at the local gym two days a week (1 hour per session, one upper and one lowerbody workout) plus an extra day of upperbody, calves, and abs. No bodyweight stuff or cardio, just pure weight lifting. After every session I'm completely exhausted, and the next few days sore all over, but that's exactly how I want to feel. Working with a trainer has been a tremendous help. It's very satisfying to increase my numbers continuously. The hardest thing for me though is still the bench press. Right now my numbers are basically: * 10 reps at 95 pounds * 10 reps at 130 pounds * 8 reps at 180 pounds * 4-5 very shaky, partially-assisted reps at about 230 pounds With basically every other exercise, I can hit 8 reps at my max weight, but benching is just really hard for me (for some reason) even though I have a big chest. Maybe I shouldn't be hard on myself since I basically just started lifting not even 2 months ago, and was untrained before that, but I still feel like it's my weakest area. On the other hand, I love seeing my improvements in other areas. For example when I started out, my bicep curls were 10x 30 lbs, 10x 40, 10x 50lbs, and I couldn't handle 60. Now, I do 10x 40, 10x 60, and about 8x 80. Big jumps.. feels good

If you can afford it, Beyerdynamic DT880s can be acquired for as little as $200 on sale. They're incredibly flat, neutral, and comfortable. I've been swearing by them since 2007 and they're frequently rated as some of the very best headphones in the world.

1. No auction house and virtually no trading (gold, legendaries, and gems are all bind on account). 2. All classes re-balanced, so many more skills + builds are viable. 3. After hitting max level, you continue gaining xp toward "Paragon Levels", which let you put extra points into 16 different stats/modifiers for extra character customization. 4. Normal, Nightmare, Hell etc is gone. Now, monsters scale to your level, but you can choose a difficulty on top of that. You can switch difficulties anytime and you don't have to clear the game over and over to unlock them. Furthermore, you get good items at all difficulties. 5. There's a new mode called "Adventure Mode" which unlocks all waypoints and removes all story events. This ties into "Bounties", which are quests listed on your map that you can complete for gold + xp bonuses. Completing 5 bounties in an act gives you even more gold/xp plus bonus loot. 6. By completing bounties, you can unlock "Nephalem Rift Fragments" to enter the titular Nephalem Rifts. These are randomized dungeons with random enemy types from all 5 acts. Kill enough monsters in a rift to face an uber "rift guardian" who drops awesome loot. 7. Speaking of loot, items have been totally rebalanced. Rather than getting tons of bad items, FAR fewer items drop... but they're much better on average, and tailored to your class. So if you're playing Monk, you will get lots of Monk items, +Dex items, etc. 8. Continuing on the loot changes, legendaries are way better and drop way more often. There are also tons of new item effects (on legendaries and otherwise) ranging from +% Area Damage to Resource Cost Reduction, crazy modifiers to specific skills, +% damage to elemental skill types, etc. Finding a single awesome legendary can inspire you to make a whole build around it. 9. Crafting is incredibly useful now. By salvaging drops you don't want, you get materials that can be used to craft anything from rares all the way to set and legendary items. 10. A new artisan, the Mystic, has been added. She allows you to reroll one stat on any item. You can keep rerolling that one stat over and over but it gets more expensive each time and requires salvage materials. This feature means you don't have to keep waiting for the "perfect drop" and instead can tailor you gear. This helps since there is no longer trading or an auction house. Put all these things together and the game is simply way more fun and deep.

Bubble Dragon has a really cool music video. That's why it got spotlighted. Do you have any concrete suggestions for giving mixes "more respect"? Every individual mix already gets reviewed by judges, a writeup by djpretzel, a unique page on the site, a YouTube video, Facebook post and tweet to hundreds of thousands of people. Isn't that enough?

Leveling up my Witch Doctor to 70 now - seems like a really weak class still, not sure how people really succeed with them... I'm still having trouble on Expert at level 68. However, I did find a hilarious safe build that specs fully into Zombie Dogs. You get +2 dogs and your dogs/gargantuan get extra damage and life. Now, I just need to get tons of thorns items and get that passive too.

You don't need to play for "hundreds of hours" to get good loot at lower levels... that's just not true. People expect to be able to waltz into Torment (etc) with minimal gear and do well. Why? There are multiple difficulty levels for a reason. I was very frustrated playing on Torment 1 while leveling up past 68, so I went down to Master. But I was still dying, so I went down to Expert, and that I could handle. Within maybe 6 hours of play I can easily handle anything in Master again, and probably ready for Torment 1. The quality of gear is basically identical on the lower difficulty levels, it's just you get less XP, less gold, fewer gems, and no 'torment' legendaries. But you can quite easily double your DPS and get millions of toughness. Just be smart about how you gear, use crafting, and use the mystic! By the way, I think the bosses are way harder for melees. I died all the time to Act 5 bosses because there are so many melee and AOE ground effects....

Loving RoS. This is Diablo at its finest. I love that the endgame is back to being super hard; I'm now just about ready to move to Master from Expert... with over 5m toughness and 300k DPS.

You have my support!

Atlantis Awakening is done!!! If you missed the Kickstarter, you can check out previews and preorder the digital OR physical edition here: https://jillianaversa.bandcamp.com/album/atlantis-awakening Thank you to everyone for you generous support and patience. The album will officially be released on March 31st!

Could be a Jeweler design.

The Master Yi on your team will feed at top, mid, or jungle. He will try - and fail - to split push while your team loses 4v5 battles. He will build only attack speed and do no damage in team fights. The enemy team Yi will have unstoppable jungle ganks and/or kill your mid over and over. He'll push your towers down in seconds and force your team into a defensive position while the enemy team does baron over and over. Eventually, he'll take the nexus if you're out of the base even for a moment.

I've been at GDC; before that I pulled back on League a bit for D3. But I'm going to be back to playing about a game a night (minimum) soon. I was reinvigorated after talking to some of the designers at Riot!

Will be at GDC

Ouch. Yeah, my recent games haven't been so great, though oddly enough the last two were 'loss prevented'. Maybe my teammates were just that bad...?

Sure you do. I played my level 60 barb for like 3 hours and went from 30-40k dps to 80k dps or so just by starting on Expert. It's really easy to find good items. If you find crafting recipes, be sure to try them out (especially the 5 and 6 property ones). Also, buy the Archon Armor recipe in Act 2 from Squirt the peddler.

Ah damnit. No, shoot me an email (aaversa.isw@gmail.com) with your transaction ID and email you used. Bug in our system I'm trying to fix.

Haven't had much lag, then again I haven't played a great deal in the last few days either. A few things I did find out though: 1. If you have a good 120-130k sheet DPS and at least 1.2m toughness, you can probably handle T5 runs of Crypt of the Ancients. This is INSANE for experience. Don't even worry about the elite, just kill all the trash and leave. 2. Crafted legendary weapons are insane now. I found the Hallowed Defender set last week (Shield + 1h weapons, including class weapons). Crafted 15 claws or so, all rolling with <1k DPS. Now, they routinely roll with 1300-1400 DPS (!!!) as well as good attributes like attack speed, class modifiers, 400-500 primary stat, big Life on Hit etc.

Oho, yes, I should have mentioned that! Your lovely guitars are in there

I've just wrapped up the latest ISW virtual instrument, Celestia, available now for Kontakt 5.3. I've got all the product info below for your enjoyment and perusal, but worth noting is that besides my own sound design (and several other talented producers), our very own bLiNd contributed a huge amount of both sound sources and patches to the library. If ambient, electronic, New Age, atmospheric, textural, and emotional music is your thing, read on....

Build stuff! I'm currently running T2 on my Monk (122k DPS / 1.1m toughness) using: * Crippling Wave w/ the fire rune * Dashing Strike w/ the 500% physical barrage * Sweeping Wind w/ fire (bigger AOE) * Cyclone Strike w/ fire burst * Seven Sided Strike w/ Fulminating Onslaught * Mantra of Healing w/ the thing that gives life on hit * Combination Strike, Seize the Initiative, One with Everything passives I tried T3 but I actually had a hard time killing treasure goblins - not sure why. Anyway, the idea here is to dash into groups of monsters, Cyclone them into me, and then wreck them with my Crippling Wave + Sweeping Winds aoe. For single targets, I have the 500% damage from Dashing Strike and Seven Sided Strike.

I think if they did nothing but the Safeguard nerf and maybe a slight number nerf on Q he would be "fine", not that he isn't fine now.. again, he has <50% win rate (48% to be exact). In comparison, Wukong has 55% win rate, Amumu has 54%, Fiddles 53%, Rammus 52%, Vi 52%... these champions all "do less" than Lee Sin but are very frequently better choices. Amumu and Wukong can completely disrupt whole teams and poop out tons of damage. One Fiddles ult will annihilate a whole team, and he can lock down anyone for like 4 seconds between silence and fear. Rammus hard counters pretty much all ADs. Vi can assassinate anyone from an entire screen away and you can never, EVER run from her.

I've seen a LOT of Lee Sins build raw offense. i.e. Elder Lizard, Hydra, Last Whisper in the jungle, or Hydra, Maw, LW in midlane, etc. It seems viable since he is still somewhat tanky even with that stuff. All the more reason why I think he's fine. They just need to tone down the god-tier junglers and tone up some of the weaker ones.

I actually thought that Lee Sin was fine overall though. True, he's a jack of all trades, and excels at mobility. But his winrate % is not great (<50%). He's also not so good that he's banned constantly, at either lower levels or even LCS. I don't think the changes make a lot of sense, personally.

Prepare for a long post I'll try to keep it focused! There are a few different audio jobs one might have in the game industry. Keep in mind these are not necessarily exclusive... you could be an inhouse sound designer but do freelance composing, or an audio programmer that also does music editing. 1. Freelance composer or sound designer. In either of these cases, you're creating assets and material for the developer. It's very unlikely that you will personally be doing anything with the game engine, code, etc. 2. Inhouse 'audio designer', sound designer, composer (rare). In a job like this, you will likely be involved in much more than just creating assets. You may be doing editing, optimization, looping, and other things to make sure the assets work right with the game. It's possible you'll be involved with some code as well; more than likely, you will be using some kind of "middleware" like FMOD or Wwise. These are basically software packages that handle audio for a game, allowing you to make many changes and edits without going into the code. I'd say the majority of non-indie games use some kind of middleware. It might be a custom solution, but it will most certainly be there. Gone are the days where you would have to specify everything in code (or script). You can set a huge number of parameters for sounds, including some triggering behavior, in the middleware. The complexity of interaction here can be immense or simple depending on the game. 3. Audio programmer. Here you will definitely have your hands dirty with code. Not all developers have dedicated audio programmers, but a good chunk of the bigger ones do. You'll be working on making sure the audio engine runs smoothly - that might involve using middleware, creating a new solution, editing existing code, etc. This is where code comes in the most, obviously. I would say that if you're interested primarily in writing music, it is unlikely that you will NEED to do any coding yourself. However, knowing a bit about programming 'logic' in general may be beneficial. You want to be able to communicate with programmers if there are things that need to be changed about how audio is triggered or handled.

I'm working on a project with a web developer friend that I thought OCR might be interested in. It's called Wavestash, a new cloud service to help musicians (composers, producers, bands, remixers, etc.) organize & monetize their music! With Wavestash, you will be able to upload your entire collection of music (in any format) while retaining any embedded metadata. You can also edit your own tags and metadata through the web interface, or upload a spreadsheet. Whether you only need general tags like 'artist' and 'track name', or deep tagging like BPM, genre, subgenre, ASCAP #, etc., all this information will be stored in your personal, searchable database. For example: say you have a potential gig and you need to quickly find all of your driving action music. With Wavestash, you can access your catalog from any computer or device and simply search your own tags for terms like 'action', 'driving', 140bpm, etc. Then, you can create and send custom playlists or downloads in any format you choose - while maintaining all metadata. If you're submitting to a music library or publisher, this makes the task much easier! Lastly, you will also be able to monetize your catalog. By enabling direct licensing, you can turn your database of music into a slick, searchable licensing store. Media creators and clients will be able to browse, search, and pay for licenses in one interface - all with no middleman or intermediary. We'll of course have options available to tailor your pricing and usage rights to your preference. Sign up for the Wavestash mailing list to receive a beta invite when it's close to launch. Your feedback will help shape it! http://wavestash.com/