Arcana

I know at least one kid who lied about his age and refused to talk on vent because he was 13 at the time. He was ashamed of his age and his voice even though (as far as we could tell) he acted relatively mature at the time. Of course until that incident the mature thing would be to tell us that he can't speak on vent rather than try to hide it (he said that he had a vocal chord problem and couldn't talk well). Eventually he came clean about it and everyone forgave him but it's kind of illustrative that even the most well-meaning kids have errors in judgement. As for MMORPGs, the kids tend to get either weeded out through an application process (ex, they get you to talk on vent for an interview) or they get weeded out through culture over time (ex: if they find out the age you get ribbed until you want to quit). In almost all of the hardcore raiding guilds I've been in in WoW, all of them had an age limit and the youngest person they recruited was 17, and he was considered the baby of the group. He was a good player but when the 17-year old is considered young you know that there'd be no tolerance for 12-year olds. Why not? Well in a game like WoW where you are expected to be online for the block of raid time (reminder, this is a hardcore raiding guild we're talking about, probably top 500 US guilds) and kids tend to interrupt with that. They have to "go do chores" or "go do homework" or "go to bed". Their parents are asking them to go to do whatever here and there. It's disruptive and difficult to work around when everyone else is able to block off time. Now if one of these things does happen, the guild would just replace his raid spot. A mature kid will handle it. An immature kid will whine about how his raid spot is given up (note that this happens to immature adults as well). If the adults are playing a game when they are in a mood to teach people (like a casual WoW guild for example) then young kids are tolerated much more. In fact if you're in a good MMORPG guild and talk with adults a lot as a kid, it is actually going to affect you and you will end up acting more like them. Most of the time 12-15 year olds don't get a chance to hang out with adults due to school, so those who do get the chance to listen to what adults talk about and how they handle situations get the opportunity to learn social conventions much faster. Note that this means that you have to play the same game with the same group of people frequently and form friendships, of course.

So I was just thinking about the White Mage from Final Fantasy since I was looking into buying the game. I don't know where I read it (I think it was here actually on OCR) but someone once said: "I had a huge crush on White Mage until she underwent a class change and turned out to be Jesus, ruining the fantasies of ten-year old boys everywhere." As for my favourite female character? It's probably Lenneth, from Valkyrie Profile. Or Mystina. Or both. There's so many good characters in that game.

Well, a mark of a good researcher is the person who is able to generate sound opinions backed up by data...

NEXT FROM OCR: "The Final Fantasy X - Hurry! remix project" directed by Liontamer.

According to the reviews I've read, they're virtually identical to the PSP versions and yes include all of the extra dungeons.

Darkesword's my go-to man for this kind of trivia. I read some press reviews of the PSP remakes and they almost unanimously claimed that the $30 asking price as too high, which means that $8 might be a fun romp in the park. Yes, the last time I played Final Fantasy I was on the NES (not even emulated). I don't know where my NES is anymore but I remember that I owned the cart and that it was the only NES game that I still owned; I sold all of my other ones. Might be worth grabbing especially since I've never completed FF II.

Has anyone tried these? They're $8 each. I am wondering if they're ports of the GBA ones that were released 4-5 years ago. Also I'm wondering if it would be better for me to just pick up the GBA ones if they're in fact very similar game-wise and graphics wise. Thanks guys,

I recall reading in an interview that he uses Pro Tools... or was that Iwadare?... let me see if I can dig it up.

You know, you would have gotten a small community if you told everyone that EA programmed a minigame in which you have to hit on chicks in a restaurant, but that you have to unlock it by doing five consecutive Birdies or something.

I totally want one of these in my house, when I get a house. They're boards with finger grips in them, so you basically hang off of them to build grip strength and finger strength. Whenever I go climbing though I think, "Man, I bet Taucer would be totally kickass at this."

What's been toned down in Logic Pro? I'm curious now.

"Korobeiniki" and "Tetris Theme" are virtually synonymous on the Internet even if the song is a much older Russian folk song. When you search for Korobeiniki, almost every single link subtitles it with "Tetris Theme". http://www.google.ca/search?q=Korobeiniki (Oddly enough the B-Type and C-Type songs aren't nearly as well known).

there FTFY

Kanthos is correct, my version is the Belkin n52 (the one he linked is the newer one, n52te). Honestly I haven't figured out how to integrate it into my mixing setup yet, I used it for playing WoW. But, with some thought I could probably come up with some awesome setups for Logic Pro like one-button tool access or something. As for the monitor, it's actually not as far off the desk as it looks, there's table behind it.

I anticipated this one actually and decided "eh whatever I won't retake the pic, people will understand". A mistake-- I left myself open to that one. :-( Damn it, this is very shameful. I keep Kleenex because I eat at my desk sometimes. The lotion because my hands get really, really dry:

I purchased those Mackie HR624 MKII monitors from the used shop. Shot with Canon PowerShot SD800 IS at 2010-03-09 By the way, my room sucks for acoustics and my desk sucks too. But I want to move in a year or so, so I'm probably not going to do anything about it. Also I think that my room sinks toward the wall, I didn't realise this until I put the two monitors on the desk and then panned my head... one's higher than the other. Fun times in rental units!

I think the plan's fine. For $2000 you'll be able to get a good computer and $500 will get you started on some software and maybe some plugins and peripherals. Before you splurge though I'd recommend getting the demos for various products and trying them out just to be sure. You can download demos for pretty much every major program nowadays.

Man I'd feel bad taking that MP3 and using it in my songs if it's from a sample library.

For those lazy workout types: I bought a resistance band and a skipping rope the other week. I haven't really used them that often, but I find that if I'm preparing dinner or if I'm waiting for something to download, I'll grab the band and do arm lifts or something like that, or I'll do a minute of skipping rope while watching the news. It's hardly a serious workout but it gets me off of the chair and moving. I own some dumbbells too but I find that the resistance band is more fun to use because it allows you to do a larger variety of exercises. So, for me, keeping stuff like this around in your house actually does improve the chances that you'll occasionally use it for a lazy workout.

Fair enough. Still, I guess a big part of my post is to illustrate that, yes, people do release games on a Mac and yes, people do buy them.

Hey guys, I'm wondering if you have any cautionary words for me regarding the purchase of used studio near-field active monitors. There's a pawn shop down the street from where I am. They normally sell tons of stuff at overpriced rates (Super Mario Kart SNES cart for $50??? what the hell) but something caught my eye: Mackie HR624 MKII monitors for (what I think is) $699. If I were to buy them in Canada new they'd be about $525 each so this is a savings of about 30%. Anything that I should be careful about or be wary about?

I believe the Valve stuff only is confirmed. However there's a lot of other games that are already on Macs or are being ported to Mac in some way or form. There's more than a few technologies that make it possible to port Windows games to Mac. For example http://www.transgaming.com/ is a huge player in this area. EVE Online uses transgaming technology for their Mac port. Aspyr is also popular for doing ports from Windows to Mac. http://www.aspyr.com/ Both id software and Blizzard Entertainment are also known as being very Mac-friendly companies, coming out with Mac versions simultaneously with Windows versions. And, I honestly have to plug PopCap for making Mac versions of all of their games as well. Mac gaming is much more dominant than Linux gaming. I believe that TransGaming initially wanted to (and I think still can) port games to Linux, but it appears that they are more involved in Mac ports nowadays. Like Rozovian I'm a mostly full-time Mac user. I have a Windows 7 installed on my alternate partition so I do play a few games once in a while on that side but I am excited about Steam for Mac.

More than double that in North America, actually: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/03/mac-os-x-north-american-installed-base-almost-11.ars I know you were joking but its market share is improving quite a bit. And yeah, all computer users know that only idiots stick with the default Apple mice; similar idiots make fun of Mac users for using one-button mice when even Apple's abandoned them in favor of the Magic Mouse. Chances are that I use the exact same mouse that you do.