Upthorn

JackKieser is right, but that doesn't mean he's not being a pretentious faux-intellectual about it. JackKieser: stop being a pretentious snot. Everyone else: Stop disregarding what Jack says just because he's a pretentious snot. Disregarding what Jack says because he's a pretentious jackass about it is like if I say "The sky is blue because Hitler outlawed masturbation in Germany during WWII." And you go "Hitler never outlawed masturbation, so you're full of shit. The sky isn't blue, jackass!"

Not making it this year due to passes sold out before I even fucking realized they were on sale.

I know, right? It's so inherently obvious that why would anybody ever have to say it except that they only just figured it out?

The theory is that a community full of jerks drives off a greater number of potential customers than the number of actual jerks in the community. The other theory is that a community full of people who are fun to play with can work as a selling point, causing more sales than the discounts provided. This can actually be ensured by making the discounts work like small percentage comission on the number of customers a player brings in. It is not that complicated, but it seems like a lot of people in this thread either just didn't get it, or aren't really concerned with knowing what they're actually talking about before speaking. (I'm hoping it is the former.)

If you read the original interview, that is not what was proposed. The proposal was that valve looks for patterns in server population associated with particular users, so, if one guy logs on, and he attracts 30 people to the server because they want to play with him, he is rewarded for that. Meanwhile, if one guy logs on, and five people immediately disconnect because he is a spiteful jerk, he loses voice chat priveleges... This method of analysis is self balancing, because users don't have direct control over other players' reputations, and the guy who would get upset and want to downrep someone in revenge for being beaten is the one who other people are less likely to play with.

That's a shame, it would be so awesome if the situation were exactly as the before/after implied.

That reminds me

At the time it was built, it was believed the maximum possible quake the fault could produce was a 7.9. It was built and tested to be able to withstand a 7.9, but what happened was a 9.0, which is about 45 times as large, and has only occured 5 times in all of recorded earthquake history.

Scientific American just published this article wherein American nuclear scientists who are familiar with the specifics of the Fukushima plants' designs explain the situation. Very helpful to slice through a lot of the conflicting reports and speculation on all sides.

Well, they're apparently having to vent potentially radioactive gas to decrease the pressure, so... I'd say that's pretty bad.

Confirmed death toll totals something like 750-800, hundreds more missing. And also there's an emergency situation with evacuation warning at the Fukushima #1 Nuclear power plant, whose emergency cooling systems were damaged by the quake.

Why did you have to make these a single thread? What if I wanted to wish Harmony a happy birthday but not pixietricks? Or pixietricks but not Harmony? Or if I just wanted to wish them happy birthdays totally separately? What then? Huh? What then?

Best answer. Though uh. @ocremix No PANZER Dragoon Saga remixes? Forshame ;P

totally off topic, but I was just skimming the forums and from the corner of my eye I swear this topic said "chthonic is no longer my martial artist name!"

#ocremix moving off of enterthegame has been a dream of mine for quite a while now. If only so I can ghost myself when I get disconnected. I find that, for no reason I can pin down, I would slightly prefer freenode to esper, but the technical differences are trivial (I haven't noticed any at all), so if esper.net already has a video game music community on it, it is really the logical choice.