the_casualty : I think the biggest problems I have with social-networking style communications is that it's person-centric. If you reply to a post, i9t's about the person, rather than the conversation topic, sort of inherently. All the venues of conversation in a social network belong to someone. Of course, this forum belongs to its owner, but the threads are simply things-of-themselves; they have an initiator, but that's nowhere near the kind of claim a social network account is for territory.

Forums are subject-centric. The subject of the post and the conversation is the most salient priority, rather than the person whose domain it's in. It makes a pretty important difference, and tends to allow for much more conversation-centric discourse.

Forums re-bump posts when someone replies; social networks just let conversations fall off the page. For the most part; G+ took the kick-to-top approach under specific circumstances (specifically, when G+ thinks you're interested in a thread), which helps, but it's still too person-centric.

The few nights I had to try to sleep on a floor because my furniture hadn't been delivered yet (I was issued a fully furnished apartment for a month as a relocation benefit by my new employer at the time, but that ran out the day before I managed to get the movers to deliver to my new place) were absolutely miserable. Dunno how you could stand it. I'm glad you have proper bedding!

Computer Architecture. Everything I was actually able to understand was just a rehash of Basic Digital Signal Processing and stuff I'd read for fun before I even entered college. It could have been a great class, and apparently is when the professor was anybody else, but the Turkish guy with a poor grasp of English and a disturbing habit of inventing words is not the best guy for the job. It's a multiplexer, not a multiplexicator- as he wrote on the slides- or "multiplicatexor", as he managed to pronounce. And let's not even get started on how "amplifying the charge on the capacitor" somehow got melded into "amplifyingacitor" in a Powerpoint slide.

It's the only class I ever got an Incomplete in, since I couldn't understand it well enough to finish the final. Thank everything I got the flu and had an excuse to not finish it. I finally got together something basically nonfunctional, an ineffective and incorrect simulation of a malfunctioning processor in VHDL, and he gave me a B. Which was good enough, in the circumstances, but also the only non-A grade directly in my major program.

I own no pets, due to allergies, but my neighbor has a cat. Our deck is connected to theirs (this is a townhouse complex), separated by a fence; since it doesn't go all the way down, the boards are pretty far apart, and there's plenty of stuff to climb, it's not stopping the cat at all. (We put up chicken wire so it would stop the dog, though, because she was pooping on our deck.) We're fine with that; despite my allergies, I like cats.

Princess Fiona (no, her owners never saw Shrek, we never did get the story behind the name) is generally friendly and fluffy (and announces her presence with loud meowing outside our window), but occasionally she wants to attack something. She usually expresses this by biting the hand that feeds her, but we keep a roll of twine available for those cases. She doesn't bite very hard.

My most notable Black Friday purchase came off of Amazon. It was the Ultimate Ears triple.fi 10 earphones, which they had marked down to $100 for a few hours; I have a pair, and it'll arrive Monday. (I have Prime, so fast delivery doesn't cost much extra.) Which is only a lot for earphones when you aren't talking about a pair that usually costs $400. The super.fi 5 pro earphones I've been using so far are truly excellent, and the 10s are the absolute best they manufacture without requiring you to visit an audiologist to get a model made of your ear canal, so I look forward to it.

I saw the site mentioned in passing on the discussion forums over at GameTap. I used to be a GameTap subscriber, but then they went to the web-only client, which was a massive disappointment and worked even worse than GameTap 3, which never worked very well for me under Vista or Win7 in the first place. GameTap got worse and worse over time, and then started losing big-name libraries, and simply stopped being worth my money, so I dropped it.

I went back to the forums from time to time in the desperate hope they were improving. Nope! In fact, they're getting worse; they lost the Namco license regularly. Someone on the forum there mentioned Vizzed, and thus, here I am.

My goal, in following any sort of faith, is to see the world for what it is and to understand experience better through it. Which is a really, really roundabout way of saying "I would prefer to believe what is true".

So of course I mix and match. It seems completely insensible to me that any one religion should have a monopoly on accuracy. I know I'm wrong about things. (If only I knew which things!) Why should I expect anybody else to be purely correct?

"Wordtris" is approximately what it sounds like: a game where you play Tetris with words. Except it has nothing of the "tetr-" prefix in it, since there's no four to be had here. Letters fall from the top of the screen; line them up to make words. There is little more to the game than that.

There's slightly more, though. Spell the "magic word", shown at the top of the screen, to clear your entire well, scoring points for each- essentially, begin a new game with a score bonus. (If you're playing under the clock- which I highly recommend doing- this does not reset the clock, so it's not quite a new game.)  Round bombs destroy one tile they hit; dynamite also destroys surrounding tiles; acid erases a column.

Every word you make scores some function of the value of its letters times the number of letters in the word. I think. I know that long words are worth more points far disproportionate to the value of just the added letters, but I'm not sure what that relation is. It's worth going for long ones; when you create a word of 6 letters or longer, you are given an acid vial before your next tile, and can clean up some of the mess you've made.

The game is forgiving to error. Forming words is pickier than forming solid lines, so some way to replace a misplaced letter needs to be provided. The bombs help, but more important is that the well is half full of water. A tile stops when it lands on the water, floating upon it. If a tile lands on another tile instead, that tile sinks below the water; every column of letters has exactly one tile above the water, unless it is empty, or unless it is full: after the column of letters has been pushed all the way down, then and only then do letters stack up.

It's a fun game. Not a deep game, but a fun game. The best multiplayer mode is actually the simplest: Tournament mode, where players take turns, playing separately. Everybody gets the same letters in the same order, however, so everybody has an equal shot. Compare word lists at the end!

This game has one bizarre thing, though: it's worse than its Game Boy counterpart.

On the Game Boy, the entire screen is your well. It's a little square screen, but on the original system, you held it reasonably close to where you could see it; here, it's zoomed in to the same size as the display for any other system. Gameplay is identical, if monochromatic. But the SNES version plays in only brown and yellow, with pictures of a Russian circus filling half the screen; your playfield is condemned to a tiny square, surrounded by an unnecessarily large frame and useless graphical debris. The constraints of the Game Boy screen made for a legitimately better game, and that's the version I have to recommend. It's a good word challenge, but Tournament mode makes it more interesting, since you have a score to compare to under the same conditions.

The game sort of drags on and on and on in Endless mode. The tension of rapidly falling blocks honestly doesn't feel interesting. You're better off setting one of the time limits in the game- 5 minutes seems about right for a standard game, 10 minutes is good for one where speed pressure should be worse, and 2 minute blitz is interesting but doesn't support much long-term building. They're surprisingly different games with the different speeds, though.

Overall: The GB version is recommended, and recommended in favor of this. Up-and-coming game designers should definitely try both to understand how, sometimes, restrictions in a system inspire a better game- and how to make sure that what's important to your game actually gets enough of the display space.

I am, very strongly, a believer in reincarnation. I believe my most recent past lives, and the balance of them on the whole, weren't human. I feel I've been around for a while, but then I don't think that's an uncommon thing at all.

My spiritual beliefs drifted from agnostic to new-age to Neo-Pagan to Buddhist, and my path shows hints of all of these things. Parallels amuse me; all these things influence me now, the totality of my past lives influence me now, and yet none of them are any reasonable definition for my present.

I believe incarnation is mostly optional. Thus, I do think it's true that most souls incarnate have something to learn- what would the point be, otherwise? Physical existence is a lot less free than astral existence, and restrictions suck- but they also breed the greatest creativity, for nowhere do you find such dedication in purpose as a person trying to figure out a way to break the rules.

For people who would prefer a heaven or hell, well, there has to be a somewhere to experience between incarnations. To a certain degree, you get what you expect; if you've chosen to follow a particular deity, perhaps you'll have a representative to guide you there after death. Some people choose not to go very far for a while, though; one of my acquaintances died in a car wreck last month, and it seems pretty clear to many of us that he's been doing his best to express that other than being dead, he's doing reasonably well. He's in no hurry, so it seems he's waiting around to stay by those he cares about. I respect that, and have similar plans, although I clearly hope it won't come to pass especially soon.

I have both. I have a photo printer mostly for printing photos, cards, wall decorations, various craft items, and, well, things that need to be in color; everything else, which is most things, run through the laser printer I bought for $50 six years ago and haven't needed to change the toner yet.

Laser printers are awesome, even low-end ones.

I don't know. So far, I haven't been impressed by most Android tablets. I'm not super-impressed by the Kindle Fire, but it is reasonably good, and solidly usable- and, honestly, "usable" is above what I've come to expect from most Android tablets.

But it's not the hardware that does it. The Kindle Fire is shockingly inexpensive; distinct compromises have been made on the hardware side of things to support that. It's sufficient, but not mindblowing, and I think that's what will show up from the alternate OSes that will soon come to be: they won't do better than mediocre, while Amazon has every incentive in the world to tune their build to be far, far better than mediocre- but they have no incentive to make their build anything other than locked down.

So it becomes a strange sort of competition in the space of the device itself. Amazon keeps selling their device, but then is fighting to keep the best OS, because that keeps people in their marketplace instead of Google's. I have no idea how it'll play out. I know Google can't be happy if the most popular Android tablet turns out to be one that avoids Google's market entirely...

It looks to me like they want you to set up your own storefront selling their (dubious) "health supplements". Apparently, you keep about 40% of the list price. I'll let you guess what that says about their actual margins, the quality of the product as a result, and the realistic chance that you'll make many sales with so much room for someone else to undercut the price- you're a middleman demanding 40%.

They provide no details on that $50 until after you sign up. The FAQ, though, says they pay only in increments of $100. So even with the most charitable interpretation, the catch is obvious: you will get that $50 when and only when you've made an additional $50 of payments due. So you have to set up a site, sell $50 * 10/4 = $50 * 2.5 = $125 of goods, and otherwise qualify for payments (there's always a catch) to get that $50.

So for your $100, you must- at your own expense and effort- set up a web site and make $125 of sales of health supplements of dubious quality and- in some jurisdictions- dubious legality. You don't actually have to handle any product, since you're just an affiliate, but you do have to provide an entry point and keep the user interested.

The odds of doing this successfully are small. The odds that you'll set something up and get a sale or two and forget about it? High enough that the original site is making a hell of a lot of profit off such breakage- people who start accounts, make them some money, but never make enough money to get paid. And I bet you have to go in and ask to actually get money, so if you make a site, set it up, leave it forever (paying hosting fees), and people actually use it but you forget about it, they also keep the money.

They wouldn't give you $50 if they didn't plan to make a heck of a lot more than that, per person they pay out, by doing so. Sketchy as anything, I'd avoid it.

Congratulations! YouTube, now under new management, swears to never release crap again. Unfortunately, while they changed management and QA teams, the programming and idea teams remain. YouTube remains unable to come up with changes that aren't crappy, releases nothing and makes no changes, utterly fails to be able to develop anything at all, and the team falls into paralysis and is eventually fired. Google shutters YouTube entirely.

I wish I was a living inflatable toy dragon.

So, what is it that upset you about the stories? You're now scared of a thing, or things- your home, and of Pokémon- but that doesn't give the fear a shape.

What root does this fear have? Is it anxiety- a rootless fear- or fear, that something will happen, a thing with a root? Address that, and pick it apart and work away at its foundations, and it will eventually fail to keep its grasp upon you.

I think everyone does, at times. I'm usually okay, but sometimes my feeling of being chained down goes way above what I'm comfortable with. My domestic partner has serious health problems (fibromyalgia, for one), and managing those takes a lot of time and effort- and keeps me at home during my off time, since I want to be available to help when I can. And of the four people living in this apartment, I'm one of the only two who can cook...

In a sense, I like being relied on, and being reliable enough to be relied on, but at a lot of other times it just sucks because I can't take a break, and if I screw up, there's nobody to catch my error.

I have an iPad, and I find myself preferring very different games on it than on my iPhone- the form factor being totally different makes for very different practical gaming. The iPad is really bad at action games, for one thing.

On the iPad, SpaceChem all the way.

On my iPhone, definitely Groove Coaster.

An iPod Touch is a gateway drug to an iPhone, seriously. I bought a damaged used first-gen iTouch from a friend for $50 because I was curious. Well, its limitations annoyed me, but I quite liked a number of the apps, so I bought a 32GB iPod Touch third-gen (what was current at the time) shortly thereafter, and used it as a portable gaming system. Much of what I like to play is simple puzzle games, and iOS is absolutely loaded with those- it matches my usage very well. The battery life is kind of a bummer.

I got an iPhone 4S recently, though. (This is skipping past my seeing if Android is a good gaming platform- it wasn't at all, for me- and winning an iPad in a computer programming quiz competition.) I'd had an iPod Touch 4 before that. The 4S's improvements are mostly that the bulkier shape of the iPhone is, honestly, easier for me to hold, and it's now also my primary communication device (at which it works better than I expected). And I still use it for gaming.

It's an excellent system for when I have a minute or two and I just want to play some simple casual game. That happens a lot. I've bought heavier and more involved games, but in the end haven't played them very much; I mostly use my actual handhelds for that, I guess.

But, yeah, as a gaming system is why I bought the iPod Touch 4. My commute to work was changing, becoming a longer bus ride rather than a medium-length carpool (I can't drive), and I figured I'd need something I could play one-handed if I had to stand on the bus regularly. This turned out to be a correct concern.

If I haven't been playing it for a while- a week and a half or so- then it's a bit headache-inducing and eyestrain-inducing to start playing, and then I get used to it, and then I can't quite focus right when I stop. I get over that by the second consecutive day, though. I guess it's just a matter of brain habits, for me, and I'll probably get used to switching after a while.

In my opinion, pornography is like anything else that makes a person feel good. I don't think it's more inherently dangerous than anything else; it's just high-profile, because more people are interested in sexuality than any other particular recreational pursuit; its universal appeal makes it a larger market than most other entertainment.

But anything can be addicting. I seem to have the personality type really, really vulnerable to addictions. I feel an addiction is a problem when and only when you start to make decisions that interfere with other parts of your life in service to this addiction. I tend to go through waves, where various things do that to me; pornography was one of them, for a time. But I simply got bored, and instead of going into that spiral of seeking out more extreme things, I simply looked to something else. It seems I always have a few obsessions; one is always computer programming, but I'm satisfying that at work now. For my off-hours, I'm playing video games again- but video games, unlike the Internet, end, and honestly become repetitive faster. In the past, video gaming did me a lot of harm; now, I've gotten sort of accustomed to it and it's safer to go back to than a lot of other addictions.

I guess I don't see porn as anything different. I think addictions are commonplace. Porn just has a much larger fan base, and by simple base rates will be highly-represented in the community of addictions. But, relative to the number of people interested in a thing at all, is pornography really more addicting than other things?

This actually happened to my father.

*pulled over*
Hello, sir, may I see your license and registration please?
Of course, sir. Yeah, I completely spaced and didn't even notice that the light was red. I'm sorry about that, I knew I'd screwed up as soon as I did it.
Oh? I didn't even notice the red light. But that was a no-left-turns intersection.
Seriously?


Somehow, he got a warning anyway. Specifically, two warnings.