Bay 12 Games Forum

Most of my biggest peeves have already been mentioned, but I'll elaborate.

Twilight.  No elaboration is needed.

Prey and Timeline are the only two books that I threw across the room instead of finishing.  In Prey, the way the humans stopped the swarm from attacking them was the crusher.  In Timeline, the explanation of how the time machine brought the people back did it for me.

I'll second the Dark Tower as well.  I've never felt more let down by the ending of a series.  I'm also not too fond of King's retconning earlier events in the series and then putting out new copies of his old books.  There's a new generation of King readers growing up who do not know that it was once said of The Beast that to speak of him was to speak of the ruination of one's own soul.  Or apparently, now it's to speak of a crazy old guy who wouldn't even make it as a boss in a Metal Gear Solid game.

Any of Dean Koontz's work in which he describes a character with a different moral frame or set of religious beliefs than his own.  Out of what I've read, "Intensity" is the worst in this regard.

Anything by Dan Brown.  80% of the fanfiction on the Community Games and Stories board is better-written than Dan Brown's work, yet it's Dan Brown that gets movies made of his work.

I'm all for tolerance, in its place.  However, in my opinion, unconditional tolerance is probably a bad thing.

I feel that the importance of INtolerance, properly applied, cannot be underestimated.  LegoLord, would it be appropriate to discuss situations in which intolerance is necessary or appropriate, or should that stuff be left out of this topic?

5/1/09
The Chief's shoulder was bothering him, so we reduced the amount of weight we did on the regular bench to 170 today and did four sets to compensate for the reduced weight.  As usual, we followed each set of ten with a set of 10x80 preacher curls and a set of 20x80 seated rows before moving on to 3x10x145 incline presses.  However, this may have been too much for The Chief, because after the last set of inclines, he claimed that his shoulder was hurting like Hell.  I hope it's just muscle fatigue and that he didn't seriously injure himself.  I'm also gratified to find out that I can lift 255, I seem to be recovering nicely.  On Monday I'll see if I can't lift 265.

5/5/09
Well, to my shame, I didn't work out yesterday or the day before that.  The Chief didn't want to work out either of those days, but that's no excuse.  He didn't want to work out today either, so I went ahead and did the 5-mile walk without him.  I threw in a little jogging as well, three separate times that I felt like I had a little extra steam, I jogged for a half mile or so before slowing back down to a fast walk.  I managed the whole five mile course in just under an hour and fifteen minutes.

5/6/09
The Chief has a darn good excuse for not working out these past few days.  He was recently in an accident (rolled his truck avoiding a deer on a wet road) and as it turns out (he got the x-rays back yesterday afternoon) he cracked his collarbone and also has a calcium growth on the cracked area.  So when he feels like NOT benching, it's not so much "being a whiny bitch" as it is "a perfectly reasonable response to a serious injury".  That said, despite all the defects in his innermost tissue layer, we did a set of 10x205 on the bench, followed by 2 sets of 10x170, interspersed with our usual 3 sets of 10x80 curls and 20x80 rows, followed by 3x10x145 incline bench.  I didn't try 265 (though I'm sure I could have gotten it) because I didn't feel comfortable asking him to spot me.  I've gotta go back over there this evening when his roommate's home, I'll be sure to try 265 then.

5/7/09
Naturally I succeeded at the 265 attempt last night, although I seriously wonder if I could get 275.  We just got back from doing the 5-mile route.  Since it took us by the city park at the very end, I convinced The Chief to do some chin-ups with me.  I managed 12, but I think I could have done a lot more if it had come at the start of the walk instead of the end.  We tried to jog a little bit but The Chief said it was making his back hurt, so we just walked.  Altogether it took us just under an hour and a half.

Yes, it can.  As long as they're somehow connected to the rest of your fort, they'll show up on the visualizer.  It may be difficult to get a good angle to show them from, but the camera doesn't mind being buried in a few hundred feet of rock, it works regardless.

I believe there's an option to show completely hidden features (such as an underground river that you haven't breached yet) but I have never gotten that to work.

Also, agreed completely about the DRM thing, the only people copy protection is going to annoy are the customers. The piracy groups see it as a challenge, they compete with each other in who can crack games faster, so better copy protection only means more street cred to whoever cracks it means more effort on part of the crackers. Totally counterproductive. And the p2p sod will just use that crack and never deal with the protection at all either. As a matter of fact I routinely crack my legit games because I refuse to juggle CDs on demand. I could understand it back in the day when harddisks were small...

This, basically.  I've been sold utterly broken software (Mercenaries 2) or programs that included draconian DRM mentioned nowhere on the package or in the documentation (Half-Life 2) enough times that I'm basically done with mainstream gaming.  If some gaming company spends enough advertising dollars on hype that it actually interests me in their product, I may pirate it to give it a "test drive".  When I find a product that actually lives up to the hype, then I buy a physical copy from a store to support the company that made it.

Yesterday we decided to increase the distance on our walk.  We went what we thought was 4 miles, but I drove it today and my odometer said it was 4.4.  The new route we're doing also has more and steeper hills.  Tomorrow we're going to bump it up to 5 miles.

We increased the weights we're doing today as well.  We benched 3x10x185 with the usual sets of 10x85 curls and 20x85 rows after each set of bench presses, then did 3x10x140 on the inclined bench.

Barbarossa, I guess you're the local track expert, have you ever tried HIIT?  Would you recommend it?  I can't run for at least another month, but I want to do something drastic to get my cardio back to the way it was before I got sick.

Lifted weights with The Chief today.  We did our usual 3x10x170 on the regular bench, with sets of 10x70 preacher curls and 20x70 seated rows after each set (we should probably bump this up fairly soon), but before we went on to our 3x10x135 incline bench, we did a set of 10x135 slow rep bench presses.  When benching normally, you probably take about a second to lower the bar to your chest, and anywhere from a second to three to raise it.  In slow rep benching, you do a much lower weight, and force yourself to take three seconds to both lower and raise the bar, also concentrating on maintaining perfect form.  I'm not sure how effective it is (it's just something The Chief read about on some forum) but it does tire one out.

Just realized I forgot to post my workout log.  Well, The Chief had some other obligations today (had to take care of his sick daughter) so he didn't want to come walking today.  So I walked the three miles by myself this afternoon.  As it turned out, he claimed that he would have walked with me after about 5:30 when his kid's mother got off work.  Unfortunately, I assumed that he wouldn't want to walk with me, and I didn't call him, otherwise I'd have done another three miles with him.  I wish I had, I really had plenty of energy left.