Absolutely nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12 today.
I repeat, nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12.

Intercourse The Penguin: A Critique Of Artificial Scarcity In A Post-Scarcity Economy

If you subscribe to a magazine electronically on Amazon, they will delete your back issues after six months "for your convenience".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:20 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Just My Opinion

Web and app designers who employ grey text on a grey background for copy should be shot.*

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Windows 8 Sucks

There are some good bits.  The Task Manager is a solid improvement.  And the file copy activity dialog is what it always should have been.  Those are a couple of minor items, though.  Overall, it sucks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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SinCity Part III

In which Maxis/EA attempt to cover up their earlier lies with more lies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:45 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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SinCity Part II

Given Maxis/EA's repeated assertions that the reason SimCity 5 is restricted to online play only is that significant parts of the simulation are handled on the servers because the requirements are too steep for desktop PCs and it can't actually run standalone, coupled with the ongoing costs of providing such infrastructure, there were really only two views one could take: Either their engineers and project managers are deeply, deeply incompetent, or they're lying through their teeth.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:26 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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SinCity

Filed this under "Rant", but it's not my rant, it's by John Walker over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

[T]here was only one valid response from EA after the clusterfuck of SimCity’s launch: capitulation. A full admission that the DRM that infests their game was needless, a bad mistake, and that they’re working to strip it out for single-player games as quickly as possible.

Claiming SimCity fixed, by removing the server queues, random crashes, lost cities, server drops, and the artificial restrictions placed on the game just to make it run, is like claiming a broken leg fixed because you’ve mended the crutches.

That's just getting warmed up.  And some of the comments are downright harsh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:06 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thinking Of Changing My Blog's Name

To Insurmountable Opportunities.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:07 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Matias Duarte, Android User Experience Lead At Google, Explains Why Nexus Devices Lack Expandable Storage

He's lazy and incompetent and thinks Android users are idiots.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:01 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Better To Live In The Past

Doctor Who gave us five episodes and went on holiday until Christmas.  The final four episodes of Kokoro Connect don't air until March.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pollies Gone Wild

In case you haven't been following Australian politics of late (and I wouldn't blame you one bit), our federal government - specifically, the Attorney General, Nicola Roxon - has been floating a trial balloon to collect unprecedented amounts of information on the people of Australia.  Between ASIC and the AFP - roughly equivalent to the FTC SEC and FBI in American terms - they want to record all online communications and phone calls of everyone, and keep all the data forever.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:29 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Nation, Friendzoned, Part N+1

VMWare have released an update to their Workstation product, version 9.  Main feature seems to be support for Windows 8.  Also better remote management (not much of an issue for me) and USB 3.0 support.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:17 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Nation, Friendzoned

FFVII is out (again) on PC.  I've never played it, and apparently some people like it, so I tried to buy it. * Well....  No.  Though this is true of the first two Final Fantasy games.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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EmuTown

SimCity 5 (or as EA would have it, just SimCity)?  One of the games I was most looking forward to?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:02 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dear Fuckheads

Yes, you, who thought it would be a great idea to ruin people's websites with your horrible spam when it gave you a tiny boost on Google, and, now that your misdeeds have caught up with you, are issuing entirely baseless DMCA complaints - 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:35 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Hate Computers

I have now been working for 21 hours straight.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:05 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Another Open Letter To Bioware

And specifically to Mark Darrah:

Maybe I should just put a stop to something right now.
We ARE NOT going to:
* Burn DA2 to the ground
* Pretend it doesn't exists
* etc...
I am proud of what DA2 accomplished in several areas. It is certainly not without flaws.
We have things to learn from BOTH Dragon Age games as well as other titles.
Starting your post by telling me to ignore the hard work of over a hundred people is NOT a good way to start a dialogue with me.

Grow up, Mark.  

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:00 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Other Days

See that post below?  Strike  that.  Reverse it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Shrink-Wrap Licenses

Should be required by law to offer three options: Agree, Disagree, and TL;DR.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ancient Wisdom

A game for 2-6 players ages 7 and up.

You will need: One six-sided die.

Rules:

1. Each player rolls the die in turn.  The resulting number is the age at which they would have died of a childhood disease now readily treatable or prevented entirely by routine vaccinations.
2. The winner is all those who can rely on modern technology instead of ancient wisdom.
   

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Other End Of The Spectrum

The other end of the spectrum from clueless junior programmers who tell you that your database can't scale to the level you already have it at, is highly paid and experienced consultants who tell you the exact same thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Send Them All Back To 1985

Listens to developer explaining how MySQL is no good for really large databases, like, over 100MB.

Looks at 6TB MySQL production database handling several thousand transactions per second.*

Raises eyebrow.

It's pretty obvious he's got broken joins.  The advantage we had back in the good old days was that rather than taking several seconds to return your data, it would take several weeks, and you could hear the drive heads thrashing about while it happened, so it was kind of obvious that you'd screwed up.

I've seen far too many programs where someone has failed to realise that the half a second or so that a function takes is because they've got it completely wrong, and it should be taking milliseconds or even microseconds.  Send them all back to 1985, I say.  Here's your Unix box.  We just upgraded it: It now has two megabytes of RAM!

* Mind you, it's not easy to get MySQL to scale that big on a single server.  But 100GB is perfectly manageable, and that's a thousand times what this guy was talking about.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:06 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Hate Electricity

Power failure in Seattle's SoftLayer datacenter.  I mean, SoftLayer's Seattle datacenter.  I think.  About 20 out of 30 servers at my day job fell over.  Yes, they have redundant power supplies and are in theory connected to two UPSes each.  Anyway....

By some stroke of good luck, all four key servers in our data path stayed up the entire time.

Everything else rebooted.  Eventually.  Except for our cloud components, which are dead as a doornail.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:18 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Great Art, Tiny Minds

So, I was just catching up on Ano Hana - which continues to bravely walk the tightrope of awesome over the great chasm of suck - and thought to myself, self, why not hop over to Youtube and find the opening and ending themes and plip them into your one-line reviewlet so that people can get an idea of what they're missing?

The answer to that question is, of course, Sony Fucking Music.*  The only clips available are mirrored, distorted, or both, because Sony F. Music have taken down all the rest.

They're also the reason I no longer have a Youtube account.  At least, I think so; Youtube won't actually tell me.

So, just trust me on this, okay?  Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai.  Watch it.  It's not for everyone, but it's sure worth taking a look.

* The Fucking is silent.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dear Hosting Company

If you don't have the exact configuration the customer ordered, it's generally acceptable to substitute a more powerful configuration at the same price.

It's not so acceptable to substitute a less powerful configuration.

Particularly if you don't bother to tell the customer.

And when you do this, it's really not a good idea to argue that this less powerful configuration is actually better.  Apologise and fix it.

Update: They apologised and fixed it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dragon Age II

This is the review I posted at Gamespot, with some italics added.

We all knew that Dragon Age II wasn't going to be a direct sequel to Dragon Age: Origins.  Since, depending on your choices in the first game, your main character might well have ended up dead at the end, that would have been tricky.  But that doesn't mean we can't compare the second game to the first - it's called Dragon Age II after all.  And when we do, it comes up short in almost every way.

Other reviewers have covered some of the glaring flaws, such as the mindless reuse of assets and the way the plot has you on rails from beginning to end, so I won't go into those.

The combat in the first game was somewhat stodgy but certainly allowed you to plan out your tactical assault.  Dragon Age II on the other hand has your characters leaping about like crack-addled squirrel monkeys with ADHD.  The combat is as easy as it is mindless, but most of all it betrays the same laziness and incompetence of the designers that shows up all through the game. 

The original game had such a fetish for surprise attacks that the true surprise ended up being not having your face ripped off the moment you opened a door, but Dragon Age II lacks any factor of surprise at all.  Enemies jump on you, you stab them, they explode for no readily apparent reason, then more enemies fall on you out of the sky as if some giant monster-crapping pigeon was circling overhead.  And repeat.  And repeat.  And repeat.

But none of this is the actual problem with the game.  The unlikeable main character, the unlikeable secondary characters, the uninspired story, the fact that the combat system has been targeted at preschoolers, even the fact that the entire game relies on a set of art assets adequate for a half-hour tech demo, none of that is what's really wrong here.  Even with all those flaws, there's still fun to be had.  Not a lot of fun, but some.

The problem is that while the story itself is uninspired, the telling of the story is a hundred times worse.  The game seems determined to yank you out of any immersion you might achieve.  Right at the start of the game, a family member and a companion are killed before your eyes.  And you will not care.  You don't know these people, and they're portrayed with all the liveliness of frozen oatmeal on a stick.

Once you get out of your darkspawn-infested village and make your way to the city of Kirkwall - which is where you'll be spending most of the game - you need to find enough money to bribe your way inside because they're not accepting any more refugees.  You have the choice of signing on for a year with either a smuggler or a mercenary company, and I chose the smuggler because it sounded like the missions would be more varied. 

Whichever one you choose, your first mission - to prove yourself and get hired - involves you killing a bunch of identical thugs, and your second mission doesn't ever happen.  The moment you're accepted, the game forgets about that part of the story, the part that would have established your character and made you glad to eventually return to the safe confines of Kirkwall, and simply skips ahead a year.

That's so inane it left me dumbfounded.  Give me something.  I don't expect or even want to play out every day in the life of Pirate Penny but give me something to indicate that it actually happened.  Because otherwise, as far as I'm concerned as a player, it didn't happen, and I was magically teleported into the city with no involvement on my part whatsoever.

What follows is an attempt to raise enough money to mount a treasure hunting expedition, which makes no sense because, as your own character points out, if you had enough money to fund the expedition you wouldn't need to do so.  When the characters in the story are pointing out that the plot is broken you have to assume that the writers have simply stopped caring, and if the creators of the game don't care then I see no reason why I should care about playing it.

And I don't.

As a standalone game it's just not very good.  As a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins - and don't try to tell me that something with a II on the end shouldn't be considered as a sequel - it's an embarrassment.  The only thing Bioware can do to recover at this point is to pretend that this game never happened and go back to the drawing board.

As a standalone game I give it 4/10.

As a sequel to the exceptional (though flawed) Dragon Age: Origins I give it -1/10.  It not only has nothing to offer in that respect, it actually detracts from the original.

Verdict: Wait for it to hit $5 on Steam and then buy something else.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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