General Discussion

It's the end of an era. With the release of Don McLeans's "American Pie", Harmonix is ending its weekly DLC releases for Rock Band. I don't know how many of you played or still play the game, but after 271 consecutive weeks, it's finally over. 4000 tracks and 1500 different artists later, this really is a feat that nobody else will match any time soon, if ever.

Rockstar released 2 new screenshots over Twitter today proving that the one man vigilante is still in the works. This is the first news that surfaced about the game since it’s announcement in 2010. via IGN Tweet This Post View the full article

Where it all started. Ebert's blog. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html IGN's rebuttal. Excellent read. http://pc.ign.com/articles/108/1084661p2.html

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/17320958-418/roger-ebert-dies-at-70-after-battle-with-cancer.html

Not a bad deal if you want to get rid of your cable bill My link

IT'S ROSE'S BIRTHDAY! Happy Birthday, Rose!!!

One of Dead Rising 2′s new features is the ability to create and customize new weapons. A meta website, Tape It or Die, has been created to help residents of Fortune City survive the zombie plague that started five years ago by making them aware of the various methods of weapon creation, providing blogs and pictures in hopes of creating the “ultimate weapon.” What they may have provided, though, is perhaps the “ultimate spoiler”. For those of you who haven’t survived the outbreak of Willamette, Colorado, be warned, there be spoilers ahead. So “Johnny Pipes”, one of the bloggers and founders, blogs about a recent outing yesterday where he took some photos of new hero Chu…

I wanted to start a thread to see if anyone else here likes to run, or even jog. I only started about last October, but I've been running a minimum of a mile pretty much every night (usually two or three). My fastest mile is about 6:52, and tonight I just did my longest run, a half marathon, completing that in about 1h41m. I run with Nike+ shoes with a sensor in them connected to my iPod nano 7g. The timing probably isn't perfect, because I run in my backyard on a path about 110ft across (220ft to go to the end and back, trying to make smooth turns each time to keep pace). I do that little path 25 times (though 24 x 220ft comes out just about at a mile, that one e…

Scientists suspect the lake's depths will reveal new life forms, show how the planet was before the ice age and how life evolved. It could offer a glimpse at what conditions for life exist in the similar extremes of Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa. "It's like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don't know what we'll find," said Valery Lukin of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the expedition. Read the rest http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/04/us-russia-antarctica-lake-idINTRE7135MB20110204

Ryan Davis passed away on July 3rd. He was 34. Obviously we’re all stunned over here. Ryan was a good friend to all of us. It’s odd to remember that, for someone who could be so acerbic at times, and despite knowing him for almost a decade, I honestly don’t recall ever actually being mad at him. He had an unconventional type of kindness that expressed itself more strongly the longer one knew him, and despite his teasing nature, he always managed to make his close friends feel loved when his attention turned towards you. Many of you know that Ryan was recently married. In the face of this awfulness, many of us will at least always remember him as we last saw him: outra…

This is so fucking sad. Not only did he post about it, but he seriously put a picture up on his wall of her dead body. He claims that she had been punching him and that he wasn't going to take the abuse anymore. A 10 year old child was also in the home (safe) when police arrived. Link to story His Facebook page has been deleted, but some sick bastards have been re-uploaded her dead body picture to imgur. Stuff like this makes me sad for humanity. Not only that, but of course this is in Florida. Why does all the bad stuff seem to happen there lately?

RIP Wes Craven , Nightmare on Elm street was the first Horror movie I saw got me hooked http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/08/30/horror-master-wes-craven-dies-at-76/?intcmp=hpbt4

Imagine running down the street, pulling out a brightly colored vibrator, and smacking random strangers with it. You will be able to do this in Saint’s Row: The Third. Now imagine running down that same street and taking a jar that you previously farted in to and tossing it like a grenade at some unsuspecting stranger. This you will not be able to do. Make sense? Didn’t think so. The team behind Grand Theft Auto’s worst nightmare, THQ”s Voilition talked to Game Informer about the not allowed “Farts in a Jar” idea and described censoring the latest installment of the franchise to porn. “It’s like defining porn. I can’t define it, but I know when I see it,” stated Seni…

I haven't seen you in FOREVER. Also, didn't know you were so young (hehe)

CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon, apologized on Wednesday for publicly opposing marijuana legalization, saying science was clearly on the side of the drug. “I think we have been terribly and systematically misled in this country for some time, and I did part of that misleading,” he told CNN host Piers Morgan. http://youtu.be/1Tqg2y3yYR0 http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/07/cnns-sanjay-gupta-americans-terribly-and-systematically-misled-about-marijuana/

MajorWhiteBoy is celebrating a birthday today, somewhere in Ohio. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PACKIE!!! The B stands for biscuits or badass. It's up to you.

I can't believe that people are actually SCAMMING the system when it comes to the Humble Indie Bundle and the current Steam Holiday Sale in order to try to work the system to get more entries into the stupid Steam Holiday contest. It makes me VERY angry that people would stoop so low, but of course not a lot surprises me these days. So, I'm giving a big F U to all the asshats out there who ruin all the good things for the rest of us.

Freaking settlement. No clear decision if consumers own, or 'lease' their consoles. http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/11/settlement-in-george-hotz-case/ Boo.

For my final project in English class, I'm doing research into videogame violence, and its effect on people. I need to find two "voices" on the subject. One that is against violence in games, and one that is for (or at least not against it). I was thinking about using Jack Thompson as my anti-violence voice, but he seems a bit too crazy/extreme, and I can't think of any great voices for games with violence off the top of my head. Does anyone have any suggestions that I could use for either? It'd be a great help.

Steubenville City Schools Supt. Michael McVey faces the most serious charges, including felony counts of obstructing justice, DeWine said. Telephone calls to the school official’s office and home were not immediately returned. All the others face misdemeanor charges. Also charged were an elementary school principal and a coach who face misdemeanor charges of failing to report possible child abuse. A former volunteer coach faces several misdemeanor charges, including making false statements and contributing to a child's delinquency. All four are to appear in court next month. Read on http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-steubenville-rape-indictiments-20131…

Researchers at Cornell have designed, built and demonstrated the first "cloak" that hides events in time. The process relies on similar methods of distorting electromagnetic fields as invisibility cloaks, but it exploits a time-space duality in electromagnetic theory: diffraction and dispersion of light in space are mathematically equivalent. Scientists have used this theory to create a "time-lens [that] can, for example, magnify or compress in time." Keep reading, here. via - Gizmodo

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/31187119?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href=" of Scott Olsen being shot by Police at Occupy Oakland</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user193922">Raleigh Latham</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

So I'm back from San Diego. I think I tweeted the hell out of it so it should come has no surprise that I spent a vast majority of my time in the Xbox Lounge (free drinks!). Playing Kinect was fun but guess what? I got bored pretty fast. You know what didn't bore me? Hydro Thunder Hurricane. I played the living **** out of this XBLA game (which comes out this Wednesday btw) and ******** it's fun as hell. They had a 12 console Live party going for prizes and I would CONSTANTLY get second place, third place, never quite winning a copy of Alan Wake and Crackdown 2 I wanted so dearly. I wanted to bring all my friends in and stack the consoles so at least one of us would win, …

An Android app developer has published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users. In a YouTube video posted on Monday, Trevor Eckhart showed how software from a Silicon Valley company known as Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys he pressed into a stock EVO handset, which he had reset to factory settings just prior to the demonstration. Using a packet sniffer while his device was in airplane mode, he demonstrated how each numeric tap and every received text message is logged by the software. Ironically, he says, the Carrier IQ software recorded the “h…