Shaikoten

Netflix, Hulu, Youtube. These are all great websites. If you live in the United States. But I'm sure many of you in Europe, Asia, Oceania, or elsewhere have come into your fair share of issues in watching videos on sites like youtube and finding warnings that "This video is blocked by copyright in your country" or some such nonsense. Netflix has a diminished library in the UK and Canada, and I'm not sure if it even exists outside of the US and those two countries. And all of these are geographically locked. Well, until now. I found a plugin for Chrome and Firefox called Media Hint. The website is terrible and doesn't explain what the plugin does for shit, but it works flawlessly. It determines where you're accessing a site from, where the optimal location is to allow access to media, and then spoofs your country code to allow you to watch what you want. What this means for me? I can watch the rare unavailable video on youtube and stream television from bbc.co.uk without a second thought. What this means if you live outside of the US? You get to watch ALL our goodies. I can confirm this works, and it works quite well. I told one of my German friends about it this morning, and he had always wanted a Netflix account. All he had to do was supply a US zip code when signing up for an account, and now he can watch all of the media that's licensed for the US. It's beautiful, and I wish all of you non-Americans good luck in discovering just how good we have it in the realm of movies and TV online here.

I admit to phrasing it like a dumbass for sure, but I'm pretty certain the proxy isn't running for much but the initial connection. Wouldn't it be terribly inefficient and costly to route streaming media traffic through a proxy? I'm not trying to say that this isn't a very simple solution, I'm almost certain it is. But I also remember what loading websites through free proxies feels like, and this does not feel like that in the least.

The website will absolutely let you once you have this plugin. It will ask you to make sure your TV License is up to date however!

Netflix is absolutely not free, I pay real money for it, and I want to be able to use it when I go outside of the US. I have the same beef with, in this day and age, certain games not being offered on Steam or other digital distribution platforms just because the consumers aren't in the right country. We're in the 21st century, and money is money no matter what country you're in. Unless it's some hyperinflationary African nation I guess. Exp: I don't know how it works, but I don't think it's a proxy--as in there's no additional lag like I might have had if I had routed all that streaming traffic through another connection. I just think it picks up on the checks within the website and sends the most helpful codes. EDIT: Bunch of people said stuff after I replied so I'll say to hardcore gamer, Netflix isn't the entity who wants to restrict other countries in this equation, it's all international distribution rights and other archaic old media leftovers. If it were up to Netflix they would likely have their full library available everywhere, but they have most likely deemed that the fees they would have to spend to make their whole library available outside of the US would not be cost effective as their subscription base is most dense in America.

I've never experienced a Chinese New Year celebration, but since moving to the west coast of the US I've discovered quite a large Asian population, so finding a celebration in the nearby cities shouldn't be too hard. Are the traditional festivities held during any particular part of the day, like is there a midnight countdown or something similar to a Western new years celebration?

No, no, those are mutton chops. THIS is me with a beard.

Please enjoy fat me and skinny me.

I totally thought this was something to do with Victorian politics. I was mildly disappointed.

Plenty of companies have a choice and choose to dick their customers over. Valve chooses not to, as much as humanly possible I think. I don't disagree that their whole greenlighting process is flawed, but it's a work in progress still. The amount of employees they have versus how many games they release on the platform is pretty low, to keep overhead down. So a game like War Z gets on because it has a big hype train riding off of DayZ's coattails. DayZ was not (and is not) highly polished, but it never once promised to be. War Z probably wouldn't be in the hot water it's in now if they didn't falsely advertise all they did, and could probably still get released. I guarantee there are more blatantly terrible games sold on Steam. The problem was the text and screenshots attached to the game, rather than the quality of the game itself (which is still bad but probably releasable) and that's a problem with the copy checking system, not the greenlighting system. tl;dr: The problem isn't with greenlight, it's in the marketing department.

Props to Valve for their response. I hope the DayZ launch goes better than this. But if not, I always have the mod which has already made money hand over fist. And I've already put over 700 hours into it this year. DayZ is pretty much my GOTY hands down.

Soon these mappers will be done with BTSX in all its glory and I will utilize them for my own evil purposes.

This. I love this. I love you. BTSXXX OFF DA RAILZ MLG 360 NOSCOPE HEADSHOT.

In no particular order... Avalanche in Day of Defeat Apartments in Red Orchestra Hammertime in The Specialists Raindance in Tribes And I confess to having a soft spot for quite a few of the .95k Skulltag maps too. Also lumpy Hellbent maps but I can't really choose just one.

When Mr. Patton is not voicing zombies for video games and jamming out in his metal sideprojects with people from bands like Slayer, apparently he likes hanging out with respectable musicians! Seriously though, this project is super well done, the orchestra makes some of this stuff sound angelic, and probably better than some of their originals. Though I do confess to not exactly being a connoisseur of Italian pop half a century or more old.

Here's a concert of Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Etc) and the Metropole Orchestra doing Italian pop covers from the 50s and 60s.

So a lot of you are Doom addicts, though I figure people have poured a lot of time into other favorite videogames as well. Post what you play and give a general time as to how long you've played if you can. I have a couple answers, one of which doesn't really count. The longest "time played" I have in a game is the MUD which I run, and even though it's probably the game I've played the most in my life, the hours I've spent connected to it aren't really representative of the time I've played because I keep my staff character connected 24/7. The total online time so far is 51677 hours. Actually what it displays on my character's profile is -13857 hours, because the short integer only goes up to 32767, and then it loops around. Seeing as I wasn't there for the whole time though, and it's not really a video game in that it's all just text, I'd have to say Civilization IV is probably one of my most played titles. I haven't kept track of how long I've played it for, but probably numbering in the thousands of hours. Not always sustained though, it's a very stop and go game and sometimes I'll ponder a single turn for a half hour, or super late in the game I'll have to wait as much as half an hour for my computer to calculate a single turn (and then hope it doesn't crash once it does.) My longest recorded played game in Steam is Team Fortress 2 with over 2000 hours logged, but a ton of that was idling back when I still cared about HATS, so, not real playtime. My second longest recorded game on Steam is Arma 2, mostly for the mod DayZ, which came out early this year, with over 600 hours logged. That was pretty much all active playtime. While it's kind of embarrassing to log that many hours in such a short time, DayZ has kind of become a big part of my social life since moving to a new place. It's got this weird vibe where you meet people and after time form huge bonds of trust through hyper-realistic combat. I know how my squadmates think, we all know what we're going to do before we actually do it, and we can just go in silently and fan out to everyone's predetermined role and make a plan go off without a hitch. So, everyone else, what do you spend way too much time playing?

Lucas may have penned the initial drafts of the original trilogy, but there was an awful lot of smacking him over the head and telling him things were a bad idea going on back in those days. For the prequel trilogies, there was an atmosphere of fear during the production when it came to saying no to George. If we went off of Lucas' drafts Han Solo would be a fucking lizardman. George Lucas is an ideas man, and he has great, general ideas for things. But when it comes to handling the specifics, he doesn't seem to know when to step aside and let talented specialists take the reins. Not anymore, at least. Being able to admit that you're not the best at everything is a skill that hundreds of millions of dollars have likely slowly eroded from the man.

How to save money on software: 1) Don't buy antivirus. Use the microsoft one or, better yet, don't click on shitty links you fucking retard. Oh, and use Chrome. Chrome works smoothly with even the junkiest of computers. 2) Microsoft Office is like a hundred bucks minimum. Don't buy it. Get Open Office if you need to have an office suite on your computer, or better yet, use Google docs and never lose a document again. 3) Media playing. If you want all the features, all the bells and whistles, and none of the shitty bloated memory hogging interface, go for Foobar 2000 for audio and VLC Player for video. Other than that, everything else is just vidja games and specialty productivity software.

SHODAN

A little coarse language doesn't make what he said less valid. Comparing a well-produced, engineered-to-be-catchy pop song with a quite frankly legendary satirical video attached to a piece of looping videogame music with no video from an unreleased game that 99.9% of gamers have never heard of is just a little bit unrealistic. Look at the rest of the post before your jimmies reach the rustled status. While it may be a bit of a fluke that this song is EXPLOSIVELY popular, especially with Americans, it was always going to have a certain audience within Korea. Psy was already a well established artist with a fan base and had a reputation for putting out good, humorous stuff. He knew what his audience expected of him and crafted it in such a way that it'd be attractive to anyone, not just people who were in on the joke. The video follows well established American music video tropes of luxury and SWAGGER, which people understand, yet subverts them by putting Psy in every day places and making him look ridiculous. And even though he may be subverting the formula, the dude still knows how to catch a few flies: putting sexy pop starlets in, and zoom shots of butts. Your "video" is a song you hired a guy to write whose name is known by hardly anyone outside this community, and this community is small. But this isn't even about the song, is it? Those of us who know you well are well aware that you have a penchant for the passive aggressive, and you're really wondering, "why isn't Wrack popular?" Well, I could go into an awful lot of factors here. I could talk about how it has ignored the lessons of the past twenty years. Or the fact that it has no marketing to speak of. Or maybe the fact that it's presently released with next to no content. But I won't derail the thread any further and I'll just end off by saying there's quite a few damn good reasons why this particular piece of media has been getting attention. People LIKE it, and for once they like it not because it's been crammed down our throats like most pre-packaged American pop. Even if it's following some of the customs of the industry, people actually chose to like and support this, and that's why the video is capable of getting ten million views a day. It's new, weird, fresh and funny to them, and people are eating it up.

Heh, where in CT? I imagine I'm familiar with some of the places by name and "talent," though I never got up the stomach to visit one of those rancid pits. I've heard more than one story of people accidentally getting a bit freaky with cousins and other distant relatives in more than one CT gentlemen's club.

I played through the demo and it felt extremely on-rails and scripted. I prefer a bit more randomness in my games. This may have just been the nature of the demo, but I thought it was extremely short and didn't give me enough free time to go with the flow of the game to decide whether or not I liked it. A friend of mine who is a games journalist has a review copy of the game and tells me it's very much a must play, but based on what I've seen in the Demo, I definitely won't buy it straight off. It almost seems "too polished" to me. I prefer games in which the player is free to tell their own stories rather than be pigeonholed into what the dev wants to tell. I think this game has the possibility of that, but the demo was more like a how-to-play tutorial and then a grand total of five minutes of making your own choices.

His name is Huy Pham, but he sucks dicks while mapping, so.

Honestly I'd rather just have the bits of story cut out of LOTR added into an extended-extended cut, but I'm not holding my breath for that. I'm not totally convinced 3 movies is the right move here, but Jackson has enough of my goodwill from LOTR for me to keep my mouth shut about it and watch it pan out.

DT-770 pro 250ohm. Sadly I've gotten rid of most of my other high end cans. The DT series takes abuse like no one's business, all of my other high end headphones I'm afraid to scratch and such, for fear of ruining their finish. I used to own a couple pairs of woodies, both headphile modded Grados and a nice pair of ATs. But despite their gorgeous looks and great sound, the Beyer wins out in long term comfort, durability, and a non-fatiguing sound to my ears.