John

Yeah, getting into one new game is like starting in on a new TV series: it's gonna take at least 10 hours and maybe upwards of 100. It's a huge time sink.

Could be that as you get older, social and capitalist pressures make you feel guilty for ever spending large chunks of time idly. Or it could be that the ever-mounting sense of life's precious brevity does the same. There's also the fact that most games are still made to appeal to adolescents, and you're probably just outgrowing their aesthetic appeal and crave something more meaningful or at least artful. And like you sort of alluded to with D&D, most video games don't fill people's needs to build and maintain real friendships (unless it's local multiplayer), and tabletop games do. The new Mario Tennis slaps though.

So far in this thread you've called her babies gross and insulted her home. Nice, bro.

Honestly anyone who signs up here in 2018 and starts posting in earnest is some kind of superhuman in my eyes, but yeah, necro-ing a thread that might be as old as the poster themselves is a truly next-level move. I couldn't even attempt it.

The song you're thinking of is "Snake Eyes" by Main Source:

If someone in like 2008 had told me that ten years later, 100% of OB's activity would be updates about a member's adorable babies, I'd be confused but very happy.

Congratulations!!

Though I wasn't close with many, there have been a lot of people I looked up to on OB as I was growing up, and even among them Des was kind of a figurehead. Part of that was just his admin status, I'm sure, but he also composed himself with a pleasant ease and steadiness that was rare on the internet. It distinguished him, and I'll remember him for that. This is the first loss of a notable member on OB that we've experienced, isn't it (apologies if it's not and I'm overlooking someone)? If so, we're really fortunate to have gone so long without a tragedy like this.

NO THANK YOU.

THANK YOU.

This is incredibly impressive work for one person! How long do you think those trailers took you?

Oh yeah, let me be clear: this game is absolute garbage in most respects. I love it, I keep playing it, but it is messed up beyond belief. Niantic didn't drop the ball on it so much as they spiked it into a sewer drain. The bugs, the poor gameplay balance (VAPOREON VAPOREON SNORLAX VAPOREON), the nonexistent server stability, and the completely senseless lack of communication from Niantic about any of this just blows my mind. Granted, Niantic is a really small studio. Granted, their one PR person had a baby and went on maternity leave just before launch. Granted, there's just no way they could've expected that their game would become the most popular mobile game ever within days. But even just one tweet saying "Hey, sorry, we know about all the issues and we're working on them" would relieve so much frustration. If you've got time to tweet at Soulja Boy, you've got time to give your player base a few crumbs of acknowledgement. But on the other hand... I just found my first cubone yesterday! C'mon, that's rad! I'm playing on a new Nexus 5X. My battery life situation is about the same, and my phone also gets hot, but not dangerously so. For a game that's supposed to be left open—but mostly not paid attention to—for long stretches of time, it's very stupidly resource heavy. A stripped-down, 2D map view or the ability to run the game in the background and get notifications when a pokémon is near would have been much more sensible, IMO. The data for pokéstops and gyms is all taken directly from Ingress, where they had gathered it early on from manual player submissions before having to shut down the submissions feature due to the popularity of the game. Yeah, the amount of people playing the game at launch was just stunning. There was a meetup one night in my city and hundreds of people showed up. The social phenomenon of the game is one of my favorite things about it. There's a lot of grumpy turdbabies who seem to need everyone to know how much they don't like the game and that it's turning everyone into screen-bound zombies, but despite the stunning originality of that sentiment, I actually feel a lot more connected to the people I see when I'm walking around and I can tell that a lot of us are all sharing this same experience. And then there's all the heartwarming stories you guys have referred to about the impact of the game on children's hospitals and animal shelters.

I SEE YOU LURKIN', and I know you're playing. Let's talk about it! What's your team? How's the scene in your area? Any good catches (or painful misses) lately?

UPDATE: MALT WEDNESDAYS WAS A RUSE, A DIRTY PRANK. DESSERT SITUATION: DEPLORABLE.

Career path update: I got that agency job! I'm a designer at a small studio in Madison, Wisconsin now. Dessert situation: apparently on Wednesdays everyone goes and gets really good malts, so I'd peg it at "agreeable".