Superbus

So I got to the second area. I got to a very critical part of the game, in the second main dungeon. A lot of things happened. I figured "OK, let's find my way out of here, so I can report back to the town. I was flying high. Then I got into one random battle, my entire team was put to sleep, and a War Hog basically thrashed me to death. Everything. Gone. Welcome to Etrian Odyssey IV.

I believe they'll unlock later tonight, no? We've had EXPontential Growth for a week now, and the DLC typically hits on Thursday.

If you want something you don't have to charge every day, then get a Nokia 5510. Otherwise, you're likely not going to get outstanding battery life. However, the new Galaxy phones seem to have the best life, and I believe they're also external (meaning, you can replace it). With the iPhone, you're stuck; if the battery blows up, your options are 1) new iPhone or 2) go fuck yourself. Also remember that the iPhone is a completely closed ecosystem. You *must* either get everything from the Apple store, or jailbreak it; I don't think you have the technical know-how to jailbreak a phone and keep it that way.

Your first month will suck. Let's get that out of the way right now. You will be homesick. You will attach yourself to every single thing that reminds you of home. You will run up a massive phone/minutes bill calling home. Stick it out. Get past that. Because what happens after that is akin to a butterfly coming out of a cuccoon (or, if you're the Pokemon type: you'll evolve into Butterfree and learn Poison Gas). Because once you're about three months in, chances are very strong that home life will feel stifling. You'll be fully incorporated into your new environment, with new friends, a newfound appreciation for your freedom (don't let that go too far; that's a double-edged sword, and you likely don't have much tolerance for, say, alcohol), and when you go home, the feeling of structure at best and rules at worst will feel offensive. This will increase over time.

I'll answer the original question with one of my own: what are you looking for in this phone, exactly?

I had some things to say about the holiday, but this is probably the best way I've seen someone put it: http://slackerella.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/valentines-day-is-bullshit/ tl;dr: Valentine's Day is fake love. I don't need one day to show who I love that I love them. I have the other 364 for that.

It's official: Chris Dorner died in that barn They burned him alive. Cowards. And I was in no way supporting Dorner. Let's see them get this into it the next time a little black girl dies from a drive-by.

As a war veteran: I'm against it. * How many women can pass a man's physical standards? I'm not saying that women are inferior to men. I'm saying that you need physical strength beyond what most people are capable of in combat positions, and as far as women go, they are inferior *in this area*. the worry has always been dumbing down the standards for the sake of a woman, and in every branch that allows them, womens' fitness standards are below that of a male's; in some cases (push-ups), drastically lower. I was 215lb. in the service; find me a woman that can drag that out of a space three levels down on a ship, and I'll find you a dude that's transitioning FTM. * In combat, no one cares what the other's gender is. It's out of combat you have to worry about. I got laid more on the ship than I did off it, because what else are you going to do when you're out to sea for a month and a half consecutively, flag your staff in your rack? If you join the Navy, I guarantee you: the machinists know all the places where you can have sex without getting caught. It's a little harder in a tent in Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean the temptation isn't there. * When I was on the George Washington from 2000 - 2004, I'd guesstimate that 10% of our female crew explicitly got pregnant just before major deployments. These "unplanned" pregnancies took these women off of their ships, and reduced their teams' effectiveness. What are you going to do, ban women from procreating unless they're on a desk job on shore, or out of a combat zone? * Sexual assault is a reality. One in every three females have been sexually assaulted, according to the Department of Defense. That's 33%! Now, you want to stick these women into combat zones, where testosterone is at its highest? As likely one of the few - if only - women in a platoon, the risk is made that much worse. We tell civilian women to not drink alone, watch who they go home with, travel in groups, etc., but we're going to tell military women "hey, sure, go into this platoon with 19 other guys who are trained to kill people without thinking, we're sure everything will be fine because something something UCMJ"? Word? * Here's the uncomfortable truth to all of this: everything I mentioned degrades the military strength of the United States Military, and you cannot just legislate it out. Sure, you can put the rapists in Leavensworth, and give the females treatment (and maybe not play blame the victim; I'd like to truly know how many women have been raped but were either scared out of reporting it, or outright had their reports torn up by senior NCOs), and all that stuff, but those are two bodies - with guns - that you've taken away from the group, that haven't been replaced, and make it more likely that, in the case of a firefight, other people will die. That is literally all that matters. Social justice has no place on a battlefield, or in a sea evolution, or whereever we're at where we have to kill bad guys. Feminists and other activists are absolutely right in calling for equality of the sexes, and it's something that I believe in... everywhere else. Not when lives are on the line. If that's hard to hear, tough shit. Women have been used as war prizes for millenia; the first thing armies of old (and even modern armies in Africa and other third world countries) would do was rape and defile the women. Forget our own guys; what happens when a woman is taken as a POW? I have two words for you: Traudl Junge. Or, hell, how about the way the Army lied about how badly Jessica Lynch was raped, to drive public opinion towards further blowing up Iraq, when she herself said that was bullshit? War is, by its very nature, barbaric. Our attempts to sterilize and clean the process up, while admirable, have directly lead to our losing in Vietnam, and our continued clusterfucks in Afghanistan and Iraq. We're intentionally tying a hand behind our backs. Letting women into combat positions, in consideration of all of this, further tightens the rope. It's a horrible thing to say if you consider women equal to men, but in this case, with thousands of years of human warfare backing this up, they truly are not, and the direction from a few civilian military commanders does not change that.

Let's not forget the use of a MILITARY DRONE to track him down, which opens up Pandora's Box in terms of citizen monitoring.

Very few middle class white men hate the police more than I do, but when you kill people - people whose only real offense is that they're shitty cops and scummy people - and carjack innocent civilians, I tend to lose my sympathy.

Stay the fuck away from energy drinks. Trust me. It's false energy, you *WILL* crash, and the sugar and other additives in those things will kill you faster than any coffee. You have a few alternatives. * Switch to tea. Some will say green tea or breakfast tea; I prefer oolong. This will also mitigate any withdrawal headaches you get. * Drop caffeine altogether, get past the headaches you're going to get, and drink more water. * Get more sleep at night. That's really about it. Everything else is a quick fix that will open up more problems than they solve.

I hate using this line considering the average age of the membership here, but (get ready to groan) things were a little different when I was growing up. Dirty Pair was as seductive as it got back then. Now... shit, I don't know what the fuck Kiss X Sis is.

I get what he's saying, and it's an annoyance for me as well: when I'm setting someone up for a kill to get a weaker character some XP, the last think I need is for dual attack to come into play. If I think I'm getting someone down to 2HP to get, say, Donnel a kill, it screws me up when that second attack hits. Also, I wouldn't mind, if I'm adjacant to multiple characters, selecting which ones I can support with.

To expand on this, remember that it's a huge financial burden in 2013 to delay a game. When I was a kid, Nintendo's delays were routine; of course, patches weren't ready yet, we didn't have the internet. But now? Take one look at what Take Two's stock did after GTAV was delayed.

I don't know what "trope" this would qualify as because I don't go to TVTropes, but the continued slide towards a 100% moe future really has me depressed. Every female in anime has to be a completely useless moeblob, a fucking tsundere, or a spunky 19 year old who looks 11 and is prominently featured in sexy poses to attract the elusive pedophile market.

On the same note as League of Legends, Team Fortress 2 is the same thing. There's no pay to win, because every weapon has a drawback. Basically, people just buy hats. Of course, TF2 started out as a fully paid game.

See, Jyo? You need to spread the Tate love! and make this special group go away

If looked at in the bigger context - you're just summoning their spirit, which has been weakened over thousands of years in alternative realms, therefore giving people only a glimpse into what they used to be - then I actually prefer it this way. Also remember that you can summon back any killed off DLC characters.

I actually see both sides to this, because what Momo's saying - gutting the game to sell off the rest of it piece by piece - is *exactly* what companies are doing by including the content on the disc and having the content unlocked with a code. It's one thing to have stuff be taken out and then downloaded later; we can't really say one way or the other (unless it's a game where someone or something is critical to gameplay, like a character in Mass Effect or Sazh's story in FFXIII-II. But if they're including it on the disc and THEN having it be unlockable, they're outright saying "we took this out of the game so we could fuck you for a few more dollars".

I'd clean up the item management interface. It's a mess.

If companies are going to force digital, why not? They gain on shipping costs anyway. For big-box promotion, most companies already work with Walmart, Target and Best Buy. So they'd cut out GameStop. Big whoop. Add Amazon to the mix, and you've pretty much replaced what GameStop was providing. GameStop doesn't have a choice. They are a video games retailer. If they're not shipping video games, they're useless. And trust me, the end user doesn't give a shit. Hell, I know a subset of gamers that would cheer the world if GameStop went under. The only people that would theoretically suffer if GameStop were to be negatively impacted would be AA publishers, and they're going digital anyway; I'm talking about companies like Atlus, NIS, etc.

OBVIOUS TRIGGER WARNINGS COMING Here's the thing: no one here has made me angry, or caused me anguish. That's long done, and in the past. I was 11 when I was raped by a neighbour, in 1992, and since then, he's died. He was homeless, and if he was described to me correctly, was a broken man. But I'm not angry, because if anything, the whole thing that this thread proves is that no one truly grasps what it's like to be raped, to be a rape victim. That's understandable, because in all honesty, it's not something that one can understand until they go through it; no simulator can emulate the true loss of power and - yes - dignity that comes with it. Thankfully, I'm home for the rest of the weekend - thanks, Nemo! - so I can try to put into words something that it truly indescribable, which took me fifteen years to admit, and another four to be able to talk about publicly, in the hopes that it would help someone (it did). When it happened to me, I didn't even truly understand what I'd gone through; all I knew was that I was in tremendous pain, I was bleeding, and that I couldn't tell anyone. Hey, he was an adult, and he said if I told, the police would take me away from my mother, so he had to have been right. Call me naive, because Lord knows I have, again and again and again. But the main meme that is put out to society is that a man who loses to, or lets another man take something from him is weak. And when I was growing up, a man who lets another man have sex with him is weak. He's a "faggot". Hey, I was only 11, but that didn't matter in my head; I was just... a faggot. A faggot who didn't fight hard enough, a faggot who was weak, and broken, and probably wanted it to happen. It's really easy to say that people can't "let" their dignity be taken, but when you're raped, it's the ultimate surrender. That piece of shit took my virginity, took my innocence, took away numerous things, feelings, anything you can name, and I couldn't do anything about it. The one thing you expect to have control of in your life is your body, and when you're raped, you have lost control of your entire body. It raises doubts in your mind. Can someone else just come along and take it? Why did it happen in the first place? Why didn't you fight back? How can you retain control of your body when you lost it so totally in the first place? As I got older, and proverbial locker room talk became more and more descriptive, people would flippantly talk about rape as if it was jaywalking, or robbery. An armed robbery of your money, your possessions, etc., that's daunting, but you can recover physical possessions. How can you recover control of your body? I tried. I basically screwed anything female that couldn't get away fast enough throughout my early 20s; basically, I was trying to literally fuck the "faggot" out of me, and prove I was a real man. How stupidly naive I was. When people say that you can't "let" someone take your dignity, even after being raped, they don't get the fear of even telling someone, and what they'll think about you. They have never had to be there with a woman while they reported being raped, and then were asked what she was wearing, who she was with, how much she had to drink. She, she, she. They haven't had side-eyes glances when they've seen a man talk about being raped, and the questions as to what was wrong with him, what he did to cause it, and how weak he was. He, he, he. For both genders, we joke about being raped in prison, and all the jokes that come with that - soap on a rope, the whole nine - until you realize that if you get raped in prison - which, thankfully, I have never experienced - there is literally no escape. That is your life, every day, for the rest of your time there, and the guards won't do shit to help you. Someone will want to violently take your body, you will resist, and you will lose, every day of your life. Remember that next time you want a white collar criminal or petty thief to get a stiff jail sentence so you can have some pathetic semblance of vengeance. When we talk about "rape culture", the paragraph above is exactly what is being talked about. We have a culture of blaming the victim, instead of blaming the person doing the raping. That culture is pervasive, everywhere we look, without us even realizing it. How can I be angry at a few people much younger than I am for not getting it, when people old enough to be *my* parents don't? Just know that I've thought about suicide virtually every day of my life from the shame of what happened to me 21 years ago, and my family, friends and the opportunity to get others through this is what's kept me alive.

Even if the EU sues, it can be held up in court for a long, long time. And if that looks likely, then the EU simply won't get that business. It will become a video game wasteland again, like it was in the 80s. Dizzy isn't as good as we all remember it being. As for GameStop threatening Microsoft and Sony, both of those companies have GameStop by the balls. The only retailers that could make an impact are the big box stores that sell other stuff, like Walmart. "Pulling your videogame product? That's OK, we'll just remove all of your shit, and sell Samsung TVs instead." Good luck with that. GameStop, on the other hand, has no leverage. "Oh yeah!? You want to get rid of our beautiful used games!?!? Well, we'll just... remove both of you! Yeah! Two out of the three system manufacturers, we'll remove them from our store! We'll maintain a global presence with Nintendo products and Farmville cards! HA!" I'm not seeing it.

The DLC content in FE13 is completely, totally, 100% optional. It has *nothing* to do with the main game, unless you want to use the characters you can recruit as playable units during the game. That's optional, and extra. If anything, FE13's DLC is DLC done completely right. And honestly? The DLC characters, in the main context of the game, isn't even that fun, because... So really, the above proves that even the DLC isn't superior to what you already have. So, long story short: you have the game. You have the whole, entire game. What you're asking for is Nintendo to throw the extra shit in as well, and I don't think that's fair. This is nowhere near, say, Capcom hiding a bunch of Tekken vs. Street Fighter characters behind a DLC code.

I'll be sure to remember how I should feel regarding something I've been fighting since before you were born. Thanks for clarifying how easy it is to just keep one's sense of dignity and pride.