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Necro

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Blog Comments posted by Necro

    Necro

    Posted

    Sometimes Walmart carries Wavemaster-style punching bags that stand up. They can also be found at sports stores, sports sections, etc. You fill the base with sand or water, and they're nice because you don't have to mount them to the ceiling. When I was pricing them for Rob's taekwondo school, they were about $120. They commonly go on pretty good sales, though. But before you hit one, you should definitely make sure you know how to throw a proper punch so that you don't injure your hand or break your wrist (get hand wraps, boxing gloves, or fingerless gloves with padding that wrap around your wrist.) Punching and beating on a bag is definitely a great way to relieve stress without harming yourself and others (as long as you know what you're doing) and get a good workout!

    Thank-you for the information. :D That's actually one of the things that I've been trying to figure out before I buy one; I've read that even if it's not that hard, a proper punch can damage your hands if they're not wrapped, and even if they are it's good to wear gloves to be safe. I know you have to tense up your wrist and forearm to keep it from bending, but honestly outside of that I don't know much about proper punching technique. The head of the school's MMA club is my RA though, so I might ask him...

    Necro

    Posted

    They say that destroying a building or whacking an old car with a sledge hammer helps vent out some anger. To be more economic, maybe stress balls? Or just use your pillow? Or yeah, a punching bag would work.

     

    I hope the source of your anger will go away soon or at least leave your thoughts.

    Pillows are too small and too soft. They go flying when you slap them lightly, there's no response when you punch them. Stress balls never worked for me - believe me I've tried, I have a drawer full of stress toys back home - so short of taking up boxing and beating up a real person - which I don't have the mean streak in me for - a punching bag is the most I can think of.

    Eyru

    Posted

    Here's a tip: you can actually play and enjoy the game without actually spending any money on hats. I've spent 400+ hours on the thing and haven't opened a single crate. I'm crazy, I know.

    TF2 hats are like fanservice episodes. They really don't serve any practical purpose, and it can easily survive without them. But they certainly make it more fun.

    Necro

    Posted

    Many years from now, historians will praise your decision to reveal where you got this, so as to avoid the start of a nuclear war by an adolescent pyromaniac that would surely have wiped out all life on the planet.

     

     

    - :burnmad:

     

    It's literally the first result on Amazon for "Garrus" :P

    Necro

    Posted

    I agree that bigger doesn't always mean better, but on the flip side, a bigger project or a longer book is commendable for the extra time and effort put into it, especially if the quality stays high throughout the length of the project/book/movie/CD/etc.

    This is true, and the effort to make a big production should be commended. But the problem I have is when people use the length of something as an automatic, inherent positive with the piece. It's one thing to commend effort, and another entirely to say that the effort to make something long is inherently more valuable when the artist in-question could, and in the past has, released a shorter work with much more impact. Effort should not be ignored, but I'm sure Michael Bay puts a lot of effort into his movies. Heck, looking at the CGI alone I know he does. Doesn't mean his movies are good.

     

    If you want to say "Artist X put so much work to make such a long, gripping story" I'm okay with that, because that means that it's not just long, it's good, and like I said in the entry, if it's long and that length serves a purpose - for example, telling a particularly intricate story - then cool. But if you want to say "This is the longest movie X has ever directed" or something of that ilk as if it somehow makes it better than shorter works just because of its length, then I have a problem with it.

     

    It also really bugs me when people use the amount of time spent making it. Don't get me wrong, I have respect for an artist who spends years getting something exactly right, but I can respect them without liking the product. The Beatles released every single one of their albums in a smaller window than Axl Rose took to make one album. Bioware made Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Jade Empire, the first two Mass Effect games, Dragon Age, Dragon Age II, and SWTOR during the 15-year span Duke Nukem Forever spent in-development.

     

    There's also a certain point where it just gets excessive. I don't care how good it is, I would never watch a six- or eight-hour movie in one sitting.

     

     

     

     

    Heck, Animal Farm isn't even 150!

     

    That book's <150 pages scared me more than any long winded Stephen King novel ever did. Except maybe The Shining, but irrelevant.

     

    I don't have a preference for books or music collections, but for movies I tend to think that longer can sometimes be better. I just like it when a director is allowed the room to tell the story they want to tell and isn't inhibited by the demand to keep their story within a certain running time. Obviously not everything needs to be long and some things shouldn't be (*cough*Hobbitmovie*cough*) but it's always painful to walk out of a shorter movie with the reaction that a longer running time could have fleshed things out more. And that happens a heck of a lot more often than the opposite.

     

    So while I agree that making something longer does not inherently make something better, it can sometimes improve the story being told. And that does make it better.

     

    I can agree with all of this. Like I said, if something that's short can't tell its story properly in spite of its brevity, I'm not interested. But I feel like, while this does happen, what happens more often is the opposite; a movie/album/etc. comes in under time, and they end up putting in filler songs/chapters/scenes/etc. to fulfill some sort of obligation.

     

    Personally, I'd like to just allow the artist to have full, free reign in any medium, because even if I don't like it, there's a market somewhere for excessively long or excessively short pieces. That way I can enjoy what I like, they can enjoy what they like, and the only restrictions are what the artist imposes themselves. Any content is there by artistic design, not as filler or to try and be impressive or anything. But unfortunately that's not economically feasible, so it exists as what it does.

    Necro

    Posted

    Wait until you reach Mass Effect 3.

    I've beaten ME3, the reason I'm annoyed about buying another copy of ME2 is that between EA's terrible quality control and my jumping from PC to 360 to PS3, including this, I have bought seven copies of it and played it through four times, including twice in the space of one summer. :P

    • Upvote 1
    Kakaru

    Posted

    Personally I always preferred the words of Sun Tzu over Plato. "If fighting is sure to result in victory then you must fight" "There is no better weapon for rendering the enemy prone than high-yield explosives" and my personal favorite, "Sun Tzu never actually said that, have you ever even read the art of war?"

    Necro

    Posted

    Some people have started selling Windows 7 on laptops again, so that might be an idea??

     

    Of course, I mention that only because I have no clue about anything regarding the MacBooks. =/

    That helps actually, but again, this thing is still running smooth as the day I bought it, so hopefully it'll last until I finish college and can get a job and can actually afford to replace it myself with something instead of having to get a summer job to pay for a cheap $300 piece of junk - no offense to anyone on a $300 laptop - since I can't get any decent-paying jobs while in college. By then I have no doubt that Windows 7 will be long-gone. We might even be onto Windows 10 by then.

     

    Hopefully the time I need a replacement ends up being so far off that any worrying I do now is preemptive and meaningless, but in the off chance it broke tomorrow, it'd still be something I'd have to think about.

     

     

     

    My Windows 7 ASUS laptop has been running since a little before I graduated high school - so right around the three year mark right now - and still runs Minecraft and Mechwarrior Online, the only games I care about, quite well. I've seen plenty of Windows-running laptops bite the dust well before then, so there is definitely an element of chance in buying one.

    Oddly enough Asus is the brand of the one Windows laptop my family has that has lasted any significant time. Guess they're one of the good brands and it wasn't just a coincidence.

     

    Honestly, I'm a lot less worried about gaming on it - I love CS:GO, Arkham City, there are a bunch of more modern/demanding games I love(Though I can't say I'm playing Crysis 3 or anything like that), but I can subsist with just FTL, Papers Please, and maybe TF2 to go along with Minecraft and my NES games and leave the rest to my PS3, 3DS, and Wii - and more worried about the "business" stuff I use this thing for running on whatever I get.

     

    Music production and graphic design are very process-hungry, especially using professional-level programs. Plus I'm not sure how willing Adobe would be to give me Windows copies of CS6 since they're trying to phase out standalone copies in favor of a subscription service, and I'd have to completely switch over from Logic to a different audio program if I went over to Windows, which can be done, but it'd cost a lot of money(Professional programs aren't cheap!)

     

    I'm keeping my options open because again, I'm not fond of where Apple's heading, but it'd be a lot easier to stay on OS X, so I'm hoping that can be done.

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