Not all of Indiana is classified as Eastern. I'm also in Indiana, and squarely in the Central Time Zone. But you're right, the time zones in Indiana are a complete mess.

This is a pretty big shock, but I can't say that it's completely unexpected. I kind of got the impression that Taco was phoning in some of the posts of late (he hasn't commented on anything since 2009), and the stories about him visiting tech companies' campuses seemed to be some kind of effort to get this site back toward its roots.

But, without being too big of a downer, I'd like to thank Rob for all he's done and wish him the best in whatever he ends up doing.

It seems to me that they've also got a serious problem attracting new and lapsed users. For the few souls out there that haven't dipped their foot into the WoW Waters(tm) yet, they might pick up the Cataclysm box in the store and notice that it requires Wrath of the Lich King, which requires Burning Crusade, which requires Vanilla WoW, and suddenly they're looking at an investment of $120, and then $15 a month on top of that. Heck, I stopped playing shortly after Burning Crusade came out, and I'd have to blow $80 on expansions if I wanted to jump in and see the new content. That's just too steep for me.

Okay, how about this: A while back, I was browsing the entry for Pibb Xtra and found a spelling error (the author confused "access" and "assess", which I corrected, only to have it immediately reverted. I figured it was an error, so I re-fixed it, only to be accused of vandalism (they thought I was writing "asses"). That was the last time I tried to edit anything on that site.

I can't tell if you're wildly off base on purpose or not, so I'll provide a counter-example: Consider a small child. When born, it has no teeth, and when the teeth start to develop and grow in, what do they do? They cut through the gums, so to speak. So, "cutting teeth" is something that someone does when they're very young, or just starting out (as in, just starting out in life). Hence, "cutting one's teeth" has become roughly analogous to the early skills learned when starting any new endeavor.

Some of the Dragon Ball Z fighting games for the Super NES had split-screens

In the link to the "bad news for PS3 owners", there is actually a lot more info on the dev team changes:

I did when I was programming COBOL back in college... *shudder*

If you only played it once, I'd bet you didn't get the full experience, once you learn the (undocumented in the arcade version) techniques to play the thing, the game's a blast.

Since the archive is around 2 petabytes it's probably going to be a while.

Believe it or not, some people (like me) like to play games and pay attention to the little details like the "backstory" and the "raison d'être" for the things you're asked to do instead of treating the game's goals and objectives like a series of meaningless checkpoints.

Even better is the crafting interface. Crafting is such a huge part of this game, and yet it's so tough to use that it's borderline imbecilic. For instance, you get a recipe for something as a quest reward and it's displayed in your log. Once. Unless you wrote it down or have perfect recall, you're going to have to consult a fansite, on another computer, because alt-tabbing away from the game currently crashes the thing. And actually crafting a thing for a quest? You have to go to your main menu -> select your crafting option -> click 'requested items' which brings up a box with the items in it -> click the item you want to craft -> click 'OK' (I forget the verbiage since I'm not in front of it now) which fills in the materials on your crafting screen -> then click again to bring up the 'crafting minigame' where you have to pick from a few different actions that will impact the quality of the item you're attempting to make. And if you want to make multiples of the same thing? You have to go through all of those steps again. Every time! How fun!

Or the loading screens. When you're sitting there trying to log in or when you teleport somewhere, you're greeted with a black screen with "now loading" and throbber in the bottom-right corner. Wow, excitement!

Oh, and that teleporting thing? That lets you go to one of the locations around the world that you've already visited? Yeah, that uses another resource called 'anima' that regenerates at an abysmally slow rate (and I couldn't find a gauge for to see how much I had left).

I never did get the payment thing set up right. For whatever reason, Square-Enix outsourced their credit card processing to an outfit called Click and Buy that I've never heard of. Turns out that you have to create a separate account with them to handle billing, which means that I have to give some third-party my credit card information, and if I terminate my FFXIV account, I have to terminate my Click and Buy account separately, which would involve writing and sending a letter. To London. I couldn't actually get the process to complete, though (some problem with the Verified by Visa, and it was a Saturday evening, so everyone who could help was closed), so I looked at other options, I can pay with Crysta (which are like Microsoft Points or Wii Points), which are available in increments of $5 (or 500 Crysta), but to buy those, I have to register my account through Click and Buy, so it's the same stupid thing! Or I can get a Playspan 'Ultimate Game Card', which again is similar to the Crysta (with the exception that you can supposedly use the points for dozens of other online games, too), but, bafflingly, though I live in a city of almost 200,000 people, the nearest place for me to get the things is nearly 40 miles away. And, for those of you keeping score at home, the account fees (for one character) are $12.99/month (or 1299 Crysta or Ultimate Points), so if you get these ridiculous 'points', you're always going to have a surplus of them you can't use. I was able to eventually tell them that I wanted to pay for my first (free) month by using Crysta instead of my credit card, but I will not be jumping through these ridiculous flaming hoops any time soon just to continue playing this mediocre mishmash of a game.