ETAs are so helpful. When this first started yesterday morning, I assumed maybe a couple of hours of downtime - AT MOST. Now we're nearly 30 hours in, with no ETA, and my builds for alternative systems started hours behind. Learning experience for me I guess.

The best place to start is by connecting with other people who share the same passions as you. I've similarly been fascinated by astronomy since I was a young child. A few years ago I rekindled my interest by buying a telescope and joining a club in Pittsburgh. I learned more from a few casual conversations with members than I had in months and months of reading and practicing on my own. Now I practice astrophotography and engage in lots of educational and community outreach events, and I owe just about everything to the club I joined. Best of luck, and clear skies!

Hey John, I'm going to parrot what a few others have said; you might want to re-think the site name a little to avoid trademark dispute and angering the Dice.com gods. Maybe something like afterslash.org (altslash, as mentioned earlier, is too similar I think to alterslash, an existing blogroll/summary site).

I'd help in any way I can. I'll contact you later.

Or ... whatever.

Marry me.

That was EA's claim, at least initially. They appear to have been lying, or at least overstating the case substantially. The only things that seem to absolutely require an active connection are resource trading (which a lot of players never do, anyway) and the cloud-based save system.

As I understand it, the game has already been cracked to work offline. The only reason it hasn't gotten more attention is because the inability to save makes it less than perfect for regular play.

Isn't that what KOTOR was? Although I wouldn't mind a Rockstar reboot.

Well, Knights of the Old Republic was a RPG using a modified version of the D&D 2nd edition rule set, not an action-adventure game. And since Rockstar is known for their sandbox games, and KOTOR wasn't even slightly sandbox in style, with planets roughly the size of a high school gymnasium, I'd say the similarities between KOTOR and the GTA games are pretty much limited to the fact that they're both third-person 3D.

Also, since Rockstar doesn't generally produce RPGs, they wouldn't be my first choice to reboot the series.

For that matter, neither Epic (developers of the Unreal titles) or id Software, both of which you mention, publish their own work, either.

id dabbled in self-distribution in the days of the original Doom days (which was mail-order only), but for most of their history they relied on third-party publishers. Mainly Activision (who handled all their releases from Quake 2 through Doom 3), until they were finally acquired by ZeniMax and became a second-party studio there.

I'm not as familiar with Epic, but I don't believe they do much of their own publishing, either. I know most of the Unreal games were published by GT Interactive/Infogrames/Atari.

Just see what happened to Bioware when it stopped being a publisher and had to dance to EA's tune instead of listening to customers.

BioWare was never a publisher. The two Baldur's Gate games, Shattered Steel, and MDK were published by Interplay, Neverwinter Nights was published by Atari, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was published by LucasArts, and Jade Empire was published by Microsoft Game Studios (for the Xbox) and 2K Games (PC version).

I don't disagree with your larger point, though.

It's not digital books that are hurting Barnes and Noble (and previously killed competitor Borders). E-books are a successful sidebar, and will very likely continue to grow. But the biggest threat to brick and mortar stores like B&N are online retailers like Amazon, and not even their Kindle offerings.

That bothers me more than anything else, really. I'm fine with digital books, movies, whatever. I've spent too many hours packing and sorting my dead tree book collection, not to mention finding places to put it all, to mythologize the format itself. But the best books I've ever read, I've found as a result of browsing the aisles at places like Barnes and Noble, and, before them, local retailers. That's an experience Amazon hasn't managed to duplicate, and they're considerably better at trying to do so that 90% of their online peers.

That's some real deep throat shit right there, man. My eyes are like friggin' open now.
And I don't like what I see!

(i.e. your posts)

If this isn't APK, then why are you double posting, anon?
I know of only one net kook who double-posts with slight changes in the follow up when he thinks of a new burn...

Sounds like all the Thinkpads and most of the Apple lappies I've had over the years. The stickers are a bit different...mostly either political, Anime/Manga or F/OSS related. But yeah, not a business look, more "geek in the house" look. My new Lenovo Ideapad is still virgin...for now. But it will look like "Ms. Geek's current lappie" soon enough. X60T was a really nice machine.

And now Meg Whitman is finishing the job.

They also collect uber-fail CEOs.