Isn’t that just as bad as giving a poor excuse to cancel?

I’d simply tell them that I’m uncomfortable and awkward in large groups of people, but if you want to do something smaller scale together, we’ll make plans.

The kind of people I’m close enough with to matter will accept that. Those who aren’t, are probably only…

If you are a high-functioning introvert like me, just avoid making plans you really know you don’t want to do in the first place. I’m at the point now in life where I only make plans I actually am interested in, and when I do have to cancel, it is for legitimate reasons.

Basically, keep your obligations—keep them few…

Moira’s dance looks like Napoleon Dynamite’s... (I know they say its from the cyber goth clip linked, but I just can’t unsee it).

Gives a whole new meaning to “Sin” City.

Champions of Norrath is one of my all time favorite games. I haven’t ever found another game that quite matched its feel and gameplay. The closest I’ve gotten is Grim Dawn on Steam, but even that falls a bit short. It’s a shame the PSX2 emulator doesn’t run the lan co-op well. Although, from what I’ve heard, the…

My fellow Pittsburgh friends and I were trying to think up a name for our city if we had a league team (which we will hopefully have someday):

Pittsburgh Industry

I hired an entire moving company for about $2000. I knew I’d be moving at a certain time in the future, so I just put aside the money over the preceding years in anticipation. Only having to pack and unpack was worth the cost.

Worse yet, it seems like character model designs sometimes make the female model based off the male skeleton rigging, or simply have no idea how female anatomy behaves or is supposed to look. The original Dragon Age and GTA5:Online have this problem in spades. It leads to broad shouldered, chunky, and disproportionate…

Let the Pikapool fanart commence!

This is a problem with “word” wheels for conversations in many games (Mass Effect, Fallout 4, etc.). It is much better to just put the actual thing the character is going to say and give us a few extra seconds to pick it.

The best thing they could do to Junkrat to make him balanced is to make his grenades hurt him again. It doesn’t make sense that Soldier and Pharah can accidently kill themselves, but Junkrat can’t. That would take care of constant grenade spam by punishing those who don’t thoughtfully time their shots.

One aspect of overlap I would see myself being able to contribute to is how digital mediums work to preserve and build awareness of built fabric. I’d be interested in studying how sites like Fort Independence in Boston receive (or don’t receive) bumps in visitation or hits on websites based on appearances in popular…

I’m playing Guild Wars 2.

Dr. Random,

Unfortunately, we are losing digital heritage rapidly. Many older games with early save systems (and even some without) ran with a CMOS battery in the cartridge. Once it died, the data contained is lost. Also, plastics degrade rapidly from UV exposure, and silicon can detach from its host board after a few decades,…

There is an amazing field of digital archaeology and preservation emerging right now. I’m a professional architectural archaeologist, so I deal mostly in physical fabric remains, but as a major video game nerd, I can’t help but worry that so much of our intellectual heritage is being lost because of changing taste and…

If Spirits Within was made today on a modern budget with improved effects, I think it’d be very well received. The story is very close to the pitch and content of modern Final Fantasy games. Heck, I’d play a Final Fantasy adaptation game of the movie set in the universe following the essential plot.

I’ve always really liked Wing Commander. It is not really that faithful to the video game, but I liked it as a late-90s low budget sci fi movie pretty decently. Maybe if I had seen it as an adult instead of as a pre-teen I might have reacted differently, but it captured the imagination of my 12 year old self pretty…

Aggressive Inline is the game whose soundtrack really stuck with me. Even all these years later, I still have many of the songs I first heard on that soundtrack on my playlist.

Let’s talk about the real hero of L.A. Noire—Rusty Galloway. “Rusty’s Razor: You blame the guy that’s banging her.” (Kidding, but I did love him.)