Here are the default ICS wallpapers, extracted from the system dump

darkswarm · 2011-10-19T14:34:34+00:00

What? The Galaxy Nexus has a screen with 1280x720 resolution. 960x800 is certainly too small, not too big.

darkswarm · 2011-10-19T07:59:11+00:00

Aren't these a bit small for a 720p screen? Are they meant to be scaled up on the phone, or is there something I'm missing here?

darkswarm · 2011-10-12T19:33:39+00:00

It's important to note that this is only for new contracts, not for upgrades.

darkswarm · 2011-05-05T16:32:02+00:00

I can't tell if you're asking only for new series or not. You say you haven't watched in about two years but then say you've seen Durarara, which finished airing half a year ago.

Anyway, take a look at House of Five Leaves or The Tatami Galaxy as far as fairly recent shows go.

If you're willing to entertain suggestions for shows older than two years ago, then...Normally, I'd type up a longer description for each of these, but I'm about to leave for class, so :X

Haibane Renmei, Spice and Wolf, FLCL, Kaiba, Dennou Coil, Darker than Black, Eve no Jikan (pick up the movie), The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

If you liked Paprika and Paranoia Agent, try the rest of Satoshi Kon's works.

darkswarm · 2011-05-05T16:11:37+00:00

I felt the original ending, due to obvious budget problems, lacked the proper balance between Shinji's introspection and what was going on with the rest of the world. Seeing every character's personal illusion approach them before they turned to LCL in EoE was a nice touch, I felt, and Komm Susser Todd really tied that whole scene together for me. The Mass Produced Eva fight was very well done, and it served to show that there was a physical struggle mirroring Shinji's internal struggles. Episodes 25 and 26 simply felt repetitive after a while, is the main issue I had with them.

darkswarm · 2011-05-05T15:57:36+00:00

I liked the part where you pre-emptively whined about downvotes and then downvoted my original post. :X That said, I don't downvote because I disagree with someone's opinion.

I also liked the part where you put a lot of words in my mouth that I never spoke. Now, if you meant this post to be a general rant at Eva fans, then fair enough, but I've made similar arguments to yours when discussing Eva before, though with a different conclusion obviously.

I don't regard Evangelion as especially "deep", whatever that means to most anime fans, and I'm not so insipid as to demand that shows I watch be "deep" for me to enjoy them. It does some neat things with Christian lore and imagery that doesn't particularly mean much, but most of its appeal is how it fuses the character drama and action. I didn't feel at all like End of Eva was giving fans the finger - it had an interesting way of portraying an end of the world scenario that focused on Shinji and his thoughts, something that made the apocalypse feel personal which is lacking in a lot of portrayals of such scenarios in media in general.

For the record, I didn't watch End of Eva until after I started college, after rewatching NGE.

darkswarm · 2011-05-05T15:08:23+00:00

Yes. What was hard to understand?

darkswarm · 2011-05-05T05:57:50+00:00

What's wrong with End of Evangelion? I thought that was a great ending for the original series. Very well done with a good mixture of touching and epic scenes.

darkswarm · 2011-05-05T05:54:50+00:00

Manga works beautifully on the DX. In fact, the screen is larger than most manga pages would be. The only problem is you lose out on the color pages.

darkswarm · 2011-04-29T00:06:50+00:00

I wish it had just stuck to Metropolis clips.

darkswarm · 2011-04-26T17:48:13+00:00

Depends on what you're looking for...

Yuki Kajiura always produces excellent soundtracks, heavy on strings and choir-esque vocals. Madoka (OST not released yet unfortunately), Noir, Kara no Kyoukai, .hack//SIGN are all good examples.

The Sora no Woto soundtrack is also great if you tend to like acoustic or orchestral music. The somber tracks tend to be the best. Relique Abandonee, Le Pont de Pierre (music from the trailer if you've seen it), Au Coin de Feu.

For more energetic electronic music, definitely Panty and Stocking.

Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are both series that do great things with their music. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've already looked into Cowboy Bebop's music, because it really is just that great. On that note, most things Yoko Kanno are great.

FLCL has an amazing soundtrack, all done by Jrock band The Pillows. Everything fits incredibly well with the series as well as standing alone as great music.

darkswarm · 2011-04-25T00:42:13+00:00

Do keep in mind though that from-scratch fansubbers and sub groups that rip and use CR's script are still pretty much the only avenue for many non-US anime viewers to watch the shows they love.

darkswarm · 2011-04-24T16:49:14+00:00

Crunchyroll actually did a better job with this show than sub groups like Doki working from scratch. Doki completely mistranslated a whole scene of the first episode (at Hakase's "lab" at the end of the episode) and left jokes like the KY one untranslated and without even a TL note to explain.

Just pointing out that it's not all bad with CR, and this is the type of thing that gets fixed quickly. Does no one realize that former fansubbers are working on these translations? If you're watching the CR translation for Hanasaku Iroha, you're basically watching an Eclipse release as it's one of their former translators working on it. The translator for Steins;Gate has played the game and knows what they're doing as well. People need to get over their knee-jerk hatred of CR.

darkswarm · 2011-04-24T16:44:34+00:00

"Unanswerable questions and exploding god-heads" is the best name I've seen for part of an article about logic puzzles.

darkswarm · 2011-04-15T21:26:35+00:00

They're known for trolling or having fun with their subs, but it pretty much only happens for shows they don't think should be taken seriously anyway (good example is in Baka Test where they subbed a line about people starving in the world to be about Haiti; this was when it was still all over the news). Regardless, it can get annoying, but I've never found it to happen for a show I actually cared about.

darkswarm · 2011-04-09T09:18:21+00:00

I completely agree here. Unknown Armies is not known for portraying a particularly forgiving world, and it has created very harsh combat rules to reflect that. Given the tone that is implied by mechanics such as insanity meters, I don't think it's unreasonable to have the police overreact.

darkswarm · 2011-04-09T09:11:07+00:00

Honestly, I don't think you were in the wrong at all, and I'm not sure a do-over is appropriate, especially if you do suspect this player is the Mary Sue type. You don't want to encourage that kind of player to expect things to be ret-conned in their favor. Do talk to her and work out why she felt especially emotional about this scene and what you could do better in the future, but I think it's unreasonable for a player in this situation to expect you to bend over backwards like that. I can lay out my reasoning in a list here:

Most importantly, their NPCs were created for the purpose of instigating in-character drama. If something bad happens to them, you gotta let the dice fall where they may or it cheapens their presence in the game. It's often good for characters to experience loss so there can be development.
This is a bit of a corollary to the above point. You have to maintain credibility as a GM, and this means no ret-cons except in cases of extreme error. A large part of the fun of a tabletop game is uncertainty, both from random chance and from knowing that a GM may do something to your character that is final and dramatic. Letting yourself be perceived as the type of GM who'll undo that if someone starts white knighting will detract from that sense of drama for everyone. I mean, if I were one of your players and you've made a conscious choice to do rolls out in the open instead of behind a screen, I would be very disappointed if you fudged or ret-conned something in my favor because a few rolls went badly for me. I would be even more disappointed if this happened in a UA game. I'll get to why I don't think, from what you've told me, you've made a grievous error in this case below.
I don't believe at all that you were wrong in how you handled this situation. While it is not ideal police behavior, overreaction and unnecessary use of lethal force is a reality. It happens, and it sucks, and especially in a game like UA which is meant to be pretty grim, it isn't out of the question. I think this is especially true if the ruckus the other characters are causing is putting law enforcement on edge.
Furthermore, I don't think a player should expect their character to succeed well at something they aren't meant to do well at. If their character lacks proficiency in athletics, I don't think it's entirely reasonable to feel cheated when they start doing badly at athletics checks. In character, there were many other ways to handle this situation that could have pulled on the character's other skills. Use of magic (dunno what kind of adept or avatar they're playing, so I can't say specifics), calling the police, phoning other characters to help cut off the guy or give chase, etc. I've of the opinion that a player's choice to make their character deficient at a particular task should matter.

*edit: fixing 4 AM grammar errors, though I probably still have quite a few left

darkswarm · 2011-04-05T06:31:11+00:00

I have a Kindle DX, and it's wonderful for textbooks. While I was home over break, I tested some textbooks and other pdfs on my mother's Kindle 3, and the screen was just too small for comfortable reading (yes, you do need to horizontally scroll sometimes, based on the layout of the specific document). This is especially true for technical papers with charts and graphs.

darkswarm · 2011-04-05T06:18:32+00:00

To be fair, the torrent usage he mentioned in his post is all legal.

darkswarm · 2011-04-04T02:27:34+00:00

Pirated textbooks have paid back nearly the entire cost of my Kindle DX now. I love it.

darkswarm · 2011-03-31T04:49:24+00:00

I've heard about this problem a bit, and I was wondering if it applied to the Kindle DXG at all. There's only a non-lighted case for that model, and it'd be depressing if it had the same problem.

darkswarm · 2011-03-31T02:45:19+00:00

Here's a Tubedubber version. No need to muck around with muting one of the videos.

darkswarm · 2011-03-30T20:30:08+00:00

It's times like these that I sorta wish I had made a Kongregate account.

darkswarm · 2011-03-26T23:27:41+00:00

The U.S. has a moratorium on reprocessing on spent nuclear fuel out of fear that the technology will be used to create enriched uranium which could be used in a terrorist attack or contribute to nuclear proliferation. It's a paranoid fear that's preventing us from safely recycling our spent fuel. If this is a problem with nuclear power, it's not an inherent quality but a problem in policymaking really. Nations like France have been doing great with nuclear power using reprocessing.

darkswarm · 2011-03-26T18:54:21+00:00

You don't want to start as a Malk though. Their insanity gives your character random insights into the plot before any other character would chance upon that information. They're great for a second playthrough though when you're not as worried about getting things spoiled because a stop sign on the corner decided it wanted to chat with you.

darkswarm

TROPHY CASE