Like Facebook, its a much better experience as your network grows.  Preferably with people you know or associate with.  It kinda blew up like everything does when Hollywood catches wind, before it was mainly technophiles on there.  It's also an acquired taste.  My first year on it I barely posted, now I tweet daily and it goes to my Facebook so I get comments on both sides. 

I just realized I never posted mine on here:

http://twitter.com/chrisz

Notebook and a pen. 

Good shit Kyle.

Get a day job.

Computer time at school for me was Conan the Barbarian and Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego on the Apple IIe.  Oh, Karateka, Moon Patrol and Burger Time, hell yea.

Pigs are smarter and more caring than dogs. Unfortunately dogs don't taste good.

The cooks at your local Chinese food joint disagree.

HAHA This is great.  I love the "Living on the Edge" chiptune.  I agree that it should be more clear what clenching does, like a visible multiplier.

DXT compression is going to be horrible at sprites that small since it works in 4x4 blocks.  My point was that in the high resolution sprite level that people were bringing up, the 4 colors the BC algorithm chooses per block will more closely represent that block when the original image isnt 16x32 (like that Mario sprite).  With sprites that small video memory will never be an issue.  Even if you had a million characters they won't (or shouldn't) be in memory at the same time.

Think of games like Guilty Gear, Alien Hominid, or Castle Crashers where the sprites are high resolution and colors are repeated several times (or are varients) across the texture.  Compression works really well here.

Also the BC6 and BC7 formats that are part of DXGI 1.1 for Windows 7 (and eventually Vista) are much more complex and produce far fewer blocking artifacts, although this is more of an issue for higher-frequency textures at larger resolutions.

From talking to people that work/worked with him, he really is a douche and it's not some public persona.

Lyx, while your arguments make complete sense and a correct in a sense, remember parents in America have a completely different mindset which is indeed very moral and protectionist.  These morals are more often than not Puritanical and clearly defined.  I'm all for more information around ratings because the alternative is censorship.  Parents can't scream bloody murder at the industry because look, you knew exactly what this game had to offer and you went ahead and bought it anyway.  It shifts responsibility over to the parents (where it should be) rather than the artists that shouldn't have to worry about censoring themselves.  As long as stores stick to the ESRB guidelines when selling games to minors, this is a very good system that should keep both sides happy.

The last few levels are a bitch, but I loved it and hope to see more content for it in the future.

Also, that first theme sounds a lot like Doug (Nickelodeon cartoon from the early 90s):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5nCnC6eSxw

What I find most daunting about most gamers is how terrible their taste in related media is.

typically it's like

books: tolkein, ender's game
movies: matrix, fight club

i wonder if games affect what one likes in other genres, because the books and movies gamers tend to like are a lot like games

I think that's a very general statement, but I'm judging by the taste in books and movies of "gamers" (I hate that word as much as "indie") that I know so I might be wrong.  I've seen enough differences in taste... but maybe that's just my generation that while we had and played video games a lot, they weren't as cookie cutter as they are today and didn't affect our tastes elsewhere.  Games are such a huge part of society now and have such common themes that it's hard to escape their influence when you're young.  When I was a kid, the only video game commercials I remember seeing were for Zelda 2 and Mario 3.  In any case, the social acceptance and integration of video games into 21st century culture is a whole other dicussion...

And it doesn't really take away from his point that the violence in one game is different from the violence in the other, yet the rating system doesn't account for that.  There could also be far greater differences that expose this flaw.  For example (although this is extreme and unlikely), a game where you kill children and hear them suffer would get a Strong Violence rating along with a game like Left 4 Dead.  You could argue that the violence in the first game is far more impacting and likely disturbing than the superficial and sometimes comedic violence in the second game. 

I think the solution was already mentioned to describe the justification for a certain rating.  I think this is a good idea and the TV rating system does this to a much smaller extent (TV-17 for drug use, suggestive sexual language, etc.).

dspencer, what platform/graphics API are you using?  For DirectX/XNA apps you can use PIX which has several modes that have helped me many times in the past.  It lets you take single frame captures of API calls, data over time, and a real-time overlay with a lot of nifty data on draw/set/create calls.

For anything else, and assuming you're working in 3D or through an engine/API that is HW accelerated, you can get vendor specific profiling tools from nVidia and ATI (PerfHUD, etc.).

This is assuming your bottleneck is on the graphics side and not in collision and AI.  I wish I could give you some good sources, but I'd recommend doing a quick search on profiling.  A basic profiler is pretty simple to write and instrument your code with (ideally in #ifdef DEBUG blocks).

EDIT:
A quick runthrough of the algorithms in some of your obvious performance impacting subsystems will help too.  For example, checking if you're doing more collision checks than you need to, taking advantage of early-outs whenever possible, caching results, etc.  Cache coherency is also a big problem sometimes, for example for particle systems you should try to preallocate a ring buffer of particles rather than allocate them on the fly since that will destroy your cache.  Make sure you're not constantly randomly accessing memory that is obviously non-adjacent, such as in scene traversal for collision and rendering.

Whoa I had no idea you were (or used to be) local!  It's even more tempting now since I live in Bothell.  Crazy.  I'll let you know.

Oh man, I wish I knew about that place when I went to GDC last year.  Looks cool.

I agree, I meant in addition to the 360 pad. 

I'm extremely jealous of those cabs Cthulhu... if I had room I'd buy the first one off you, but right now I think my wife would kill me.

Do yourself a favor and get an arcade stick for SF4 (are they still doing a PC port?), you can use the Xbox ones on PC AFAIK but you'd might wanna make sure first.  I've heard the one I use works on PC.  Look for Hori EX2 on eBay.  The SF4 Horis are nice too, specifically the Tournament Edition stick.

I didn't know about the Events feature, that could work if someone with the permissions could take charge of that.  It's just sad to see our server at 0/24 every time I log in to Steam.