Category Archives: My Thoughts

Codecademy/Ready Review

2017-01-06

The internet is a wonderful and horrible place, and I have long felt compelled to make my mark on it (hopefully for the better). I used to have a Geocities site. I took a class in community college where I learned the fundamentals of HTML. I still have my copy of HTML Goodies, which was a fantastic reference book in its time for newbies like me.

Every few years, I feel the urge to dive into creating websites again. This very site is the result of one such urge. Nowadays, anyone with an internet connection can build a website using WordPress or another content management system (CMS). You can download themes and change colors and fonts. But what if you want to go deeper? You are going to need some training. And thankfully, in this age of technology, there are resources for learning web development, just like Codecademy.

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Toxic Rocket League community, you win this round

sketch

What is “toxic”

What does it mean to be a toxic community? In multiplayer online video games you are bound to play against some trash-talkers. There is trash talk in physical sports, e-sports, regular life. Some people just talk trash, but they might still respect their opponent and their team. Judging a community’s toxicity is not a science, it’s more of a “feel”. When I play Titanfall 2 online, most people aren’t using voice chat, but when they are, it’s largely not “hate speech” and vitriol. So if I were to judge the Titanfall 2 community, at least on Xbox One, I would say that is not toxic, but also not especially helpful. That’s just how it “feels” to me, and your mileage may vary.

A “toxic” game on the other hand has an apparently plentiful stock of players who have zero respect for others, and they blissfully display this disregard in voice chat, text chat, and private messages. (Thanks for letting me know how “trash” I am through an Xbox Live message. The win wasn’t enough, you have to kick a guy when he’s down?) Continue reading →

Multiplayer parity is overrated: Why Scorpio should boost Xbox One games’ online performance

The landscape of console gaming is changing. Those of us who have been “in the game” for a long time are experiencing a bit of a shock with the reveal of the mid-generation refresh. Sony, with the PlayStation 4 Pro; and Microsoft, with the announced Scorpio; represent the first of their kind; more power and performance part-way through a console’s lifecycle.

These beefier-than-launch consoles are new territory, for both console makers and players. And with this more powerful hardware comes some challenging design decisions.

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