I am listing to Messuggah right now and this is something amazing.

ok here is a method that men used since ancient times to grow up and understand the world.

1. find a good, strong and long branch, use a good knife to make it into a staff
2. find a deposit of hard rock, like flint, make a spear tip from it.
3. remove all clothes, shoes and such and put a strap of leather on you
4. make a fire, and recite this prayer: "I am a man and now I embark on a journey to find the fire to carry me through life"
5. put war paint on your chest and face
6. go to the forest and hunt a bear, you must use the spear you made.
7. kill the bear but honor him, for you just took life.
8. understand that life is temporary and every moment is lost forever, so regret nothing and cherish everything

While we all were new users once, it seems that a lot of new guys came to gamespot as of late, it seems that the whole community is being saturated by people who joined few weeks or months ago, I don't say it's a bad thing but many people that I used to see are gone. I admit I never was too involved in the community here at gamespot, heck I joined in 2003 but for many years I didn't even post in the forums or in my blog. I guess like in "Fight Club" you choose your own level of involvement. Maybe with the summer people get more bored and try to find a new community to be part of, our own virtual village.

It's funny that this "surge" of new comers happens the same time that GiantBomb opened their doors, and some GS users left, while others share time between the two. I opened an account too, even the same user name, but GiantBomb is the same place, just less mods, but the same topics, questions and debates. Both have the same threads pretty much glued to the front OT page, some users even post the same thread simultaneously at both sites. Which warrant the question: did users go to GiantBomb just feel they are part of something new, while doing the same thing they did here?

Well, GiantBomb apparently is without corporate corruption that struck the very core of Gamespot, but the forums were never affected by the main site, after all the forums are made by the users.
One thing happens all the time here on Gamespot: users that are known in the community cross the fine lines of the ToS and get banned. Some open new account and start again, some get very angry and don't come back, it's like killing your own gene pool, usually the people that get banned (I don't mean the account suicides) are borderline trolling and flaming because usually the threads they are in have some "interesting" topics, and when a mod see that and use the "ban-hammer" they actually harming the whole community, after all you don't have that many intelligent posts (no offense).

It can be compared to the 3 laws of robotics the first being "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." in this case its the not a human being but the ToS, but remember that eventually R. Daneel understood that robots must act in the interest of all humanity and not merely individuals, in this case the individual rules of the ToS sometimes harm the whole community, and without it there is no Gamespot, making the ToS obsolete. Sometimes a mod must act in the interest of the whole community, and not the dry rules of the ToS.

Of course for a mod it's much easier to follow hard rules rather then some subjective understanding of the importance of a single user to the whole community, and after reading the last sentence I understand that for a human being its impossible to act upon zeroth rule of "community before ToS", as so I predict that eventually this impossibility will destroy Gamespot, because the mods are not gods in their understanding of the community, yet the ToS will statistically remove all the meaningful users in the community.

Alrighty then soon the big day come, for the past 14 years I live in a very small village, now about 30 people live here (it was 70 when we came here), I work not far from it as a security guard in a factory, but plan to move out next month to the big city! (about 500,000 people).
And while its all calm and quiet here, I really need to get out, there are no girls here, nothing to do except gaming (thank god I have my computer). It's not like I didn't live some in other places, once I lived in Eilat, which is a tourist city, for 7 months, but it was as a waiter in a hotel, and they gave me accommodation, so it's not completely independent, after that I lived 6 months in LA, but it was with my family there and again, not in my own place and my own master sort of speak.

This time its the moment that every person reaches in his life, when he really move out into the world.
I think its important to "move out of your mother's basement" (I don't live in the basement, we don't have one) in order to keep developing as a human, and to regain some of my mental health that left without me, well, imagine living in a monastery in the mountains for many years having connection with people and friends only once a while, many periods of complete physical solitude, it's not easy, but it's what I lived through.

The reason I didn't move out earlier is that I guess I have a very serious problem of chronic procrastination that got more and more sever over the years, I guess the fact that almost nothing changed around me, made me feel that there is always time, but it might be something different, who knows...
My friend that lived here until he was 17 finished school one year earlier just so he can move our quicker, I didn't have the same willpower.

But no more! time to meet new people, see new places, having parties, and in general catch up with life and society that I only saw through the internet, or brief periods of time when I went to my friends. It's not that I live in the jungle and don't know what modern life is, I have a good computer, a car and all of the modern stuff, but almost no interaction with people. That is one important thing, because I really became sociopathic and quite depressed in the long years I lived here.

Just few more weeks, then I'll have enough money for a month or two until I find a new job in the city.

Putting the legitimacy of piracy aside, I think we had enough of these treads already.
Every day 4 new treads appear, saying another ridicules argument, giving misleading numbers and generally saying stupid things.
Then you have the same For and Against replies.

Don't you people see that pirates don't care? They may have bags with money under their beds, but they don't want to buy games, for whatever reason. Is game prices unfair? I don't know. Should companies add more protection to their games? Absolutely not. Why? because the people who crack those protections love it, every cracker love starforce, because when he get up in the morning he got a new challenge. All games are being cracked. When it comes to software, all it takes is time, nothing else. And when you have so many groups of enthusiasts that love to find a weak spot, this time decreases to hours or days. Copy protection damaging more costumers than anyone else, you think pirates that download games have any problem with it? Of course not, they already take it for granted that some sort of copy protection is in place, and that it will be cracked in a matter of days (422 days in the case of chaos theory).

What piracy does do? It gives developers more excuses when it comes to buggy, not finished games.
When asked why their game is not working well, who is to blame? Of course! The community of criminal gamers who steal all their games. The games don't work because gamers are using illegal No-CD cracks, the games don't work because who knows what. Never it is the developer who didn't beta test the game a bit more. A game is a product that people pay money for, as such, it should be as finished as possible, I understand the nature of software and hardware, and that developers cannot find all the bugs in their games, but when every single person is complaining about the same 3 problems, something is wrong with your game. Imagine you would buy a car, and when you try to make a left turn it would stop, every time, and the car manufacturer will blame the car thieves, why the car don't perform as promised? Piracy of course. Start taking responsibility for your creations and back them up, longer beta testing, more patches, that actually fix your games, and above all Stop rushing your games. A delayed game is annoying, but a broken one is outrageous. Yes games now are multi-million projects, that every day cost a lot of money, and yet it doesn't give developers and publishers any right to sell broken games and then blame piracy.

Piracy does not kill the PC platform, in fact the PC is not dying, it simple losing it dominance that it had in the late 90's early 00's, why? Because more and more people are getting consoles, its easier to develop to one hardware configuration, plus all the new people that join the gaming community are NEW. And that is what I believe is the real reason seasoned gamers are really complain about. Some companies take the easy path and develop games that bring nothing new to the scene, if not a few steps back, because they know there are many people who didn't play that kind of games before, but for a person that game for 15 years those games are a joke.

Oh, and stop with the Anti-Piracy threads already, we get the point...

I've shot millions of people on FPS, build bases, collected resources and destroyed the enemy in RTS, leveled up countless of times in RPG, won many races in, em, racing games, jumped many platforms, solved puzzles, made portals (but never got the cake) and now after about 15 years of gaming I got to the point where games no longer really excite me, it became like TV for me, another thing to burn the minutes of life. I have about 15 games right now installed, some new, some old, all of them are good games, and yet nothing, zero excitement.

I remember about 10 years ago when I was younger, when I was playing a game, I didn't judge it, I was just playing it with unconditional love, enjoying it. Now every game I play I start checking quality like some QA, graphics - check, sound - check , story - check, something new and groundbreaking - check. Any of this things missing I will be thinking that the game is not good. Games that are fun are like a lightning in a bright day for me. What happened, after all look at how far we've come, I used to play Duke Nukem 3D for weeks never getting bored, now I have crysis, yet, I don't play it any more, it's just not fun.

I'm wondering if gaming became like smoking for me, a habit, I enjoy it sometimes, but most of the time it's just to make the wait shorter. But that's the problem, I don't want it to be like that, I want to enjoy it, I want to love it again, like I used to.

Finally after 4 very bad years for gaming for me (and for that matter, the last 10 year, since my first PC where bad gaming years), I am getting a new computer!

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.0Ghz
• Mobo: P35-DS3R
• RAM: 2x1GB OCZ 800Mhz
• GPU: Powercolor X1950XT 512MB
• HDD: Western Digital 400GB
• Optical drive: LG DVD±RW GSA-H42NK x18
• Case: Thermaltake Soprano VB1000BWS
• PSU: Thermaltake TR2 Power 550W
• Monitor: Chimei 946D 19'' LCD 2ms
• Speakers: Logitech® X-230 2.1