PixlBit

I know your story well, Julian. Puberty did me no favors, along with somewhat typical teenage depression. I ballooned up in High School and hated that I was no longer the stick I was in my younger days. Senior year I finally got my shit together and started working out every other day and I got down to a solid 170... then college started and I gained 100 lbs. Soda, junk food, and repeat depression due to the challenges of school amongst a slew of other things just ruined me.

Before getting married I managed to drop 80 lbs. The doctor basically told me I was borderline for getting diabetes and that was enough to scare me into doing something about my habits. Since then I've managed to keep pretty consistent between 190 and 210. Primarily, I cut soda out of my diet and started eating simpler meals that were high in protein so I'd stay full and eat less. I also started running, which hasn't really done a tremendous amount for my weight, but generally speaking, just makes me feel better both physically and mentally.

Weight control is still something I feel like I struggle with every day and the pull to fall off routine just never seems to go away. It's really frustrating, so I know how you feel. Getting started is always the hardest part, but hopefully you can hit stride and get better. Best of luck to you man, I've got faith that you can do it!

I'm about 20 hours in on this. Another 135 hours seems so crazy. I wonder if I'll have the lasting power to make it all the way through.

I've been wanting to do some sort of embedded IM system for a while. Hopefully I can figure it out. Notifications on all article types is definitely in the mix though. I've already got a plan on how that feature will happen for anything posted to the site.

Amen to that, Matt. I'm the same way. On the rare occasion I look at the achievements, I'll simply scan them to see if there's some interesting challenge tucked away in there. If so, I might pursue it, but otherwise once I feel like I'm done with a game, I'm done.

I like getting 100% of the stuff, when that's a thing to do and I like the game, but even then it's usually not enough to get all the achievements. I've found that many of the achievements offered are silly nonsense stuff that's just not worth my time.

Yeah... the forums were taken over by the machines. Someone launched Skynet and sent the full spam bot army our way. Luckily, I was able to run some scripts and clean them up programmatically. I believe they should be usable now!

I'd love nothing more than to get them in motion, so please feel free to throw some threads up for discussion!

Content curation is definitely one of the biggest challenges to overcome with the new version. I do think the concept of an internal comment feed a la Twitter will help, but there's more curation that also needs to get done to keep relevant stuff higher in the food chain. I haven't sorted it all out yet, but as I come up with stuff I'll be posting blogs about my progress that will hopefully spark some more discussion about the direction things are headed and I can course correct if people are finding evident flaws that continue some of our current problems.

Nathan's and IPAs coming right up!

We currently have that capability on the staff side, but I'm actually planning on jettisoning it with the rewrite and using imgur instead. We had an incident some time back where I hot-deployed a site update and Tomcat went on a wild deleting spree and we lost loads of images. Since then I've hated the thought of keeping images on the server because I don't have any of the proper backups for that stuff to ensure their safety.

What I can do is perhaps embed some sort of upload function from an image hosting service that might make it seamless to add pics to the articles. I'll investigate that option while I'm working through the implementation.

YouTube posting will be much easier in the new version of the site. We actually have tight YouTube integration for the staff posts to the front page, but I'll be rolling that out for everyone with the new version.

I can certainly do the same for Twitch as well!

You'll absolutely have some more control over your profile with the new version of the site. I never went through and made the appropriate changes with the current version to support that despite having intentions to do so.