PixlBit

The orca watches sound amazing, it's one thing I didn't think about till now. Whenever I think about moving to WA I think about searching for lighthouses, and hiking around Olympic National Park. Now that you mentioned orca watches happen up there it'll have to be a must for me when I move out there.

Watching Blackfish made me sad and angry. I didn't know any of Tilikum's story going into it so it was all fresh. As heartbreaking as Blackfish was to watch I learned a lot about how big their brains are, how they can experience intense emotions, and how important the pods/socialization/solidarity are to orcas. I'm stunned and fascinated by how intelligent and social they are, it's like nothing else I've ever seen or heard of before. In the documentary The Whale about the orca Luna off the coast of Vancouver Island one of the filmakers was mentioning how there's some people who look to outer space hoping to find intelligent life and have a transcendent experience with a unique being, but he felt those feelings and got that experience here on Earth by being close to Luna and socializing with him.

I think it's generally super interesting to study intelligence in creatures whether it's humans, felines, apes, etc, but learning about orcas is something on a different level. Saying they're like humans seems kind of cruel because they seem a little nicer than us lol, but I think you'd understand what I mean. It's almost like coming across a human-like alien, like a human in the sea. Similar to us in a lot of ways yet completely alien. Ancient and evolving in their own ways with their own awareness, feelings, families, and diversity. Gosh they're an infinitely fascinating and mind blowing evolution of life; orcas are something amazing.

I'm excited that you're back at work in the park now, it usually means even more neat pictures of the wildlife and things you come across. I always love the pictures.

I've been using netflix to watch some documentaries lately. I watched all the orca related docs I could find. First I saw Blackfish, which chronicles the story of the male orca Tilikum whom was captured and stolen from his family as a baby and then has gone the rest of his life in captivity, killed two trainers, and really has had a heartbreaking story. I never realized how much misinformation and nastiness has gone on around sea parks over the years.

Then I saw one called The Whale about a male orca Luna that got lost or seperated from his pod as a kid and managed to survive right off the coast of Vancouver Island and began socializing with the humans, and people were unsure of what to do about it. The native First Nations believed Luna to be the reincarnation of their late tribal leader, the local government wanted to keep people from interacting with Luna so they could keep all parties safe, and all the citizens were developing relationships with him and going out on their boats to spend time and play with him.

Then I saw a short older Discovery tv special about orcas that I'd already seen but wanted to rewatch on netflix. They talked about their intelligence, the different varieties of orcas, transient orcas and how they adapt to hunt new prey in new places around the world. Evidence of orcas killing white sharks as well as their dolphin cousins was probably the craziest thing in that special. It was a pretty okay show but it was mostly about hunting. I prefer the documentaries that talk about orca pods, the emotional capacity and behavior of orcas, and the life long solidarity pods have.

This is good news, it means you guys can get that Flappy Bird rip-off Dark Souls II out of the way and focus on reviewing new hot masterpieces like Goat Simulator and the new Rambo video game. Get on it.

I'm real excited for VR and the possibilties it could offer. 1st person games are my favorite types of games from stealth games like Thief and Dishonored to shooters like Half Life to puzzlers like Portal to exploration games like Myst and the upcoming The Witness game. VR tech could be the perfect way to play the particular games I enjoy most.

You could create some truly awesome 1st person detective games with VR. You could focus more on exploration, examination, and investigative work instead of having to settle for an action game like Arkham City or LA Noir that has some lite detective mechanics mixed in with the action game that it is at its core. You could see indie games and/or smaller budget big studio games that could focus on creating a detective game from the ground up without having to rely on shooting to progress the game.

VR doesn't take anything away from anybody, it's not there to replace anything or get rid of genres, it's there to open new possibilities. Gaming is more diverse than ever before, there's a little something for everybody out there, and I think a lot of people are trying to expand that variety further, which is what we need. VR is a tool that might help bring some new variety and experiences out. There's a lot of creative people and developers who are exceedingly passionate and excited about what they could do with VR, that's a really good sign.

I remember some assholes harassing you over Gutterdelve, was it from those dudes, did they actually end up coming here? We have a user base that seems pretty active and signs on regularly to check up on things, and the same goes for a lot of the staff, and they really love the community we have ,so altogether I agree with you and I think we have a top to bottom system where people seem to keep an eye out for trolls and people who are destructive.

I'm scared of the gaming communities and "industry" at large, I don't consider myself to be a part of it even though I'm heading towards game programming school, I probably actively avoid it all to be honest. Maybe the more accurate way to put it is that I'm hoping to avoid the public side of it. Pixlbit is that little oasis where we have good staff who produce interesting content, and a relatively small but tight knit enthusiast community that looks out for one another and gets along well.

I'm happy we have this place Ben, I wouldn't want to try and make friends or fit in over at a much bigger site. Not that there aren't plenty of good people all around the place I'm sure, but there's just a lot more noise in the process of finding those good people I bet. Lots of bad eggs that would just add stress for me.

That's great you got into TF2 Alex, that's one of my favorites. I love the classes, especially the Engineer and the Scout. When I play capture the flag I start as a Scout and try to rush to get the intelligence before people can settle in and put up sentries. Once people have set up defenses I usually switch to Engineer as long as there's people on the team who are doing the offense. However, sometimes I end up on teams where EVERYBODY wants to play defense so I end up having to be an offense dude like a spy or soldier lol.

I don't like any of the writers you mentioned so I have no reason to defend them, but by far the greatest idiocy I see in the industry is from gamers and people in comment sections and on Twitter. There's a lot of writers who either aren't very good or in a lot of cases they actually are kinda good but they have agendas I might not agree with. Or certain ones might have values I agree with but they express it in extremely exclusive and condescending ways. Whatever the individual cases might be, in most cases at least those writers aren't tossing out death threats, rape threats, harrassing people, and threatening people's families. For some public personalities that kind of abuse and bullshit is a daily occurance.

The internet is a trash pile and you can find an occassional small oasis if you're lucky. There's a lot of shitty people out there in gaming communities who don't know how to think about what they say before they say it, control their temper, or take responsibility for their words. I would hate to be a public face in this industry whether it be a designer, paid writer, or just a popular blogger somewhere.

The types of internet behavior some people seem to have developed is a million times more disturbing than any of the agenda-articles I've seen written. Ever. All combined. People can learn to write better and articulate their ideas in ways that aren't condescending or exclusionary, if they really want to get better that is. But on the community side and knee-jerk social media side of things, people who have no impulse control, unrepentant rage, and no online conscience are the ones with the much bigger issues to work through. Social media is like the modern world's town square, and it's the type of town square where anybody from any corner of the world can instantly become part of the lynch mob and burn the witch at the stake, whoever the witch happens to be that day, whatever visable personality happens to have an opinion, be a dick that day, or just be a human.

I can't think of any times we have had to worry about that here, we have a pretty tight knit community with lots of good people who foster an accepting environment, and when people disagree it doesn't lead to flame wars, which I'm glad for. It's one of the biggest reasons I like our family we have going here. Venturing out into other bigger communities is kind of a nightmare, you can easily get lost in the rabble of hateful community members and people who think it's okay to be psycho online. Imagine if the way so many people acted and raged online was translated into real life, face-to-face interaction. We would have an honest to God apocalypse. There isn't a week that goes by where I'm not thankful we have this kind of atmosphere at Pixlbit, we can kind of be in here and look out at the craziness instead of be right in the middle of it.

I want new Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance (set in Forgotten Realms D&D) and Champions of Norrath (set in Everquest) action rpg games. Diablo III scratches many of the itches those games gave me, but it's still not the same.

Every single Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy game. Doesn't really bother me either.

At the soonest I'll get a PS4 between this holiday and next summer I bet. I need to start pouring all my money into school this year and next, so I don't know how much I'll be able to invest into gaming at all, or my reading, etc.

The most interesting thing about next gen games is the setting in Second Son. I never played the first two and I honestly don't care about the game or the action, it doesn't look particularly up my alley, but the fact that they apparently tried so hard to recreate Seattle makes me want to play it as a tour guide of the city. Once I'm done with these calculus, physics, and computer science classes at our community college I'm planning to apply to DigiPen in Redmond outside of Seattle. If I end up getting accepted I'll obviously move out there to live, so having a high fidelity AAA game that's trying to recreate the feel and layout of Seattle accurately is hugely appealing to me. I could get to know the area a little bit, virtually.