This Stolen Pixels does not mention City of Heroes or comment on it in any way. Yet it is the product of CoH. I’ll leave the details for the reader to figure out.
If you’re one of the people who has had trouble with The Escapist loading slow, please do poke around as see how it works for you now. Changes have been made (due partly to helpful suggestions from you folks) and I’m curious to see how things work now. I’ll leave this thread open. (Although as always I encourage you to encourage me by commenting over there.) Please do mention how the site works for you and what problems you find that might keep you away.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Hysterical!
Sloth should have been a picture of Shamus playing City of Heroes.
That was… kind of funny. Not a laugh-out-loud funny, but funny none-the-less.
Though it never loaded slow for me before, I notice it’s even faster than before. And that’s never a bad thing!
Also, I think the Sloth choice is good as it is because it breaks up the monotony of having ALL ingame shots.
That said, how did you manage to get all the iterations of Lara Croft together?
Let me tell you what I noticed immediately:
The links to other “Stolen Pixel” comments in the right gutter are FINALLY in reverse-time order. They were pretty scatter-shot before. I don’t visit the site all the time (I know, you’re shocked), but when I do, I liked to go back and make sure I’d read the one prior (you know, in case I missed it…I don’t memorize the issue numbers)…and after you got past about 10, the previous one wasn’t always in the link-list.
And yes, it loaded nice and fast.
Stolen Pixels only loads halfway when I am on dial-up here at home.
Today it loads 1/8 of the way while I am here at home with dial-up.
Rampage! Awww, the memories… :)
@ Avaz: Technically he missed one: the really polygonal one from the original and it’s expansion. He’s got all of the ones from 2 on up, but not that first one.
Actually, technically he’s missing teenage Lara from the training level of Last Revelation, and the various costumes from 2 and 3 (and possibly others as well–I stopped paying much attention from that point, I’m afraid). But he’s got one from each game except the original, anyway.
I laughed super hard at Rampage. So many innocent Saturday mornings, ruthlessly wasted in my PJs, consuming damsels in distress, oversized hamburgers, and lone infantrymen with all the caution and prudence of Tank Man…
Sorry for commenting here, but I can’t be arsed to register at a site on which I only follow one column.
Woot @ Rampage! That was my ABSOLUTE FAVORITEST GAME when I was a kid. :D
Lust and Envy were pretty funny too. Lara really has changed over her different incarnations. At least she has a somewhat realistic waist now.
Aw shucks. . I thought this thread was going to stay at seven deadly posts.
Shamus, you planning on saying that leaving comments unlocked on this was also slothful?
Noticed it’s a heaps better connection at stolen pixels (escapist mag, whatever) a while back, and still improving I think; at least on my modem. Still bugs out once in a while, but not any more than most graphics-heavy sites these days.
I still couldn’t tell you what they do, other than host your comics, mostly because their link things are all style over substance and I don’t care for blind clicking (and a quick trip to “features” to investigate was all “OMG bewbs, lol” headlines and me none the wiser, unless that is what they spend their money on, which would be a bold move to say the least).
But whatever, at least it’s functional now. Congrats. 8]
Goddamn, Tussock, I hadn’t even bothered to look around, and I thought you must have been exaggerating, but there really are no fewer than 4 features whose abstracts contain references to breasts or hot viyda gaem wimmins. Guess I’m not the target audience.
The speed is much better now, thanks for fixing it. It’s no longer a monumental effort to read the comic(which was funny as usual).
The only difficulty now is that Peer Guardian seems to block the site.
Ah, I see the biggest change is that my companies firewall now blocks Stolen Pixels unlike before. Oh well maybe I’ll remember to check it out when I get home.
In #30, the command bar that lets you navigate to previous/next strips, etc. is located on the right side, below your comments. Usually it is at the bottom of the strip on the left…
…which I would prefer if the navigation bar was at the TOP of the page (or both top and bottom?)
Thanks for the comments about the site performance. We’ve had pretty aggressive caching on the images for a while now, so generally your first visit to the site will be the slowest, and then after things should be quicker as you’ll have most things cached (except the most recent comic of course).
I did some tweaks on the server scripts to speed up compilation/caching of the pages a week or two ago, so that would explain any recent improvements you may be seeing as far as speed. Still trying to nail down the issues some people are having with not being able to parts of the site at all though.