It is impossible to overstate how good Ryan North’s take on the Fantastic Four is. He gets them as a family, as a super-heroes, and as super-science explorers. Case in point is issue #33, released three months ago - the Fantastic Four decide to travel back to the Big Bang to fix their current predicament (Ben lost his powers due to a whole Doctor Doom crossover, and now all of them are losing their powers). Most of the issue is brainstorming how they would survive for nanoseconds in the most hostile environment possible. Then comes the sacrifice. And the epilogue of the issue are big-mind contemplations on the fact the universe is made of matter. So incredibly excellent.

They’re going into a new volume next issue (which Marvel does now, for basically any random reason that they feel like), and hopefully Ryan North will still be knocking it out of the park.

For that matter - if you haven’t already, go read his run on Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

The Atlantic’s cover story this month is on the history of originalism, tying it to the politicization of the judicial process and, in turn, tying it to America’s modern unwillingness to use the amendments process. It treads some fairly known ground including the fact that Originalism ignores that history is the study of humanity, which is never as neat and tidy as Originalist judges would have you believe.

Of course if we want to talk about amendments, my first suggestion would not be this article, but Judge John Paul Steven’s’ excellent Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Amend the Constitution (Little, Brown, and Company, 2014)

I’ve been itching for a lj like blogging platform for a while now, so I thought I would create a dreamwidth account. Social media is basically trash, so let’s see where this goes.

 I'm somewhat meh about the whole facebook/twitter connect thing. I would mind it putting a link to public posts onto my twitter and facebook stream. The comments thing is a little crazy, though. I'm glad to see that comments to protected entries automatically default to "do not crosspost", since that would be a glaring security hole.

I may, or may not link my facebook and twitter here. If so, I'll likely never cross-post comments since I'm not sure I see the point in having the conversation taken out of context.

In the end, I suspect this is livejournal's rather desperate attempt to not die - I've noticed that the frequency of livejournal posts (at last amongst my friends list, which is not the whole internet) has been sharply down.

Not much to say about my personal life at the moment. Maybe a longer post later.

In the meantime, I just posted an article about Internalization in ASP.NET to my development blog - http://netbard.blogspot.com/2010/04/quick-post-on-internationalization.html.

That counts as content, right?

So I've been playing Mass Effect 2 over the past two days or so, and have about five or six hours total into the game. Enough to start coming up with first impressions.

First, this is definitely not Mass Effect 1.5. It is apparent they put a lot of thought into what changes they would make to Mass Effect for the sequel, instead of just putting in a new story that fit with the old system. The game, over all, plays a lot less like a RPG/shooter and more like a shooter. A lot of the traditional RPG elements have been left on the cutting room floor, in the name of a focused emphasis on action.

For instance - you no longer find weapons, armor and ammunition (at least ammunition as used in Mass Effect 1, more on this in a bit) in caches around the world setting. You will instead be finding research opportunities (which can be utilized on your ship), credits, or one of four elements useful in researching upgrades. You will no longer be spending a lot of time (or any, judging by my first six hours) on an inventory screen trying to decide on the best armor, helmet and ammunition combination. The caveat to this, of course, is that I've only played six hours, and it was only towards the mid and end of Mass Effect 1 that I really started to do that. I'm not sure I see where the opportunity will arise here.

A nice incidental to this, by the way, is that you're not longer going to spend lots of time trying to keep your inventory underneath an artificial limit. I hated the item cap in Mass Effect 1. I have, in fact, hated it in every game I run into it across - the sort of management required to deal with that is simply not fun.

The basic mechanics of combat remain about the same as ever. One major difference is that you now have expendable ammunition. This changes combat drastically in that you can no longer simply rely on one gun class in all of your combats. I frequently find myself trying to decide if a shotgun, assault rifle, or sniper rifle would be the best, most efficient way to deal with any given combat situation - and the gun classes themselves have differing effects on health, armor, shields, and biotic barriers. It adds a level of strategic thought to combat which is fun. While I have only gotten two different guns from the starting load-out (a pistol and an assault rifle), the new assault rifle fires so differently than the base assault rifle that it might as well be considered a different class. When I first got the gun, I spent a couple fights wondering why I was always running out of ammunition, only to realize that the new gun uses ammunition differently than my prior assault rifle, and I was fine. I did spend a lot of time hunting around for ammunition, though, so there is also that. I imagine as I level up that it will make me also focus more on biotic and tech powers.

Exploring planets has also been streamlined, in a good way. You're no longer driving across barren, empty wastelands trying to find resources on your map - you'll instead by scanning the planet from orbit, by looking at a wavefront and moving your cursor over the planet looking for peaks. Similar changes have been done to lock-picking and hacking, which are still memory games but much more interesting memory games.

All in all? I'm having fun with Mass Effect 2, though I definitely miss some of the elements of Mass Effect 1 that they dropped. And I'm only six hours in, so there's still a lot of game to play.

Just saw the second part of The End of Time.

( Spoiler Alert! )