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The Summoner's Guidebook: Dealing with emotional stress in League of Legends
League of Legends is a frustrating game. As much as I portray myself as an unfeeling robot in the Summoner's Guidebook, I am not a paragon of precise execution and flawless decision-making. I've mentioned that I experience rage at my fellow players just as much as the next person. In fact, I probably get upset when I play more frequently than a typical player does. As many of you have probably noticed, I take League of Legends pretty seriously. I don't screw around or play oddball characters. I don't like the idea of "playing for fun," even though I like to have fun as much as the next person. Saying "I play for fun" is just an excuse to dodge responsibility for my failures, and I don't like to play that way. I like to think that my contribution in a game matters, and two to four other people are counting on me to play my best. Even though that responsibility is hard to carry sometimes, it's better to shoulder it than to mindlessly mash my face on the keyboard and expect a win. The problem is that sometimes it wears on me. I will frequently play only one game in a day if that one game ends up causing me a lot of frustration. It isn't about winning or losing; it's about dealing with the emotional frustration that comes from a game outside my control.
Totem Talk: The 3 easiest ways to improve your restoration performance
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and cohost of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how. No matter how good you are at the job you're doing, there's always something more that you can do to make yourself better. Even at the top of your game, most of us are continuously looking for ways to improve our performance -- to squeeze out a little more DPS, to survive a bit longer, to do that much more healing. While you can spend your time poring over logs or upgrading your internet to faster speeds, tweaking your stats or replacing your mouse and keyboard, I like to follow words of wisdom given to me years ago by a musician friend of mine: Sometimes you have to get real simple before you can get real good. To that effect, let's highlight the easy things you can do to improve your healing performance.
Spiritual Guidance: Can Prayer of Mending be improved?
Every week (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a UI and addons blog for WoW. Can the relationship between Prayer of Mending and Power Word: Shield be improved any further? I received an email from a distraught yet dedicated Discipline priest the other day. He's a raiding priest, first of all. So what was he upset over? It's about the interactions between our Power Word: Shield and Prayer of Mending. There are times where a quick PoM hit will land on a shielded player which results in it fading off. Why? Well because the shield has to expire first before the PoM bouncing effect occurs. It's not so bad with Holy priests because the strength of their shields are no match for Discipline shields. It does suck though since the shield just has to wear off before the PoM can shoot off to someone else. Sometimes time just runs out.
How to make a better Nintendo DS
Next-Generation's Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh acknowledges that the Nintendo DS is an industry-changing system, but still sees the portable console as an "unfinished project." He wrote up a wishlist of improvements that he feels would fulfill the handheld's potential, extending its shelf-life. And while we've already seen dozens of message board topics filled with wild-eyed suggestions and what-they-should-really-do ideas in the past, Eric's revisions actually sound half-way sane.So what are some of his seven steps for making a better Nintendo DS? Slap on some internal flash memory, paving the way for firmware updates and a Virtual Console setup for handheld games (GB/GBA/NGPC/etc.). Allow for an expandable, customizable system interface. Flesh out its WiFi support by integrating Pictochat and developing a unified online service. They're all great recommendations, but one has to wonder how implementing those changes would affect the portable's retail price. The DS probably wouldn't have been such a success if it weren't for its impulse-buy pricing. Still, we would love to see Eric's suggestions make it into the handheld's next revision.We're sure that our readers have their own ideas on what the next Nintendo DS should have. VoIP capabilities? A flux capacitor? Maybe just throw some Ds on it? Drop us a comment and let us know what you think would make a better Nintendo DS!
Surprise - Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 released with Universal goodness
Right alongside Firefox's update today, Mozilla has also brought Thunderbird up to the 1.5.0.4 (.3.2.1.12) version with a big improvement for Intel Mac owners: Universal Binary super-powers. Also in this update are security and bug fixes. Let us all take a moment of silence in remembrance of the bugs who lost their lives in the making of this update.One thing I am not sure of, however, is if that GmailUI extension we blogged earlier will work after this update. Does anyone know?
