Last week Ars Technica ran an interesting article discussing ways that PC gamers can make their voices heard to game studios when they're upset about decisions those studios have made. I'm not sure why they narrowed in specifically on PC gamers, since I think their advice would work equally well with respect to console releases or even customer/company interactions that have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever. Perhaps it's because the majority of what they touched on was regarding anonymity within internet communities that led them to keep their focus on PC players– I'm not sure.

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NaNoWriMo has been an event that has intrigued me for a few years now. I've often thought of doing it but never actually committed the "thinking" into "doing," despite seeing it crop up every year in my friends' status updates on various social networking services. I admit to a certain level of elitism preventing me from getting involved, as well: NaNoWriMo has always seemed like an interesting idea, but in practice I always come off feeling that it's the sort of deal bored housewives do to make themselves seem more interesting– "I'm a novelist," etc. No, dear, you watch Oprah.

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After various amounts of work adjusting the layout and getting everything migrated I'm quite excited to announce the opening of ctrlclick.com, the new home of what used to be joshuameadows.com. As I've mentioned here a few times I no longer feel the content I write about here is quite appropriate to be housed under an address so specific and personal to myself, so I think that it is better kept in this new location.

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Blizzard sits at the apex of a legacy that few companies in the game industry share in; creators of not one but three influential franchises, they are also responsible for the defacto MMOG. Whether you love it or hate it it's hard to deny the impact World of Warcraft has had. World of Warcraft has just celebrated its 5th anniversary but more than that, the Warcraft franchise itself has reached the 15 year milestone.

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In a period of time to be determined (either immediately or sometime in the next few days, depending on free time and motivation), this site will be transitioning from its current domain to ctrlclick.com. I have a lot of reasons for wanting to do this; I feel that a domain name based around someone's real name probably should be full of personalized content, and that's not really been the focal point of my writing here for quite some time, so I don't feel that it's all that fitting any longer.

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Last week the body of 19 year old Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado was found on the side of a road in central Puerto Rico. The body had been decapitated, dismembered and partially burned. Both of his arms and legs had been severed, an attempt had been made to do the same with his torso, and the entirety of his body had been dumped off of an isolated street. Jorge was openly gay, well liked and very popular.

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BioWare is a developer with an extensive history in roleplaying games. One of their earliest titles, Baldur's Gate, is often lauded as revitalizing the computer RPG genre entirely as well as introducing the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ruleset to an audience that had never been exposed to it. When their 2007 sci-fi RPG Mass Effect was released on the Xbox 360, it had amassed a million in worldwide sales in its first three weeks. Dragon Age: Origins is BioWare's latest release, returning to their roots as fantasy aficionados after their forays into science fiction.

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