https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FatHLHG2uGY

This thread in a nutshell.

Not really a bad hardware setup, but for the last 8-12 months I've had the most dire internet connections(for video-gaming) I've ever known.

The connection I had for 5-6 years suddenly starts giving me massive ping spikes, which after trying numerous things and contacting support, I discontinued.

My current connection has pretty stable ping, with less than 5ms of variance, but servers where I'd normally get 70-80 ping now give me 140, and to make matters worse, no amount of re-routing via a VPN or WTFast help for some inexplicable reason. Even contacted WTFast support and they told me that my ISP is a bunch of idiots doing weird shit with their routing and network infrastructure.

It's literally like I can't get good ISPs within a 2km radius of my house.

Thanks. A few tips for anyone attempting this that I forgot to mention:

If I'm not mistaken, pretty much all cables these days are made of a coil of wire wrapped around some sort of synthetic fibre based thread. Some of the wire may even be coated in a coloured enamel. Usually, you won't even be able to tell the thread is in there. To successfully work with such cabling, you need to do two things. First, take of the outermost insulation(about an inch) being very careful not to cut or damage the two wires inside. Next, twist the coil of wire the opposite direction it's currently going, exposing the fibres. Try and get the individual strands of wire and fibre as separate as possible, then pull all the fibres together and cut them as far as possible. If one or more of the wires is any colour other than copper, that most likely means it has an enamel coating. Get a lighter and briefly flick it on and off, 1-2 times, under the enamel-covered area. Get out some sandpaper, flatten the strands of wire and gently sand them to get the residue off. You'll see them gradually turn from a dusty black to a light copper colour. Test the connection with a multimeter. If there are any copper coloured cables, be sure to test them as well. If they don't seem to conduct you may need to sand them(but not burn them) too.

The regular panel-mount 3.5mm jacks are pretty damn blocky and there was absolutely no way for me to get them to fit inside the earcups of my headset. A good but trickier alternative is to find a really cheap USB sound card, take it apart and cannibalise the output jack. The tricky part is de-soldering it without melting it to a blob. Same applies for soldering it to the speaker leads. Also keep in mind that these are stereo jacks, and if your headset has two separate cables, you'll have to use two jacks, but only solder the 2 of the leads per cable.

Always test your connections at every step. You don't want to solder all your cables, stick the jack in with hot glue and close up your headset to find something isn't working. Find a simple guide on using a multimeter.

This is how I learned to buy headsets without microphone and volume control. I don't own a Siberia myself, but here are two DIY links if you're out of warranty, and feeling really adventurous. I've tried something similar to the overclock project with an old pair of Sennheiser headphones and had great success.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1292403/mod-steelseries-siberia-v2-cord-mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUalP7Of7MU

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19664301/HeadsetMod001.jpg

It's basically unhealthy to be doing either sitting or standing for extended periods. Standing gets you varicose veins, sitting ruins your back and neck(usually)

Man, I can do maybe 20 seconds on dragon flag, 10 on levers, but I can't even attempt a human flag.

As for my goals, I want to be able to do ridiculous gymnastic/calisthenics moves like human flags, planches/planche-handstand transitions, in addition to packing on around 2-3kgs of muscle.

I've always had a pretty low bodyfat percentage in the range of 7-9% but putting on any sort of weight has always been pretty hard for me if I don't stuff my face with food every few hours. I'm almost completely unconcerned with improving aesthetics since I've almost always had a lean physique. My current lean mass to body fat ratio is pretty much my ideal of a few years ago, and all I want to focus on now is improving mobility, functional strength and explosive power.

A few of my personal bests(all body-weight exercises since that's been my go-to for a long time)
Dead hang one-arm chinup
One arm pushup
Pistol squat with an added 12kgs

I think one of the greatest days of my life was the day I finally managed a one-arm chinup.

The Hulk and Martian Manhunter are my two favourite superheroes, though I do like Captain America nearly as much. I think I just really like green people.

Also, incredibly disappointed that both the Hulk and Martian Manhunter have no solo movies announced thus far.

I think even that is wishful thinking. Out of both Quake and CS, the only real reason CS made is not just because of the developer support, but because it's a game with a much lower skill ceiling than Quake, and thus far more marketable. Similarly, I think TF2 would have shared the same fate Quake has today; few decent-sized tournament, but a fairly stagnant playerbase.

Game is dead in that the devs don't intend for it to be played by a lot of people at the moment. Barring the big kickstarter push at the beginning, they don't plan to do much advertising/marketing till the game is ready for the masses, or else people who are expecting a polished game will buy it and create negative vibes for it.

If you want to find games, I think the official Reflex forums have a thread for it.

I thought that during the process of streamlining gameplay, they removed the corner clipping bug because it was completely unintuitive to newer people.

As for Reflex vs. CPM, the whole point of Relfex is to attempt to do what no arena FPS has been able to do since Quake 3; become a CS/Dota/MOBA-scale modern competitive game. If you dislike that pretext and its implications(streamlined, possibly less challenging gameplay than CPMA in certain respects) then there's still CPMA, Warsow, Nexuiz, Xonotic and whatever other arena shooters there are out there for you.
I haven't been following Reborn, so I'm not sure how its gameplay differs in terms of originality of weapons, physics, etc, but why so many people want both Reflex and Reborn to succeed massively is because there just hasn't been a marketing push, and subsequently an adopting of truly high-skill twitch shooters as popular competitive games.

Now, whether player ranking, competitive match-making, easy tournaments, advanced spectator/replay features and in-game skins will achieve mass appeal or not is another story, but I'd much rather play/support Reflex, which has this potential rather than any of the existing, established arena shooters that are never going to get any bigger in terms of playerbase.

You should be able to keep a steady 125FPS at 1280x720.

Don't die; come to the dark side, play Reflex.

I used to have a Roccat Sota, and while I love the texture and glide, I can't recommend it as it's not very durable.

I've owned a Roccat Alumic for around 18 months now, and I've loved pretty much every minute of it.
It's a tiny bit smaller than I would have liked, and you do need to clean the surface with a damp cloth once a day in addition to brushing dust off occasionally, but the glide is absolutely brilliant, and wear on both the mousepad itself and on my mouse feet has been minimal. There are two places you can tell the mousepad is not brand new, but only one is marginally relevant to surface feel/durability.

The mousepad itself is a sheet of anodized aluminum(approx 3mm thick), with two different polymer surfaces heat bonded to each side. The anodizing is starting to look a little faded in the spot my wrist makes contact with the metal, but that's just a cosmetic issue.
One problem you'll have with nearly any hard pad is surface wear, but it varies from one pad to another. With mine, for example the surface is less grainy and more reflective in the two spots that see the most mouse movement, but at the same time you can barely tell the difference in glide and texture so I really don't count that as a negative for this mousepad. Do keep in mind that the problem will be exacerbated if you allow dust to accumulate while using it.

However, the real deal-breaker for this mousepad, and a good number of hard mousepads is the edge of the mousepad on which you'll be resting your wrist. It took me literally 2-3 weeks to figure out how to use it without the bottom edge constantly making contact with the tendons in my forearm. Using the wrist rest was too awkward, so I've stuck to putting my old mousepad under this one, and leaving a 1.5cm strip of the old mousepad exposed at the bottom, on which I rest part of my arm.

In addition to all the above, keep in mind you're effectively getting two hardpads with this one. While I can understand why most people would stick to an ordinary cloth mousepad, I don't really see myself using anything other than a hardpad, or at best something like an Artisan Shidenkai.

Might want to take a look here, although there's a massive amount of content.

http://www.hookingupsmart.com/

And yes, it's a lot more worthwhile than the name would make you think.

Just bought 3 pairs for really cheap($15-ish each), and having checked out the various supposedly tell-tale signs indicating a fake, in addition to sound quality, they seem to be the real deal.

Just to be sure, does anyone know if the fakes are also made of metal?

It's funny, just looking back at all this stuff makes me want to start playing pubs again.