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crabcore!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's mostly the mask thing. It makes you look like some kind of S&M gimp. Coupled with the pant, it really makes for one stomach-turning ensemble.

FWIW, I have the same bonus points showing up and I didn't do shit.

that's no mask bro.

Just got a email called my personalized Xbox News, they show a breakdown of my time spent on xbox live and how much time it took to complete certain games. I would love to see this feature every month.

I did as well.

I spent a ton of time in Netflix and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.

A random blog broke this news yesterday and I've been trying since then to get back "pinata242" since I was prevented from using it again when I got the 360. It seems like an awful waste of 800 points but, dammit, it's mine!

But what are you going to do when somebody comes along and claims pinata243?

Burn SLC to the ground.

The power supply on my new-ish slim model has gone bad. I guess the fan inside it stopped working, because it overheats after about 30-45 minutes of playtime and then the light goes from green to red and shuts down the Xbox instantly and without warning. Not cool. It was happening only every once in a while at first, but it quickly changed to a consistent and unavoidable behavior.

I tried most of the suggestions on the support site, but none of those worked (surprise!). I called support and they're going to replace it since it's still within warranty, but I have to send them the bad one before they'll ship the new one. Kind of a blessing in disguise since I have midterms in 2 weeks and thus far this semester I've spent a little too much time playing through the Renaissance in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and not enough time reading works from the Renaissance. I was looking forward to the new Fable III and Dead Space 2 DLC, plus BG&E, but I suppose those can wait.

I know what I'm getting you for your birthday!

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/unleash

Looks flammable to me. Go for it!

http://www.figureprints.com/xbox/

Too bad that you can't use most (all?) of the licensed stuff.

I think that would be pretty cool to have but I don't know if it's sixty dollars cool.

Has there been any word on what the spring update will be?

Avatar Kinect
Hulu+
Netflix-Kinect integration

Not much else that's been announced.

I'm kind of pissed at Microsoft now. It seems that even the new slim 360s are prone to issues. Over the past month or so, here's what I've gone through:

1) Started getting the E68 error with hard drive. Around the same time, the console itself started having problems too (randomly turning itself off and on).
2) Replace console.
3) New console arrives. Console issues resolved. Hard drive still causes E68 error.
4) Replace hard drive.
5) New hard drive arrives. Works for about a day. Then I start getting E68 issues again.

I guess I'll start the process to replace the hard drive again. Thing is, this latest one was a brand new retail boxed product that MS sent to me as a replacement. I don't know if it's really an issue with the hard drive, or if the refurbished console is somehow causing the problems. Honestly, if I go through the HDD replacement process again and it still doesn't work, I may just use a USB hub and several 16GB USB memory sticks, because my patience is really wearing thin. I love a lot of things about the Xbox 360, but the QA and hardware quality has always been bottom-of-the-barrel shit in my experience.

The thing only supports 2 USB sticks.

So, when a HDD goes out like that, what happens with your saves? Are they lost or can you get into the drive long enough to transfer?

Fortunately, it was functional enough for me to rescue all of my saves before I sent it in. I backed the saves up onto an external HDD and also onto my PC. If I had lost my Mass Effect 1 and 2 saves, I would've been inconsolable.

I could probably get by with 32 GB of USB storage if I had to, rather than repeatedly sending in 250 GB HDDs and consoles and hoping for the luck of the draw. 16 GB for Rock Band songs and 16 GB for saves and whichever XBLA games, indie games, and demos I'm currently playing.

I bitch about the PS3 for many things, but at least they use generic laptop hard drives and let you easily swap them out yourself. If only Microsoft was willing to support such a radical concept.

Just googled this E68 error, it seems it's an issue with the hard drive. The good news for me is that since I have two Xboxes I use an USB drive for all my saves.

Is this E68 error pretty common with the Slims?

I don't know how common it is. When I searched for E68 info, I saw a fair number of posts about it from summer 2010 onwards. So, there are definitely other people experiencing this problem.

The whole experience has really soured me on the new 250 GB slim HDDs.

"From the creators of Windows ME comes the Xbox 360!"

MS seriously needs to get their QA better.

There's a new thing called "Live Labs" on the "My Community" section of the Dashboard. Download a 3.21mb app and run it to help MS study network connectivity and traffic.

Obviously you can't do anything else while it's running, but if you let it run for 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 6 hours (cumulatively, not consecutively) you can get some new avatar items.

Mine is running and should be done before I'm ready to use it anyway.