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Watching the CDL hurts my brain.

I just tried to sit down and watch some of the Call of Duty League stream from this weekend’s opening festivities in Minnesota and hoo boy, I dunno.

They’ve brought over the color scheme design ATVI’ve tried previously with Overwatch and while it works in a game set in an alternate future in the pretense of an ongoing battle between good and evil, I’m not sure that highlighting the colors during the gameplay is the ideal way to approach overcoming the catchability problem that CODXVI has.

I will never understand how they’ve allowed the game sets to include deathmatch-influenced game modes where, presumably, the random roll of where the spawn is going to put you or the randomness of the hardpoint location actually influences the match.

This is a battle for the soul of the FPS that I will freely admit to being on the losing side of.

The layout behind the stream makes a lot of sense. The info boxes on their perpetual rotation at the top of the screen is a nice touch, but they’re missing the point of giving us statistics on player performance. How about a running accuracy percentage? What about a small icon next to their name representing which of the four guns in the game they’re allowed to use that they’re actually using? I mean, at least it all looked slick.

Also, they’re promoting non-ATVI games during ad breaks? How hard up are these guys for money? Was YouTube’s exclusivity payoff not as flashy as Twitch’s from OWL’s debut?

Ahh, well, I admit I’m being slightly grumpy about the whole thing, but from what I could see, it was a solid start.

All except that part where they threw the amateur teams out in a parking garage for their tournament. Yeah, someone fucked up for not thinking through the idea that a parking garage was going to be a good venue to hold a tournament at, let alone a parking garage located in Minnesota in the middle of winter.

I suppose I was too optimistic about that MTG/CSPPA joint statement.

So yeah, I suppose I was too optimistic about that MTG/CSPPA joint statement.

MSFT release stable branch of Edge Chromium.

Yeah, you could say I’m pretty excited for this.

Ever since MSFT started including the Mac version of Outlook in on the good fun its Windows counterpart was capable of, their software’s been pretty good. I had a very public love affair with OneNote for the longest time until paying for an Office365 subscription didn’t make any sense for me considering I was already paying for plenty of space on iCloud and other solutions synced better with my devices.

When Edge Chromium was announced I was bouncing back and forth between Firefox and Opera on my PC. I’ve historically preferred actually using Edge, but for awhile, I stopped using it when running into some compatibility issues with some web-based applications I was using at the time. After ditching Edge, I switched back and forth between Firefox and Opera, but didn’t really feel compelled to stick with either one.

After exclusively using the Canary branch of Edge Chromium, I would highly recommend giving the new browser a try if you’re looking for alternatives or if you’re used to Chromium-based browsers elsewhere and you’d rather not have Google’s browser help track you across the web. And considering you can add in Chromium-compatible extensions, there’s fewer pain points to switching.