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Kelandon

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Everything posted by Kelandon

  1. Harehunter, you often cite the most determined and unrepentant criminals as if they are the only ones who do harm with guns. This is untrue. Most gun violence consists of crimes of opportunity. Most gun violence is not premeditated. It is not committed by people who have links to organized crime or gun trafficking. It is committed because a relatively ordinary person was in the wrong place at the wrong time with a gun. That's not an opinion; that's a statistic. And thus far, you've engaged in this conversation without ever coming to grips with that fact.
  2. This reminds me of the other argument that often bothers me. People often say something like, "It's not law-abiding citizens that you have to worry about, but these terrible murderers and criminals!" But I don't think it's actually true that most preventable gun incidents (including accidents and suicides) are committed by those who have previously committed such heinous acts that they are identifiable as "people who already have a complete disregard for the law." I don't have the statistics at hand, but I suspect that most of the harm from guns comes from those who have not previously committed serious crimes. Sure, it's only those who will in the future do serious harm with guns who need to be deterred, but those people are indistinguishable from law-abiding citizens before they commit those acts. In other words, if you're going to deter gun violence, you have to deter (currently) law-abiding citizens, because they are the ones who (in the future) are going to break the laws. Again, I'm not making a normative statement about what the laws ought to be, just an attempt at a positive analysis of the factual background. (And Alo sniped me while I was in the bathroom. Well, I wouldn't expect anything less.) If I'm not mis-remembering Criminal Law last spring (which I might be), in the United States, at least, this depends on the exact law (both statutory and common) of your state. There may be circumstances in which you can say something like, "I know he was fleeing, but I thought he was leaving the room to get a gun from his car and shoot me, so I still was in reasonable fear of my life."
  3. I think I've said this before on these boards, but the Second Amendment is probably the part of the Constitution that is most removed from its original context and purpose because of the changes in society and technology since 1791. The purpose of the Second Amendment is plain from its text. It was to enable state militias. A state militia, at the time, just issued a call to the citizens of the state to gather up. It didn't issue guns, provide any training, or do anything like what the federal military does today. The citizens had to bring their own guns and know how to use them. And yes, the state militias might have been intended to be a counterbalance to federal power and a last stand against a tyrannical takeover by a monarch or dictator or something. There was some idea that if the federal government grew too oppressive, the states could resist it through their militias, or at least there were some mumblings of that nature; I'm not clear on how widely this sentiment was shared among the Founders. You have to remember that when people actually took it into their heads to do this, Lincoln (who was himself something of an expert on the law) believed that they were acting in complete violation of the Constitution and the will of the Founders. But the world has changed since 1791. State militias no longer exist. Citizens don't bring their own guns to military service anymore. The military provides training when people do enlist, so it's no longer necessary for every citizen to know how to use a gun. Those who say that an armed citizenry can resist a tyrannical government typically can't cite an American example of private citizens with guns changing the course of a war more recently than the 19th century, and I think that's telling. The reality is that an armed citizenry can't do anything at all against a twenty-first century government, at least not one with the kind of weaponry that the American military has. Today, the federal government has precision missiles, drones, and other kinds of technology that pretty much render any gun that you might purchase moot. You can't resist the federal government by force. That option simply no longer exists, and it was never really supposed to be an option for some random individual; it was supposed to be the state, acting in concert, as a militia, that was supposed to do it (to the extent that anyone was supposed to do it, which, as I've said, is pretty questionable in the first place). So what do we do with the Second Amendment? The explicit purpose of the Amendment (state militias) no longer applies at all. People present other reasons private citizens might have reason to own guns (hunting, self-defense), but we have to weigh that against the specter of gun violence that hangs over any conversation of guns. I did ultimately find the old studies, and as far as anyone can tell, buying a gun for self-defense is, on average, a terrible bet. It's much more likely to be used to harm someone in the household than to protect someone in the household (again, on average). I've not yet made an argument as to what the law ought to be, though people who read what I write on guns tend to assume that I'm in favor of strong gun control. It's interesting that people think that, when I think that I'm just describing the factual background to the discussion.
  4. To show their opposition to skeleton control laws, politicians talk at great length about the skeletons in their closets.
  5. Probably not a glitch, just way more webbed than you realized. You need to wait for as many turns as your character has Webbed levels, so you may have needed to wait for 40 or 50 turns.
  6. I'm contending that one can deal with the "even more" gun control regulation when it is proposed, not before anyone has ever thought of it. Down your line of reasoning lies madness.
  7. The OP here reminds me of a slippery-slope argument that people often make in the context of gun control: banning whatever is under consideration (say, assault rifles) is just the first step towards banning all guns and instituting death camps and.... My reaction is typically, "Huh?" No one's proposing banning all guns, building death camps, etc. If someone did, we would talk about that (and presumably reject the death camps, I would think). But we're talking about a completely different policy, so quit changing the subject. The reason the OP reminds me of that is that Brocktree's position appears to be that any attempt at all to regulate the possession or sale of firearms leads to banning video game controllers. To which my reaction is, and I repeat myself, "Huh?" No, a law banning gun imitations leads to banning video game controllers. It is entirely possible to have a legal system that regulates at least some aspect of gun ownership without, say, forbidding people from owning things that don't fire actual bullets. When analyzed literally, the OP is so silly that I assume it is an attempt at some kind of humor or irony, but the thing is, people say this stuff with a straight face, too, and it's hard to tell the difference.
  8. Play one of mine. You'll be cured of this sense of beauty in no time.
  9. One of these days, I'm actually going to release my latest scenario, and... well, no one will care. But at least it will bring me some kind of closure.
  10. I'm starting to warm to the idea of the Redbeard fight. I played it on Normal, and it was okay, but it didn't occur to me until about halfway through that you're really much better off if you can lure Redbeard into one of the side chambers so that you can take down soul jars and him at the same time. I suspect that if you hoard items (as I did) and get him in the right spot, you can just whale on him and the jars. Well, except that the main issue I've consistently had with the fight is that I can't figure out how to do enough damage to the soul jars to get rid of enough of them that Redbeard can take reasonable amounts of damage. It seems as though you need to be able to keep the number down to no more than one or two in any given turn or else he's pretty much immune to everything, but you have to do a lot of damage every turn to be able to do that, and I never did solve that problem on anything higher than Normal. (To be fair, i didn't really try on the one playthrough when I might've been able to.) If you can't do it right, then you're stuck doing very little for a few turns until you can kill enough soul jars all at once and then trying to take advantage of that one vulnerability in that turn, and then you repeat. You spend many turns doing nothing just to get one turn of doing something. This works, but it's boring. And there's something to be said against a fight in which the puzzle is figuring out how to make the fight not annoying.
  11. I guess it's not as snappy a joke if you add the word "sometimes."
  12. I never got a BS, and only one of my four subject areas is a hard science.
  13. You'd think that Jeff would realize that naming two series with words that start with "Av" would be a bad idea. When Avadon 2 comes out, we're going to have to start talking about AN2 (for AverNum) and AD2 (for AvaDon), to distinguish between the two and fit with our GF (GeneForge) and NG (NetherGate) system of adopting capitals from syllables.
  14. I'm assuming that really understanding this requires physics beyond what I ever studied, but would negative specific heat mean that as you add heat energy, the temperature goes down? Or are we talking something beyond q = mcΔT? If so, am I right in thinking that means that something with a higher temperature needs to gain heat rather than lose it in order to equilibrate with a lower-temperature object? That is, heat flows from low temperature to high temperature in order to make them the same temperature? So the idea is that a high-temperature object sucks up heat from colder things around it, possibly reaching an equilibrium, but an equilibrium at which it has even more energy than before, at which point it can start fusing. That's pretty weird. In Stars class, we basically just started from the idea that there was enough accumulated matter in some area to start a Kelvin-Helmholtz contraction, and then that got things up to temperatures and pressures necessary for fusion. Now that I think about it, there were some gaps in that logic. But star formation wasn't really the point of Stars class anyway.
  15. Economic Analysis of Public Policy (Econ) Empirical Methods II (Stats) Political Institutions and Public Policy (Politics) Some kind of Finance class, most likely either Financial Management in Public and Nonprofit Organizations or State and Local Public Finance. An elective, most likely The U.S. Congress and Law Making. I'll also be teaching introductory Macroeconomics. I'm a little worried about Econ and Politics, because the sections that I'd take by default are taught by teachers with pretty awful student evaluations in past years, so I'm pretty likely to switch out. For Politics, that's fine, because I'd be switching from American Politics to Comparative Politics, which would probably be more interesting anyway, because my guess is that American Politics will be too basic for me. For Econ, that's a little more disappointing, because I'd be moving from the harder math Econ to the easier math Econ. But I was reminded last semester that it's worth any effort to get out of classes that are going to be bad. Next year, I'll have a lot more choices, and my classes are going to be AWESOME.
  16. I read A Memory of Light right when it came out, and I liked it a lot. Not very spoiler-y comments in a spoiler tag....
  17. After going with the wrong character class for my build and eventually giving up on Geneforge 4 in Chapter 3 (in the Fens), I revisited the game over the past few weeks and finished it. Here are some thoughts. GAME MECHANICS This time, I played on Tricky with an Infiltrator who I ended up just treating like a Lifecrafter. I started by boosting Leadership and Mechanics (more Mechanics), so I made a pack of fyoras who I traded in for artilas fairly early on in order to boost my character's damage. I ended up repairing Moseh and finishing Chapter 2 with only artilas, because I went pro-Rebel too much at first and was unable to get training in other creations (and I went no-canister). Then, once I traveled to the Fens, I started getting Wingbolts and boosted Intelligence basically to the exclusion of everything else. I finished the game with four Wingbolts and had enough Essence for a fifth, but I decided not to sacrifice the spell ability at that point. One more level and I probably would've gotten a fifth (I ended at level 38, I think). What was striking was how odd this build progression was, as it seemed remarkably good. If you're a Lifecrafter or Infiltrator, you get plenty of Essence, so you should end up with lots of creations. No matter what you are, you get lots more experience and loot if you boost Leadership and Mechanics pretty high really early on. I may not have hit the exact right progression (you can probably be a bit more gradual than I was with the two skills), but it was notable that I never increased Leadership or Mechanics after Chapter 2 (though I did get a lot more equipment that boosted those skills). Few encounters were difficult this way. STRUCTURE The optimal mission choices were likewise a bit surprising. This was a very different game from what I remember of Geneforge 3, where it was difficult or impossible to play both sides. In Geneforge 4, it seems as though you're supposed to play both sides against each other, and then betray them both in the Trakovite ending. Lots of seemingly sane and rational people, such as Khyryk and to some extent Litalia, suggest to you that the Shapers are bad but the Rebels are as bad or worse, and the Trakovite way is the only way to find something better. (Most of the endings also imply this.) In this vein, I was able to continue playing both sides almost all the way to the end. Even in Chapter 4, I aided all the infiltrators and then killed them. Doing all the quests for both sides seemed to be the best way to see the whole game all at once. It required somewhat delicate balancing; I found it was best to complete all the quests for one side (so as to build up my reputation for that side and get more quests), then do all the quests for the other side, but this required fairly high Leadership from the early game. PLOT The one thing that I noticed about the plot (other than that it was well done, as is typical for Spiderweb) is that it felt very strongly like a sequel (in a good way). Maybe I'm just forgetting older games, but I suspect that there's something different about the way that GF4 is a sequel to GF3. It has virtually the same characters and virtually the same sides following through on the actions that took place in the earlier game. A2 is in the same setting as A1, and the background involves the consequences of your actions in A1 (the Empire War), but the vahnatai, who are very much the center of A2, are new and not foreshadowed. A2 feels like another Avernum, but it doesn't feel as closely tied to A1 as GF4 does to GF3. Similarly, GF2 involves the same factions as GF1 and some of the same characters, but in many ways, it feels like a do-over and expansion of GF1, rather than the next step. This was a nice touch, really, and it makes me look forward to playing GF5 whenever I next have some spare time. The progression of events in the Geneforge world really looks like it's going somewhere, and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
  18. Basically, when porting from BoE, you just have to spread stuff out a bit. You can't put it in exactly the same square as before. As long as you're okay with that, there are no problems.
  19. You're not going to get sued for working on the open-source editor. Jeff is pretty good about that sort of thing. You can package the default images along with the editor, but you're still going to have to process the custom images that designers make for their scenarios. Those custom graphics are in the same format as the default graphics. Oh, hey, you could just use the BMPs that the Windows scenarios use, and then basically just include Graphics Adjustor code in your editor that creates the cmg file from the BMPs. It's a little clunky, but for a 1.0, it would be fine. The idea is that you require designers to include BMPs of their custom graphics in their scenario folder (which is what the Windows versions do anyway) and then automatically create Mac-version graphics from those BMPs using existing code (the Graphics Adjustor utility) or your own version of the same thing.
  20. Well, you do get to choose to spare or kill certain people, just not as many people as you might think. Maybe that's the idea: Hands ostensibly have huge amounts of freedom, but in actual fact, they only get to make a few (admittedly life or death) decisions here and there. I mean, the entire point the Wayfarer tries to make is that Avadon has discretion but no real choice. Once Hands go to an area, the final result for that area is pretty clear, no matter what the exact path is.
  21. I think the thing that bothers people who have this complaint about Avadon is that it feels as though you ought to have choices with consequences, but you don't. I think part of this is that some very obvious moves (go back to Redbeard and complain about not getting into the castle) are explicitly mentioned by characters but cannot be done, and sometimes you do have seemingly important choices that end up having no consequences. It's interesting that Jeff decided to do this. It didn't bother me, but it bothered a fair number of people.
  22. Goodbye forever, Miramor! See you tomorrow. (Only because that is the traditional farewell in goodbye topics.)
  23. In the Bugs topic (pinned): "The calls set_terrain, set_floor, and set_height only inconsistently work outdoors. They most often do nothing." Huh. Even though I wrote that, I've forgotten the context in which I determined this. At any rate, I would assume that outdoors do the same thing that towns do, namely returning their floors/terrains/etc. to defaults when you leave far enough away that the section resets, and I think the same happens when you reload. But it's worth experimenting with this a bit... I haven't done anything with it in a long while.
  24. I feel like we need to put this in a header somewhere. The first three games have been/will be remade twice: Exile 1 -> Avernum 1 -> Avernum: Escape From the Pit Exile 2 -> Avernum 2 -> Avernum 2: Crystal Souls (not yet released) Exile 3 -> Avernum 3 -> Avernum 3: Ruined World (not yet released) The other four games are different: Blades of Avernum (older engine) Avernum 4 Avernum 5 Avernum 6 This comes up a lot. If I were a responsible moderator, I'd figure out where to put it.
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