Metatron

No. Poor choice of words on my part. When I say "I know this is too little too late...," I don't mean "You deserve an apology. I will make a show of contrition." I mean "Although it's been a while, if knowledge about what motivated me to give Exodus a poor review will positively influence future scenario releases, then let me share what I remember."

Hey folks. I used to post on the Spidweb boards a lot when I was younger. I generally went by the name rakshasi, and my member number was 5814 I think. I was part of the Exodus open beta, and I wrote a review of Exodus a long time ago in which I said something like "The name Exodus is stupid. It's a pointless reference." and wrote about a page of rambling text trashing Kelandon's hard work. I think I ended the review by giving the scenario a 3/10 or so. The review wasn't copied from the Lyceum, probably because my review was basically a personal attack that had nothing to do with the scenario. In a thread made years later, I think Kelandon mentioned on the Spiderweb boards that my review was one of the most disheartening and confusing. I can't find my review or his later post, unfortunately. Anyway, I hope you believe me when I say that I contributed a lot of negativity. In case it'll help, I'll now explain why: I was trying to mimic TM and be offensive. My low review of Exodus had nothing to do with Exodus's storytelling or gameplay. I know this is too little too late, but in case Kelandon ever wondered what motivated people to go on the internet and say soul-crushing things about his scenario, there it is.

A Markov chain defines the chance that a process will move from one state to another state. Music can be thought of as a series of series of states over time. By parsing a musical script, you can generate a matrix that defines the chance of playing a note n after having played a note m. By pulling a series of (semi) random numbers out of a source, you can generate a new song whose movement from note to note is similar to that of the original song. Someone in the youtube comments guessed that this was gleaned from a Debussy song. For reference, here's Claire de Lune by Debussy:

Some animals have a sense of self. Some animals are able to use a mirror to locate and remove an object that is attached to some part of their head (and would be invisible to them without use of the mirror). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test Many animals can also learn that a particular human vocalization means that human wants attention from that animal. E.g. dogs and birds. I'm not sure if animals like rats and kangaroos can learn their name. So some animals have a capacity to be self-aware and to learn their own name. The potential is there. Songbirds are believed to use their songs as a way of communicating their identity. There's a lot of sites on the internet that say that, but few citations...

I'm really looking forward to it.

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/c...piron-17r-n7110 Code: PROCESSOR 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.10 GHz MEMORY 6GB Shared Dual Channel DDR3 Memory HARD DRIVE 640GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Drive VIDEO CARD NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 525M (128-bit) 2GB for $799.99? Sounds like a good deal, I think. Should I go for it? Does anyone have opinions on Dell manufacturing, support, and durability?

Originally Posted By: Kelandon I assume that's the fastest my Mac Mini can process data, not the fastest that my network can send/receive it. Harvard Law, bro? Nice.

Well, I was bored during my lab hours so I tried to find the site. I remembered that it was projecteuler.something, but I didn't remember whether it was a .com or a .org. Not wanting to appear foolish, I didn't bother googling. I went directly to the .com, which is apparently a scam site. It's probably a website set up by Dantius to steal bank account information and passwords. Joke's on you, I'm a student. I'm POOR.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Freytag's triangle is so general that it's useless for analyzing fiction. However, it's still important for writing fiction. It's a lot easier to write stories that follow more complicated structures if you have the basic triangle down. Dikiyoba. I only bother reading fiction whose narrative structure provides a good approximation of fractal behavior. Syntax is highly recursive. Does syntax count as structure? "Dantius crushed the rebellion." vs "The rebellion crushed Dantius." I'm pretty sure that grammar affected narrative in that sentence.

Originally Posted By: Micawber Can anyone remember, what spell in A1 was replaced by Cloud of Blades in A2/A3? I know Sanctuary was in A1, those Slith high priests liked to cast it...

I'm a left-hander who uses a laptop with no USB mouse. I prefer to keep my right hand in the power zone: backspace, enter, right shift, end, pg dn, pg up, home. Semicolons, parenthesis, and brackets also reside here. They are very important to me. Left hand moves around more, although obviously the right hand contributes to some degree when typing. But left hand is used for ctrl-l, ctrl-t, ctrl-v, ctrl-c, ctrl-x, ctrl-w, and of course ctrl-z. I'm much faster than most people when, for example, using Firefox web browser or editing text. I'm working on incorporating alt-f4 and the keyboard's right-click into my keyboard use. Pressing caps lock initiates the self-destruct sequence.

Originally Posted By: Trenton Uchiha, shaper servile. Thats me, I can run around the room like crazy...If I didnt weigh 214 pounds. And I cant listan to people, like I say what all the time. Wait. Wait wait wait. You weigh 214 pounds? That's not a joke or a typo? How tall are you? If you want to live a full active life, you need to lose weight. If you don't lose weight, you will die very early.

You know BoE is open-source, right? You can play all the scenarios for free and it's almost the same engine as E3.

The only reasons I check this forum are for BoA and long lectures on physics, discrete math, and advanced scientific research. I mostly skip posts by newer members because they don't contain any useful information.

Originally Posted By: Kelandon Glad to hear you liked the story! And I admit that I'm surprised, but I guess pleased, that people are still playing these, so many years after I made them. The plan was always to make a third scenario, Homeland, that finished the story. ("We have repented at Bahssikava. We have made the Exodus. Now, it is time for us to retake the Homeland!") After the poor reception of Exodus by the community at the time, though, I pretty much quit making scenarios for Blades, with the exception of Nobody's Heroes, a short joke scenario that I claimed was released by "Kelandon's friend" for a long time to avoid the crap that was heaped on me every time I released anything. It kind of pains me that I never finished the trilogy, and you get some hints as to what happens in Homeland if you play Nobody's Heroes (notably, the main quest-giver in NH is an older but not really wiser Machrone). I think the community is different now. Everybody who plays Blades is 1) not TM 2) an oldbie. So they've probably calmed down by now. Or you could write Homeland, and then not release it. You could just make posts telling everyone how awesome it is. But you shouldn't let an unfinished story roll around in your head. I know that I constantly edit my plots of upcoming scenarios, even if I've ever only released one. Am I right in guessing that you still have notes on Homeland, and you still edit them? Because it's so much fun to write a story! And so long as it's unpublished, it can still be edited and made more complex. The writing process only ends for when you release the story/scenario, because it's only then that you can stop editing and writing new content.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Karoka What's the largest named number? Is it this? nope Graham's number is way, way bigger, like unfathomably bigger, like if you took that number you typed and raised it to the power of itself it'd still be much smaller than Graham's number and there are specific numbers useful in mathematics that are bigger than that. TREE(3) is a number so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly large that even Graham's number is tiny by comparison I had a class with Ronald Graham. He was lecturing on Stirling numbers of the second kind, which count the number of ways to perfectly partition n numbers into k subsets. He said "These numbers grow pretty quickly... But if you want to see a big number, look up Graham's number. That's an impressive one."

I always thought it was strange that salamanders dropped 45-50 gold pieces, and large wooden shields. It was so unrealistic. Salamanders radiate fire fields, so the wooden shields would have caught on fire, and their pockets are too small to fit 45-50 gold pieces.

Relevant: if anybody's spent the past ten years thinking "Man, I have Python set up on my computer but I'm too lazy to spend five minutes writing a script to append new nodes to my dialog files" well today is your lucky day. gen new node.py This Python script will probably find the latest unused node, and then fill in all the boilerplate: condition = 1, state = -1, text1 = "some text", all that stuff. Note that you need to have Python set up on your computer in order to run the script. I also leave blank nodes.

Is it really difficult to write platform-generic code?

Originally Posted By: Glassk ARGHHHHH! Nothing important, well. Maybe it's lack of level design, how do you think? Sometimes it's really just laziness. My scenario, Enemy at the Gates, originally had another character in it. But it was confusing, so I just deleted the character. I left all the dialog.

Hopefully, we'll soon be able to figure out where consciousness comes from, measure it, and pin down its brain structures. I think we should all get our stories straight now, and then when the truth is found out the person who guessed right can laugh at the rest of us. I for one think consciousness is just distributed neurons measuring neurons. If there was a full brain structure for consciousness it must have been very well hidden. But we can look at animals with few neurons, like jellyfish or starfish, and move up the taxonomic tree through reptiles and birds and monkeys to humans. And clearly more conscious things have more brain. Clearly drugs that affect cognition do so by affecting the brain. Therefore consciousness is distributed and has a real basis in the brain. Although I will concede that there is counterevidence, that removing even a substantial part of the brain can sometimes leave a person functional, and their personality intact. === Originally Posted By: Goldenking Now, hold on. We don't just gain understanding by making comparison of things that are the same. To the contrary, it is through contrasting of unlike things that we learn a lot about things. 'Hot', for instance, is meaningless if we compare only amongst things that are of the same temperature; it is only when we add in the element of cold that the concept of 'hot' gains any meaning. We have to know the other in order to know the same. But you have nerves that, one way or another, perceive heat. Some of us have been saying that, if God is all the Bible says he is, and if human minds are of a different origin than God's mind, then there's no sensible way of comparing or contrasting. Comparing a God's mind to a human's mind isn't like comparing hot to cold; it's like comparing hot to math, or maybe to a drawing of a fish, or maybe to a drawing of something undrawable. To all: So let's suppose God's mind is comprehendable and comparable to that of a human mind, because one of those minds made the other. Then what does a God think about? Not food, right? Why does he really think about resting? Apparently he needs rest. For an unfettered omnipotent abstract being, he seems to need many arbitrary things: one day of rest and worship for seven days of work, three days to resurrect his son, ten people in a city full of sinners, seven plagues. And does it take time for him to think? Why is his favorite number seven? Why does he have a gender? Asking these sorts of questions makes this mind of God seem like an imperfect system. I can understand something tangible having physical limitations, but why would there be limitations or arbitrary constants that keep on reappearing? === I guess what I'm getting at is, if most of what I say is right, and if God is conscious and has humanlike thought, there must be a God neural network floating around somewhere. And if God is as arbitrary as he seems, then it must be a biological brain with physical limitations. But that's silly to think about, nobody wants that and nobody says that. Hopefully if God's brain network exists, it's mostly network and very little interconnected neurons.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity I personally cannot accept that any God worthy of respect would impose eternal punishment for finite offenses I don't if it's safe to assume that a human can reason about an omniscient, omnipotent creator. We greatly misunderstand people of other cultures. We wouldn't understand alien customs if we ever met an alien. Now a god, that would be something else. Not only foreign in origin, but also thinking on a completely different scope. Before we finish the sentence "It's unreasonable for God to think that..." there are a few things we need to prove. 1) God thinks 2) God thinks like a human 3) God thinks like a human who desires respect 4) The reasoning of God can be comprehended by a rational human I don't know which human first spread the rumor that gods can be comprehended (I personally blame Plato), but I think we need to reevaluate whether that's a safe assumption to make. Maybe minor deities like those in the Egyptian or Greek pantheons can be described with human personalities and thoughts, but this is no ordinary god. You might say "God made man in His own image; we do not assume God thinks like us, but rather God told us that we think like Him." However, I have never heard that passage of the Bible interpreted as such. And if I had, I would ask why it was interpreted specifically as it was. The language certainly does not indicate that that's what was meant. Using that passage would feel to me like post-facto retconning.

"We have met the enemy and he is us" - Pogo "All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." - Chesty Puller "Great. Now we can shoot at those bastards from every direction." - Chesty Puller "We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them." - Chesty Puller "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." - Thomas Jefferson

So, friendlyspider, how do you like At the Gallows? EDIT: Oh wait, you already reviewed it. Nevermind.

Kelner, huh? Doesn't he die in Avernum 3? You might get more views doing a Let's Play of Avadon. It's a much more modern game and it's just been released, so it's getting plenty of attention. I don't want to discourage you, but I think most people who are interested in Avernum 2 have bought Avernum 2... It's just such an old game.