Edgwyn

Sylae, marriage for any two people who are 18 or over would qualify in my mind as an expansion of rights that many conservatives did not support without justification. I suspect that a number (though probably not a majority) of the people who did not support it were concerned about it trampling on their right to freely exercise their religion (Church X does not recognize marriages which is recognized by the US government and so refuses to host certain marriage ceremonies in their facility, so Church X should lose its tax exempt status and be sued out of existence). While many of us hope that a Church would be seen as different under the law than a commercial enterprise (baker, restaurant, etc), the dividing line between church as religious institution and church as commercial enterprise is gray and wavy making it not unreasonable for some people to be concerned that the government would attempt to dictate policies inside of the church. The question becomes even greater when you get into how much religion is one allowed to practice in your private life. For example, can an Amish, Orthodox Jew or devout Muslim establish a separate school system that instead of differing in relatively small (but important) ways from the public school system the way that most Catholic and Christian schools do, differ in larger ways from the public school system. The answer has been yes, especially with the Amish and Orthodox Jewish population. I am not sure that I personally approve of some of the exceptions that have been made for their boys and girls, but I am not sure how to properly and fairly split the baby between what I would like to forbid and what I would like to allow. Some "liberals" would say tear it down right away (after all, all religion is wrong), some "conservatives" would say as long as there is a religious motivation it is fine (as long as it is a religious motivation they believe in). I firmly believe that the better public policy is somewhere in the middle and that given the lack of center we will never see it.

ADOS, you are conflating social and economic terms to a point that is frankly insulting. An American with Libertarian, Classical Liberal or Free Market views on the economy is generally farther to the right than their European counterparts, but is in no way shape or form a fascist (a term which has a pretty significant negative connotation to all of us). Dikiyoba, I am in no way about trampling minority rights. Nor are most American conservatives. Some conservatives do not support an expansion of rights (sometimes without justification, sometimes with), but they generally do not go around attempting to curtail existing rights. In general, the conservative side of American politics is too likely to oppose the creation of new rights and the "liberal" side of American politics is too likely to curtail existing rights sometimes in support of creating new rights. Neither approach is very good, but as both parties have moved away from the center, both sides have gotten worse about rights, just in different ways. As to the so called "Muslim Ban", the executive order effects around 13% of the world's Muslim population. So calling it a Muslim ban is a pretty far stretch. If its purpose is to prevent the movement of Muslims into and out of this country, it is completely ineffective. If its purpose is to prevent the movement of nationals of the countries that supplied the 9/11 terrorists, it is also completely ineffective. About the only thing that it does do is make it harder for nationals of six war torn countries that have a somewhat significant number of Daesh and Daesh affiliated groups from traveling to the US, plus of course Iran (because I guess Iran is Iran and I certainly have a lot of personal reasons to hate Iran and they do support terrorist groups, but Daesh is not among the terrorist groups that they support thanks to that whole Sunni vs Shia thing). Of terrorist attacks in Europe in the last couple of years that were committed by people who claim that they are Muslim, the attackers were significantly more likely to either claim Daesh affiliation or be claimed by Daesh than by any of the traditional terrorist organization that claim they are Muslim (and are more prevalent in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lebanon, etc). The vast majority of the 13% of Muslims effected by the executive order are not terrorists. The text implies that this measure will lead to enhanced screening of visitors into this country from those countries in order to prevent the movement of terrorists into this country. If I wrote an opinion poll where the question was "Do you support screening of visitors to this country to prevent terrorism" I suspect that most of us would say yes, but of course the devil is in the details. One of the problems with being the government is that as soon as something bad happens, the question is why didn't you prevent it, how could you let this happen. That attitude from the public drives politicians to make bad policies (terrorism, natural disasters, finance, crime, etc, etc, etc). I am not saying that this executive order is a good policy, I am saying that its merits need to be debated based on what it actually is (a travel ban from seven countries) and not what the majority (who haven't actually read it) are saying it is.

Sorry, yes they do.

I think that the issue comes down to why wear a pixilated dragon fly. Wearing a pixilated minecraft character ties into a recently popular game. Wearing a pixilated Mario invokes nostalgia. The nostalgia is not for a simpler time when graphics were highly limited. The nostalgia is for the enjoyment from playing the 8, 16, 32 or 64 bit game when life was simpler. Obviously you cannot sell pixilated Marios because of copy right issues, but I doubt you are gone to find a market for pixilated random objects.

Even She Hulk was drawn with an athletic body type instead of a weightlifters body type which would make more sense than the shot putters body type. The body type in the third picture might be more realistic than Gal Gadot or Lynda Carter's or the comic book wonder woman, but all three at least have something close to the right skin and hair color for an ancient Greek. At least they never made Wonder Woman blonde. Most male superheroes are attractive as well though there are of course more exceptions than there are with female superheroes, but of course there are a lot more male superheroes. I remember the 1980s Rogue as being (to me) less conventionally pretty than the typical female superhero (or Storm or Kitty Pryde). Some of it is objectification, some of it is that teen/tween age boys want pictures of pretty girls, and some of it is that "good is handsome/pretty, evil is ugly".

I just looked up the details and despite the headlines (and what I wrote), Thor is not female, but Jane Foster took over the role and more importantly name of Thor (and the comic series) because Thor could no longer wield Mjolnir. This happened three years ago. And yes, you are correct, there were some sections in the poetic Edda where Thor dressed as a bride, so anime is useful.

One of the reasons that I was so happy with the success of Wonder Woman is that the DC comics movies (and as a kid I was much more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan, which I suppose could be another grand poll question) have been underperforming in comparison to the Marvel movies (which talked about a Black Widow movie but never did so). Release a DC based action movie with a female lead could definitely been seen as a big risk, but it did well, and I believe primarily because it was a "pretty good" film. I wasn't as impressed with Rogue One having a female lead, because I am convinced after the success of episodes 1-3, you could put the label "Star Wars" on just about anything and it would make a lot of money (unfortunately including my money). In what will I am sure not surprise anyone I am not a fan of he SJWs and their tactics. I was very disappointed when the decision was made to make Thor female, but since I haven't bought a new comic book in close to 30 years, my opinion has zero impact on Marvel's bottom line.

I do not disagree with your statement of the results, but I do suspect that most authors of those games were not part of a vast conspiracy to maintain gender roles. I believe that the most likely motivation was a lack of imagination and unwillingness to take risk. Very little fiction/games had strong female protagonists not because strong females are bad, but because "stories with strong females do not sell". There is still a lot of uncertainty over the question of can a female led movie make lots of money. The success of Wonder Woman will hopefully clear the way for more female led movies in the future. I also do not think that the failure of the Ghostbusters reboot was that it was female led, I think that the failure was that it was simply a bad movie. People sell things to make money. With todays storage mediums it is trivial to have multiple skins for characters which was not the case with 30-40 years ago. With the limits at the time, did you risk your company on a female lead or go with the safe bet of a male lead. I am not attempting to deny the tendency to turn the female protagonist into a sex object (Ripley, Metroid, Laura Croft, Jiggle Physics, fan service, etc, or for that matter the Avernum character choices which still reflect the AD&D chainmail bikini) but again, that seems to be what sells, as a fairly large portion of the female talent in the visual and audio entertainment industries have chosen to embrace the sex sells mentality.

I think that it had a lot more to do with expectations of gender roles than caring if women wanted them. A lot of the early games involved sports or shooting things and "women/girls don't like sports or shooting things", which while not true on an individual level still has a degree of accuracy on a statistical level (the cause for the difference in preferences can of course be debated). I do believe that certain games, like PacMan did better and of course Ms. PacMan was "radical" in that it put you into a female character.

This weekend I happened to be looking at the few comic books that I retained (all bronze age). The older ones were purchased in a more accessible location, but their ads tended towards tween/teen boy oriented (toy soldiers, x-ray glasses, Mr. Atlas). The later bronze age ones were purchased in specialty stores and had more ads for computer games and TSR publications (a lot of D&D). For 1970s/1980s arcade games and home console games, there were very few that were considered "appealing to females", and I remember the arcade culture as being primarily male with the occasional girl friend being present. That said, my wife had an Atari 2600 until the mid 90s, but I do not remember them being nearly as common with my female friends as my male friends. For computer games, Sierra-on-line was female owned, and I remember in being a big deal when King's Quest iV had a female protagonist.

I started playing D&D around 1981 or so, so I missed the 70s and the boxed sets. I was taught by my female neighbor who was 8-10 years older than I. The group at the local hobby shop was all guys. Of the people who I played with (all within one year of my age), you probably had 6 active male players, 1 active female player and a bunch of casual male players, so the one female player was pretty out numbered. Of course this is all anecdotal. I went to three or four conventions in the mid to late 80s and while there were females there, the ratio was pretty off. I had the impression that some of the other RPGs at the time (like Champions) had a few more female players than D&D did, but again, I do not have any actual statistics.

Kelandon, I spent four years in the Bay Area in the 80s/90s and I knew one. But the area that I spent all my time in was rather limited (not H-A or Castro) and of course anyone is orders of magnitude more likely to be out today than they were when you were there, much less when I was there. Sylae, I do not have any improvements to your statistics. The only thing that shocks me is that 139 separate people posted here 10 or more times in the last five months. My impression would have been of a much lower number of active users, which would of course make the percentage of trans users even higher. Dintiridan, I think that different aspects of the 80s geek culture were a little more open to women than others. Dumping some unrelated groups in together, the SCA/Renaissance Fair/Berkeley neo-pagans seemed to have a relatively healthy number of females. The SF community was not as healthy, although the Star Trek community (despite ST:TOS's lack of good female roles) seemed to attract a fair number of women and a very good number of women authors. D&D and the computer culture seemed to be at the very bottom of inclusivity which of course makes the Spidweb numbers and the number of women active members of the forums more interesting.

I think that part of it may be that RPGs (even before computers were involved) attract people who want to escape reality by being someone else (the macho warrior, the wizard, the cat/human hybrid, the male, the female, the neuter, etc, etc.). Then you add to that the anonymity that the computer aspect gives and then bring in the fact that Jeff has a no bullying policy in these forums (that the mods do a good job of enforcing) and then it becomes a safe place that allows critical masses to build.

I believe that the HUD does not scale in the same way that the world does. I suspect that this might have been deliberate to ensure that the HUD portions are clear no matter how small/lo-res a display that you are using. So unfortunately, to get the look that you want, I believe that you will need to play on a higher resolution/larger screen.

Reloading is definitely not punishment. Perma-Death (1st Ed AD&D or Rogue) is punishment, having to create a new party to retrieve the corpses of your old party (Wizardry) is punishment. Sorry, old person venting here. I do not find constant reloading fun which is why I tend to play on normal difficulty. Were I to go through many of the fan made BoA scenarios, I would end up on easy difficulty. But a game where every combat was identical and so you could respond with identical tactics would get really boring really quickly.

Hopefully Ultima IV will be remembered as a classic for a long time. That said, Wizardry I-III with their nothing but violence, pure dungeon crawling approach appealed to me more than Ultima I-IV did (though I spent a fair amount of time with Ultima II-IV). In some ways the more developed walk around kill and steal from different locations bothers me more than the very basic, go kill everything that might move in the dungeon that the mad overlord created.

I ended up with a fair number of maybes, so I do agree with the comment about nuance, but I wasn't interested in doing the 1,000 question purity test tonight, so I probably would not have put up with a more nuanced test and this was interesting. Economically, I believe that I am more right than center (although around here, being a centrist does put me in the extreme right side of the spectrum), and I do not think that I am as anti-government as it states. You are a: Centrist Anti-Government Multilateralist Cosmopolitan Traditionalist Collectivism score: 0%Authoritarianism score: -33%Internationalism score: 50%Tribalism score: -17%Liberalism score: -17%

I always pronounced "archmage" the way that Kelandon does (with Zaggyg being the one I was most aware of), but I struggled with "Charisma" a lot. Fortunately my D&D playing friends had no idea how to pronounce "Charisma" either. Unfortunately, I missed the transformation of Angel to Archangel, but that meant that I never had to try to pronounce it.

I just tried on os 10.12.4 with the same version of N:R and it opened fine for me.

You need a gray pass and you need to have a boat and explore the waterfall warrens. In them you will find the Halls of Chaos which has two levels. There are NorthEast and SouthWest defense controls that you need to activate at different times to open gates that lead to stairs down to the lower level. There are also controls where you need to put objects in boxes to activate. The objects can be found scattered around the upper level. Both the upper and lower levels are divided into four separate areas that you have to use the various gates and stairs to access. The chaos codes themselves are in a chest in the southeast section of the lower level.

Thank you. I don't do it often, but I do like to periodically look at the list. The sort by function gives several options to arrange the, admittedly long, search results.

There are a limited set of colors to use that provide good contrast without seeming glaring and the red, blue and green colors that are being used are pretty good. Once a topic has enough posts, green appears more than the red and blue do. The scheme simply uses the basic RGB colors. Of course red, white and blue give you the USA, UK, Russia and French flags in addition to probably 25% or more of all the nations in the world (thanks to the UK).

I just switched to spiderlicious just to make things a little different. I will probably switch back to default in a week or so. There is a lot of wasted space in default, but I prefer it to the C&C, because it seems prettier to me. Also, it seems harder with the new software to ignore posts in certain topics (I happen to not be interested in GF). I figured it out, but it was harder. Also, the ability to see the list of members seems to have gone away as well.

If you are talking about Neray the smuggler, this is just a side quest and you should be able to continue playing the game without completing this.

The stairs down are only reachable by boat and are in the very HW corner of the 2nd level.