Nephil Thief

I figured Feoderic was male but androgynous looking. Might be bias, dunno. (Actually, I always thought his graphic looked like Michael Jackson...)

ADoS, I'm curious, how did you vanquish the numbers?

Updates, yay... Edit: yeah, let's actually embed this.

Again - thank you so much everyone for the advice and support. Things are pretty quiet right now, Dad's basically on best behavior. I hope things stay this way, but I suspect he'll lapse back in another few months. Mom said she'd talk to him in a week or two, re that he could use some counseling; and that I should keep quiet myself. It's now a week or two, and she doesn't seem to want to tell him that. Can't blame her. I think maybe I should float it, but I don't want to trigger another episode of nastiness. It's like, he acts up, and then he just stops for a long while. And during that time, everyone forgets that the acting up ever happened. And meanwhile, Mom (and to a lesser extent myself) continue to be dependent on him. e.g. I need him for transportation at times, because while I have a license, I don't have a car, and I never really developed the confidence to drive. (My road test was a white-knuckle nightmare.) I'm at least financially independent, since my job is reachable by public transit, and pays better than Dad's. But Mom, being effectively retired, depends on him heavily. I feel like this is a vicious cycle. I wish I could figure out how to break it. And yet, at times like right now, it somehow doesn't seem bad enough to warrant action. *sigh*

For singletons, probably Protection, followed by Antimagic Cloud. Avatar looks nice on paper, but the invuln doesn't last very long, and it is quite expensive. The problem with singletons, though, is that they can only do one thing at a time. Even Minor Bless is astonishingly powerful, when you have all six PCs casting it on only one of their number. Edit: I happen to like small parties though, due to logistics (and characterization!) being easier.

Called the hotline. ADoS and Triumph, and everyone else here - thank you. You've done me a serious mitzvoh. *hugs* all around

Gave the number to my mom, too - she needs to talk to someone expert on this stuff, much more than I do. I shouldn't act as a relay... or, for that matter, a gatekeeper. (Just FYI.) Again, thank you all.

Thank you very much also, Triumph. I'll give the hotline a call tomorrow. Right now it's getting late. Again - thank both of you so much for giving me solid feedback on this.

Thanks very much, ADoS. *hugs* The thing is, though, it never reaches "crisis." It's just a slow, on-and-off simmer. And I'm afraid of, well, crocking up a situation where there isn't any. Or making things worse. Or that my thoughts on this are completely out of line with reality. I don't know. I don't want to cause trouble and waste people's time. But thank you for that, anyway.

So, today my parents went for a swim at a nearby beach. As my mom was putting some stuff in the trunk - leaning over it in the process - my dad closed it. It hit her in the head, luckily giving her nothing worse than a bruise. He was completely unapologetic, and told her she just shouldn't lean over the trunk like that. My mom told me about this... And I wouldn't think much, except stuff like this happens every few months. A few months back, my dad yanked open the freezer door as my mom putting stuff in the fridge, hitting her in the head. When she complained, he told her she ought to watch out. Going further back, this stuff has been repeated with cabinet doors, elbows, shoulders, and - on one occasion - a slipper. The slipper was a particularly heavy type with a rubber sole, and actually broke my mom's nose. That was back when I was in college. Sure, accidental. I could believe that, I've been clumsy too. But it never happens to me, and she never does it to him, and I never do it to either of them... It's only him accidentally whacking her. And even assuming it's pure accident, it's hurting her physically, which is not cool and has to stop. ... After my mom told me about this, we agreed that in view of past incidents, this seemed like a problem, and we both confronted my dad. He got annoyed with Mom immediately. When I told him I thought she had a point, though, he absolutely blew a fuse; screaming at me to "butt out" at the top of his lungs, and accusing me of "crocking s**t up." He was extremely insistent that it was all Mom's fault for leaning over the trunk, or generally getting in the way, and went on to say that he also banged his own head routinely just by way of being clumsy. (Which is true.) When the argument ended, he still hadn't apologized. Is that all? No, of course not. ... See, Dad has frankly been verbally abusive to Mom, on and off, for a long time. Not so much insulting her, as belittling her and making her feel stupid. e.g. Recently she was vacuuming the carpet, and didn't notice that the vacuum's hose had gotten disconnected. Simple, right? Any normal person would say, "Hey, just FYI, that vacuum's hose isn't attached." But him, nope. He's all like, "Oh for God's sake, what are you doing, you're just pushing the dust around, what the hell are you thinking" etc. etc. etc. He talks to her like she's a child at times like that. And, at this point, she frankly has the self-confidence of a child. Any time she messes something up, he's on her about it like a ton of bricks, the anxiety from which causes her to mess stuff up, etc. etc. For instance, she has no confidence in how to use a computer. I'll show her how to do some stuff with it, and she'll do it, and then a week later she'll ask for my help again on the same thing - not because she forgets how, but because she's afraid she'll mess it up. Likewise, she has zero confidence in her ability to handle financial stuff... Even though she's been dealing with various bank accounts for a while. Dad has told her, on several occasions, such things as: "Clearly I'll have to outlive you, because you're just not able to handle financial stuff." There have been, literally, occasions when Mom has felt the need to ask Dad what she should think of some opinion - political, financial, whatever. Just think about that. ... And I'm getting increasingly bothered by this. And I just don't know what to do. I'm especially disturbed by my dad's accusation now that I'm "crocking s**t up," because a) I'm not altogether certain I'm not, and I'm bothered by the lack of trust in my motivations that this indicates. But I have absolutely no idea what to do. Help?

Alas, no, but be assured there are wonders aplenty anyway.

Everything I ever wanted to know about mushrooms, courtesy of a fellow named Stephen Stephenson. http://www.amazon.com/The-Kingdom-Fungi-Biology-Mushrooms/dp/0881928917 It's quite heavy on the jargon, and more or less consists of a series of extended infodumps, but I'm finding it entertaining anyway - fungi (and biology in general) are something I just never bothered learning much about. (And the complexity and range of fungal, uh, behavior is just fascinating. Jeff Vandermeer doesn't cover a tenth of it.)

Sylae is offering a PCI wireless adapter, not USB adapter. Which is probably a better solution anyway.

The above works now. Thank you! Seriously, this is amazing. Edit: still crashes on save in the Scenario Editor... Really though I should not have offered to try and fix stuff, because a) I'm not much good with C++ I'm mad busy right now (just started on a new job last week) And also I've basically abandoned the idea of making a BoE scenario, at this point. Your work is seriously impressive though. Just messing around in the Scenario Editor, I was able to create a wand that shoots slime and is powered by the weilder's intelligence. The level of control is astonishing.

Don't know, and honestly it might be beyond my expertise. My main thought is that a PCI USB controller might work, if the one on the motherboard is dodgy.

USB adapter looks normal... Oh oh oh wait a minute. I somehow misread that bit about USB controllers as "wifi adapter" - thought you were on a laptop! Whoops. D'oh. Okay - are you on a desktop? Do you have the adapter plugged into a front USB port? If so, try a rear one. Front USB ports are always flaky. (And Dell does use rubbish USB controllers in my experience, and just rubbish in general.) Edit: USB stuff in dmesg looks normal. Also it looks like I'm really stupid today. I mean, how many laptops have that many SATA ports?

Hmm. You're located in the US, but it's using the wifi country code for the UK. (GB is "Great Britain.") That might cause problems, not sure. And it does need firmware apparently, but you have that already. Hmm. Can you link the output of 'ifconfig -a'? Edit: to be entirely clear, the USB adapter is detected by your kernel and appears to be working (though I think the country code might present an issue). Edit 2: whoops, I missed that it switches to US later. Good.

That ThinkPenguin adapter has the same chipset as my netbook's wireless, IIRC. It should be handled with the ath9k driver. It doesn't need any firmware, and should work magnificently under Linux, going all the way back to the 2.6 kernels. (It should also last forever and give excellent signal reception, if my netbook is any indication.) If I were you, I would take a look at the output of the 'dmesg' command, and see if there are any errors or warnings from the wifi adapter. If you can't make head nor tail of it, post it here and I'll take a look. As for random cheap adapters, one catch is that they may require proprietary firmware. I'm assuming you don't care about that, since you're already running Linux Mint. But IMO you should try to make the old USB adapter work, before chucking it and buying another. Usually these issues can be fixed in my experience.

Just FYI, as of Wine 1.7.45, the VC++ package is installable in Wine and the game runs! Edit: err, it runs, but is very slow and crashes a lot. I'll see if I can fix any of this stuff. Edit 2: looks like an unimplemented function is being called somewhere. I think it might have to do with different C++ function name mangling on Windows vs. Linux? Not sure.

Oh cool, a question I can actually answer... There are a lot of chipsets that will work with a modern Linux distro. For my laptop-turned-router, I use a cheap one with the Ralink RT5370 chipset. Something like this: http://www.ebay.com/...=item3aac6fd532 This chipset is fantastic. Strong signal, bandwidth about as good as 100 Mb/s wired ethernet. Re the Dell wifi, the ThinkPenguin guy makes it sound like the MTU is wrong? That can be changed using ifconfig, if necessary, but I doubt it's the problem. More likely either the wifi is weak or the Linux driver is rubbish, or both.

@BainIhrno Nope, unfortunately not; at least not without a lot of setup. It needs .NET 4.0 and a library called XNA. Edit: .NET 4 should run under Wine but might have problems. Not really sure. XNA I have no idea.

Ah, got it. I'm thinking those two might be related though - casual disrespect can be a manifestation of political power. Probably all the more so when those being disrespectful don't normally consider it such. (I can think of a lot of day-to-day examples of this.) As do I... And you raise a good point there. South Korea was once a dictatorship, too. OTOH, I feel that it's perilous to forget that the ghosts of imperialism aren't the only force at work. Might be my privilege talking though. I sometimes have to remind myself that the stability of my life, here in the US, is largely a result of my background; peace is a privilege here. I'd just rather that it became a right; as opposed to making everyone's life equally filled with violence.

@Goldengirl: that's an interesting thought, and I'll have to mull it over a while. A few things on this though I think the key word in the first few sentences is "formal." Those power structures may be formally defunct, but their continued influence is huge. A lot of the old policies are basically still there in force, just more or less unofficially. (I may be misunderstanding you there, though.) The other thing is that... well, I'm not very knowledgeable about international politics, to say the very least. But I think some of the liberation projects have not worked so well. Zimbabwe, for instance, is still a brutal dictatorship.

Okay good - apologies if I caused any alarm about this BTW.

FYI, as far as I'm concerned the special node system has always been a major barrier. It's easy to pick up, but actually doing anything complex with it is nigh impossible - at least for people like me who have poor spatial and/or organizational skills.