Nephil Thief

Just an idea for the new scenario format... It would be cool to have integration with a distributed content tracker, such as Git or Mercurial. Instead of just a tarball with files, a scenario could be a Git or HG repo in a tarball; while working on it, the scenario editor would untar it somewhere. Or maybe it could be untarred before being played/worked on. Or something like that. It might be a bit late for this, but it would be nice to be able to track one's development history on a scenario, etc.

KITTIES ARE BEING FLUFFY TOGETHER YAAAAAAYYYY (Cagney is on the left, Lacey on the right)

@msazad: and that is why I wish nation-states would just go away already. "The ends justify the means" will be the end of humanity some day. I don't care which government it is, I honestly don't care, blowing people to smithereens because they're stuck in the wrong place is wrong. @Slartibus: agreed. The problem is that figuring out what to do can be really hard, when every action you take may damage someone. Even people who try very hard to do the right thing will not necessarily be effectual about it. @Goldengirl: ironically I think you're basically saying what I was trying to say, but more coherently (and with less white-boy rage). And @everyone - I'm done here. I can't move in these circles. I try hard, but at the end of the day I'm just another selfish human being, and my pretentions of being "progressive" or "an ally" are just that - pretentions. I wish I could be like you guys, but right now I need to focus on functioning day-to-day and not getting suicidal again. For now, so long. P.S. @Goldengirl You're awesome for asking all the hard questions. I hope you succeed at... everything, really. @Lilith I know I don't know you, like, at all, but I have a lot of respect for you. Seriously, best of luck. I wish I had your integrity.

I rather expected that analogy... I guess what bugs me about this stuff, is the combination of a) "If you're not wholly with us, you're against us" and "Violence is sometimes necessary to get things done" which both have their points, but in combination read to me as "If you're not wholly with us, we might consider you an appropriate target for violence." In the US at least, radical politics has killed far fewer people than reactionary politics, so I guess I might be being a little alarmist here... I don't know. I guess I want to see some acknowledgement that even people with messed up opinions are not irrideemable. Whatever. OTOH, half the times I come home from work, I see homeless people sleeping just outside Bank of America's gilded marble doors. I don't know, I probably shouldn't have opened this discussion...

I'm not sure I should post this, but this forum seems to be full of highly educated political radicals... So here goes. We know the stability of day to day life for middle class people, particularly middle class white male people like me, is heavily dependent on being white, male, and middle class. And we want to do something about that, right? I mean, I want to. Or so I'm inclined to think. But then the question becomes "How much are you willing to give up?" and I'm afraid to lose my privilege, or at least that's what everyone says, and I'm pretty sure it's true to some extent. But. Let me post a sample of someone else's post here: But wait! By the same token, my tax money funded the mass murder of civilians in Iraq. Every time I buy from a US based company that pays taxes (and some do, believe it or not) I'm supporting war crimes. And yes, I know this. A lot of people know this. But you try not paying taxes. You'll wind up in prison, and you know what US prisons are like. The point there, though, are those two words: "dirt bag." By that logic, probably over 50% of American citizens qualify as some variety of "dirt bag." You know what happens when you declare large swaths of people to be fair game? Go on, guess. It's happened plenty before. But, you might say, human lives in Iraq and Palestine also matter. And of course you'd be right. Does that justify considering 50+% of Americans complicit in war crimes and therefore deserving of punishment? Iraq under Saddam Hussein committed war crimes. Can Iraqis who lived through that be considered complicit, and therefore effectively evil? If you completely throw out the concept of mens rea while maintaining that punishment is necessary, you need to be aware of what that entails. To be candid: there are people who I love who are not very privileged, and there are people who I love who are quite privileged. I don't want to see any of them die. Not by revolution, not by the jackboots and billy-clubs of reactionaries, not by anything. I know politics-as-usual is already killing people - lots of people. People who might also be someone Iove, but for the luck of the draw. I do care. But I'm not going to put my faith in a revolution. And if you tell me that that makes me a reactionary, and therefore a bad person... Then you are entirely missing the point.

I'm really sorry, Lilith. That must be hard like I can't imagine. I've seen other people get messed over by absurd immigration policies as well, though not usually to such an extent. I'd say it's definitely worth caring, but also worth recognizing that covering every single base is more or less impossible. But that is purely IMO.

Wow. That's horrible. I'm sorry. I would have thought Australia was better about that, too. I hope things get better for her (and for you).

I agree with this, but also feel that it runs into some practical problems for people living under a greedist system. Ideally the state would be competent and humane and actually deal with this stuff, but it isn't and doesn't, and that's not likely to change for some time. (Though gods know, better people than me are trying to change that.)

The problem is that this really hinges heavily on the definitions of "dirt bag" and "holding people accountable." The intersection of "bad person" being too broad, and "punishment" being too harsh, is lots and lots and lots of people being harmed in the supposed name of justice; which gets you right back to square one. So, I'm curious how you define those terms. What kind of accountability is warranted? If most people are criminals, and crime requires punishment, what do most people deserve as punishment?

I think almost all human beings are complicit in evil. On the other hand a) Dedicating your life to having zero negative impact is ultimately less helpful than accepting some negative impact, and trying to do more good by more people despite it. I realize that's very hard to stomach, and also very hard to live up to, but I think it's the only way to go. (Not that I do a particularly good job at it, mind...) There are many degrees of "being complicit," and not all of them should qualify as crimes against humanity. c) Likewise, I think there's a need to differentiate between "complicit in evil" and "deserves punishment." Especially when "punishment" necessarily consists of something harmful to a person. Seriously, I think the idea that justice == vengeance is incredibly dangerous; taken to its logical conclusion, everyone alive would deserve some kind of punishment. A healthy society needs a concept of forgiveness, as well as one of judgment. Re charities, I know it's popular to point out (a la Oscar Wilde) that keeping the poor alive won't change the system that keeps them poor, but, but... it's still keeping them alive, and that counts for something. Also IMO, whether a charity qualifies as abusive depends on its practices and its efficacy, not on some ideological constant that all charities are bad. (Sorry, not trying to be rude here; the Wilde thing is a sore point with me.) Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter. [Disclaimer: I have clinical depression and OCD. The above may contain some rationalization in the interests of my own day-to-day survival. You have been warned.]

BoE assembly language? I like it. An awful lot, actually. (Reading real x86 ASM makes my eyes bleed, but treating BoE nodes as if they were instructions for a really weird CPU seems like a fantastic approach. Might just be the late hour though.) Edit: you wrote a header file? OMG OMG you are so awesome. Thank you, I'll see if I can't contribute something to the Github repo this weekend when I'm not horribly busy...

Cool! How complete is GCC's support for C++11 though?

Hi SkeleTony, just FYI I've reported the post above. I understand where you're coming from but IMHO this is not the sort of board where such things should be posted, at least not without some sort of warning for readers... I'll see what the moderators have to say on it though.

The Windows code does not depend on Boost, which is probably a good thing (for now anyway). Compiling against third-party libraries on Windows is rather involved.

Okay, for the BoE game itself, some code changes are needed. 1. boe.combat.cpp, around line 3359: all the casts to (long) are incorrect. They should be removed. 2. boe.fileio.cpp, around line 1758: itoa() is deprecated and should not be used, and the newer _itoa() seems not to be available in the version of Wine I'm using. One could probably hack around this with std::stringstream for now, I guess? I'll post more as they come...

I was just able to get the character editor compiled against winelib, and yes, it actually works. The makefile needs the following modifications: CPP = wineg++ CC = wineg++ WINDRES = wrc Additionally the output filename must not contain any spaces, not even with quotes. There seems to be an upstream bug somewhere that messes things up otherwise. Also note that there will be a ".exe.so" file that must be in the same directory as the .exe file, with the same name. Changing the names after they're built will make them not work. But yeah, that's it. I'll see if I can also get the game and scenario editor working too.

I read those books in high school, but still remember them pretty vividly. Fantastic setting and fantastic characters.

First off, you might want to use something like Process Explorer: http://technet.micro...s/bb896653.aspx to see where the bottleneck occurs. It might be RAM like you're thinking, or it might be something like disk I/O, or something more obscure like CPU cache misses. Re the browser, I'd encourage using a Javascript blocker extension, or disabling Javascript for all sites except trusted ones (Chrome and Opera can both do this). Javascript is responsible for most of the memory and CPU load on modern websites, and third-party JS content is also one of the largest security risks. Edit: err, I didn't realize Dark Souls II was released this year. What are the specs on your laptop? At a guess, I'd say the hardware may simply be inadequate for a graphics-intensive game.

Alternatively you can invoke it with 'wine start /unix' instead of just 'wine'. That works on Linux anyway.

... I have to say I'm a little disturbed by the combination of specificity ("defend the Constitution") and vagueness ("against all enemies, foreign and domestic") in that oath. With that wording, it seems like almost any civil rights activist could be considered a "domestic enemy" if they supported a Constitutional amendment.

@Harehunter: I would consider it less an expansion of rights, and more an increase in coverage of those rights. That's... kind of the point. You can't guarantee that people will be happy, but you can give everyone a roughly equal shot at it.

Classic BoE (the open source version) should work, more or less, with almost any version of Wine. I use Linux almost exclusively, so yeah. Original BoE, and the Exile games, did not work last I tried. Used to be you needed to set the sysctl vm.mmap_min_addr to 65536 or less, so as to avoid breaking 16-bit support in Wine; now that doesn't seem to work either. Not sure what the issue is. One might do better using Windows XP in Virtualbox.

So, Unspeakable Things is an amazing, thought provoking, harrowing, maybe life changing read. And I'm not even halfway through yet. Penny has been there, done that, got the T-shirt; and also happens to be a very skilled writer. If you are over 18, and are not cisgender and/or male, you might want to read this book. If you are over 18, and are cisgender and male, you need to read this book (if you haven't already). The more people who understand the scale and scope of the problem, the better, IMHO.

Just finished: The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin). I last read this in high school, and I had forgotten how good it was. I'm just a little sad that it's over now. Just started: brain candy, The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross). Hmm... The Computational Demonology conceit is starting to wear a bit thin, especially now that it's been tempered with more typical magic. Bob Howard is starting to irritate me (I know he's supposed to be very Joe Average, but still). And vampires, feh... Because urban fantasy trends, more feh. But hey, it will probably be entertaining, which will help with the next item... Waiting for it to arrive: anti brain candy, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution (Laurie Penny). I will read this. Really. The whole thing. Might take a while, but I need to know this stuff. I will face my fear, I will let it flow through me, etc. etc.

Apocalypse, no, but it's already a humanitarian disaster. Over 3000 deaths, and last I heard the projected death toll 6 months from now was something like 40,000. Mind, this is in countries that already have terrible healthcare and infrastructure, and just the quarantine measures etc. are making life even harder. (The Onion recently ran an article about how we're still "50 or so white people away from an Ebola vaccine." I thought that was depressingly accurate.)