Aran

In theory, almost everything about the forum output can be skinned. That includes making an optional skin that shows login names instead of PDNs. In practice, login names are private information. They've never been visible to non-moderators, and probably shouldn't be. And choosing a particular PDN from the history and showing that goes way beyond skinning. On the other hand, a greasemonkey script that recognizes members by UID and replaces their PDN with a fixed string is probably doable. It would also allow renaming people you don't like with various unflattering titles only you can see, for much hilarity. I don't really have time or much interest in the idea though, so this would be for someone else to do.

+1. Question presumes a dichotomy that does not exist, because "being" good or evil misleadingly implies doing good precludes doing evil & vice versa. Also an inherent system of morals may simply belong to the same class of fictional concepts as an inherent language. Without even an inherent definition of good and evil, an inherent tendency towards either couldn't exist as a meaningful concept.

*nerdgasm*

My successor has shown to be a worthy pony indeed. Might be interesting to see the stats split by General / Game fora, to identify the impact of game releases more clearly. Side note: I'm unable to back up the post table due to memory issues. I really hope that doesn't mean I'll have to rewrite piperbot again...

I think it may be insufficiently fluffy, but it'll do. Aerial turtles - no nobody's sanity is safe.

I like it. But I have mixed feelings about all the ajax and javascript animations. Time was, Spiderweb was powered by Perl scripts using flat files, and your signature didn't update until you posted in the thread, and if a topic got too long, the Old Ones would devour it. We didn't have no fancy Javascript then, no sir. When we wanted to post, we had to open a form, and then we got sent to an interstitial page eventually redirecting us to the topic. Uphill both ways, in the blizzard.

Ooh, hey, new fora. You've had this place redecorated, haven't you? I like it. (Seriously, great work on the skin.) Major PPP deja vu. Timestamp and author UID should be unique together (except for actual duplicated posts). Of course, the UIDs have changed too, but since the order has remained the same, those should be easy to match up if you have a complete user list of both forums.

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith Considering recent events, I feel it would be safest if we nuked the national parks to eliminate the bear threat.

Originally Posted By: Future Wonderbolt So, um. Remember how I said I was going to create a fancy thing that would show you who was on the calref wesnoth server and all that? Well, I spent a rather ominous four-hour coding spree on it, and I now have a chunk of JSON that is updated every five minutes. The data is available here. Anyone is more than welcome to use this as a source of data for their personal interfaces, as long as they don't DDoS me. Originally Posted By: Future Wonderbolt It is done. Now I think I shall go work on getting nick registrations working. woohoo. You are awesome.

Originally Posted By: Future Wonderbolt Originally Posted By: Triumph How many Richard Whites are there? 1 in 641 people in the US with the first name Richard. 1 in 422 people with the surname White. 309 million people. 309,000,000 * 641^-1 * 422^-1 == 1142 people. Can you safely assume independent probabilities even inside a single country? World-wide, of course, you get Muhammad Chang as the oft-cited counterexample - in this case, I'd guess at a positive correlation instead.

I Originally Posted By: Captain TrEnToN. How can you volunteer if the admins ask you It's not like they make you an offer you can't refuse. Edit: In theory, I mean. I don't remember anyone who refused.

Originally Posted By: Darkest retroperitoneal corners What things that you do, like, or are do you find people consistently misunderstanding, misconstruing, and misappropriating? I study computer science. Enough said...

I'm technically doing it too, but you only notice it when someone quotes me.

Gotham General is safe.

I like music in games if it's done right (that is, well-composed, high quality and augmenting the game's atmosphere). The best soundtracks are those that I also like listening to outside the game. My favorites are Cyan's Myst series ( , (who also worked on Mass Effect) and for the ), Impressions' City Building Series (Robert Euvino, Keith Zizza, Henry Beckett) and Blue Byte's Settlers series (Haiko Ruttmann). A lot of Michael Shapiro's stuff for Empire Earth II also is great. (And I'd really wish to hear my all-time favorite film soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer do work for a video game, but he's in a whole different league.) The common theme is that I like orchestral stuff. 8-bit synthesized tracks somewhat less, and without playing console games I also don't have nostalgic attachment to them. Though I like humming the Tetris theme when I need to annoy someone.

Congratulations. You're awesome and we're indeed lucky to have you here. To 0x10c more! Edit: Ooh, I just noticed I have a milestone coming up too.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Quote: As far as the two-party system is concerned: the system really does prevent certain issues from coming into light, because if both parties agree on an issue (often, I argue) then any meaningful opposition is thrown under the rug in favor of political expediency. If a certain idea becomes popular then one party will begrudgingly adopt it for a while until it's forgotten about. This is problematic because the two-party system represents a narrow set of viewpoints. If the two-party system is really standing in the way of any given policy, then it can only be because neither of the two parties, each representing about half of the voting population, can be persuaded to adopt the policy. If you can't convince a majority of half the people to believe in your policy, why would you expect to convince a majority of all the people to believe in it, if only the two-party system weren't there? That seems over-simplified. The two parties only "represent" half each of the voting population in the sense that half the voting population can stomach voting for one and half the other. I see several problems with this. First: It gives the parties much more leeway than they should have. Obama literally orders extra-judicial killings, supports incarcerating Manning, opposes meaningful copyright reform and he'll still have my vote because the other guy will do all that and worse. There are similar ideological differences on the other side, I'm sure. Secondly: Convincing someone not to vote for your opponent is exactly as effective as convincing him to vote for you. This rewards a campaign strategy that casts the opposing party as the ultimate enemy, which makes it impossible to cooperate on any but the most empty or obvious policies. Policies don't face the greatest opposition because they are considered bad, but because the issue doesn't interest most people enough to base their vote on it. A large party can't unify behind such an issue. A ten-percent party can focus on it, and gain momentum among its own voters. Then they form a coalition with the larger party, whose voters don't strongly support or oppose the issue, and agree on a compromise. In a two-party system, both sides consider a compromise a pact with the devil, so that doesn't work.

Spiderweb games are characteristically non-linear. A movie is linear by definition. That doesn't make this sort of franchise expansion impossible (it's the relative obscurity that does that, or at least makes it rather unlikely). It just means that it doesn't work directly. The only way I could see it happening is a series of novels or something set in the game world (more or less loosely based on the games, or possibly exploring backgrounds like the Myst novels) which might then be adapted to a screenplay. Also, Hawthorne shoots at Erika first.

Saturday night on the east coast, Sunday morning in Europe. Yeah, that was kind of vague. Think I'll start idling around 22:00 UTC (18:00 East).

The community behind EE used to be pretty much Slarty and me for a long while, and now it's mostly dormant (though Milla worked on it extensively earlier this year). If you want to edit anything, I can give you an account - registration and anonymous editing is closed because only spammers were using it. There are some pictures (slithzerikai and nephilim). If you mean a specific article that could be improved by a game graphic, see above re editing. I don't remember the game saying anything about Athron's mate that isn't included in the article. If you've found something, see above.

I could be in over the weekend, Saturday night / Sunday morning?

Originally Posted By: House of S an Istari *cough*that's the plural*cough* Huh, that's interesting. Referring to Sauron as a "necromancer" kind of dates that quote, mind you. In an OOC perspective, this was before the Hobbit was even set in Middle-Earth; in an IC perspective we can probably reconcile it with Bilbo being an unreliable narrator at that point as he's repeating what he overheard without really knowing the background. This was before Bilbo spent half a century studying lore.

Originally Posted By: Lilith well this line of conversation sure brings back some old sw memories Originally Posted By: Dead man Walking faggots are sticks Originally Posted By: Dire Hobbit Faggots were bundles of sticks for starting a fire. OMG you are both BANNED! (Obligatory historical note: http://pied-piper.ermarian.net/topic/13/162/p2#38 ) Quote: great council of the white wizards Quote: Yeah, it's a meeting of the White Council, not a council of white wizards. Yup. In any case, there weren't any "white wizards" - only Saruman (and later Gandalf) went by that title. The other wizards were grey, brown, blue and blue. Okay... dug out the Silmarillion again. Ever most vigilant was Mithrandir, and he it was that most doubted the darkness in Mirkwood, for though many deemed that it was wrought by the Ringwraiths, he feared that it was indeed the first shadow of Sauron returning; and he went to Dol Guldur, and the Sorcerer fled from him, and there was a watchful peace for a long while. But at length the Shadow returned and its power increased; and in that time was first made the Council of the Wise that is called the White Council, and therein were Elrond and Galadriel and Cirdan, and other lords of the Eldar, and with them were Mithrandir and Curunir. And Curunir (that was Saruman the White) was chosen to be their chief, for he had most studied the devices of Sauron of old. Galadriel indeed had wished that Mithrandir should be the head of the Council, and Saruman begrudged them that, for his pride and desire of mastery was grown great; but Mithrandir refused the office, since he would have no ties and no allegiance, save to those who sent him, and he would abide in no place nor be subject to any summons. Huh. This means that a) Radagast wasn't in there (didn't know that), no humans at all, c) there were other elves beside the three ring-bearers. Thranduil, possibly?

Originally Posted By: Jerakeen Originally Posted By: Randomizer text computer version Oh wow. This was almost my first text based computer game. It took me ages just to get past the first part, because I didn't know what a buffered analgesic was. Considering H2G2 is the top Google result, and the first non-fictional use is number six, I'm guessing most people don't. And OMFG that babelfish. Back to the topic, there was a Hobbit text adventure as well.

When I first saw the movie, I was a recent fan of the books and nerdraged at every detail Jackson left out or changed. "It's pronounced Cuiva nwalca Carnirasse nai yarvaxea rasSELya, not RASselya, you hack!" (Okay, maybe exaggerated.) So leaving out the Scouring of the Shire was unforgiveable. Eventually I realized what it would've done to the movie. Around half an hour of screentime would have been devoted to a plot that was completely separate from everything so far - Sauron, the Ring and all that stuff. To grope for an analogy, it's like Harry defeating Voldemort two thirds in and then spending the rest of the story persuading McGonnagall to let him graduate despite missing the final year.