Aran

This reminds me of a DOS game I saw in the early 90s, called . (Which itself is apparently based on a C64 game called ).

Specifically, Best Theme started as an April Fool's joke this year and just stuck around.

Wow, this is still here. http://ermarian.net/resources/ipip-neo/arancaytar-2015 (Previous: http://ermarian.net/resources/ipip-neo/arancaytar-2013) I haven't compared my answers, but I suspect I haven't changed much since 2013. Edit: Holy cow, I've changed quite a bit. http://ermarian.net/resources/ipip-neo/diff-2013-2015

From an in-universe perspective, Avernite historians may have downplayed Vahnatai contributions after the events of A3. The Vahnatai were really good allies at the time - the Avernites even trusted them with a permanent outpost in Upper Avernum (which they might have helped discover and settle in the first place, given the teleportation magic involved), before Rentar-Ihrno effectively betrayed them by going on a private genocide mission and sabotaging the peace process. Anyway, this doesn't mean the Vahnatai did everything - they just turned the tide in a war of attrition. Avernum might have lost without Vahnatai assistance, but it would have been a pyrrhic victory for the Empire.

Since all three factions are extremely powerful in an organized fight, I suspect it comes down to how well one faction can exploit the divisions and tensions inside the others. All three factions face internal resistance or strife. The Pact especially, since it's a frayed alliance of nations who would be at each other's throats if they weren't forced into cooperation by common enemies. The Shapers are pretty cruel toward their creations. The Empire (under Hawthorne/Garzahd), of course, has a whole penal colony full of enemies. I suspect that once again The Empire Always Loses, because it's too rigid and paranoid to play that game. The Shapers and the Pact both employ small, highly independent groups that can work behind enemy lines; the Empire distrusts and exiles people like that. If they can stir up some resistance in remote areas, sow some conflicts, in the case of the Shapers maybe create a few monster plagues a la Rentar-Ihrno, then the Empire soon has a lot of fires to put out. Get some of the Empire's many enemies on board (eg. the dragons, the Vahnatai, Avernum) and it gets even worse. I don't think the Empire could be destroyed as a state, but it could probably be forced into some significant concessions. Between the Pact and the Shapers, it looks somewhat fuzzier. I suspect that the Pact is more vulnerable - it's liable to disintegrate completely if the central authority (Avadon) was defeated and certain conflicts broke out at the same time.

Aw, I was expecting a really lame pun. (And now I can't stop trying to think of one.) Deep Down. There. Now I can finally leave it alone.

Aw, I was expecting a really lame pun. (And now I can't stop trying to think of one.)

I just started on Yudkovsky's From AI To Zombies, but I haven't gotten far enough to form an opinion of it yet.

I recently started binge-watching Burn Notice; I'm now about halfway through the sixth season. Also, I started to catch up on six years of NCIS - the last season I definitely completed was the fifth.

By series, the first Avernum trilogy. By individual game, I'd pick Exile 3, but Avernum 1-2. The first two Exiles just felt too rough around the edges, and I'd already played their remakes by that point. Exile 3 on the other hand was my intro to SW.

Birthday cake pictures? Birthday cake pictures. (The writing says "7 7 7 7", which stands for 28. Traditionally my sister and I come up with new geeky number representations for each other's cakes every year. Hers will be in hexadecimal this time.) (Family redacted for privacy.)

aba boot bucker?

Oneth.

That one's still on my reading list. Other than that, I've been sporadically continuing my re-read of the Discworld series. Started last September; I'm now finishing up Pyramids (#7). (At least now I'll eventually catch up. ) (It's only partly a re-read; I've so far read less than half of the series in total.)

I've mostly had two machines running over the years (a desktop and a laptop); they've been replaced a few times though. Currently I'm down to one laptop, so that's not as interesting. The entire network consists of one router and wifi AP (EasyBox). starbright was the first laptop (Samsung V25) that was actually my own, and it was in service the longest (September 2004-September 2009), and I still occasionally use it when I need XP and don't have a VM available. It's the only computer I have that can reliably run Age of Empires II and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. enki was my first Linux (Ubuntu, 9.04-10.10) desktop (AMD Athlon, dual-core, 2GB RAM). (September 2009-December 2012; CoD: Mobo failure during RAM upgrade). metis was an HP 625 laptop (February 2011-September 2014; CoD: hard drive failure). Since the screen was already broken by an earlier accident, I replaced it with another one of the same model. dagon was enki's successor (AMD Phenom, quad-core, 4GB), (March 2013-December 2014; CoD: Mobo failure). The motherboard randomly failed exactly two years after enki kicked it. Maybe it's a curse. It was running debian sid. luna () is the successor of metis, and currently my only computer (October 2014-). It's still running Ubuntu 14.04. I have a phone (Nexus 4) that doesn't really have a name (because it's not rooted, so how would I even set the hostname? ), although I call it athena in some config files. (August 2013-) Oh, and my desktop at work is named rom (German spelling of Rome; the department uses capital cities as names).

Yeeeeah, I don't think that redeye filter was particularly effective.

I have no idea what is going on with my right eye in that picture; it's kind of creepy. (Also, those Eddings novels look huge, especially next to the Robert Jordan ones below. The Eddings paperbacks (aside from Belgarath/Polgara) in our school library weren't even half the size of The Eye of the World...)

Slipped to place four. I guess I either need to plan another trip... or try to recruit some more of my friends and family to this forum.

While the name cameo one has just over 70k... accumulated over the past seven years.

I don't tease out every last XP point and every bit of loot, but if there's anything vaguely shaped like a quest then I'm doing it on the first run.

Well, that's this board, not the archive. The old posts got migrated as rendered HTML instead of BBCode, apparently, so they're all messed up. Some of us mods take a minute to manually fix up the old posts when a thread gets linked, now and then. The Safari thing on PPP is interesting, though, not sure what happens there.

I've been perennially fixing it for seven years; most recently two weeks ago. Some day I may get it right. (Any examples? The first few posts by Kel I clicked through seemed fine.)

Yeah, you'd better be.

I've been to a few countries in Europe, but only left the continent twice. Once to Tunisia in 2000 and once to the US last year in 2013 (huh, time flies).