Aran

Quote: Sociology is applied psychology and literary criticism is applied sociology, and even pure psychology is on its training wheels as a science right now. http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/451/ (Don't mind me)

Originally Posted By: Toby-Linn That reminds me of this article I read about funny metaphors in high school essays. http://help.com/post/124066-funny-metaphors-used-in-high-school I find it hilarious! Quote: 9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t. That ripped off Douglas Adams.

Originally Posted By: Toby-Linn Yeah, the series isn't complete yet, so I might not start it until then. I remember how hard it was to wait for Stephen King to finish his Dark Tower series, also waiting for J.K. Rowling to finish Harry Potter. Or GRRM to finish the Song of Ice and Fire. I finally got a hold of Feast for Crows a while back after planning for years to read it. It wasn't as satisfying as I'd hoped, because three of my four favorite characters (Dany, Jon, Tyrion) were basically missing, with only Arya getting POV chapters. But the story had some rather interesting developments, for example in having queens succeed to the throne almost everywhere. Click to reveal.. (This reveals details of the plot of A Feast for Crows) Down in King's Landing, Margaery Tyrell and Cersei Lannister are having a private war, and toward the end it seemed that the fortunes were finally changing. In the north, Petyr is scheming to let Sansa inherit both the Vale of Arryn and Winterfell. In Dorne, the throne will pass to Arianne. In the Iron Isles, Asha was this close to becoming Queen. She would have been a rather good queen too, I think.

Originally Posted By: Evnissyen Diki: No!... dammit, they took out her Author's Notes, which was half the fun. "STOP FLAMMING DA STORY PREPZ OK! odderwize fangs 2 da goffik ppl 4 da good reveiws!" What kind of mangled fake dialect is that? "da" as a definite article sounds more like Rapper English, and it should be "thx" instead of "fangs".

A few months ago, I re-read all the works of David Eddings. It was interesting to see how my perception of them changed in the past six years: They still are nice, but a lot of it is just deliberate cliche or repetitive jokes. The sad part is that in the midst of all-powerful deities duking it out (I blame the Belgariad for more than half of the omnipotence fantasies I had in middle school), Eddings occasionally lets some deeper ethical or philosophical thought shine through, which is then gagged as if not to overtax the reader. Interestingly, this is absent from his earlier work High Hunt, which makes it better in my opinion. So in summary, I wish he didn't feel the need to dumb it down. I enjoyed reading it, but more in the way I enjoy Donald Duck cartoons than Lord of the Rings. At least Tolkien's clichéd good-vs-evil was set off by the conlang and background; in the Belgariad, there are about only a handful of words in a fictional language and none of them get translated. After Eddings, I binged on Diana Wynne Jones for weeks. So far, I'd only read Dark Lord of Derkholm, Howl's Moving Castle and Dogsbody; now I read all the rest. Wish I hadn't, I think. The books I had already read (and their sequels) were the very best. The Chrestomanci stories quickly got repetitive. Chrestomanci is a deus ex machina, repeatedly saving the day throughout the space-time-continuum, from Italian civil war to witch-hunts in Britain. The central theme of several of the stories is also carbon-copied - one of the main characters is unwittingly being used by his sister for nefarious purposes, while another two suffer the same from their uncles (the "long-assumed close confidant secretly being a villain" archetype is almost universal in Jones' works). The stories are rather captivating on their own - though they have the unfortunate tendency to really muddle up the plot towards the end of the book, which left me confused until the ending came with a barrage of stunning and confusing revelations. The series I liked (Derkholm and Castle) fell victim to the same, but it was not too bad. The worst of them were The Time of the Ghost and Archer's Goon, which (deliberately, of course) left the reader in the dark for the entire time. This works in crime novels, because you have some idea of what's happening (this guy's dead, it had to be done with a gun). In fantasy, where the explanation is summed up as "Magic", the confusion is much worse. After that, I finally started reading the rest of the Barocque Cycle. I'm getting fairly tired now (I've written on this for an hour, and I have a bad cold anyway), so I won't go into detail on that. I really loved The Confusion though, and I'm about a quarter into The System of the World. I suppose it's strange that I don't like being confused by Diana Wynne Jones, but enjoy the at times tricky challenge of unraveling the story by Neal Stephenson. Perhaps it's because I can be sure that the latter won't end with "and poof, the two mysteriously split probability timelines were magically merged into one again". If Stephenson drives the plot into the ground, he has to dig it out himself, Enoch Root or no Enoch Root. Suffice to say that a week ago I started reading Thomas Paine and various books about 18th century history, and this is a direct consequence of reading the Cycle. Edit: I recall it was Alorael who first got me into Cryptonomicon. Thank you so much, Alo.

There is a buggy version floating around on some of the download sites. The bug involves duplicate (conflicting) use of an SDF variable that causes the villain not to be recognized in the tavern. It's been fixed over a year but apparently some of the download sites haven't updated yet. The only version that I can guarantee to work is at http://blades.ermarian.net/scenario/blades-of-avernum/express-delivery Edit: It's also possible that the mac version doesn't have the bug fix at all. In that case, you will need to extract the Windows download, and replace all the .txt files.

Edit: My apologies.

I didn't delete anything. I see that the only forum appears to have vanished mysteriously. Database says the posts are still there, though. Edit: Oh bugrit. Updated forum software, missed the database update. Here we go.

Slarty and Dikiyoba, just as a note, the forum structure hasn't been set up yet; we only have a test forum. I don't know what subforums you want, so I'll leave this to you.

It's a heck of a lot easier than an encyclopedia of Ermarian, thanks to the non-existence of sub-canon. And we did that one all right.

Quote: Originally written by Kelandon: Quote: Originally written by Emperor Tullegolar: Who is the true Queen of Badass? You're right: clearly you are. Zing!

It's most definitely not worth it. I mean, registering on the forum requires several hours of filling out background check forms, scheduling an interview to determine your eligibility for an account on the Ermarian Network, and paying an annual membership fee of a few hundred dollars. Seriously, if you aren't ready to make this your life's work, don't bother.

Or you could have registered on it two months ago and actually gotten stuff done. But who am I to judge, I'm a procrastinator myself.

It so happens I checked the thing yesterday and found that both the wiki and the board were covered in cobwebs. I hope you can get that thing off the ground.

They replace it, and the old version is not kept. There are a few problems that make keeping revisions very impractical. Edited posts are more or less found only by accident, as I only re-archive threads when someone's bumped them. And multiple edits before the next re-archiving wouldn't be saved. So even if I did keep revisions, they would be unreliable and incomplete. Signatures are archived as part of the post , and this isn't easy to fix. If you changed your signature, all your posts would be saved as new revisions. Lots of clutter. The ppp_posts table is 1 GB big as it is, and only navigable through heavy indexing and optimization. Putting old revisions in it would make it too hugemassive. If content is deliberately censored (through editing, not pruning) from the forum, it will disappear from the archive. If it were kept, I'd have to take a more active role in moderating it.

Diprosopus: I have it on excellent authority that if you press "Wait" a total of 81 times, the actual scenario will start. And it is glorious.

It is certainly more legitimate than RLY. And I can vouch that the words "Never gonna give you up" do not appear anywhere in it.

Unfortunately, this is beyond my ability to fix. Drupal 6 has better form handling, but (see above) it will be quite a while before the Blades Forge is ready to be upgraded. I could place the comment form on a different page, but that would require an extra page load whenever you want to post - not worth the slight chance of being logged out in the mean time, I think. If the form page has been open for a long time, you should reload to make sure the form is still available - normally sessions don't expire that quickly.

Keep in mind that I browse this through the archives most of the time. Piperbot presently has a clock speed of one query in five minutes - really low power. And depending on how inactive this forum is, it might skip it for a turn or two. So I often see the thread as it was a few hours ago.

You cannot make files "hidden" in Unix without prefixing the filename with a period. Also, I have no problem accessing http://blades.nethergate.net/ as well as http://blades.nethergate.net/index.htm (same page). What's the matter?

The idea is nice, but: One more gateway that people have to click through and that has to be kept up to date...

Technically he didn't say a word about computer difficulties unless he communicated with you outside of that forum. Quote: I apologize to everyone who has asked to beta test. I have come across some unforeseen problems and am unable to send the scenario at this time. You can be sure that I will send it as soon as I am able. Please be patient. Could be alien abduction / battling terminal cancer / indefinite vacation in Guantanamo Bay.

You could say it was living on borrowed time for all these years. I have yet to learn of a single community hosted by ezboard that did not meet with disaster or sufficient inconvenience to eventually pack up and go somewhere competent - although the Lyceum kept on for astonishingly long.

I'm not sure when the Forge review section will be finished, let alone function smoothly. Given that my schedule is still getting tighter, it could be as late as May or June. I don't advocate waiting till then. Especially with ezboard being what it is, I wouldn't wait to move the data. To put it another way, moving from a sinking ship to a ship that has not yet been built isn't smart. By all means, migrate the CSR to Shadow Vale. Perhaps the Forge could simply aggregate that instead, like it's doing for the Lyceum now. But what happens at the Forge can be decided later on when we have a stable review site and I have more time again.

You didn't miss much, at least regarding the CSR. I couldn't stay as long as I'd hoped, and most people arrived after I left. There was some scenario design discussion, and Jewels speculated on transferring the existing data on the Lyceum to her site. http://blades.ermarian.net/news/2008/03/09/march-blades-chat