Aran

Whee, if I have it right on my head, that should make the graph chordal again (no cycles except for cliques)! Edit: also, if we can maintain this thing as an edge list in a text file and not just a diagram, that'd allow using tools to draw it automatically.

I'm trying to unify those charts and noticed a weird discrepancy. Diki's chart isn't a superset of Slarty's old one, in that it does not link Sarachim to Marlenny. Sy's chart is a superset of Slarty's but not Diki's, in that it doesn't link Sarachim and Nicothodes, nor Nalyd and Vergil. (It also omits Archmage Micael and my dad, but both of those are debatable.) For reference, here are each of the graphs as edge lists with consistent names (eg. Lilith), including in normalized (symmetric+sorted) form. http://stuff.ermarian.net/arancaytar/swgraph.tar.gz

I secretly ship all of you. ( )

It took me a couple hours of seeing you wear it constantly, even indoors, to find it remarkable enough to comment on, but then I felt weird about bringing it up for a while. (I mean, sure you've worn a hat in all photos I've ever seen of you, but until then I'd assumed that was coincidence.)

Here's an awful secret: The facepalm was A LIE. There was no facepalm. My worldview was shattered. Does that mean when people type "rofl" they are not, in fact, rolling on the floor at all?

Ergh my voice. But I can't complain, not with all those embarrassing poetry recordings still floating around on the net.

*squee* Heh. In graph theory terms, I'm a minimal vertex separator. (With the biggest connected components, apparently. You and Tyran would be ahead but for the Drakefyre-Dragyn Bob edge that is in Sy's diagram) One couple and a room-mate are a commune, or are you counting everyone living in Colorado?

what.

I wonder if in fifty or sixty years we'll still be posting from the internet link embedded in our wheelchairs. (Or in our brain preservation tanks.)

:yay: welcome to the double digit club!

(my face when) (Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. )

I'm 39% through REAMDE (this is the first book I'm reading on an e-reader) and am indeed missing a lot of what I loved about Cryptonomicon - the rambling asides, rapid shifts in style and perspective, attention to detail, etcetera. The characters are great, but after this whetted my appetite with virtual currencies, cryptography, metaverses, crowd phenomena (WoR) etc., the endless chases and shootouts in Xiamen are a bit of a letdown. By conservation of detail, I'm sure that the threads will come together at some point, but it feels a bit bogged down. Currently on the boat with Zula and Yuxia. Edit: And yeah, the end was basically one huge shootout scene. No intriguing yet scientifically unsound mind virus, no van-Eck phreaking or cryptography. Thumbs down. :|

Well, they've signed the treaty, but according to Wikipedia the constitutional amendment for the currency change has neither the required 2/3 majority (national conservative opposition is too strong), nor popular support. The Euro isn't looking too hot right now, I guess.

Barely 40 pages in so far, which is still pretty much character exposition. It's promising, and the themes (and atmosphere) seem to overlap with Cryptonomicon somewhat. The style so far feels similar too. Edit: It took me embarrassingly long to catch the Tolkien cameo in the character Donald Cameron, Cambridge professor and fantasy author. (The parallels just keep coming, like his obsession with language and inventing words. He writes his first draft in the in-universe language. To be frank, once he opens his mouth he practically becomes JRR. I'm pretty sure that when he mentions starting "rather with words and language and constructed all upon that foundation" he's either quoting or paraphrasing him. )

Neal Stephenson, Reamde.

Well, it is scientifically known that a certain quantity of alcohol is vital for good programming. I saw it on xkcd, and Randall Munroe is a physicist, qed.

Q: A: And there we go. Anyway, I just brought up the alignment system as a brief aside, not to derail the original topic.

I really don't follow your argument at all. An alignment does not simply describe your ultimate goal but the way you choose to pursue that goal. If you showed compassion to a bad person, should that be an act of Evil? If it isn't, then neither should killing someone evil (in itself) be considered an act of Good. It would be a Neutral act at best, and only if it were immediately necessary to defend someone. (I'd give paladins some leeway there because they essentially have a divine license to fight evil, but note that even a paladin couldn't get away with killing a defenseless Evil-aligned person.) That means the alignment system isn't some scoring system of moral worth, because it can be argued in most situations that there is no such system. Being Chaotic-Neutral ("I did what I had to do") doesn't make you a worse person than being Chaotic-Good.

Yeah, that sounds like Chaotic Good in D&D terms.

Wikipedia says November 23. I haven't come across any spoilers yet except for one possible CMC episode; even the (real) episode titles don't seem to be up yet.

The only game where I have had any indication of playing time so far is Avadon thanks to the Steam overlay; and I'm messing up that estimate pretty badly by idling or forgetting to close. However, I'd estimate that A3 took me over two weeks to finish; possibly as much as 100 hours. I tend to be thorough with the side quests and exploration.

My results. In less quantified terms, I'd sum it up as "Chaotic-Good / Fluttershy".

In that case, I have it on good authority that one of the episodes' working titles is "Cupcakes". (:trollface:)

You're late. This is like three months and 24 days old.