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Punctuation rains from the heavens

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Posts posted by Punctuation rains from the heavens

  1.   

    On 11/27/2009 at 2:16 PM, Ingenuine Autochthony said:

    —Alorael, who finds these scrambles insufficiently challenging. The next time you should pick a bunch of members, scramble them all together, and see who can come up with the complete list of mashed-up members with no letters left over.

     

    But scrambling member names seemed both limiting in audience, and probably too easy.  Instead, I've chosen to celebrate the remake of Geneforge 1 by scrambling the names of 18 major characters from the Geneforge series.

     

    ...and one Spiderweb member, just to keep things interesting.

     

    Have at it!  Can you untangle all 18 Geneforge characters?

     

     

    DOLANNERAYAVTRGYNZDO

    GTYAMAMERNAIWKARAHIL

    ILNHAIAAOLERTLCEZTAR

    AHHNRLTAARHHSBANTWPD

    ERKAORLIOAAZGITYHERI

    SADNRNTHEKKRCMNJTIAR

    TSGAGLAE

  2. It's probably permission to write to where save game files are stored.

     

    Geneforge doesn't actually ask you that itself, by the way -- the box you see is either from Windows Defender or your antivirus software, which jumps in to double check when an app requires write permission to a sensitive area.  Geneforge 1 is old enough that it may still have been dropping saved games in the system folder somewhere, rather than in a user folder, which could be why you don't see this with the others.  (Nethergate is older still, and still used individual save files rather than save slots.)

  3. aetuzcu, I notice you said you killed "the" Altered Giant.  Normally, the following sequence of events takes place:

     

    1) Kill first Altered Giant

    2) Enter grassy area, which is empty

    3) Spring trap - gate closes (with you INSIDE), six Altered Giants appear

    4) Turn wheel (in hidden passage on north wall) to reopen gate

    5) Push button just north of gate to open the next passage

     

    Is there ANY possibility that you entered the grassy area in combat mode?  Perhaps even while fighting the first Altered Giant.

     

    I ask because in your screenshot, there is a giant visible in the grassy area -- but there will not be a giant there until the trap has been sprung.

     

    If you wandered into the grassy area in combat mode, then left before ending combat, that could have caused this.  It's possible that the trap will only trigger at the end of a round of combat, or maybe even when combat is over (probably to avoid having party members end up on different sides of the gate).

     

    Alternately, if you triggered the trap, thought you were stuck, and used a cheat like "exitzone" or "backtostart" to get out, that could also create this predicament.

     

    Or, if you visited the Final Gauntlet earlier in the game, but then used "backtostart" instead of reloading from your save at Sulfras's cave, that could also explain things.

     

    https://homepages.uni-regensburg.de/~mim09509/Avernum/AvernumEscPit/Towns/FinalGauntlet.html

  4. "The first version of Rosetta, introduced in 2006 as a component of Mac OS X Tiger, allows PowerPC applications to run on Intel-based Macs. The second version, introduced in 2020 as a component of macOS Big Sur, is part of the Mac transition from Intel processors to Apple silicon."

  5. 16 hours ago, Alfaerin said:

    Now that is a huge fallacy right there, not to mention you're comparing apples and oranges. While you, a lowly Hand, can't question orders, you report directly to a Heart of Avadon whose job description is to speak frankly to Redbeard. The game may not give you the option, but hypothetically you could raise any concerns you have with Miranda/Protus or Callan. Jenell also indicates that she argues with her superiors all the time, and has never gotten into trouble for it. And there are times when Redbeard asks the PC for their input on something. Realistically, if your PC wanted to reform Avadon, you could work your way up to become a Heart of Avadon and use that position to effect change. Miranda in A1 talks about how Redbeard makes the big decisions, but she makes lots of little decisions and that gives her quite a lot of power. Acting as if assassinating Redbeard is the only reasonable option if you oppose his policies is simply not true.

     

    We could argue how much room there truly is for a "lowly Hand" to question Redbeard's choices, but I'll grant that the player, at least, can do that to his face a few times without anything bad happening to you.

     

    But that "lowly Hand" is expected to be treated with absolute obedience by those outside Avadon.  Those outside Avadon clearly fear retribution being visited upon them if they too openly express disapproval of Avadon's actions.

     

    No matter how "lowly" you may feel within Avadon as a Hand, the PC is not Everyman within the Pact.  This is emphasized so heavily in the games.  The PC's power situation, including their ability to speak and express opinions freely, has no bearing on the power situation of the vast majority of Pact citizens -- certainly including the malcontents.  And, um...

     

    16 hours ago, Alfaerin said:

    Realistically, if your PC wanted to reform Avadon, you could work your way up to become a Heart of Avadon

    I mean, I'm not sure that option is "realistic" for every Hand -- there are after all only three Hearts, and many Hands.  But it's certainly zero percent realistic for Pact citizens who are not an appendage of Avadon.

     

    You're going to hate me for saying that this immediately invoked, for me, "the solution to poverty is to work your way up from nothing" -- but the system dynamics are exactly the same.  If the grossly unfair situation that puts you at a great disadvantage isn't being addressed, you should simply work your way up to the top of the system from that point of great disadvantage.

     

    "Realistically."

  6. 15 hours ago, googoogjoob said:

    Personally, I don't think I'd argue that Redbeard is primarily to blame for the Farlands' issues regarding the Pact. I think most of the issues are intrinsic to the hegemonic, exclusive nature of the Pact. I do also think, though, that Redbeard is sort of a keystone in the Pact's structure, and that he is personally/morally complicit in its injustices. He's the sternest public face of the Pact, even if its workings are mostly impersonal and systematic.

    This.

     

    But even moreso:

    15 hours ago, googoogjoob said:

    It's not possible to deal in good faith when one party holds hegemonic power over the other.

    This.

     

    I think the "options" being imputed to the Farlands (as well as discontents with the Pact) in this thread are incredibly unrealistic in light of the power dynamics at play.

     

    As for this:

    16 hours ago, Alfaerin said:

    It's absolutely not fair to try to superimpose real life politics on a fictional medieval fantasy setting. The situations are completely different, and nothing I've said here has any bearing on my political beliefs.

    The worlds are different, the circumstances are different, even some of the laws of nature are different.  No question.  There's no 1:1 relationship of anything here, and you're quite right that you can't just blindly superimpose one on the other.  But system dynamics are system dynamics; power and ethics are about applications of principles, and those principles are abstract -- they apply across different instances, real or imagined, and can certainly apply across different worlds.

     

    I drew analogies above because I was struck by some similarities in the power dynamics, in particular.  There may well be circumstantial differences extreme enough to lead you, or anyone, to draw different ethical conclusions about those situations -- I even noted some while making the comparisons.  If you want to say "Despite the similarity in power dynamic, I evaluate these completely differently because X" I'd be genuinely interested.  Or "I think you're off your rocker about the power dynamics being similar, because Y."  Those would be great conversations.  But "fantasy can't ever be applicable to politics" is just baloney.

     

    (It's also, FWIW, just historically untrue of modern fictional medieval fantasy settings.  Tolkien famously objected to allegorical reads of his works, while stating that they are applicable to the politics of his time; he invoked structural sociopolitical problems that culminate when "some Orc gets hold of a ring of power".  Other authors have been more explicit.)

  7. I'm probably not being fair, but in the context of current U.S. politics, this is pretty much how I read some of these points:

     

    8 hours ago, Alfaerin said:

    Your PC helping Farlanders makes very little sense
    Do the Farlands have legitimate grievances with the Pact? Absolutely. They pay heavy tribute and don't even have the right to self-defense against Pact citizens. Are their actions in the game justified? Nope. Dheless in A2 claims that all he wanted was to remove the Pact's boot from their throats, but this is BS. If all he wanted to accomplish was deterring Pact/Avadon aggression, the Farlands could have made their own pact for that. But what did they do? They engaged in repeated, deliberate acts of war against the Midlands Pact. Sending armed spies and saboteurs into Pact lands was an act of war. Assassinating Monitor Shigaz was an act of war. Attacking Avadon was an act of war. They don't want freedom; they want to crush the Midlands under their heels like in olden days. Your PC has been fighting for the Pact all this time, so why would they decide to suddenly switch sides? From a moral standpoint, a role-play standpoint, it makes absolutely no sense to ally with the people invading your homelands.

     

    "Do the protesters have legitimate grievances with the government?  Absolutely.  Are their actions justified?  Nope."

     

    I realize that the Farlanders do things far more serious than just protesting, but the above paragraph contains lots of elaboration on what the Farlanders do, and zero elaboration on what the grievances are that lead to them taking these actions.  You're trying to say their actions aren't justified, that they're disproportionate, but without any consideration of what the proper proportion actually would be.

     

    If complaining about their grievances doesn't lead to change, their options are either to say "oh well" or to escalate things.  Since you agree the grievances are legitimate, what do you think they should do, given that their complaints are shut down in a second when they are even heard at all?

     

     

    8 hours ago, Alfaerin said:

    There's no real alternative

    We're justified in assassinating Redbeard for failing to check his crystal ball, but it's totes okay that Hanvar's Council is so plagued by infighting and indecisiveness that they completely ignore multiple clear and blatant acts of war from Tawon for years, up to and including the attack on Fort Foresight. Everything will definitely be totally fine if we trust these guys to run the show instead.

     

    "All we've done for the last 20 years is elect men, mostly old men, who reject policy changes that a majority of the population supports.  There's no alternative!"

     

    This is a ridiculous fallacy.  The game only depicts one political situation and one government structure, therefore it's the only thing that could exist?  There's no possible way to set up a council that works better than Hanvar's?  There's no possible way for a Keeper (Redbeard included, but presumably someone replacing him, since he is unwilling) to address any of the grievances at all without the Pact falling apart, just because Redbeard thinks there isn't and therefore hasn't tried?

     

    You might think the alternatives won't work, but that's basically pure speculation, and the alternatives certainly exist.  And they certainly aren't any worse for the people who die, or whose loved ones die, under Redbeard's regime.

     

     

    8 hours ago, Alfaerin said:

    If you are loyal to the Pact, the timing (in A1 and A2 at least) makes it a bad idea

    Even if you have quibbles with how Redbeard runs things, why the heckin' heck would you decide to kill Redbeard when Avadon is being overrun by foreign invaders?

     

    "We were just attacked, if you are loyal to the U.S. you can't question anything the President is doing"

     

    Again, I realize that "question" and "kill" are very different, but Redbeard basically makes "questioning" unavailable as an option, by being so unresponsive, and suppressing dissent to the degree that he does.

  8. 17 minutes ago, theloathable said:

    - What amount of time passed between A:EFTP and A2:CS?

     

    Approximately six years, based on the handful of chronological references in the games.

     

    It was very disappointing to see Kyass gone.  His entire settlement was not in Exile:EFTP or Avernum 1, it was new content in A:EFTP.  A2:CS doesn't really have that kind of new content, unfortunately.

     

    I can't quite tell if you're asking for build advice or not.  If you are, I wrote a fairly compact primer here, and you can find more info in A2:CS Strategy Central.

  9. Edgwyn continues to say a lot of things that were, indeed, conventional wisdom on politics in the U.S. at one point -- but no longer apply, and haven't for a great many years.

     

    2 hours ago, Edgwyn said:

    I do not think that Senator Sanders could have won, or even been close, in 2016 or 2020.  I believe that if Secretary Clinton had run a similar campaign to the one that Governor Clinton ran she would have been the second President Clinton.

    The 1992 U.S. and the 2016 U.S. were extremely different countries, and HRC is a very different politician from WJC.  I think what you're suggesting here is broadly impossible .

     

    As far as the Bernie-Trump matchup, lots of people love to speculate on that point, and there's no shortage of opinions.  People have done polls on such a theoretical matchup, and while that's obviously nowhere close to the same thing as a whole long campaign season, I still find those more substantive than random opinions.

     

    2 hours ago, Edgwyn said:

    Dem Nominee -- Competent, failed to learn lessons from her husband's victories (running from the center), shot herself in the foot at the end by calling half the county deplorables and then not even trying to walk it back

    There were a profusion of factors that led to this loss.  100% agreed on the second point being one of them, but 0% agreed on the first.  The difference between her performance and Biden's isn't that she failed to turn out independents, it's that she failed to turn out the base.  You don't turn out the base by moving towards the center.

     

    2 hours ago, Edgwyn said:

    Dem Runner up -- Guy... who still would have had an embarrassing loss against an opponent who was helping drive high democrat participation

    Still waiting for the evidence or argumentation behind this continued assertion.

     

    2 hours ago, Edgwyn said:

    Significant voting blocks (like the Unions who are traditionally pro democratic) have better health care then medicare for all.  Public Option polls better with most voters then Medicare For All, and the Biden campaign spent some effort to reassure the unions that Medicare for All was not Biden's goal.

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/public-option-vs-medicare-for-all-debate-biden-buttigieg-sanders-polls.html

  10. 7 hours ago, Edgwyn said:

    Some of the cultural differences are the value that American culture has traditionally placed on economic freedom.

     

    Just to be clear, this is not a universal American value -- it's a hotly contested one, as it has been throughout the country's history.  (It was, for example, one of the arguments made in defense of slavery.)  Definitely true that it has a stronger following here than in most places.

     

     

    7 hours ago, Edgwyn said:

    ...socialist paradises.  Prettying the wording up by calling it democratic socialism does not give them a warm fuzzy since most of the places that they choose to leave, usually with great discomfort and sometimes with great risk, called themselves socialist democracies or socialist republics.

     

    If you're actually prettying up the wording, then absolutely.  But "social democrat" is widely used across Europe (and beyond) for political parties that have little to nothing in common with the repressive authoritarian states you're referring to.  "Democratic socialism" in that context isn't a misuse of the words, and it's not prettying up anything, it's another use entirely -- and frankly a more accurate use, and a more globally consistent one.

     

    Let's be very direct here: while you're talking about a real effect, and there are some immigrants with that association to "socialism", the far more widespread bad association in the U.S. is one largely restricted to older Americans, and it's the direct result of McCarthyism and the era of repressive government actions associated with it.

     

    I'd also note that exactly the same argument can be made about "democratic" given the un-democratic countries that insert that into their name.

  11. it doesn't make sense to a lot of people here either.

     

    but the short answer is that it has more to do with culture and with power dynamics than it does with policy.  (us/them power dynamics on the right, and organizational power dynamics on the 'left', both reinforced by the 2 party system and single pass voting (which also reinforce each other))

  12. Hi ka1yhi,

     

    Can you please copy and paste the exact email address you sent your requests to?

     

    It sounds like your emails may not be making it to Spiderweb.  This will help us find that out.

     

    Thanks.

  13. Okay, I guess this can have one last update.

     

    Lucca

    Elizabeth Warren

    Simone de Beauvoir
    Robo
    Princess Leia
    Buffy Summers

    Zhuge Liang
    Henry Agard Wallace
    Bernie Sanders

    Micah
    Uncle Iroh
    Jean-Luc Picard

    Zeniba
    Lady Gaga
    Erika Redmark
    Zuko
    Mary Poppins
    Socrates
    Sylak
    Eowyn
    Captain America
    Aragorn
    Katara
    Frog

    FDR
    Plato
    Graham Nelson
    Empress Prazac
    Abigail Adams
    Honor Harrington
    Lisa Simpson

    Kierkegaard

    Thanos (comics)
    R2-D2

    Ereshkigal

    Aristotle
    Magus

    Jiji
    Diogenes the Cynic

    The Kangxi Emperor

    LBJ
    Aang

    Kiki
    Lord Havelock Vetinari

    Yubaba
    King Arthur
    Cleopatra (Shakespeare)
    Peter Gabriel
    Orson Welles
    Mary Shelley

    Eisenhower
    Epicurus

    JFK
    Kathryn Janeway

    Kamala Harris

    Puddleglum
    Professor Oak
    Sherlock Holmes
    Ayla
    Cleopatra Jones

    Harry S. Truman
    Redbeard
    Zaphod Beeblebrox
    Julius Caesar
    Blaise Pascal
    Olga of Kiev
    Boudica
    Cicero
    The Doctor
    Toph
    Julius Martov
    Lord British
    Queen Elizabeth I

    Inanna
    Melanchion

    Mao Zedong
    Faramir
    Dumbledore
    Starrus
    Gladwell
    Manfred Redmark
    Bob the Builder
    Billie Holiday
    Ken Burns
    Eeyore
    Marle

    Le Petit Prince
    Multivac
    Sokka
    Pat Paulsen

    Joe Biden
    Seth MacFarlane
    Khan Noonien Singh
    Werdna
    Mal Reynolds
    Queen Elizabeth II
    Clifford the Big Red Dog
    Aslan
    Sir Topham Hatt
    James T. Kirk

    Pete Buttigieg

    Denethor

    Amy Klobuchar

    Tucker Carlson
    Henri III
    Ayn Rand
    Cleopatra (real)
    Daddy Warbucks
    Pat Sajak
    Cardinal Richelieu

    Ozzy Osbourne
    Sulla
    Lavos
    Pilgor the Goat
    Curious George
    Kikuchiyo
    Miss Piggy
    Lyndon LaRouche

    Captain Ahab

    Tiamat

    Lady Macbeth

    Benjamin Sisko
    Darth Vader
    Evil Abed
    Crassus
    Pompey
    Spider

    Donald Duck
    Rand al'Thor
    Caligula
    Yosemite Sam
    George Jetson
    One of the 7 dwarves (Disney)
    Guybrush Threepwood
    Boris Johnson
    Julie d'Aubigny
    Zapp Brannigan

    Donald Trump

    Pol Pot
    Grima, Wormtongue
    Yogi Bear
    Shaper Rawal
    Kylo Ren
    Harcourt Fenton Mudd
    George Wickham

    Mike Pence
    Ivan the Terrible
    Genghis Khan
    Morgoth
    The White Witch
    Hawthorne
    Hitler
    Emperor Palpatine
    Dorikas
    Elizabeth Báthory
    Kefka
    Smaug
    The Allied Mastercomputer

  14. 3 minutes ago, TriRodent said:

    Much like sausage, you generally don't want to see what goes into making it, but the end result is usually ok.

     

    If you're comparing U.S. politics to a hot dog, the analogy makes a lot of sense.  And no, the end result composition of a hot dog is not ok.

  15. The reality is that much of fantasy combat is unrealistic.  Maybe it's unrealistic to dodge a fireball or an explosive ordinance -- but not any more unrealistic than it is to take five direct slashes from a bladed weapon, each causing physical injury, and at the end be (1) alive, (2) with no systemic impact on your fighting ability or any other ability, (3) with no chance of lost or incapacitated limbs or other injuries.

     

    It may be legit unrealistic according to the combat paradigm you have gotten used to.  I say this with all empathy; I experience it too sometimes.  But that is still a paradigm far removed from reality.  So "unrealistic," like "flaw," is a bit of a grand proclamation, IMHO.

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