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DANTIUS GOT A CHAOS MACGUFFIN

Wait, is there some SMoE-Infernal connection I am unaware of?

That was Student of Trinity, in beta testing, BEFORE Jeff apparently boosted their power somewhat.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Je prononce à regret cette fatale vérité: Le fromage doit mourir, parce qu'il faut que la peuple vive! Napoleon, your use of google translate is showing. Regardless, you are all wrong: although ma, mon, and mes are the feminine, masculine, and plural 1st person singular possessive pronouns, the gender refers to the gender of the object being modified, NOT the person who possesses it. Thus "Ma mère et mon père sont mes parents" -- "My mother and my father are my parents." In this regard they are quite different from English his, her, its; French in fact does not make that distinction, and has only one set of 3rd person singular possessives.

I think we could make a chart of the use of the "rocks fall" joke, and how funny it has been: I think it peaked at Ephesos's "cows fall" line, and since then has been in freefall due to serious overuse.

Honk! That said, it seems slightly less psychotic if you look at the standard, late-D&D or proto-AD&D campaign it was coming from, in which good and evil tended to be both front and center and also black and white.

No offense intended to anyone personally: but the fact that people think that their fancy for "getting a taste of" one thing or another thing should be a serious consideration in how major elements of society are structured, rather than keeping in mind how we can help those in serious need by dealing with poverty, hunger, violence, and so on, is a problem in itself.

It's true: http://groups.google.com/group/talk.bizarre/browse_thread/thread/7775d695050a005f

Is it just me, or does Redbeard look suspiciously like Jeff?

Pole is more effective early because of the good poles. If you use those, Pole is effective early without any points put into it, so it's very reasonable to use Pole early on without skill points put into it, then switch to DW later.

It had a handful of relatively unimportant dialogue pieces that were not yet translated, but it was otherwise completely translated and it was completely playable.

Wow -- many many years, no kidding. Of course, DQ6 has been available in English for over a decade. Just not commercially. But at least it didn't include "Carver" and "Milly"... ugh.

Kaboom! Adios, thread.

Originally Posted By: Dantius I don't like dual-wielding because it's an "innovation" that has occurred literally ONLY in video games, because it's cool, yet horribly horribly impractical- it breaks immersion because I know it's impossible. I agree with Dantius on this one. The thing is that the MAJORITY of the combat physics in every RPG break immersion if you take ten seconds to think about how bleeding, shock, traumatic strikes and cutting wounds affect the human body, or about how weapons are related to the damage they do, or about how chaotic melee combat is, and so on. Dual-wielding, despite being more absurd than the combat model for single-wielding and even shields, is still less incredulity-inducing (or should be) than everything above.

I don't think Alorael was being unfair at all. Obviously Nikki wasn't being particularly serious and not at all malicious. But if there's someone reading the thread who _does_ get depressed during the winter, well, I can't imagine that comment made them feel particularly welcome and understood.

Most (but not all, I think) of these were discussed in a previous thread by Chokboyz and myself. I think it was one of the incredibly large OBoE threads, and I don't know which one or where. But a number of statements about which version was correct were made.

Pulled off of google, here's a blog post summarizing a study (available elsewhere on the web) and citing opinions of two respected psychiatrists: http://www.furiousseasons.com/archives/2...osis_study.html I'm not intending this as prime evidence, but just to show that this opinion does come from psychiatrists and psychologists. In fact I've rarely heard a mental health professional say otherwise, and I've worked with quite a few over the last decade. This, again, is not intended as evidence (it's not) but just as the etiology of my own opinion. Originally Posted By: Telluric Black Oceans ...mental illnesses have been considered non-illnesses for a very long time, and they're only very slowly gaining recognition as legitimate, biological, and treatable. Legitimate, yes. Treatable, yes. Biological... depends what you mean. Is biology involved at all? Obviously. Can relevant distinctions be seen biologically with the tools at our disposal? Sometimes. Can what's going on with the biology be discretely delineated and understood? Much less commonly. There is an egregious tug-of-war, and has been for some time, between the neurologically oriented view of mental illness and the psychodynamically oriented view. The chemical changes we go after with medication now are often supported with legitimate evidence; they are a far cry from the days of lobotomy -- but they are arrived at just as haphazardly. Mental illness is legitimately different from physical illness because we can't manage it the same way, because our understanding of its biology is limited -- and I am skeptical that it is possible for us to get beyond that for a certain chunk of the mental illness pie.

I wasn't questioning that, I was questioning this statement, which has nothing to do with how you address the Abrahamic deity: Originally Posted By: Txgangsta I used a lowercase "g" to designate something other than a supernatural deity Last time I checked, deities are by definition supernatural...

Well, it's more about the parameters of what counts as psychiatric illness, which are not well-defined. None of our brains work in precisely the same ways -- at what point is it legit to call something a mental illness? Once upon a time, this quietly hinged on something I've heard labelled as "social breakdown syndrome" -- if somebody's life peels apart in a way that affects and is visible to others, and you can see a pattern when you look at it side by side with other people, there's a mental illness. But the last decade or so it seems to be trending sharply towards what people can find or see, when they go looking proactively for mental illness. Look at the overdiagnosis of ADHD and bipolar disorders, and look at some of the diagnoses considered for the DSM-V -- shopping disorder? SAD is actually relatively reasonably defined -- it's not technically considered its own disorder, just a variety of depression; and whether or not you like specific definitions of depression, or whether you think it should be considered an illness, it makes a lot of sense that depression EXISTS and that it can be largely seasonal in nature.

This is an omission that I simply don't understand. Dual-wielding isn't something that weirdos on the forums wish for while complaining about Avernum 4, etc. This is something that 13-year-old boys LOVE! People really, really love dual-wielding. So why not include it?

Uhh... there are lots of "supernatural deities" to talk about besides the God of Abraham, and the convention in many languages calls for nothing special for them, just lowercase "god."

Yeah, this also sounds completely normal to me. Sleep is touchy, and in my experience, it is especially touchy for people who spend a lot of time in their heads, because it is easy for what's going on in your head to override feeling tired. Your friends in trying to have a stable sleep pattern: 1) exercise. Plenty of physical exertion. Seriously, this has made a much huger difference for me than anything else. 2) routine. This is probably unrealistic for a college student; many people need something forcing them to awaken at the same time every day for this to work. But having a very consistent routine can really help; your body DOES get used to going to sleep at a certain time. 3) not taking too much caffeine. Caffeine DIRECTLY messes with your ability to know how tired you are. I drink coffee once in a while, and love it, so I'm not dissing caffeine, but if you consume caffeine on literally a daily basis and have sleep problems, that's something to consider. 4) if there isn't a direct biological cause, it means that consciously or unconsciously, something is on your mind. and that means talking about what's on your mind, probably in therapy. although sleep deprivation is on the list of symptoms for various DSM diagnoses (depression, anxiety, seasonal affective disorder) you don't have to actually have those for it to affect you.

The problem with the Zarargument is that for most of human history, the people dispensing morality have been in control of society. There are counterexamples, such as (very) early Christianity, but they are relatively limited.

Who cares about the rest of society? I'm just talking about (a) what makes sense, and ( what makes sense here. Yeah, the fact that marriage is so closely regulated by the government is really bizarre to me. Most of Europe has had no trouble adopting the union/marriage bifurcation. But here? Nope.

I'm absolutely not suggesting that. I'm saying that we should call it what it is, rather than speaking as if minority values (that some people consider to be degrading to certain groups) are in fact universal. Maybe "call it what it is" sounds too aggressive. What I mean is that "family-friendly" is not an accurate term because lots of different kinds of people have families, and have different ideas of what is OK for their kids. I'd even be okay with "conservative family-friendly" which I think is a perfectly respectful way of putting it.