Kelandon

As if that hasn't already happened.

You know me well.

There is some. I read a 538 analysis of dating site data that went into this a bit. It didn't analyze successful relationships, only expressions of interest, so there may be some differences there.

I didn't say that it was mysterious. I just said that I don't pretend to know why it is. Presumably it's some combination of biological factors — girls mature faster than boys, men are able to have children until an older age than women, etc. — and sociological factors, but I don't know biology or sociology terribly well, so I don't claim to have any particular handle on causative factors here. (The same-sex age gap is actually mysterious to me. I have no idea what that's about.)

More to the point, more women than men graduate college, so if the need to be financially stable were impacting men and women equally, one would expect women to wait longer than men to get married (especially given that women earn less, on average — a trend which, if I remember correctly, applies to female college graduates as well as females in general).

I mean, once you go to this description (younger woman, older man), it may just be that books are reflecting life, and it's more common for opposite-sex couples to have an older man and a younger woman than vice-versa. (Those statistics show that the median age difference for opposite-sex married couples in the U.S. is that the man is 2-3 years older than the woman.) Why this is, I don't pretend to know, but it is true. (This made me wonder about same-sex couples, which is not relevant to the topic of discussion at all, but I was curious. Googling turned up that in Australia, there are larger age differences between same-sex couples than between opposite-sex couples. I wonder why that is... I have no clue.)

I don't think the descriptions are in the scripts. To the best of my recollection, these things are generally hardcoded based on item type, which means in the earlier games (on the Mac versions) you could change them with a resource editor, and in the later games, you may need some kind of hex editor. I may be forgetting, though, and some games may be exceptions.

Harehunter: To be clear, you have not said anything offensive or inappropriate lately. You will be told — by name, directly — the next time you do. 'Til then, you're good. Don't worry about it. And, as a gratuitous piece of advice, if you'd like to move past things from the past, stop bringing them up. Also, to everyone, I'd like to quote myself (a favorite pastime of mine) from a similar topic a couple of years ago:

And now we have come full circle, with Dikiyoba concluding that Trenton was right in the first place.

If you've got to go out, I suppose that's one of the better ways to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Okay, if we're blowing this topic up into the awful portrayal of women in media, one of the more depressing examples for me is Marvel movies, particularly the X-Men movies. Look at Chris Claremont-era X-Men comics, and then look at what's been done with them in film. Claremont was very careful about diversity along a whole bunch of different lines (immigrants, racial minorities, etc.). His female character were strong, but the "strong" thing is overplayed; they were interesting and complex, which is far more important. Then look at the movies, and despair at Hollywood. (Rogue in the first X-Men movie is actually sort of an example of what the first post was originally talking about.)

I'm glad that I spring to mind.

I think Randomizer may have missed the point of the topic. What SoT described is not terribly different from the plot of Buffy, though Buffy herself had some backstory and knowledge of her powers even before Angel (and Giles & co.) got involved. Then again, there's a semi-similar pattern with genders reversed in the Monkey Island series, though Guybrush has no particular powers, and the Voodoo Lady isn't his lover (and Elaine is just a lot more competent, though she has no real powers either). I think the "other person with powers and more backstory" is just a convenient plot device, and like any convenient plot device, it's sort of lazily applied.

That is, you're very likely to see the Avernum 2 and 3 remakes come out for the iPad, when they're released, which will get you Avernum 1-3 and Avernum 6. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if, at that point, he decided to port 4 and 5, because that'd put all of them on the iPad. Also, all future Avadon games are likely to come out for the iPad. The real gap is going to be Geneforge (and Nethergate, I suppose), which were released recently enough that they mostly run decently on modern systems (sometimes with some effort), so they don't need to be remade soon, but which predated the iPad, so they didn't get iPad versions at the time. For those, I recommend just playing on a computer.

The rings of Saturn and the might god Ouranos shall make you tremble, impudent mortal!

No, and I think the concept is sort of silly. Exile had 6. Avernum had 4. Avadon had 3 most of the time, but as many as 5 or (in Avadon 2) 6 at times. Geneforge had up to 8 (sort of). It never struck me one way or another that there was much of a difference.

Presumably the more interesting number would be ratio of quotes to postcount.

Totally this. It was a long haul from the entrance to the zone all the way back up the stairs, to the portal. In light of the entire set of events in that area, I see why it was done this way, but there had to be a better way to organize it.

(I should add that I've taught intro physics before and know what a Reynolds number is; I just was saying that my pseudo-metaphor didn't make any sense whatsoever, whereas other people's seemed to.)

We could also change the diameter of our threads. I mean, what are we using here? Spiderwebs? Spider thread can't possibly be that thick. We could upgrade to huge steel tubes for our interwebs. (No, I don't know what I'm talking about either.)

I think a lot of the oldbies were able to get away with stuff because they were moderators themselves in the very early days and they were friends with the moderators/administrators in the later days. That only holds for so long, though, and eventually they shaped up or departed — with maybe one or two exceptions (you know who you are). Blades was the reason the community began in the first place, and it was the reason a number of us (um, me) joined later versions of the community, so I think it attracted the first group of oldbies. Come to think of it, part of the iconoclastic tenor of the community started before the Spidweb boards began, because of the often contentious relationship the early BoE community had with Jeff.

You may be having the some problem as described here, in which case I make the same recommendation to you as I did there.

Them's fightin' words. The nephils are also from the surface. Boooooooring! Sliths are from deeper in the caves, like the vahnatai! Clearly superior.

Good catch! Both count, which I hadn't noticed before. I'll fix that.

You could always start up a good, old-fashioned political debate. Just like old times.