Kelandon

Was that last thing a release? I want the features you posted about!

Linguae barbaricae!

Jewels's topics depend heavily on memorization but not at all on critical thinking. This is perhaps the least important ability for a president to have. The last three presidents have all taken relatively demanding standardized tests (LSAT, GMAT) and done well enough to get into Ivy League law or business schools. I don't think any of them ever released what their scores were, but I'm pretty sure that they all did decently. (Bush's SAT scores were notoriously not stellar, but they were good; I'd guess the same was true of his GMAT score.) Test scores aren't everything, though; Elliot Spitzer got a perfect score on the LSAT. (So did I. Vote Kelandon in the mod elections!) I'm pretty sure that every president in the history of this country has understood, at a basic level, what the Constitution means. People don't really agree on the greater significance of the document, though (most obviously, originalism vs. living constitutionalism), so you can't really fault presidents for having a position you disagree with on that. Also, as much as I enjoy the fact that our current president was a lecturer on Constitutional Law at one of the top law schools in the country for several years, any president does have an army of lawyers available to explain pretty much any constitutional issue that might arise. Understanding is not the issue. Warping and manipulating is, and no amount of testing is going to prevent that. This isn't really true. Political maneuvering, partly. Giving speeches and telling lies to keep everyone happy, only a little. People tend to underestimate what presidents do (and what the government does, generally) because so much of it happens in the background. But the president manages the vast Executive Branch, with its myriad executive agencies and ever-increasing powers. The job is, first and foremost, a management job. The president is not a do-nothing figurehead who just kind of talks about stuff sometimes. If I actually believed that totally unqualified people were being elected to the presidency, I might say that we should place some roadblocks in the way. But if you list the biggest problems with the past three presidents (respectively, probably networking, judgment, and character), they didn't have a lot to do with raw intelligence or with memorization of facts. Note that someone like Sarah Palin, who was grossly unqualified even to be vice-president, scared off enough people from voting for her ticket that she lost big. I do worry that some of the people we're electing to Congress are unqualified, though. Not many, but a few.

I think it's intentional. You're not supposed to be able to scheme your way out of boss fights that easily/randomly.

In the case of an Electoral College tie, we still have the House decide the presidency and the Senate decide the vice-presidency, which, had Obama won Ohio and New Hampshire and lost basically all of the other top swing states, would have ended up with a Republican chamber choosing Romney and a Democratic chamber possibly choosing Biden. The Founding Fathers were brilliant and forward-thinking, but they screwed up some stuff, and we haven't fixed it all yet. The most egregious stuff got fixed in the 19th century, but the less egregious stuff is still there.

I think the idea was supposed to be to provide something that remains constant as people change their names, avatars, etc. My member number is a lot lower than it was when I first joined.

Ah, I miss the needle/ferrets. And RWG. (The forum, not so much the games.)

He's very close to the word order of Latin, which does tend to put the verb on the end. The very strict "subject-verb" ending of the sentence that he follows is a little weird, but most of the time, presumably it reflects a conjugated verb. For example, in "look as good, you will not," the phrase "you will not" would be one word in Latin (a verb) and it would naturally go at the end of the sentence. There are some places where isn't quite what he's doing ("Agree with you, the council does") and wouldn't be completely normal in Latin, but it would be comprehensible for sure. It would just be slightly emphatic (emphasis on "Agree with you").

I can't really play any instruments. I like a lot of music, but my favorite genre is heavy metal, and my favorite sub-genre is prog/power metal.

I just want to emphasize the most important thing to remember from this topic (and all topics, really).

That seems... quite ambitious. Good luck.

One of the things that I like about English writing from about the 16th century to about the 18th century or so (depending on the author) is that it's basically modern English, but they were imitating the ancients (and imitating people imitating the ancients) so much that they pretty much freed up English word order, too, with a surprisingly small amount of ambiguity. We can do a hell of a lot more with English than most people ever attempt, and there was a time in high prose and (more so) in high poetry that it was in fashion to do so. He was also probably sleeping with the emperor's daughter, and this probably had at least something to do with his exile.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this isn't right. Ovid didn't use more declensions or conjugations than any other Latin writer of his era, really. One of the common lines about Ovid, actually, is that his work was incredibly smooth and graceful, without a lot of the straining that makes Propertius sort of fun but kind of hard to understand. His word order was a little funky, but most poets' word orders were, and you can kind of do that in Latin. We do have some non-literary Latin that shows how Latin was used by the common people back in the day. Graffiti on walls in particular is an interesting source, and it has all the properties you would expect of graffiti, though in an ancient culture. Some papyrus, too, has weird everyday Latin on it. Even that stuff, though, doesn't really break the inflectional system as much as just screw up a form here or there, or mis-spell a word (because of changed pronunciation).

The pronoun is so frequently left out that when you include it, you pretty much have to translate it as "It is I who..." rather than just translating the sentence. But it's not grammatically incorrect as such to include it. There's a little bit of this, but less than you might think. Modern people trying to read/write Latin are pretty much going for a particular place (Rome) at a particular time (the first century B.C.). That's pretty much been the ideal since at least the Renaissance, and arguably since that era actually occurred; people began studying Vergil and Cicero in literally the next generation. I'm not much of an expert, either, but the core rules from Plautus all the way to, say, Augustine don't change all that much. Vocabulary is a little fluid, and pronunciation changed some bit, and the occasional form shifted, but the changes were quite minor compared to, say, what happened to English from 1400 to 2000 (a comparable length of time).

Could it really just be that they were so much longer? I guess Kva and Kellem-blah start with the same letter, too. Duly noted for future story-writing. I guess it also had something to do with the relatively giant number of nations/major characters. In Avernum, you pretty much have three (nephils, sliths, Avernites) that grow in the later games (vahnatai, Empire). In Geneforge, the names of the factions are words, and there are not huge masses of characters to keep track of (Trajkov and maybe two or three others in GF1). In Avadon, there were, what, five major nations, each with large numbers of major/minor characters, so it's all rather huge in scope for a single game.

Have we ever put our collective finger on why the names in Avadon were so hard to keep track of? Even as I was playing it, I couldn't remember which nation was which or, much of the time, which character was which. I never had that problem with, say, Mertis or Cotra or Lorelei.

One of the reasons Paul got so much coverage in the NT is that he was a reasonably literate Greek. He never knew Jesus or anything; he just knew how to write. Anyone who thinks Revelation sounds weird in English should read it in Greek. Yes, you get the general sense of it in translation, but it loses some of its flavor in translation. It's really weird in the original. On calling it "Revelation" vs. "Apocalypse": tradition makes for bad translation. Look at the Latinate names of what we call Genesis, Exodus, etc., and compare them to the Hebrew-translated names. The Hebrew ones are vastly better.

I think he said that he was. The project took far longer than expected but made very little money, if I remember correctly, and I'm pretty sure he said he was never doing anything like that again. He did say that he was never doing E4/A4, and then he did, but that was because he knew he would make tons of money doing it (and he did), whereas another Blades could very well lose him money again.

Less time for BoE than for BoA, but still a long time. Depends on how ambitious you are, too; complex noding can take a lot longer, or serious engine retinkering. (These things can actually be faster in BoA.)

I can now complain about this (regarding myself) on two different topics.

All these people growing and changing and becoming different... and here I am still pretty much the same as I was in 2004. Sigh.

I had this kind of problem repeatedly throughout Avadon (not being able to find the quest-giver in order to complete the quest). It's worth keeping track of who asked you to do what and where that person is.

Shards of Fire! I remember her being one of the good ones, but I don't remember much else. It would have been much cooler if ET and TM had been the same person. I would've been impressed at the range that that would've required.

I liked it, but I'm not picky about linearity vs. open-ended exploration. I kind of think that Spiderweb does open-ended exploration better than just about anything else I've played, whereas it does strong linear plotlines well but not much better than other game companies, and that might explain why a lot of SW fans are disappointed when a SW game is more linear, but that's just a guess from someone who hasn't played many RPGs and doesn't really have enough of a frame of reference to make that kind of guess.

This is the crucial point. The game gets harder, even at a constant difficulty setting, as you go along. There are significant jumps in the mid-game.