Kelandon

Originally Posted By: Actaeon I don't think drugs are entirely off the hook for harming others, though. Many drugs can result in agression or violence, while almost any drug inhibits your ability to pilot an automobile or care for a child. You're entirely right, of course. Second-hand smoke is an obvious enough example of drug use that harms others, and some people do use guns to shoot themselves, not others. This is why fairly left-leaning people who generally want to legalize drugs can still push for restricting the areas and contexts in which people use them, and fairly right-leaning people who generally want people to be able to have guns can approve of gun safety training.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon In a related note, could someone explain why deregulation of drugs and deregulation of firearms are on opposite ends of the political spectrum? Because there's a difference between harming other people and harming yourself.

If you want a conspiracy theory about business interests profiting from us invading Iraq, it's not the oil itself. It's the private security contracting and the rebuilding costs. Halliburton, etc. I don't know enough to say for sure how beneficial it was to them, but I was under the impression that they made out like bandits. By kind of acting like bandits.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon I gather we're pretty well agreed that it's a less than ideal group of candidates. But can any of them actually defeat Barack Obama? Short answer? No.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon What does "Property" consist of? I don't really know, not having taken the class yet, but my impression from the casebook's table of contents is that there's some discussion of legal acquisition of property, types of estates, landlord-tenant law, land transfers, and various legal constraints on the use of land (zoning, eminent domain, that kind of thing). I don't know how much of that we'll actually cover.

Criminal Law Property International Law: China History of American Legal Education (a seminar — assuming I don't get into Negotiation, which I probably won't) (And of course LRW, which doesn't really count.) Looking forward to it. Will be hard but fun.

Of several likely outcomes, the one that gives me shivers is the Republicans keeping the House, taking the Senate, but not getting the presidency. (I don't consider the Republicans getting the presidency a likely outcome, but have all three would be worse, though in a different way.) At one point, Obama said that the people had voted (in 2010) for divided government, but not dysfunctional government. Both chambers of Congress for the R's but the presidency with the D's would be a vote for dysfunctional government. Anyone who's friends with me on Facebook has had plenty of my opinions on the elections, but in short: * I worked for a Bain-purchased company. I don't like Romney. (He's also insincere and full of bad policies.) * All of the rest of the remaining Republican presidential candidates are worse, except maybe Ron Paul, who's still not good. * Obama is better than most Democrats and independents give him credit for. * The one bright spot for Democrats in the Senate is Elizabeth Warren, who is great, will probably win, and taught a class that I took last semester.

Given that Jeff's strongest game characteristic is usually plot and weakest is usually graphics/sound, MMO would be exactly the wrong way to go.

Originally Posted By: No Government Organization —Alorael, who would like to know how many of those posts were bold, italic, and impenetrable. One more, now. (Well, not italic.)

Shame upon thy spam and its quintuple-digit multiplicity! Shame!

You started Valley of Dying Things, but it doesn't sound as though you ever finished. If you had, you'd save right after completing, and then enter another scenario. Fortunately, if I remember correctly, you can just walk your party out of the scenario (to the south) to exit. Then follow the usual instructions to enter Crescent Valley. Alternatively, just create a new party and use that to enter Crescent Valley instead of Valley of Dying Things.

I'm at the same spot in my re-read of WoT (well, in the middle of LoC). I think because I started reading WoT right before CoS came out, I just sort of think of all the stuff that happened in books 1-6 as having "already happened a long time ago," as if it all took place by the end of book 1. But if you look at it from the perspective of the series as a whole... I mean, people often point out that book 3 hardly involves Rand at all. At that point, the number of characters isn't big enough to do what books 9 and 10 did (same time, different characters), but it has the same feeling. The whole time I'm reading the book, I want to get back to Rand, and we have only a couple of scenes until the very end that involve him at all. Equally, the first half of book 5 (part of the much-hyped books 4-6 segment of the series) is really, really slow, as someone pointed out a few pages ago in this topic. The end of the book is rather astonishingly fast (how many regions, how many major characters? woah), but that's just the last couple hundred pages or so. So I think the reason I so much liked the re-read I did right before book 12 came out was just that we had book 11 by that point, and book 12 shortly thereafter. Brandon Sanderson said this at one point, but I think he was right: the books in the series are fairly consistent, but since books 1-6 came out so much more rapidly than the books thereafter, they were better received. Even if book 5 was a little slow, you were still reeling from book 4 just a year earlier and had only a year to wait until book 6 came out. On the other hand, when book 10 was a little slow, you had been waiting for it for over two years, and you had two and a half years to wait for the next one. That said, none of the books since book 10 has dragged at all. Click to reveal.. Also, the series reads kind of the way that (I'm told) watching the Sixth Sense works. Once you know the twists at the end (or in ToM, at least), the whole thing takes on a completely new flavor. Verin being a Darkfriend makes a lot of Moiraine's (and Verin's) comments take on a new character. Knowing that there is going to be something funky with Lanfear's not-evilness (as at least implied at the end of ToM) makes her whole plotline a lot more interesting to watch; she does a LOT to help Rand in the early books. There are tons of other things like this. I'm still not sure I totally get Graendel killing Asmodean. I know that Rahvin, Sammael, and Graendel were conspiring, so it would make sense for either Rahvin or Sammael to be in Caemlyn when Rand takes the city, and if Sammy were there, he'd probably not be able to resist taking a big shot at Rand during the battle, but Graendel rarely likes to fight directly in that way. Okay, so I see how we narrow it down to her. (Though I still think that Taim made at least as much sense, unless there is something that I'm missing that made it have to be a female channeler. Maybe that Rand would've sensed it? As female channelers go, Graendel is by far the most obvious.) But why did she do it? Just to weaken Rand? I gather that RJ thought that the next few books help explain this, so I'll keep my eyes on Graendel for a bit and see what the heck. I have two big theories for the last book. First, Perrin finds the Song. There is a ton of stuff between Perrin and Tinkers in the first handful of books. (For the whole series, if you count Aram.) All that business about choosing between the ax and the hammer also leans that way. Perrin casts off violence and becomes a Tinker. Second, we find out what is going on with Taim. He's clearly a Darkfriend, but my call is that what actually happened when he got away from the Aes Sedai and eventually showed up at Caemlyn is that the Shadow broke him free from the Aes Sedai and turned him against his will. This "turn to the Shadow against one's will" trick was Chekhov's gun starting in book 3, but no one ever shot it, that we know of. Yet Taim shows up in book 6 after a known plot by the Black Ajah to capture Taim from the Aes Sedai, and he's obviously a Darkfriend (and looks funny to Bashere, who ought to know him, and freaks out LTT, who, judging by book 13, can sense Darkfriends). He also responds with terror at the mention of the Forsaken showing up at the beginning of book 6. He's been turned against his will. The other speculations, that he's turning Black Tower men against their will also in order to create an army of male Dreadlords, seems pretty fair here too. The Shadow captured him early in book 4, and he doesn't show up in Caemlyn until Rand announces his amnesty, at which point he shows up promptly, within moments. That seems awfully convenient. I think the Shadow turned him and didn't know what to do with him until Rand's amnesty. I don't count the expectation that Rand will die at the Last Battle or that he'll seal up the Bore, linked with Alivia and probably Nynaeve and using Callandor, because those I take as obvious. I do think that it may happen (this would be cool) with Perrin leading an army of Tinkers/Aiel/Ogier with the Song to make the fix "grow" back (maybe with a cutting from Avendesora, maybe with something taking the place of a Nym?), but obviously that's a theory contingent upon another theory, which is tricky.

Yeah, use whatever you want from whatever. I tried to make some really simple but versatile scripts, particularly in Exodus; use whatever you want.

Alint saved my life as I made scenarios.

As I recall, I set up specdeath (in any of my various scenarios) to do this with memory cells.

Originally Posted By: Lilith after all, bruce banner didn't turn into The Credible Hulk now did he Sounds like a gag for Nobody's Heroes 2.

Originally Posted By: VCH I find internet insults more hurtful than the ones delivered in person. I don't know why that is, but it is. Perhaps, it's the lack of facial cues or context that makes the insult worse. You don't know what the person really meant or didn't—whether they are really a jerk or not. I've determined that the answer is almost always that they are really a jerk, so I've stopped worrying about it.

Didn't Djur program a script that did that at one point? I seem to recall that there was someone's posts he just blocked out entirely, and frankly, it sounded like a good idea to me.

It was sort of satisfying to give someone you didn't like only 1 star.

Originally Posted By: Iffy Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Still less than Alorael's rate. There are plenty of people here who have surpassed his rate for even a few months at a time, but he has unparalled consistency. Such as me, but then interest died out/relative maturity happened. Maybe someday Alorael will also develop relative maturity. We can all hope not, though.

At one point, I thought I might catch Alorael. Then I realized that it's impossible. Do the math. He has 10 years of 2,000 posts per year. 2,000 posts per year is an average of more than 5 posts per day, every day of the year. To catch up to him, you'd have to manage 10-15 posts per day, every day of the year, for a good 5-10 years. That's a high and unabating level of activity for many years at a time. Alo is a dirtier spammer than any of the rest of us will ever manage.

I think there's a preferences file you have to delete in order for it to be unregistered, and that's not going to happen with a simple re-install. If it does become unregistered, Jeff is pretty good about sending a new key. (For free, if you already purchased the game.)

I don't see anything in the temple either, at least looking in the editor. It seems to have some coins and stuff, and that's it. The story goes that Jeff made DWtD after making the BoA engine, and he was exhausted by that point. I presume from this that it didn't end up being quite the level that he was hoping, in terms of, er, quality.

Originally Posted By: Lilith alec's now housemates with djur and also married (not to djur). Not legally, anyway.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Click to reveal.. I haven't read Book Thirteen yet, but I hear that Graendal is finally, explicitly confirmed as Asmodean's killer. Click to reveal.. It's confirmed very indirectly in the text — it mentions that she's responsible for the deaths of three Forsaken, and we know of two at that point other than Asmodean — and confirmed in the Glossary. I didn't notice in the text, not really following at the time, but then I read somewhere to check the Glossary.