Kelandon

I'm a little late, but... Steve Jobs was incredible, even when he butted heads. Jef Raskin was a family friend of mine, and while I never really asked for the details, there was apparently not a lot of love lost between the two men. It is true that Steve Jobs could be arrogant, dismissive, and all those other things that smart, influential people often are. Even so, it was clear that both of them stood for the same thing, and always had, since the late '70s: making computers accessible and intuitive. Apple has always worked to make interfaces so good that you don't even notice that you're using an interface. And it has done that spectacularly. I've owned Macs since the beginning (the Mac came out around when I was born, and that's when my family started buying them) and more or less every iThing that has come out in the past decade, and I've never had to spend more than a minute or two getting started. I've always never fought with them, the way that I have to fight with Microsoft Word to get it to do what I want. I've never skipped an update because I don't want to have to learn a new set of arbitrary workarounds to get the damned thing to do what I want, the way that I did with Vista and am doing with Word 2010/2011. Apple products just work, and they do what I want them to. Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the many other greats who worked for Apple at one point or another did a lot of work trying to figure out what makes a system intuitive in the first place. What do we expect computers to do? Why do we expect that? These are not simple questions to answer, but the answers make all the difference. I'll be getting a new iPhone in a week or two, and when I do, I'll give a moment of silence for Steve Jobs. I normally don't care much about CEOs, but he was something else.

Major possible points of entry: Avernum 1 is the first of the original Avernum Trilogy. It's a remake of Exile 1, which (obviously) comes before the games you played years ago. It's being remade right now, so you could play it now or wait for the remake to come out. (The current version looks different from either Exile or Avadon; it was an intermediate look-and-feel that Spidweb kept only for a few years. I like it, but some don't.) Avernum 4 is the direct sequel to the plotline of Exile 3. I think it's the weakest of the series, personally, but a lot of people like it. It looks sort of like Avadon, graphically. If you want to skip it, I think you could go straight into Avernum 5 (which I think is better) without much loss of continuity. Geneforge 1 is the beginning of the GF series, which is not better or worse than Avernum, but it's different. Some like it more, some less. Graphically, it looks like Avadon, and the plots feel more like Avadon's than like Avernum's. GF1 is pretty old, and the engine developed quite a ways since the beginning; if you'd like to pick up from a point of greater refinement, you could start at GF4, which is one of the stronger recent efforts. You don't have to play the earlier games to understand GF4 (well, mostly). You could also go in for Nethergate: Resurrection, Blades of Exile, or Blades of Avernum. N:R is a stand-alone game with the look-and-feel of Avernum but an independent plot; it's great, one of the finest that Spidweb has ever done. Blades of Exile is in the classic look-and-feel of the Exile Trilogy, but with literally hundreds of quite long and quite good user-made scenarios; it's now free and open-source. Blades of Avernum is also primarily geared towards user-made scenarios, and there are dozens, though not as many and not as long as the BoE ones. Try some demos to see what you think. The demos are representative of their respective games.

Hmm, 20% off of free is still free. Being a mod is pretty cool sometimes.

Originally Posted By: PSPACE I've had high, daily quantities of coffee for months at a time, and then just stopping. All that happened was that I felt drowsy for a day or two while catching up on my sleep. I don't think that's what withdrawal feels like. Edit: Regular use certainly builds up a tolerance, so a larger dose is required for the same effect, but tolerance is not the same as dependence. As Harehunter implies, you were fortunate not to have debilitating headaches and more severe drowsiness. Most people who have heavy caffeine dependence and quit cold turkey at least have one of the two, and many have both. Now, how to interpret that is another issue.

To be fair, the intention of that post was not terribly clear. Nor is the meaning in the context of the play totally unambiguous. I seem to recall that most people take Polonius as being somewhat pompous and preachy there, but there are other possible readings, even in context. The above list of various drugs with various addictive levels reminds me how arbitrary and bizarre the federal drug schedules are. The fact that something is a Schedule I controlled substance vs. any other schedule controlled substance usually is less than meaningless, medically. If there were ever a hypocritical, logically inconsistent system in need of reform, that's one. For example, morphine and fentanyl are Schedule II, but heroin is Schedule I. Huh? How does that make sense? (All three are very similar opiates, but in terms of potency at equal dosages, morphine < heroin < fentanyl.) This is far from the worst inconsistency, but virtually every categorization in the schedules is questionable in relation to something else.

I might be somewhat affected in my current state by the fact that I literally cannot escape from the smell of cigarette smoke in my dorm right now, save by closing all the windows and not walking in the hallways. This might be causing me to overstate my true position, and I might change my mind tomorrow. But I think that my support for a ban on forcing tobacco smoke on others (generally — maybe the better example is, say, an airplane) is not simply based on a single factor. It's a combination of the fact that second-hand smoke is medically harmful to others (to greater and lesser degrees; obviously more to asthmatics) and a public nuisance (again to greater and lesser degrees). I don't want to decide whether any one factor is decisive, because not only one factor is present. They're all present. And one factor happens to affect me more than most people, so I obviously care about it more than most people. That said, where do we draw the line? I've thought about this occasionally, usually when I'm walking ten or twenty feet behind someone who's smoking and desperately trying to pass him or her so as to get away from the stink. I'm in favor of restrictive laws on smoking but not on banning it entirely, but why? I suppose I draw the line here: people need to not damage the health and well-being of others, but they can damage their own health and well-being as much as they want. So if people can smoke in completely open air such that no one else has to breath it (an open-air concert obviously doesn't count, since even with festival seating you usually can't choose your spot very well), then smoking is okay. In all other circumstances, smoking can be limited.

My point was that cigarette smokers pollute public air with a foul odor. I don't need to do a study to know that; it's pretty obvious. Would you really need a study to know that most non-smokers find that cigarette smoke smells offensive? This means, at the very least, that cigarette smokers should not be allowed to impose their foul odors on others in a regular and predictable fashion (e.g. in closed-air restaurants). This is not overbearing nannying; this is protecting those who would otherwise be harmed.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter Then there is the issue of 'second hand smoke' regulations. This appears to me to be another case of the 'nanny state' politicians concocting a junk science proof to support their cause. This is where I think you're indisputably wrong. I don't smoke, and I'm extremely sensitive to cigarette smoke. If I'm stopped in traffic and someone is smoking in a car with closed windows several cars in front of me, I can smell it. If someone is smoking on the other side of the building from me, and I have the window open, I not only can smell it but have to close the window because it is so putrid, and I may have to leave my room for a few minutes for the smell to go away. People who smoke around me are probably negatively affecting my health — I find it hard to imagine that the stuff in cigarette smoke isn't harmful, but I haven't studied the statistics carefully — but they are definitely causing me harm. It would be far worse if smoking were allowed in restaurants, etc., as it used to be, since I would be (almost literally) forced out. It's fair to check out statistical studies to verify that their methodologies were acceptable, that they're not drawing excessively broad inferences, and all those sorts of things. It's another thing entirely to dismiss statistical studies entirely.

Originally Posted By: Alex Originally Posted By: Harehunter How does this relate to the James Byrd case I was talking about? It does not, I was actually inspired by Kelandon's fiery rant against The Man. Maybe I should have quoted his post. You could try to interpret the data differently, but the statistics remain the statistics.

It's almost irrelevant whether the death penalty could ever be an appropriate punishment. The unbelievably racist pattern of assigning it throughout basically all of the U.S. is enough to say that our system for doing it is so broken that we would have to redesign the system entirely in order to get a functioning capital punishment system. At that point, we should just scrap it and save the debate. This is only the beginning of a whole series of problems with the criminal justice system. Troy Davis's case is notable for the wild evidentiary problems and alleged police misconduct. Six of the nine witnesses claimed to be threatened by the police if they didn't identify Davis as the killer. All of those, plus another, recanted their testimony. They also implicated the person who had pointed the finger at Davis originally. There was basically no other evidence than these eyewitnesses. But the entire system is plagued with racism, and perhaps even worse than that, incarceration on a scale unprecedented and unplanned for. Well over 7 times as many people are incarcerated as were forty years ago. Enough African-Americans in some Southern states have been convicted of felonies and have permanently lost their rights to vote that we're approaching the disenfranchisement of the pre-Voting Rights Act of 1965 era. Children of 13 and 14 are being sentenced as adults (huh?) and put in adult prisons, where they are brutally abused, not occasionally, but as a matter of course. The whole system is full of gross injustice. This is probably just another example.

On the Mac version, is the Frame Rectangle broken? It seems as though it's doing the same thing as the Fill Rectangle. EDIT: And the Fill Rectangle doesn't seem to be filling.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Interpol only works when the person is in a country where the police will help capture the person. bin Laden was in an area where the Pakistan government had little control. Uh, he was in a suburb next to the equivalent of West Point. I think that the government had reasonable control over that area. (Well, to the extent that Darth Ernie isn't just right in the first place, I suppose.) Maybe you mean earlier, when he was in the mountains (or Afghanistan). But I'm talking about when he actually died. EDIT: Oh, and a lecturer I heard today made an interesting point. This idea that is sometimes propagated, that terrorism is somehow newly a part of American life, is not only wrong — one successful attack does not make for a lifestyle — but also offensive to at least a good percentage of the older African-American population who can still remember the lynchings of the 1950's and 1960's.

Originally Posted By: Sylae Originally Posted By: Kelandon Originally Posted By: tridash The tiles images are already a little larger than the default - I suppose the best way to do it would be to have a slider or something to increase/decrease the tiles image size independent of the size of the window? Pretty much any way you could do it would be great. I was figuring that you could just let the Tile window be resized left-right in addition to up-down and automatically resize the tile images based on the width of the window, but whatever's easiest, really. Or perhaps have a full-size tile pop up where you clicked, in the good ol' Windows Character Map style. Or maybe have a little 'selected tile' indicator. Well, that wouldn't solve my problem, which is not being able to find the thing to click on in the first place. But that could also be a good idea.

Originally Posted By: tridash The tiles images are already a little larger than the default - I suppose the best way to do it would be to have a slider or something to increase/decrease the tiles image size independent of the size of the window? Pretty much any way you could do it would be great. I was figuring that you could just let the Tile window be resized left-right in addition to up-down and automatically resize the tile images based on the width of the window, but whatever's easiest, really.

It seems as though Jeff is marketing Avadon more vigorously than he has marketed previous games and generally stretching to reach new audiences. This is a good thing.

I think that I resized the outdoors successfully at least once or twice in Nobody's Heroes. I didn't have crashing problems. Hey, would it be possible to make the "Tiles" images resizable? I often find that it's really difficult to find what I need in the terrains and such because the pictures are too small. (This is actually much better already since the window can be made big enough that I can see all the terrains at once. Good god, this is beautiful.)

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity The alternative in which rich countries bunker themselves against the barbarians is probably at least as feasible, but I'm pretty sure it would be a worse option even just for the rich countries. So in the meantime I think the best option for dealing with problems like terrorism, that exploit cracks between jurisdictions, is to improvise in ways that tend towards the open world with global metaculture, rather than bunker states. Even brief nods to the UN, or token participations by small local states in multinational coalitions, may be worthwhile for their long-term implications. I agree about the general goal, although I don't know (literally — I am not informed enough on the subject) about the methods. Consider the example of the strike on Osama bin Laden, as above. There had been an arrest warrant from Interpol since 1998, I guess, but no move was made to involve Interpol or any sort of international organization. No token participation by the local state was attempted. Yet it was probably done in exactly the right way: we had actionable intelligence, couldn't wait for the (slow) international process to work, and couldn't really trust the local authorities, so we just went it alone. In war, this is a terrible policy, but in a surgical counterterrorist strike, it seemed necessary. Or is there even an international process? I guess I'll know more about this in a couple of years, but my understanding from quick Googling is that all that international organizations can do is force sovereign powers to communicate. They can't actually take action themselves. I guess the solution might be to reform Interpol (or some part of the UN) substantially to give it better ability to handle situations like these, but is that feasible? Alternatively, should we have involved the Pakistani government? That seems deeply dangerous, and the fact that someone as committed to international law as Obama (see: Libya) didn't is probably an indication that it was simply not a good idea, but maybe he was wrong. What about the drone strikes on major Al Qaeda leaders? Is that different or the same? I guess the crucial issue here is not really trusting the local Pakistani authorities, because if this were, say, Britain, there would not have been a problem working with them. There are ungoverned regions, and then there are governments that are corrupt, ineffective, not committed to international law and order (*cough* maybe us for a little while, honestly), or whatever. The former are obviously a problem, but maybe the latter are an even bigger (or just very different) problem.

Oh, I just realized that I had a more serious comment to add (in addition to my Obama = Akhenaten — who, according to another conspiracy theory, was an alien... so I guess the birthers were right after all?). I heard a brief lecture from Michael Chertoff on "the law of 9/11" today. His argument was, in essence, that because of improvements in communications technology and weapons technology, individuals from virtually any part of the world can inflict grievous harm on virtually any other part of the world (e.g. a plan from a remote part of Afghanistan killing thousands of people in New York City). This is a recent development; a hundred years ago (or even fifty years ago), the communications technology was not in place to make such a remote connection possible, and (this seemed like a weaker point) weapons technology had not reached the point where individuals could do as much damage as they can now. As an aside, I suppose he meant theoretical damage more than anything that has actually occurred. Individuals could build bombs decades ago — famously, the Munich Olympics in 1972 involved grenade explosions, and various other terrorist bombings took place in the 1970's (the Weathermen come to mind) — and while airplanes hadn't been used as missiles before (to my knowledge), it had been possible for quite some time. But the capacity for an individual to acquire biological weapons or a dirty bomb is far greater now than it was in, say, the 1950's. Or maybe his point was just that it's easier to do more damage now than it was in the past. Either way, he pointed out that this combines with the fact that there are essentially ungoverned pockets around the world (much of Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) where organizations can not only operate with impunity and direct these campaigns, but also experiment and recruit. Together, this means that while in previous centuries only states were a serious threat to national security (e.g. the Soviet Union could nuke us), today non-state organizations can do severe damage at a distance in a way previously impossible. He then went on to say that our previous paradigms in dealing with people who harm other people have been military or criminal justice. That is, when people killed other people previously, it either war or a crime, and these were considered extremely different and handled in very different ways. But international terrorism represents a somewhat different situation, which means that the solutions have to be somewhat different than we're used to. His example of a different solution was the mission that took out Bin Laden. Bin Laden killed people as a terrorist, not so much as a criminal or a soldier. Under criminal codes, we would request extradition from the government of the area, or at worst, we'd try very hard to capture him alive. Under military procedures, we'd have to be at war with someone or other, but the only person we deliberately killed was Bin Laden himself. It doesn't sound much like a criminal justice action or a military one, because if it were, we didn't do it right, and it would've provoked a lot more outrage than it did. But then what was it, and have we ever done something like that before? He went on to describe some of the things we have to decide in getting a set of rules and procedures in place (how much to borrow from criminal procedure and how much from military, basically). I'm not sure how well I've replicated the argument or how much I buy it, but the whole thing was an interesting take.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus Originally Posted By: Sylae You aren't one of those crazyfolk who think... that Obama is japanese are you? I've never heard that one before. Have you heard that he's Akhenaten? Because I hadn't until a few days ago.

There are various links in the BoA Editor forum header (that thing at the top that everyone ignores) to get you started on BoA designing generally.

Wow. I wish I'd had this six or seven years ago. This is a ridiculously huge improvement.

I'm going to venture back onto AIM for evenings this weekend just in case I could be useful in such a chat.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Note to Self 2. None of those are political qualifications. You know that, right? I'd be leery of A and B for their poor health decisions, but they also lived in a different era, and it's not exactly correct to judge them by modern standards. C sure has nice personal habits; it's a shame his policies didn't live up to them. also, if we are being scrupulously fair about describing each of the candidates, neglecting to mention Hitler's criminal history (for a coup attempt, at that) seems like rather a serious omission Or for that matter that he never "had an affair" because he didn't marry his mistress until right before their suicides. Hitler didn't even have particularly good personal habits, at least with regard to women. He treated Eva Braun with a certain degree of dismissive disdain, frankly.

I'm (slowly) replaying on Torment and finding that it does feel like a completely different game than it did on Hard, and the second time through on Hard (when I jacked mostly middle skills rather than the sides) felt like a completely different game than the first time through on Hard. So yeah, I think we are all playing different games. The tactics are completely different depending on your build and difficulty level. Jeff made a conscious decision to make Avadon a different kind of story — darker — than Avernum, as he mentioned somewhere in this forum. It won't appeal to everyone. If you don't like it, don't buy Avadon games. Buy Avernum and maybe GF games (though GF has its own ambiguities and challenges). I have to say, I assumed that the whole point of the return to Avadon (alone) was to lure the enemies back to the first room where you have two or three helpers, who will take them down. It was a little time-consuming and a little finicky, but not all that hard.

Originally Posted By: Dantius It's also possible to make the argument that by having children, you are by definition not a rational, intelligent individual, since by doing so, you are making a decision that is contrary to your best interests. It's also possible to make exactly the opposite argument, that by doing so, you are making a decision that is perfectly aligned with your best interests (perhaps more perfectly aligned than any other possible decision). Depends on what you mean by "your best interests," of course. As to the original issue in this topic, there is a general sense in a lot of literature on education that children today pay attention (or don't) in completely different ways than they did a few decades ago, partly because of the incredible spread of technology that creates a vast generation gap. The world is changing. What no one can really agree on, in education literature or elsewhere, is how large the change is, either in absolute or relative terms. Does the rise of smartphones with Internet access and complex game stimulation availability everywhere (or the rise of personal computers some years earlier, or...) represent the largest change in everyday experience in the history of the world? Is it just a moderately large change? Or is it just a small change, having only a slight impact on our actual functioning as human beings? I don't think anyone really has a definitive answer. For that matter, what about changes in discipline? Once upon a time, "getting sent to the principal's office" was a big deal because the principal was the one to whom it was given to administer significant physical discipline. (Nuns with rulers who smacked hands were available in Catholic schools, but less so in public schools.) Now, if you simply raise your voice to a student, you might be charged with assault, and the charges alone might lose you your job. What impact does this have? What about similar changes in parenting? Again, we don't really know. There's a lot of disagreement.