Alorael at Large

The list of shows I've seen in their entirety, at least within the last decade, is very short. Firefly: It's really good. Is it the best thing every? No, but it was different and it was exceptionally well written and well acted. I think if it had lived longer it would have eventually shown warts, but it didn't, so it's forever going to be a thing of beauty killed in its prime. What it really nailed was aesthetic. I like long-form drama; this had practically none. I like character arcs; this was too short to provide much, although it did have inklings of development. But it absolutely nailed the flavor and feeling of a place that never was. Dollhouse: Seen on the wings of having recently acquired and watched Firefly. It's not so good. Or rather, it's bad, then eventually became tolerably but not exceptionally good late in its run. I suspect it was building towards something interesting, but we'll never know. Would not watch, no tears shed. I think I would have stopped watching it except that it came with some nice social perks. Arrested Development: I was dragged into this one by well-meaning friends. I don't love it the way others seem to, nor have I watched the resurrected Netflix season, but it's head and shoulders above other sitcoms. The density of humor, and blink-and-you'll-miss-it "bonus" humor, really sell it. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes humorous TV and a fair number of people who claim not to. Battlestar Galactica: I think this one holds the distinction of being the only show I've seen in its entirety while it was on air for its own sake. Don't let the terrible name fool you; it's a great show with excellent writing, excellent acting, and an interesting story arc. Not without some unevenness, particularly in some of the individual episodes (with forewarning, you can skip them and miss next to nothing) but I'll label it my favorite show without hesitation. And not just because I'm a sci-fi fan; I think it really deserves the encomiums heaped upon it. And some things where I've watched at least one season: Scrubs: Light watching, silly, but still quite funny. It never pretends to be what it's not, but it does what it does well, and even does manage to pluck heartstrings well once in a while (and with cheap tricks a little more often). I actually only picked it up in the last few years, and I was surprised by how much it shows its age. Not in the clothes or jokes or anything else, but in the way hospitals work. It's amazing how quickly electronic everything has dominated the field. Anyway, it's still a largely funny show. I made it quite a few seasons in before the quality was obviously starting to deteriorate. Babylon 5: Watched on recommendation after thoroughly enjoying Battlestar Galactica. This one has really not stood the test of time for me. The acting is largely execrable, the special effects show their age a little bit, and the writing is ham-handed. Still a milestone of sci-fi, I think, and maybe would be more meaningful if I had seen any Star Trek ever, but not amazing. It does get points for a long and consistent overarching story. It sadly suffers badly from having a first season that's really, really bad but also sadly important as the foundation for subsequent seasons. For the hard-core sci-fi fan only. If you like Star Trek it'll probably do. Of note, as mentioned, I've never seen Star Trek. Not one episode, as far as I can recall. Do I need to turn in my geek card? —Alorael, who supposes he's also seen all of Sherlock. It's a little different, since it's (slowly) ongoing, but that's also a great show. It feels a lot more like a series of movies than TV, though. And it also suffers from inexplicably bad middle episodes to each three episode series, although the most recent was the least bad of the lot.

There's a large body of bioethical literature about it. Some of it is about discomfort with making cosmetic choices. If blond hair and blue eyes are perceived as attractive and money can buy them... what does that say about us? Some is about the tradeoffs: if I can give a child greatly enhanced mathematical and computational ability at the cost of a very high likelihood of depression and increased risk of serious infection, is that a fair thing to choose for someone else? Still more is about distributional justice: if the rich can make their children smarter, stronger, healthier, and so on, and the poor cannot, does this lead to a more unjust society, or even potential subspeciation of humanity? And what does it mean if I can decide to give a child the genetic potential to be, say, a virtuoso pianist or gymnast. That sets the child up for expectations that would not otherwise exist. —Alorael, who isn't sure genetic enhancement is wrong. He does think that it's a complex and fraught issue and cavalier dismissal is a good way to end up, many years down the line, with ethical crises and regulatory scrambling.

Flu is transmitted via aerosol. Aerosolized zombie is unusual. —Alorael, who imagines that flying zombies really would make everything worse. And flying microscopic zombies? You're pretty much doomed.

The zombie scenarios that make the most sense are the ones where it's some highly contagious, probably airborne plague/curse/whatever that infects almost everyone but that only hits, say, 95% of the population with the remaining 5% resistant. That's an instant apocalypse, but you'd get apocalyptic disaster even if the victims weren't zombies just by that 95% lethality. —Alorael, who can come up with other ways to make more plausible zombies. The problem is that it never keeps all the elements that have somehow become the lowest common zombie denominator. Instant zombification from infection helps somewhat in getting the first horde going, for instance, but you lose the agonizing over infected survivors and the brain-eating.

Zombie scenarios all seem to posit a nearly symptom-free incubation period that is long enough for travel but that then turns into sudden, unexpected face-gnawing. And somehow the hordes happen even though zombies want to eat the brains, which are also a zombie's only weak point, meaning their victims probably wouldn't rise as more shambling undead. Everyone conceals their injuries, and their friends' and relatives', despite the inevitable horrible fate that in turn puts friends and relatives at risk. No one forms mobs to throughly dismember the potentially infected in crazed mobs. Look, this isn't a highly transmissible illness. No one is going around in a contagious but non-obvious state. Sure, once most humans are dead it's really hard to fix things, but what's the likelihood of an uncontained outbreak, really? —Alorael, who finds zombie fiction very poorly thought-out. He is not convinced by the scare-mongering. But get your flu shot.

Oh, there was a mod who deleted that post. I replaced the post and deleted her. Then I deleted all her previous posts and her account. Then I deleted your memories of her ever having been here. This is now the only record of her existence. —Alorael, who would also like to remind you that these boards have always been at war with Eastasia RPG Codex.

Genetics and genomics have been fertile providers of fear-mongering. In this case, as in pretty much all the prior cases, real-world technology doesn't provide much reason to fear for the things that are getting the hype. The real downside is accidentally causing genetic damage in the process; if we're editing germ-line genes, we'd pass that damage on to children. That's bad, of course, but it's worth weighing that against the harm of passing on unedited genes known to be harmful. None of this really resembles Geneforge. All we're really capable of, at the moment, is recognizing (some) harmful mutations and what the non-harmful genetic sequence would be. Being able to replace the former with the latter is a major goal of medicine right now. But all the enhancements to make better people in the future? We're not there yet. —Alorael, who can see a little bit more concernw with so-called designer babies, where someone wants to engineer, say, blue eyes. Or height, but height is already complicated enough that that's probably not in the immediate future. That's worth raising concerns over, but it's not along the lines of making novel modifications to humans to make them anything even slightly non-human.

The vahnatai have caves in which they cultivate bats to produce the finest oreguano. —Alorael, who may be forced to leave his thread. If so, he leaves it satisfied.

Lost Souls is a pretty simple idea, but it never quite lived up to its potential. Mostly it needs map editor. —Alorael, who might well get this game. Lost Souls was always the standout good RWG for him.

In A3, maybe. In A4 she has no interest in getting collaboration from Avernites. In A5-6 Rentar-Ihrno is very irrelevant. —Alorael, who can even see siding with Rentar in A3 as a reasonable choice based on callous pragmatism instead of puppy-stomping evil.

X is just reinventing the wheel. What exactly do you think Divine Thud does? —Alorael, who believes there was a lengthy and frequently esoteric argument in theological circles about whether the thud is the fall of the anvil or whether the world itself is the anvil and the thud is the blow of the god['s/s'] hammer.

X has an addiction to weird, useless magic. Solberg flees at the first sign of trouble for a very, very long time. Rone's mind is not so sharp. At least Erika is reliably working on things, many of which seem to be useful, and forwarding her goals without causing a whole lot of collateral damage. —Alorael, who supposes you have to consider the entire Empire-Avernum war not collateral damage. That's rather debatable.

Why do you think the vlish is a perennial favorite among Shapers? —Alorael, who also imagines living tools are great for getting those things that rolled way under the sofa where you can't quite reach.

I'm always of the opinion that you should play however you enjoy it. Some people like struggling mightily on Torment. Some want additional self-set challenges to make the game a titanic undertaking. Some people just want to crank the difficulty all the way down and breeze through the story. And some people want to cheat so much that they can stomp through everything regardless of difficulty and have a great time doing it. There's no right way to play. The experience is certainly different among all those options, but none is necessarily better. Play how you want. —Alorael, who could suggest getting the App Store or iOS versions of games, if you have a Mac or iPad. They doesn't let you edit scripts. For most people that's a downside, but for you it might be what you want.

It's only a baffling thing to come across unless you've gotten the out-of-game tip that Dispel Barrier is in there. —Alorael, who supposes impassable but tempting places are also a bit cruel.

It's possible, of course, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. Depending on whether you count from A3 or from E3, it took four to nine years to get a continuation. And we'll see, but Avadon 3 could very well give a very final ending. Jeff has bandied about the idea of prequels but he hasn't actually done any. —Alorael, who also just doesn't think Avadon has the same depth as Avernum. Jeff's first world has all the detail and love of a first world. Avadon is nicely designed but it's also more of a specific version of generic fantasyland.

Thahds and battle alphas/betas? If the Shapers could do that I think they would have ensured the loyalty and lack of attachment in drayks and drakons, averting much of the troubles of the rebellion. Actually, getting all this seems to be a lot of the point of those creations, maybe minus the shaping, and it backfired terribly. —Alorael, who really thinks the Shapers never got careful manipulation of minds and character down the way they nailed physical form and capability. They couldn't get blind loyalty without stupidity, even among serviles; trying to get anything capable of leadership and shaping is probably way beyond what shaping can do.

What's the point of shaping more humans? Humans are already good at making more of themselves. There'd presumably be issues with fully-formed but entirely ignorant humans that would still mean putting in a lot of work to make them actually useful; that's probably why serviles are all born, not shaped, now that the stock exists. The shaped creations are all improvements in some way from a base and designed for specific things. What's the point of making a baseline human? —Alorael, who wouldn't even be so sure that no shaper locked in his lab has not made... a man! Presumably because he wants an heir to carry on his great work but can't figure out how to do this the normal way, or thinks shaping is more awesome, or something. And probably at least half of those cases are the kinds of sealed bunkers that are full of mines, unstable things, and shades. Because it's traditional.

I'm not sure. At least in X1 they make a big deal out of lack of metal, but Blosk is a giant mining operation and Fort Draco is a giant smelting operation. What they lack more is good hardwood instead of lousy cavewood. I'd chalk it up to not having mining and production up to the task of outfitting everyone who needs outfitting because they're just getting started, but X1 actually isn't the rough beginnings of Avernum. So I don't know. I don't think Sliths are cold-blooded, just more cold-intolerant. They're also not native. And reptiles generally eat less, but it's because they're exothermic, so again, who knows. Jeff is not a biologist. Sure. It just seems strange that rounding people up and teleporting them en masse is somehow cheaper than execution. Swords and axes are pretty cheap, reusable, and final. Fireballs, too. Why go to the trouble of banishment if not for mercy or the appearance thereof? The undead encountered are almost all human. The ones who maybe aren't are the Ancient Crypt near Formello, which is unclear in origin, and the vahnatai crypts, which also have hraithes and vahnavoi. —Alorael, who is fairly sure that Erika modifying the fungus is a bit of forum fanon to reconcile the differing accounts.

I'm actually curious. What's the possible problem, and what does it have to do with operating system? —Alorael, who took the opportunity to arrange his icons artistically. Who needs a desktop background when you can have the icons themselves form art. It's like a digital rock garden.

Says you. My desktop is a jumble of 70 icons, many of which are overlapping. Is it messy? Undoubtedly. Does it give me immediate access to all the stuff I need? Sure. Does it need cleaning? Probably, but it's not like the excess junk there causes any problems. —Alorael, whose desktop catastrophe is a form of security. No one can find his important files in the clutter even if he accidentally leaves his screen unlocked. Yep.

Displaying my current desktop is a violation of federal law. Alternately a pretty but very blank default background. —Alorael, who would put in the effort to make it legal, but then it would also be cleaned-up and boring, which nobody wants.

The behavior is actually understandable. Firstly, Rentar-Ihrno is always clear that she doesn't like humans generally and puts up with Avernum because she hates the Empire more. Secondly, for Rentar and her followers, A3 is a direct continuation of A2. Avernum considers the war over when the Empire withdraws, but Rentar is satisfied by nothing less than total annihilation of the Empire and just carries on hostilities. As mentioned, Rentar tries to kill you, and not Avernum generally, only because you are actively messing up her plans and, in fact, literally invading her base. —Alorael, who then considers A4 a direct extension of A3. Really, plot-wise, A2-4 make a much better trilogy than A1-3 or A4-6.

None of the magic in Geneforge is at all realistic. The best you could plausibly come up with without invoking technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic is highly advanced genetic engineering to create entirely new forms of life, and it would look nothing like shaping and could not plausibly produce, say, fire- or ice-breathing velociraptors. —Alorael, who if anything would remove the genes from Geneforge and keep that inaccurate and unnecessary nod to science out of the way of a neat but entirely fantasy conceit.

The caves were survivable. They had air, they had some light, and they had some edible fish and lizards and maybe even fungi. What they definitely did not have was enough of anything, or enough of anything cultivatable, to support the human settlements. It's likely that sliths have both different dietary requirements and lower metabolisms. Maybe they lived happily on fish that wouldn't support humans. I'm not sure what xenocide you're talking about. The Empire didn't, in any obvious way, intend the exiles to wipe out anything. They were just dumped. The only thing really worth targeting was the sliths, and they came very close to wiping out the Avernites. Someone on the surface sent down some cows, probably just as aid. What other surface megafauna is there in Avernum? The lizards, the major beast of burden and food animal, are native. And the dragons weren't, according to most sources, banished. They came down on their own long before the Empire knew the caves were there. —Alorael, who at the very least notes that Motrax was there to greet the First Expedition, which was the Empire's presumable first foray into the caves. It's not like they tossed in giant, magical, fire-breathing reptiles, waited a long time, and then thought to send in some adventurers to see what happened.