Alorael at Large

You know you should have started with Alcritas. Or play whatever. Spiderweb has plenty of good games and there's no reason not to happily play any or all. —Alorael, who rolls your circle into the deep past.

You're welcome. —Alorael, who will take credit for being the first one to bring it up. And he coincidentally has travel plans for an online dating wedding to arrange.

I would definitely take it. If this magic test were really able to fully identify a broad range of strengths and weaknesses, that's immensely helpful! Not just for trying to organize life around harnessing strengths and avoiding weaknesses but also for becoming aware of weaknesses and trying to retrain in those areas. —Alorael, who notes that things like sarcasm detection and empathy, which have been considered inborn personality traits, turn out to be things that can be taught, trained, and exercised. And there's also the conversation starter of, "So, did you know my aptitude for making pleasant conversation while quietly plotting your downfall is in the top 5%?"

It could be worse. When I was little and first learning to play a wind instrument my teacher was frustrated that I kept reversing my hands for the fingering because I couldn't tell left from right. She pointed to a mole on my left arm and told me to remember that it was left. Except I had moles on both arms, so I went from confusion about left and right to confusion about which mole was which. Eventually a marker came out, and I had an artificial port-wine stain of sorts until I sorted myself out. —Alorael, who didn't quite get a tattoo. It was just a purple dot, and came off quickly after it stopped being renewed daily.

I've learned tons of mnemonics over the years. So many, in fact, that I have trouble remembering all of them. —Alorael, who has been forced to create second-order mnemonics to keep track of all the mnemonics for information he might need to recall.

We have punned too deep and summoned Harehunter. —Alorael, who now sees that this thread has reaped what it deserved. And blames Lilith for providing the alpha. Now all that remains is the omega... oanned.

Junk actually used to be worth a tiny amount. That resulted in diligent players picking up every single piece of junk, which was both a ton of not very fun work and a way to break the gold curve. Jeff Vogel then made it all worthless. —Alorael, who thinks it was a good choice. Some trowels need to be unsellable.

It all depends on how much micro-management is required and how well the engine facilitates the use of a large party. Geneforge is fine; you've got one full character and I'd be able to manage many creations. I think I prefer 4 to 6 for Exile/Avernum; it makes individual character choices more meaningful and limits the ability to swarm to win. In games where party members have dialogue and personalities I like having more, but that's mostly because I hate feeling like I'm missing out on what characters have to say or do. —Alorael, who has a dream that one day RPGs will finish the progression from large group of characters you can't use to all usable with experience leak to everybody comes on every mission, or is at least somehow useful and not just twiddling their thumbs in base. Whether that's smaller parties or more use, he just hates having some character sit around for the entire game.

There's been linguistic drift here. We're going for -anned, not -enned. —Alorael, who weeps to see that the ramparts of the fortress of prescriptivism have gone unmanned.

Absolutely yes on the first, but I'm also in the loving junk camp. —Alorael, who is sure Avadon will not be updated again. 25% sales, though, seem perfectly likely.

Some of that reduced activity probably really is from lower tolerance of abrasive debate, which was rampant in the very early days of Spiderweb. Still, I don't think that's anywhere close to the whole story. There were later times with many long, civil, and usually circular arguments about any number of things. Maybe those have also died down because the community tolerance for circularity is also decreasing. —Alorael, who doesn't think that communities really stop growing up until they die off. The internet is very bad at stasis.

It seems like only yesterday. My, how the time does fly. —Alorael, who is tempted to go back through the PPP and actually see. He has a hunch that things in the past are sometimes closer than they appear in hindsight. The good old days were sometimes not so many days ago.

I'm not sure how many Russian speakers we have. I do know that Latvia is not a great source. It has Russian speakers, of course, but they're the minority, and unlike Belarusian, Latvian isn't particularly close to Russian and isn't really at all mutually intelligible. —Alorael, who knows Zeviz spoke Russian. And probably still does, wherever he is, but he hasn't been speaking it around here for a long time.

I'm not sure if sniper rifles are exactly practical in Alaska. They're not really ideal for hunting. I guess if you just want to shoot someone the vast distances in the state might make them more practical, but it seems like a stretch. —Alorael, who was going to a say a long shot, and then didn't, but then did anyway. Also he'll have you know his sniper rifle isn't for practicality, it's for style.

Supposedly according to whom? From my own admittedly second-hand and anecdotal experience, which is not even remotely data, some people have really positive experiences with just about any site, and I know more OKCupid successes than eHarmony successes. Part of that's due to more OKCupid users, but maybe not all of it. —Alorael, who for what it's worth is only measuring by Serious Long-Term Relationship. Casual dating, flings, and just-friends are decidedly different things.

Sure, but most people on the internet probably aren't within the age range of your intended dating pool. About half (leaving aside internet demographics) are going to be the wrong gender (unless you have no preferred gender). Many won't be interested in dating, and of those who are many won't be interested in dating over internet chatrooms. And of the pool that's left, most will be very, very far away even if you do live in a big metropolitan area. Long-distance internet dating can work, but the logistics are hard and it often doesn't. I'd say good starting filtering can go a long way. —Alorael, who isn't sure not having a girlfriend is really dodging a bullet. Nice for you if you don't want one, but plenty of people do. And unlike bullets, girlfriends are pretty easy to not have. Why, well over half of all humans have no girlfriends or wives!

Which differs in no appreciable way from any other free dating service. Craiglist has a distinct reputation, which can become self-fulfilling, but it's just another medium, —Alorael, who recently advertised M4SK. Sadly no serial killers responded.

In fact, I believe the fascinating OKCupid stats page backs you up. Spending more time exchanging text via internet makes you less likely to get a real date in person. (I need to verify that, though!) And I'm not sure the difficulty of rural dating on OKCupid is the site's fault. It's still the population problem, but I imagine that dating in person has the same problem of the small dating pool. I actually know of some rural online dating successes too, but it required willingness to travel long distances for dates. —Alorael, who thinks the minimum requirement is just being able to ask to go on a date, ideally with some personalization of the request. Maybe a couple of messages along the way. Remember, it probably feels pretty awkward from the other side as well. The only real quirk of online dating, and it's sadly a mirror of old-fashioned, in-person relationships, is that men are often expected to do the messaging and women often get inundated with messages. It's at least more egalitarian for same sex dating.

We're living in the future. Online dating is a big thing, and while it's certainly not perfect, it's at least a way to meet people who you at least share some kind of interests with (if that's how you want to filter) and who are available and interested in dating. —Alorael, who has not used online dating. He can't personally vouch for it. He does have friends who have, though, and while there are plenty who found it frustrating and gave up there are also success stories who have been together for years now. The best example he knows being someone who made a profile on OKCupid, sent one message to one person, and after some hiccups and hijinks ended up settling down as a couple with over-numerous animals.

Oh, the capitalization. And I was so certain nephar was singular and nepharim plural, presumably from false appearance of Hebrew. —Alorael, who chalks the meaner up to base racism. You'd be mean too if you were were considered a big, sterile jerk of no social value.

I can't actually recall the nepharim being described as stupider and meaner. Stupid in particular seems odd; they have shamans, and nephar shamans have been stronger than nephil shamans as enemies. —Alorael, who also doesn't remember any friendly nepharim. But he also doesn't remember them being described as total morons. Even if they're a little less bright than nephilim they could still be perfectly capable craftsmen and farmers who live with everyone else just fine.

Pan Lever: Seventeen apple roving mirror moiety. Of turned quorum jaggedly the. Blue? —Alorael, who believes that basic grammar is actually a basic function of the human brain. Producing word salad is a sign of serious brain damage even if you were raised on a diet of word salad. That's how non-native, non-fluent speakers of a language can raise a native-speaking child with set grammar. It's all part of human pattern recognition and creation.

I respectfully disagree. Ranged is optimal, but my first playthrough largely rested on a shadowwalker and blademaster, both strength-invested and melee-oriented, and it worked just fine. Zhossa Mindtaker is one of the harder fights, though, and it also took me several reloads. The biggest thing is that it's a trick fight, one you can't just win by pumping damage into an enemy. —Alorael, who found it tough but manageable once he understood that focusing damage, keeping himself away from damage sources, and prioritizing being safe over making progress was a good way through the fight. Glass cannoning through it did not go well for him.

Keep in mind that your Mechanics skill and Unlock spell let you open doors of a certain difficulty. It's thus helpful to be stingy with living tools and spend only enough to get to the point where you can open it. For a spell-using character, that's often a few tools and then casting Unlock. —Alorael, who finds G1 incredibly clunky. It was a first effort with a new engine, and it still has a lot of rough edges. The later Geneforges are much more user-friendly.

Declensions aren't obvious if you're not used to languages that use them, but you can think of it as conjugation for nouns. Nouns in Latin are actually many different words, with each one denoting exactly how it's being used in the sentence. In English and many other languages, those cues are all in the order of words in the sentence: "The man bit the dog!" and "The dog bit the man!" obviously have the subject and object reversed. In Latin the word order can be either way, and it's the declension of the noun that says which is which. Roughly, anyway; I'm not expert enough to really hold forth. That's part of what makes the guy writing Latin with English word order funny. As I understand it, it's technically grammatically correct but stylistically awful. —Alorael, who has changed his mind. Down with grammar enforcement! He won't surrender to the tyranny of not talk like man from simple time when fewer word and more hunt mammoth. Or maybe be thahd. Thahd also not have time for grammar. Too busy squishing.