Alorael at Large

And a full season of killing chitrachs in the Eastern Gallery. —Alorael, who agrees that the episodic nature of quest-based plot fits TV better than film. The lack of much in the way of well-developed major characters also means a lot of new work.

Hey, a link to Polaris! That takes me back. The Avernum rewrites are the same plot with a moderately different engine. The graphics are different, or at least like those of A4-6. The mechanics of combat are a little different and continue the Spiderweb trend of making things more varied and interesting and using special scripts in special fights. They're still fun. —Alorael, who had to Google himself to see if he has previously had a comma immediately after his personal pronoun. Precedent says that that's an unusual but canonical signature style, and a quick perusal shows that it is, in fact, perhaps only done with adjective phrases beginning with "due to" in exactly the manner demonstrated by SMoE. Official seal of approval!

Spoken like someone who has never gotten the batter on the ceiling. —Alorael, who stirs with vigor and stern dedication. He stirs to win.

It's possible that the universe will undergo a Big Crunch into another single singularity and then Big Bang all over again. Whether that will happen or not is still an active question in physics; whether another Big Bang would just reboot this universe or produce an entirely different one is at this time beyond the scope of any of the models we have; we don't understand the first seconds of the universe at all, which means we don't understand the Big Bang. Lots of speculation, very little evidence. —Alorael, who prefers to believe that Hume was right to be suspicious of inductive reasoning all along and that one day the rules of the universe will suddenly change. The stars will relocate and the planets completely ignore their old, stead orbits! Entropy will run backwards! Even death may die! And there will be spontaneous, inexplicable pudding for everyone!

Cytochrome P450 isn't a gene, it's a whole bunch of genes (over 50 at last count, although between five and ten account for most drug metabolism). If you have a nonfunctional copy of one of the cytochromes (surprisingly common) the effects can be varied. Some drugs you need much lower or more infrequent doses because it will stick around in your system much longer. Other drugs actually have to be metabolized to activate them, so they won't work right. Other people have overactive versions of a particular cytochrome, so the drugs will be removed too fast. Drugs can increase or decrease cytochrome activity. Drug metabolism is complicated. Aspirin actually isn't metabolized by the cytochrome system, but it's one of the drugs that can increase the activity of a particular cytochrome protein (CYP2C19), so taking aspirin can modify the effects of some other medications. Parkinson's is usually treated by neurologists, sometimes with input from a psychiatrist if there is a large component of psych symptoms (most commonly depression). A psychologist really isn't who you want to talk to first; there's good treatment for Parkinson's, but it's medical and occasionally surgical; psychologists aren't trained to diagnose Parkinson's and can't prescribe anything in any case. —Alorael, who admits to struggling with weighing in on this topic. It's hard for him to know where to put boundaries on advising or when to butt out of threads. He's mostly sticking to matters of fact for now.

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. —Alorael, who is comfortable with the idea of going back to not existing. He'd just like to be as comfortable as possible in the process of getting there. Living a very long time might be possible within a human lifetime from now; forever isn't. It isn't remotely plausible even if you ignore the eventual ironclad laws of thermodynamics.

There's a pretty low bar for seeking help from any of a variety of counselors, therapist, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Since this seems to be causing some distress, it's worth trying. There's no "you're weird and wrong and crazy, you must see a shrink!" to it. You're saying that this is bothering you; there are people who can try to help you figure out how to change that, be it by accepting that your fantasy is fine and healthy or helping you move past it. Which should it be? I don't know; that's why you would go to one of them. You don't have to be crazy to get help with mental health help. You can be sad, or worried, or lonely instead. Or you can just be not sure and look for help from someone who can, at the very least, reassure you that while you're lonely you're okay. Yes, I 'm biased as one of those mental health professionals. I don't think we're perfect, but I do think we can be helpful. It's not unreasonable to go see a doctor because you have aches and pains even if they're probably nothing; it's not to go see a psych(otherapist/ologist/iatrist) for an equivalent checkup. Without any commentary on the rest of the post, I object to the mild butchering of the musical and film Man of La Mancha. The plot has Miguel de Cervantes imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition and, while there, putting on a play (a show within a show) about Alonso Quixano, the doddering gentleman who decides to be the knight Errant Don Quixote de la Mancha. Cervantes isn't crazy at all, he's just an impromptu playwright and actor. —Alorael, who really is now legally required to tell you that he is not providing medical advice and is acting entirely in a lay capacity.

I had a quiet night last night and I'm very thankful for it. —Alorael, who has many things to be thankful for. Friends, family, colleagues, and the relative willingness of all of them to put up with his griping. It's a cultural thing.

If you're hit by a big enough meteorite strike it's not messy, or more accurately there's a big mess but most of it isn't you. And mass extinction means you're in good company! —Alorael, who supposes he's now ethically obligated to append a notification that he is not your doctor and cannot provide professional opinions on sanity or optimal locations for it, nor should his statements be construed as medical advice. Talk with your doctor before undergoing any sanity relocations or for any insanity lasting longer than 4 hours. All that really takes a lot of the ring out of the Spiderweb motto, though.

I didn't say it was a good idea, just there's kind of a way you can rationalize it. I don't have any particular opinion on misattribution of arousal, and all of my familiarity with it comes from a friend, who's a psychologist, who finds it hilarious and uses it as the explanation/justification for all kinds of completely irrelevant stuff. Most recently, yesterday evening, it was his justification for extremely difficult exams with merciless grading. "It's not better to be loved than to be feared. Teach them to fear you and they'll find themselves loving you because of misattribution of arousal!" —Alorael, who also supposes, along with bears, dying during the landing of a UFO is probably not a bad one. Likely pretty quick, you'll be in the history books as trivia forever, and hey, hugely momentous occasion for all of humanity!

Death's not really common flirtation material, but I can see it as clever leveraging of misattribution of arousal. Kind of. —Alorael, who would settle for any kind essentially instantaneous death. Ones that don't leave a gory mess would be a kindness those who have to clean up and anyone having to identify his body. Sudden massive stroke, maybe? Unwitnessed ventricular fibrillation's also usually a quick and probably fairly comfortable death. Unknowing asphyxiation by non-noxious gas is rather unlikely but not so bad either. Or a tragic factor of ten error in anesthesic during surgery. Gunshots (sadly likely) or falling pianos (quite unlikely) are definitely too quick to hurt much but very much fail the messiness part.

It doesn't matter what the population of Linnaeus thinks. Redbeard is allergic to milk, so he has ensured that there is no milk. —Alorael, who played the early beta of Avadon where there were still a couple of bottles of milk and a wedge of cheese. It really helped out with the last fight.

The turn-based nature of the games means they'd have to be heavily altered to make multiplayer even remotely workable. Turn-based, even with strict limits on turn length, becomes clunky and unfun very quickly when other people's turns can put a pause in your gameplay. There are a lot of college graduates, some college students, and a few hopefuls around. —Alorael, who has finally put his student days behind him. Not exams, though. Exams never really go away.

Along with physical rewards, stretch goals have seemed to lead to disaster. Backers get carried away with enthusiasm for more, but so do creators. The best products, games or otherwise, are perfect as they are and don't get better with more stuff. And okay, maybe there's room for more, but more stuff is hard and it's easy to end up promising the moon just to keep the money rolling in. —Alorael, who suspects Jeff, if he bothered at all, would go with one of those really boring Kickstarters that promises to make X if Y dollars are pledged, no bells and whistles. Jeff's that kind of ornery. But he might use extra money for outsourceable stuff. Extra graphics are someone else's work and always nice, and he is always complaining about the cost of the pretty things.

People are even more inclined to pay extra for the shirt. —Alorael, who could also see Jeff Kickstarting a "get these games running on iOS" and a stretch goal of "Android too, why not?" to let the alleged clamoring hordes put their money where their mouth is. Enough demand pays for someone to make it happen.

The other RPGs have largely had the advantages of being made by entire teams, not just one guy, and those teams (or the key members of them) being well known and beloved for mainstream successes in the past. Jeff doesn't have the inclination to run a team nor does he have any experience with one. I don't think wonders would spring forth; there's a learning curve. —Alorael, who does think Jeff could easily drink from the Kickstarter trough. Not that he seems particularly desperate for cash, but he really does have enough reputation and exposure that he could get piles of money in advance of actually doing any work.

I disagree. Spider, spider, spider, and spider are definitely major characters, and I can see spider, spider, and spider counting as well, but spider and spider really don't do much besides provide some background entertainment, and spider is a standard Bob. The other spiders I can't remember, which doesn't necessarily mean anything one way or another. —Alorael, who actually admits to some surprise over the absence of more cross-universe characters. It's the kind of easter egg that is both common and seems to fit Jeff's style, at least in earlier games.

That was exactly my point. I agree that the Shades are significant. I'm still just not sure that they are actually characters. Do they actually talk, ever? People in A3 have interactions with the plagues, but aside from the plagues being multiple vs. singular entities there's really not much difference. I'm just not convinced that they count as characters in any meaningful way. But there's room for disagreement. —Alorael, who supposes that on a character level they're really almost as significant as Garzahd, though. He's undeniably a speaking, intelligent, individual entity, and lots of people talk about him, but your personal interactions with him that aren't entirely murder-oriented also amount to nothing.

I think my approach to important characters is different. Which isn't a bad thing, or a "you're wrong" accusation, just something I'm noticing. A lot of these characters are plot points. The Shades are a great example. Lots of people talk about them and worry about the, but they don't actually have personality or motivation. They are essentially natural disasters. Ahonar is important as setting. Again, he's not a character, he's just emblematic of a movement. The movement itself is largely background. Sure, you can join the Anama, but it's mostly for a challenge. It opens up a few things, but none are particularly interesting in a plot or character sense. And some of these characters are really of local importance. Monarch's a big deal in his particular chapter of the story, and then he's irrelevant. Memorable, certainly, but not major! He could be cut from the game, or rendered very differently, and the game as a whole would be the same. That can be argued for almost all Spiderweb characters; these aren't really games heavy on characterization. Still, Erika not being Erika or especially Redbeard not being Redbeard would make for a very different experience. Greta, Alwan, and Litalia actually (gasp!) change over the course of the series. Lots of the other characters listed are of local significance and slightly less complete interchangeability than we expect from NPCs. —Alorael, who actually thinks E1/A1 really set the bar high for minor characters. Random meat-sellers get surprising characterization. No, not always a life story, although sometimes even that, but you can get a sense of who random people are in the towns. A lot of that loses prominence in later games. No one cares about Merry. Or whats-his-name the kind of arrogant wizard/Shaper/whatever selling mid-tier spells.

Yep, the two faction guys, whose names I also can't recall, are important as Bobs if nothing else. The most important Nethergate characters are the opposite party, but you don't actually get dialogue with them. Kelner probably squeaks in. Lark doesn't. Neither does Raven; he shows up in one place and is more background than plot. —Alorael, who agrees that neither Avernum trilogy is really heavy on characters, and neither is Nethergate. It's in Geneforge when Jeff started trying to put together important casts. Avernum is just too episodic. You deal with one area's characters and problems and then you move on.

That's really perfect with your avatar. —Alorael, who can see the horrors now. "We will bury you! ...In paperwork that must be completed in triplicate."

The fact that humans are not wholly rational actors, and in fact really can't be, doesn't mean that rationality is pointless. It does mean that we have to be very careful when we're trying to act based on conclusions drawn from data because each step is something we're not inherently good at. We need robust systems for gathering accurate data, a careful way of drawing plausible conclusions from that data, and checks on whether the actions we decide to take actually do match the conclusions. The scientific method helps with all of these, but it's not perfect. The political process is really lousy at it, and we suffer the consequences. That's a reflection on bad thinking, though, not the fact that thinking itself is bad. —Alorael, who has not found emotions falsifiable. He knows what Popper would say to that: emotions aren't real! That's definitely how the doctrine of falsifiability goes.

You're going to have trouble discussing much of philosophy or human nature if you arbitrarily reassign meaning to terms. "Rational" has an understood meaning. People like to claim they're "just being rational" while doing all kinds of terrible things, but that's not the fault of rationality, especially since often those most loudly claiming that their horrendous conclusions are eminently rational are guilty of some rather broken logic. Do reason and logic inevitably lead to war? Not by any obvious path. Dadaism had more of a claim that capitalism lived by reason and led to war. The former isn't true; bourgeois society isn't especially dedicated to impeccable, ironclad reasoning. The second also isn't cut and dried. Capitalism has had its major conflicts, but it's not like non-capitalist societies in history haven't. Dadaism, to the extent that it had a point (a very anti-Dada notion!), didn't have a very finely pointed one. Dada was a product of its time and its left. The Cold War made capitalism an agenda, not just an economic idea. That gave us the threat of nuclear war. It also gave us Vietnam, which still exercises a powerful influence on the American conception of war. But I'd also argue that since WW2 Europe and the US have enjoyed remarkable peace. The wars that have been fought have been fought elsewhere. Still no great thing, capitalism is part of the reason disputes among wealthy countries are settled by saber-rattling and politics, not bombs. —Alorael, who also sees Dada as a deliberate, gleeful thumbing of the nose at reason. Previous (and subsequent) movements in art deliberately evoked emotion, but Dada didn't go for emotion so much as confusion.

He doesn't, and for liability reasons he can't take ideas from fans, so you're better off not telling him and hoping he arrives at the idea independently. —Alorael, who also doesn't think Jeff has ever been really hurting for game ideas. Ideas are cheap and easy. Good execution on games is the long and hard part.

Enjoy your big bastion of civilization cost of living premium! —Alorael, who writes as a refugee from a food desert. But he now lives within blocks of grocery stores and enjoys it very much. He also writes this after eating a (leftover) meal of the lentils described above after an entire day without eating and he is full of repleteness and satisfaction.