Goldengirl

Assuming a straight rebel run for G4 (which G5 indicates is canon) it makes some sense for me to see Southforge being reactivated. Sure, its location is compromised, but it is pretty far from the front lines. The agents and chemicals all would have been safely transported to Northforge Citadel by caravan, under the protection of Warmaster Kharikiss and the remaining soldiers from Southforge Citadel. There's some dialogue in the G5 that suggests that the Rebels have taken over the sea advantage. This is further suggested by the fact that they are able to send in Lifecrafters to the Dera Reaches by boat under cover of night. These Lifecrafters then can make a swarm of rogues and leave the way they came, scrambling the loyalists. Moreover, the Rebels aren't overly active in west Terrestia. In the Dera Reaches, they are mainly running hit-and-run tactics to harass the loyalists, rather than open warfare. The Drakons are bogged down at the Line in the Storm Plains, with a few infiltrators working in the province. There's a truce in the Mera Tev, with the majority of the human Rebels in waiting in the Okavano Fens. Again, a few infiltrators are working to sabotage the Shapers, especially by means of the Shadow Road and the experiments going on there, but that's a low key operation. The Rebels are nearly absent from the Foundry, and completely absent from Lethia Province, the Nodye Coast, and the Shaper Citadel. This leads me to believe that the brunt of the Rebel Army is doing clean up. The Burwood Infiltrators wreaked a lot of havoc on one of the last strongholds of the human parts of the Rebellion. Even the Grayghost Mountains suffered some damage in General Alwan's last ditch effort to stop the Unbound. Monarch literally tore apart the only city in the Fens of Aziraph, and the Rebel fort there would have likely been all but abandoned in a retreat to Burwood Province after the Shapers were free to focus on that meager camp. Illya Province was thoroughly occupied and ruined, save for Dillame. The Forsaken Lands were forsaken, even occupied by the loyalist Therile colony, and Southforge Citadel devastated and abandoned after the assaults by General Crowley. Between the ravages of warfare, the prevalence of refugees, and the disdain the civilians had for the Rebels, there would be a lot of work to restore productivity and win the hearts and minds of east Terrestia.

A lot of the points I'd make to respond to your arguments, SoT, have already been made. Perhaps more harshly than I would have made them, but nonetheless they were made. My only point of information that I'd like to add, then, is a rhetorical question. Doesn't the distinction you're describing already exist in the form of trade schools as a distinct alternative to universities?

I just finished Gloria Anzaldua's classic,Borderlands / La Frontera. It's an auto-ethnography that studies Chicana experience, thought, and consciousness especially as it relates to immigration, Mexico, colonialism, queer identity, and feminism. It draws heavily on Aztec religion as well as the lived experiences of the author to advance its expository rhetoric. I feel ill at ease with it. It purports to represent a Chicana experience as authentic and genuine, but the author is an academic and her text is written for a white, colonial audience. It isn't too caught in academic trappings, but still I feel like it is actually not too accessible to the people she's writing about. She uses token Spanish in her writing, but it's easily understood through context clues; knowing Spanish and trying to read the English, one would be lost. This is a really small thing, but it resonates with me just because of Derrida's deconstruction of the Kafka's fable, Before the Law. The title situates the words "La Frontera" beneath "Borderlands," and starkly draws a line underlining "Borderlands." This is a visual, symbolic representation of the actual US-Mexico border. The English word is above the Spanish one, which is correct from a cartographic view, but only if maps are oriented northward. The Spanish phrase is also italicized, which is, to the best of my knowledge, standard writing procedure for foreign words. Thus, Spanish is marked as a foreign language, otherized. All of this, just from the title, seems to create an uncomfortable dualism that is contradictory to the argument of the book. This itself makes me feel that the Chicana consciousness Anzaldua describes is perhaps more "Anglo" (to use her term) than she'd like to admit.

"Hell is other people." - Jean-Paul Sartre. Alienation is inevitable. I have enough aspirations here that aren't necessarily technologically-bound, though, that I'd prefer my hell on Earth than in the cosmos. As a social scientist, I feel like I've got a lot to do here.

I'd love to play, but it just seems to complicated. If we did something more akin to the level of the Darkside Loyalist games a while back, though, that would be cool. Even an RP would be fun, though perhaps it should be closely managed to prevent becoming too sprawling.

Sure, a lot of dialogue would have to be added. How many of the "great" characters that recur from game to game are really just Bobs that provide useful exposition from previous games? At the same time, though, so much would have to be taken out! The things that make for a great puzzle in a game would probably be ceaselessly boring to read about. The pitter-patter dialogue that the PC has with every single character in every area is tedious. This doesn't just apply to the banal interactions with merchants or quest-givers, but even some of the people in areas that are supposed to provide information and exposition would be hard to transfer while still being anything near entertaining.

I know few people who have made such a visible, long term impact on the community. See you when you next swing by!

For most things I use my track pad. I've had to include gaming with this. I have a mouse, but no good mouse pad and I've perpetually forgotten to get a new one. However, I make it a point to improvise some sort of surface for playing any real time game, save Geneforge. I used to have a really big economics textbook that worked well, but I was finally able to sell it. In retrospect, maybe I should have used some of that money to get a better mousepad. I probably used it for something unimportant, like groceries.

This is an idea I really want to delve into. So much environmental eschatology states that the world, the environment, the ecology, the species on the endangered species list, the human race, etc. is doomed if we allow the status quo to continue unchallenged, but we can fix it by turning off our lights. I mentioned in the OP responses that included not just practices but also spreading ideas. My working thesis is that these efforts ultimately are meant to alleviate a profound modern societal guilt in terms of our relationship with the larger environment in which we live. However, while these micro-actions help wash our hands of complicity in environmental crises, but they can't wash away our ecological footprints. I literally do not know how you can support this statement, especially since you haven't. Industry is caused by industrialists, the producers and not the consumers. They are responding to the consumers, sure, trying to undercut the other producers and thereby offer a quality product for cheaper, but ultimately they are the ones responsible for their actions. It's an incentive structure, but opportunities for collusion, tacit or explicit, may have prevented such industrialization. The Luddites seem the classic example here to show that the modern industrial society was not inevitable.

SoT, I think it's interesting that you focused in immediately on climate change and energy issues. Those are certainly parts of the environmental crisis, large parts even, but I was thinking about smaller and more easily identifiable crises. The extinction and endangerment of specific species is just as much an environmental crisis as the larger global ecological trends, the devastation of water sources through pollution, increasing desertification in places like the Sahara, all are pressing issues.

I don't want to be too leading. Broadly speaking, I think it's common consensus that there's something wrong "out there" in the environment, whether one defines the environment as all-inclusive or nonhuman nature. Some say the problems come from "in here" (some say there's no such distinction between society and nature) and certainly at least some of them (e.g. pollution) do come as a result of human actions. Moreover, we have a unique cross section of society, including natural scientists, social scientists, humanities experts, social justice advocates, lay people, etc. This brings a lot of ways of thoughts together from all over, ostensibly because we all like Spiderweb Software games. What do you do about the environmental crises? Do you work on personal practices, such as recycling? Do you get dismayed and do nothing? Do you try to advocate to change minds? Do you do something else entirely? I'm curious. And since we have so many different people here, I'd love to see your reasoning for what you do.

I'm pro-Oxford Comma, though I've come to the grudging acceptance that it often doesn't have any effect on the meaning of the sentence. People can talk about "the strippers, Kennedy, and Stalin" versus "the strippers, Kennedy and Stalin," but I think ultimately that's a contrived example that doesn't often arise. I still use it, but I don't look too critically if it's omitted. I use the passive voice as a means of emphasis for passive conditions. In my historical work, there's a huge rhetorical difference between, "Emancipation was given to the slaves," and "Slaves were emancipated." Portraying slaves as objects versus subjects in these sentences speaks volumes to the depths of the historical debate. I don't often split infinitives, but I'm alright with them. English isn't Latin, and the Nordic Invasion of England by William the Bastard happened so long ago that I don't think the Franco-Latin rules should govern our discourse. I feel the same way about the subjunctive form. I absolutely use the term "whom." People may not know when to use it, but they can at least recognize what it means, so there seems no reason to not use it. I sometimes correct people when they don't use it, but only ironically to be snooty. Otherwise, I don't care. I begin sentences with conjunctions, but never in formal writing. There are plenty of better phrases to use at the beginning that are accepted, aside from conjunctions. "And" can become "in addition," "but" can become "however." In creative writing and plain conversation, however, I'm all for it. I tend to avoid ending my sentences with prepositions, especially in formal writing. I used to be a lot more prescriptivist, so it makes me cringe slightly to do it, but I don't care if other people do. I don't like the awkward syntactical acrobatics one has to do sometimes to avoid it. I have no preference between "as" and "like." "Like" is more casual, with connotations of valley girls, "as" is slightly more formal but still not exceptional. Likewise, I feel the same way about the contrived differentiation between "less" and "fewer," though I recognize the distinction regardless. I've never even heard of putting two spaces after a period. That sounds like a waste of paper, sacrificing the lives of the trees that fell for the purposes of our text. Singular "they" is something that makes sense and has historical backing, though I don't think that history should necessarily control the language. Plural "they" is also acceptable, obviously. The most imperative I've heard is that they're optional. I've never heard that it's something you shouldn't do at all.

For future reference with your charts and such, it's Goldengirl now. My perennial complaint is that I just don't understand what things like not thinking about sadness, or whatever that specific question was, have to do with anything political. Is it authoritarian to never think of how sad I may or may not be? I don't know, because I try to not think about things like that.

always congratulate people on their 3000th post always like people's selfies, they're showing a lot of courage by putting themselves out there always ask people's gender pronouns, don't assume you know

Comparing this old post from when I started this thread (hmm) to the current one is somewhat unsettling.

I definitely remember that distinction happening with my AP classes. It was especially prevalent my senior year, when five of my seven courses were AP. I called the distinction the "AP community" because from AP class to AP class there'd be minimal shuffling and as such there was a distinctive group of people who formed a little academic nucleus in school.

Political Compass time! I don't know when that time is. I usually just post it when it feels like it's been a while since someone else posted it. For those who are unfamiliar, this is a short and simple political quiz that does its best to quantify where your political ideology is in terms of economics on one axis and social issues on the other. It's not decisive, and it has its short comings. In general though, I think it's a good way to find your political ideological neighbors, relatively speaking. My results: Economic Left/Right: -0.88 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.36 I'll leave it to the more archive-minded Spiderwebbers to dig up past results to this test so we can see how some of the community members have shifted over time. What I will say is that my economics have definitely moderated; I used to be way more left. I attribute this to my collegiate studies in economics, where I've learned more of the empirics and the mathematically-based principles that are simply true, in that they hold to ideology. I still have a lot of problems with capitalism in its current iteration, but I think that any alternative system still needs to play by essentially capitalistic principles to operate effectively.

re:sylae Agreed. But just because I can do something 99 times and get the same result doesn't mean that the 100th time will as well. I can make predictions and guess at probability, but ultimately it's a guess. I assume this is aimed at me. If so, I'm not sure why you're calling my conception of "fate" something akin to fantasy novels. What I'm saying is that it's a direct opposition to determinism. The universe is essentially random and chaotic. This isn't exactly true to my belief, but it's a clear delineation between you and me. Everything is really complicated. When you say "everything you think or do has a cause," you are wrong because there are actually infinitely many causes that aren't even necessarily related in clear and obvious ways, like the flight of a butterfly causing a hurricane. In the same way, there is not an effect but an instead an infinitely reproduced echo of influence and nuanced results that play into the future. That's not determinism, it's an admission that nothing can be determined.

To believe in predetermination, there are three necessary conditions in my opinion. 1, believing in some form of higher power that has determined what everything should do, 2, believing that that power can act on any determination, and 3, believing that this higher power wants to do it. I don't believe in any such power, so I'm out right there. Predermination implies intentionality, and there's nothing to have such an intention in my view. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his explication of Friedrich Nietzsche, describes fate as our life. Our lives are infinitely more complicated and complex than we can every control. This, I think, is a thought that many who favor predetermination favor. The response of the humanists is epitomized in the poem "Invictus," by Walter Henley, "I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul." Nietzsche responds with "Amor Fati," the love of fate, that says that we must love our life and fate. The forces that construct our lives are infinitely minute and massive, from the spin of electrons and the minute interactions in childhood to the political actions of empires and the shifting of ideologies over time. I like to think of it as being akin to gravity; the attraction between too bodies is directly proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to their distance. Some events occurred a long time ago and have negligible effects on you, some materials you interact with are too small to influence you, but some events are big and pressing and can do nothing but alter you. In this sense of the word fate, then yes, I do believe. I do not hold life to blame, do not put it on trial, do not hold it responsible for ills. What I do is live with what this fate has given me.

My memory is a little foggy, too, but I'm pretty sure that the character you're looking for is in Geneforge 3. It's an ill woman, in Fort Kentia I believe, which is on Greenwood Island. That's the first island, and it's easily accessible in the demo.

I've been working on and off on The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It's got an interesting format, which keeps me reading, but I'm frustrated with the writing style. It's written from the point of view of a high schooler, and reads like it. The main character isn't that great of a writer. That doesn't irritate me. What does, however, is how the author sometimes slips into a lot more skillful prose in describing things. It's skillfully planted few and far between the more sophomoric prose, but it's enough to annoy me with its inconsistency.

I think the problem is that everyone up to know has measured Hermione on other people's terms. Her capability with magic, her fount of knowledge, etc. These are areas where she excels, but they're all too common. She's not the greatest witch in terms of ability; McGonagoll and Lestrange both could probably overcome her in technique or prowess. True, with time, Hermione would probably be the best witch of her time, and not just of her generation. However, that's not the case. In her own terms, though, Hermione is extraordinary. We see the seeds of this germinate in the first and second books when Hermione is intentionally kind to Neville and takes major offense to Draco calling her a "Mudblood." It's not until she starts the unfortunately named SPEW (Society for the Prevention of Elvish Welfare) that it becomes severely obvious that Hermione is the only true social justice advocate in the corrupt Wizarding world. Even progressive heroes such as Dumbledore only care about the blood quantum issue, leaving the mistreating of goblins and elves under the rug. Not to deride Dumbledore, who did advocate for the centaurs, but that's the only place he shines. Hermione is the leader of a new generation of socially conscious magical folk.

I think the algorithms y'all are making are far too complicated. Try going back old school to doing things by hand! For instance Answer: probably a disturbingly large number of the people who post here. 4/5. Witty and slightly self-deprecating, in a humorous way. Possibly unnecessary use of smiley. No typos.

If it's word post jokes you want, Spiderweb is the right lanned.

I'd like to add a few of the more indisputably infamous to the list, if only because they're entertaining in retrospect. Though I have a lot of mixed feelings about making any real sort of comparison between these two, I'll succumb and let it be done. Commander Ed Emperor Tullegolar