Goldengirl

Actaeon, tell me more about the On the Road movie. I'm a big Kerouac fan and have been dying to see it. Since it's more of an indie film, though, I haven't had the chance to do so.

Be polite. That's no way to interact with a relatively new member of the community.

</micromod>

As for becoming a mod and getting a custom title, both come with time, luck, and favorable position in the community. The rule of thumb is to never ask for a custom title, as that's a guarantee you won't get it; this is not always the case however.

I remember getting into SubTerra just before Jeff stopped hosting them on his website, and the fora for that and the Richard White Games were scrubbed. Such a fun and quirky little puzzle game. Did you know there's now a SubTerra 2?

I think Cathy Ames seemed a bit too real to me at the time I tried to read it.

Fair enough. Her character is quite powerful in that she's evil in a powerful way, but in a wholly human way as well. That's one of the things I liked about the book so much, to be honest, but I can see how it'd be off-putting.

I prefer Grapes of Wrath to most of Steinbeck's other work. I am also a proponent of his short stories, and enjoyed East of Eden up to a certain point- then it started to creep me out on a Cormac McCarthy level and I ditched it.

I've read some of Steinbeck's short stories and novellas (e.g. The Pearl, a pretty good one though not my favorite) but East of Eden is the only book I've read of his. That said, I liked it quite a lot; what have you got against it that creeped you out so much you had to put it down?

Moreover, the viewpoints of their faction are more or less revived in a new context by Astoria in G5.

They did get wiped out after G1 and G2. All survivors after G2 wound up joining the Rebellion; Pirik comes to mind as the rebel leader of the Illya Safehouse.

If you joined before January 10, 2006, you're an oldbie. Otherwise, you're a newbie.

Huh. I don't feel like an oldbie, especially with such a relatively low post count.

Mix tapes (more often CD's) are still a thing, though mix playlists are more a thing now and will continue on that trajectory. People love to show how diverse and "good" their taste in music is, and so they'll continue mashing together compositions like Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" with Kid Cudi's "Mr. Solo Dolo pt. 2" to create some very interesting combinations.

When I say I listen to all genres of music, I mean it. Even country and rap, the traditional exclusions, and even the more obscure things like the occasional Gregorian chant. My preferred music, though, changes based on my mood, and usually alternates between pop while I'm in the car; indie rock/pop if I'm cheery; EDM if I want to dance or am excited; classical, punk, or alternative rock if I'm angry or enthused; and anything else if the mood strikes me.

My thought is that civil war (maybe not among all nations of the Pact) is going to erupt. That would indicate further success for the conspiracy workers.

The Avernum series is a remake of the Exile series, so if you have Avernum 3 it's the same thing.

The first Geneforge game lends itself to a spacey, eerie, and haunting music to fit with the mood and atmosphere of exploring a dangerous island.

The second Exile/Avernum game lends itself towards some of that same musical genre in the passage to Vahnatai lands, but also to epic battle music fighting the war.

Nethergate, of course, lends itself to very good Celtic and Roman inspired music.

These would be my suggestions.

This isn't my first time reading Foucault, necessarily. I've read plenty of secondary sources on his writing and his theories about biopolitics and biopower. I've also read a few of his lectures, quite enjoying them, especially "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History". Aside from Derrida, I'd recommend Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer as a good text for anyone interested in Foucauldian thought.

Indeed. The object of the verb was prison, where underworld is an adjective specifying the type of prison. He certainly didn't create the caves though, you're right.

Scumbag Hawthorne: Create an underworld prison filled with monsters

Congratulations! You proved it can be done, after all. Well done.

I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov ​by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I have a feeling it will take a while.

Still reading Karamazov, and it astounds me how I've read so much but still haven't gone far, in terms of page numbers out of the total or in terms of plot action. With so much exposition and background, though, I'm fine with it. Anyway, I've been reading other books for class which I have finished. The first is E.P. Thompson's Making of the English working class which focuses on the development of class identity in a positive sense, rather than a more passive and inactive class. The major element I chose to analyze through Thompson's book was the creation of a sense of agency in the working class in the time period (~pre-American Revolution - ~1840's).

Having finished this decidedly Marxist perspective, I'm moving on to one of my favorite theorists, an eminent and seminal postmodernist - Michel Foucault. His work, Discipline and Punish, is what I've just started. I'll post my reaction when I finish.

The original creations, as they're in the research process, may have been made from stock creations like that, but once that process is done it is assured that the Shaping occurs from scratch.

There has been plenty of NPC romance - lords and ladies, husbands and wives, etc. However, no series has seen PC relationships. In Exile/Avernum and Nethergate, this makes sense, given that you control a party of adventurers. In Geneforge, though there was always just one PC (and however many creations/tag-alongs), that PC was normally going insane slowly due to canister usage. In Avadon, neither of these barriers are in the way, although I wouldn't be surprised if Redbeard discourages relationships. He wants your full loyalty.

I'd be surprised if we revisited any of the places we say in the first Avadon game, except obviously Avadon itself. As such, I doubt that the demon or the dragon will enter into the game at all, except perhaps as references to what's going on. My guess is that the party stayed loyal, but the PC is mysteriously missing for whatever reason. That's the way things tend to play out in Spiderweb games, rather than the PCs being explicitly killed. Dhoral Stead will probably be gone, and even if it isn't, I don't think there will be a return visit.

Duke Gryfyn probably managed to escape assassination by the PC. I'd like to see him reappear.

Discussion of game mechanics? Not on my watch. For this thread I want to talk about the life that isn't a result of Shaper shenanigans.

 

We know that all Creations are created from SOMETHING. Indeterminate lizards for most of the fire creations. A lot of the battle creations apparently use humanoid stock but might also have been made by playing with apes, serviles, or even humans from a time before the Shapers said using Shaping on humans was bad. Clawbugs are just scorpions but bigger. Vlish . . . Maybe they started with a squid? No clue on the Glaahks. Or the Roamers to be honest. Atila from some sort of worm. Then the Wingbolt when they further modified the Artila and tossed in some bat features.

This isn't actually as clear as you make it out to be. There's relatively little in game information about the mechanics of Shaping; this isn't necessarily surprising, as if I were Jeff, i wouldn't want to get into such a mess either. There's some information about "stock" from the loading screens, some details about roamers being modified dogs (there's an answer to that, by the way) and some information about lifecrafters holding essence in their body and Shaping it. Personally, my theory about how Shaping works varies quite a bit from yours; I suspect that the Shapers use essence that they hold in their body and transform it through magical bombardment into a living form, rather than altering a previously existing animal or plant. The problem of what "stock" means exactly in the context of the game can be resolved by saying that the animals mentioned served as inspiration, not a base material.

I find this to be the only way to resolve the "Every Shaper is an army" mentality that allows infiltrators to be so devastating. If lifecrafters had to catch animals before they could Shape, or else carry a small zoo with them to do their magic at a moment's notice, then they wouldn't be nearly as effective. Moreover, some of the elements of the story would completely fall apart, such as the Barrier Zone in G4 where immobile Shapers produced a huge army. Shaping in battle is the most clear testimonial, though; General Alwan wouldn't be scavenging around to find a lizard so he could make a kyshakk to attack you in the middle of a fight, he's too busy with his sword.

By the way, glaahks seem to be a modified form of clawbugs. That's my intuition, at least, based on their similar tails.

The point is . . . All Creations are ultimately just a "normal" plant or animal that the Shapers tweaked. As I said, this we already know. What I was curious about is just how much do we know about the life that was native to Terrestia before the Shapers came to power. I'd already assume they don't have, for example, horses. I don't believe they have dogs or cats either. (Wild or domesticated.) I mean, maybe they had something like them at some point but Creations drove them into extinction? Maybe the Shapers themselves did, because making a new form of loyal being was easier than domesticating pre-existing animals?

 

Anyways . . . Has it ever been hashed out what kind of non-Creation wildlife exists in Terrestia that we might be able to recognize? Has Jeff ever weighed in on this.

 

Really, the main reason I'm asking is I actually want to do a little bit of writing. Specifically, something involving a Shaper visiting another land. So I'm trying to figure out what kind of things would make a Shaper ask "What the [censored] is that?" as well as what kind of things would make a Shaper ask "You have these too?"

I suspect that there are still natural plants and animals, coexisting with the Shaper fauna and flora. There has been some ingame evidence of this, mentions of native flora and fauna. I suspect the reason we don't see this (perhaps the unexplained flora - are those the Shaper made trees or natural ones? and what about the grass?) is because it isn't relevant to the game at all. The game sometimes mentions birdsong, and we have no reason to suspect the Shapers made birds. Surely there are insects and such in the swamps of the Mera Tev, but for some reason Jeff chose to focus on the presence of the Unbound.

The fact that there's a mention in Geneforge 4 at the Illya Safehouse of roamers being modified dogs indicates that dogs at least did exist. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if many native animals have been driven to extinction by Shaper creations. Battle creations aside, the Shapers seem to focus most of their work on improving local ecosystems to be more productive for humanity (and Serviles) by creating better crops and such. They're engineered to be better fitted into their niche than natural organisms. Unfortunately, Jeff hasn't weighted in on this, so we are left to conjecture based on inferences and text from the game.

Maybe see some horses and think "Why didn't we think of that?"

There's no reason to believe that Terrestia has or had horses, if only because no one uses them or their creation version. In the midst of a massive rebellion, and in a society that is centered around using animals to do work, it seems like a pretty glaring oversight if they existed and weren't used. Therefore, it's a safe assumption to say that they aren't present in the greater world of Terrestia, beyond what the games directly show. They may, however, be in the lands of the Sholai. Considering how hard it is to transport horses oversea, they would have had no reason to do so, so that option remains open. Obviously, they could be in one of the other parts of the world, as well.

Well, fine, but: Marxism? Seriously? One dead white male's idiosyncratic rantings from the bleary dawn of industrial capitalism, as the basis of an entire academic discipline? That's almost as bad as generative linguistics. I mean, specializing in the history of industrial development, as something that Karl Marx happened also to have taken a stab at in his day, I can totally understand. And Marxism has certainly existed as a historical phenomenon, an ideology that influenced much of the world for several generations. The history of Marxism is a perfectly legitimate topic. But being a Marxist historian just strikes me as absurd, let alone having to choose Marxism first, before studying history.

Marxism as a methodology is not necessarily tied to Marxism as an ideology, though the latter uses the former to formulate much of its rhetoric. A Marxist historian would be interested in such topics as the bourgeois nature of the French Revolution, class structures in pre-Columbian American societies, and the making of the English working class (coincidentally a book by the aforementioned E.P. Thompson that I'm currently reading).

Marxism as an ideology is certainly a historical topic that I would say is worthy of investigation, but the rationale Marx initially used to develop that ideology is closely tied to history in a different way. He proposed that material relations to the means of production are the deciding factor in society, in that they are the engine of society that propels them through history. A society begins as hunter-gathers, develops a slave-based economy in the manner of Rome or Greece, formulates feudalism, and from there becomes capitalist. Marx called this historical materialism. This historical materialism is what Marxist historians generally use; they are called Marxist historians perhaps because "historical materialist historian" doesn't really communicate very well.

Physics is a mature natural science with a small and uncontroversial body of basic principles. Ask, What should every physicist know about physics? and you'll get very much the same answers from every physics professor in the world. So a preliminary exam like the one I wrote really makes sense in physics. I'm really curious what the analogous thing in history might be, though. Is it a test of factual knowledge, to make sure that every history PhD knows the gross outline of major world events for the past three millennia? I can see some point in that, but on the other hand I'm not sure it's so unambiguous to decide which events were 'major'. Or is it a test of basic historian skills? If so, what are those?

I've talked to the head of the history department at my university; she's been working at convincing me to get a doctorate in history. We'll see.

That said, though, she described the basic process as, indeed, a test of basic historian skills. To become a doctor of history, one needs to have demonstrated through sample works that one can make sophisticated and critical reasoning skills when it comes to critiquing other historians' work, as well a mastery of document analysis and the composition of theses based on them.

Usually, according to this professor, a grad student picks one of the 'houses' of history - such as Marxism, feminism, postcolonial, ethnohistory, postmodernism/poststructuralism - and uses that as the basis for their future works. Thus, they must also be well versed in their particular fields foundational works. For instance, a Marxist historian would obviously have to have read Marx, but also authors like E.P. Thompson; a postmodern historian would have to read Foucault, by the same logic, and so on. Of course, a functional understanding of all the major methodologies is important.

I finally dug up my old copy of Emerald.

Roxanne has the stone badge, Brawly has the knuckle badge, Wattson has the dynamo badge, Flannery has the heat badge, Winona has the feather badge, Tate and Liza have the mind badge, and Juan has the rain badge.

A friend down the hall has been playing fifth gen. He says Roxie has the toxic badge and Marlon has the wave badge.

Unfortunately, that's all I can do. Someone else will have to get fourth gen.