Goldengirl

Whitney does give the Plain Badge, Morty is the Fog Badge, Chuck the Storm Badge, and Clair the Rising Badge.

For Pokemon types, we have flying, electric, bug, ghost, dark, fighting, water, fire, rock, grass, dragon, steel, ice, ground, poison, psychic... That's all that comes to mind at the moment.

Kanto Region

I can't remember most of the badges, maybe I'll have to look at my games for that. However, we have Brock, Misty (cascade badge?), Lieutenant Surge (thunder badge?), Erika, Blaine (volcano badge?), Giovanni (later replaced by Blue), Sabrina, Koga and then Janine after he went to the Elite Four.

Johto Region

Falkner (flying badge?), Bugsy (bug badge? shot in the dark), Whitney with the Plain Badge, Morty, Chuck (fighting badge?), Jasmine, Pryce with the Glacier Badge, and Clair (dragon badge?).

I hope this helps others to remember what I can't at the moment.

Thanks for the hint, professor; the last baby Pokémon is Budew!

Most of my knowledge has already been expended by those who posted before me. However, I do know that Tyrogue and Bonsly are both baby Pokémon.

Group Pokémon Trainer Quiz Part 1.A

16. Pikachu

22. Raticate

Group Pokémon Trainer Quiz Part 1.C

Bah, sniped. The middle evolution for Cyndaquil is Quilava, though.

Edit: Sniped twice. Phooey.

If you're playing a loyalist, you can get an amulet to go through safely.

The last ring is in the ruins of Thornton, which is part of the Barrier Zone. Unless you are very good at stealth, or have a way to safely cross the Barrier Zone, it's not worth getting until later.

There are more puresteel rings in Burwood Province, but there is also another person who will trade them for canisters, so it's not necessarily beneficial to take them from Burwood to use the Illya Safehouse.

We revel in our memetic superiority, at least in our tiny corner of the virtual world.

Given Richard Dawkins' original definition of a meme as a self-replicating unit of culture, can we really call any meme successful if it is limited to a tiny corner of the virtual world, such as exemplified by the Spiderweb community?

I think it was "ou sont les Neigedens d'antan?". This keyboard doesn't do diacriticals.

 

Ils sont partis, elles sont parties, for gender consistency: neige is feminine, so let's all say together "la neige".

 

"elles s'en sont enfuies" is more poetical.

 

I was "la Canaliste" till my identity was eaten, a wound which will not heal quickly.

 

These are random answers, thus preserving off-topicness.

Forgive my mix-up with the subject pronoun; my French is a little rusty.

Anyway, the point stands that the snows of yesteryear are melted away. Unless, of course, they fell in areas where more snow falls and more ice is deposited than melts, in which case they were converted into glacial ice. So too, have the times melted away or else been converted into glacial ice.

Où sont les neiges d'antan?

Ils sont parties.

The real question is, where have the times gone?

Congratulations!

Well, if not like the Avernum portals, maybe something like...

...this?

Aside from The Brothers Karamazov, which has been going well so far, I'm reading The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg. It's a really fascinating essay that attempts to reconstruct peasant culture in Europe during the sixteenth century based on a limited supply of literature available at the time and the transcripts of a heretic's trial. The heretic, a miller in Italy, advocates a peculiar type of theology and cosmogony that draws aspects from the texts he read; however, more critically, it has many wholly unique aspects that indicate he was synthesizing aspects of peasant oral culture into his belief system. Thus, the previously shrouded "lower" culture that has been obscured by the material dominance of the "higher culture" of the nobility, church, and well-educated in Europe at the time begins to be revealed, and its influence on future trends can be examined further.

Randomizer may have a point. The psychological effects of standing next to a portal for a long time, knowing that beyond there lies hopelessness and misery, must be quite effective as a disciplinary tool. It's like being shown the rack.

Dealing with escape attempts by desperate prisoners not wanting to get cast down also makes sense in my mind.

Yes.

Exile, which was the original version of the Avernum remakes and the current generation of remakes, precedes Oblivion by twelve years, according to Wikipedia. It's doubtful that anyone at Bethesda was inspired by Spiderweb Software. However, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Jeff has taken some inspiration from the Elder Scroll series over time, even if subconsciously. He does like to game, after all.

I can't even stomach gin, or brandy for that matter. Although, the worst alcohol I've tried is a "beer" called Pabst Blue Ribbon. I've accidentally drank spoiled milk before, and I would rate that experience as more pleasant than that foul substance.

PBR is basically water, from all accounts I'm aware. Cheap and flavorless to get you drunk.

You identified the two questions I struggled most with already, SoT, and for the exact same reasons I did. I have to ask, though, because the answer isn't readily obvious. What was the intent of the question about the workplace? What qualitative data are you trying to measure with that question?

Agreed. If there was a fault with the poll, it's that I couldn't explain myself adequately in the space provided. It's almost like you didn't want to read an essay or something.

Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Jeff's games are actually full of humor. It's just not as explicit as, say, Kingdom of Loathing. Rather, most of it's pretty dry and deadpan. It's great stuff.

Does the game world ever really suggest that Shapers are particularly skilled at governance? They're immensely powerful militarily ("every shaper is an army") and highly intelligent, but they certainly seem to value shaping ability more highly than administrative skills. It'd be quite surprising if masters of such a demanding art happened to also be politically adept enough to efficiently govern a complex state. Getting that good at something as hard as shaping takes focus - probably something even beyond a PHD equivalent. I think they rule because they are (or were for most of their history) militarily dominant, not because they are good at ruling. It doesn't seem common to find outsiders who genuinely think they govern well.

I always got the impression that the Shapers governed in the fashion that the Romans did. The local people could continue ruling themselves more or less as before, but under the auspices of the Shaper infrastructure of law. They pay taxes to the Shapers, ask the Shapers for help, let their lands be subject to Shaper flora and fauna and experiments, send soldiers to the Shaper army, etc. but they are more or less left to figure out their own civil code. After all, the only mention of Shaper law that ever gets given are regulations on Shaping.

I think the mayor in Dillame was the one who originally gave me this impression, though I may be mistaken.

For all that The Chosen One is a cliche, in games it really helps to explain why the main character can do things that no one else can if they really are different from everyone else.

 

Geneforge generally does a good job of tying up everyone else who's supposed to be more powerful than you with other work, but sometimes you do things (e.g. wiping out the Poryphra camp in G4, which pits you directly against those people with 2000 HP) which show that you really are more powerful than everyone else.

They can also clearly take you down. In the end, it's the fact that most enemies don't heal themselves that makes you able to defeat them. In a scenario where it's the PC versus Poryphra where the Shapers and loyalists all have plenty of pods and spores, it almost certainly would be next to impossible to win.

Shaping disasters are not considered a serious problem, sure. Well, actually, that statement is troublesome, because they almost always are. That's why they're disasters; no one who ever sends you into a Shaping lab gone awry has ever not addressed it as a problem of some sort. However, Shaping disasters aren't generally considered a widespread, systemic problem, as far as we are aware. There's never any mention of how the Shapers are struggling to contain their own empire from collapsing due to all these failed labs full of rogues.

However, we can make some implicit inferences from the narrative that suggest that they are, indeed, a problem. The Shapers have developed what seems to be (since we never get the full details) an elaborate system of checks to insure safety. That indicates that, at some point, the Shapers had far less of a lid on things and were just wildly Shaping at their own will. This makes sense for the early days of Shaping, but the empire has matured to some degree. However, their ultimate failsafe is to lock an area down and bar it, as they did with Sucia Isle.

Barring things has unequivocally been a failure in every scenario we've seen. Drayks, Sucia Isle, the Geneforge, Drakons, canisters, spawners, and the stoneworks near Krotoa-Kel are all examples of things that the Shapers barred. All of them erupted into problem situations. The problem with evaluating how successful the Shapers actually are at barring things is that we wouldn't hear about the sucesses, since they're barred, but these all mushroomed into some very severe problems.

Moreover, we have direct evidence from the game that indicates that the Shaping disasters are actually a serious problem. Sure, the narrative given by the Shapers indicates they're benign, for the most part. However, the PC investigates and often times expresses shock at how severe the situation is. This, too, comes from the narrative, and that's because there are factional biases present in what the Shapers say that don't match up with the rest of the narrative that we see. Just because the Shapers are telling us to pay no heed to what's behind the curtain doesn't mean that it isn't something worth worrying about; rather, it just shows they are unreliable narrators with a bias towards themselves. That's not really a shock.

The interpretive debate here is whether or not we can trust what the Shapers are saying about themselves. As they are the dominant class of Terrestia and have very strong incentives to maintain that position, I'm skeptical as to how trustworthy they actually are. They censor, as stated in canon multiple times. And there are plenty of examples of the Shapers saying something that doesn't match up with what's seen in the game.

I remember a while back Iffy proving that the stealth, mechanics, and leadership route can actually get you all the way through G4 without ever fighting yourself. I think he played as a fence-sitter, or maybe as a Shaper. He couldn't have been a diehard Rebel, because they have to kill Moseh and can't escape that. I also think, though, that there were a lot of situations in which he recruited allies (not in his party) and had to help them fight off his opponents for him by blessing and healing.

Anyway, as far as the issue of leveling goes... You're mostly right, SoT. However, there's one issue where the game actually plays out more or less as you describe. G5 has someone who used the Geneforge and then got somehow altered and weakened. At several points in the game, it talks about how, when you get stronger, it's more that you're remembering the powers and strengths that you forgot. Sometimes this is directly untapped via magic and further reShaping, sometimes you just figure it out on your own (i.e. through combat). The other games don't hold up as well, though, although there are traces of explanations. Shapers are taught to learn very quickly, for instance, and the G4 PC just so happens to get a lot of canisters and Shaped by the Geneforge, but they're weak explanations comparatively speaking.

Years ago, when this topic came around at that time, I remember arguing that the Shapers were really a bunch of baggy-suited incompetents, stumbling through the minefield of history.

 

I think my main point was that over 50% of the Shapers you met in the games were in some way corrupt or crazy, and nearly 100% of the Shaper facilities you explored were sealed vaults in which something had gone nightmarishly wrong. That implied that the Shapers as a group were clearly incompetent to deal with the problems they faced. So clearly incompetent, in fact, that the few Shapers who seemed to sincerely believe in the Shaper cause must have been Dunning-Kruger idiots as well, to have been so unreasonably confident. Any intelligent Shaper would have seen the glaring evidence and recognized that they were operating well out of their depth.

 

Instead, the Shaper idea of dealing with any problem was just to seal off the disaster, and dig a new lab somewhere else. What could possibly go wrong? The Shaper regime was a one-party totalitarian state where Chernobyls seemed to happen every year. Once I found this viewpoint, it really seemed compelling. I started hearing all the Shaper dialog as though spoken with a drunken slur and stammer. What a bunch of idiots.

 

That was certainly before G5, maybe before G4. But I don't think those games changed my impression very much.

In all fairness, the regions the games took place were exceptional. Sucia Island is the only one of its kind, and its shutdown was effective for two hundred years. Drypeak was a backwater colony that would have had no problems had the Shapers not gotten involved in Sucia Island. There wasn't even anything particularly wrong with the Ashen Isles, aside from a minor squabble between Diwanyia and Lankan on Harmony Island. Looking at regions in G4 and G5 doesn't really work in this aspect, as everything is changed due to the Rebellion.

I think it would have been far more illustrative of Shaper society to see any of the major provinces in peacetime. Until then, all we know of regular Shaper society is what it's like at the war zones and backwaters.

One thing I would like to point out, however, is how much I love the civilians in Geneforge 4 and 5. They're one of the aspects of the game that I thought impressively well-written. They tend not to be ideologues or even want to take sides. However, when they do, they're almost always loyalists because they hate how much death and destruction the rebels have brought. I thought that to be a particularly realistic touch by Jeff in a series full of people spouting philosophy.