Dikiyoba

Okay, Dikiyoba is locking this thread now, in an attempt to keep things from getting worse. Senaden, please calm down. Someone was rude to you and you have the right to be upset by that, but being rude toward everyone in response will only make things worse, not better.

Mint is harder to walk on than grass. Neighbors also become irritated when their lawns are also mint.

Really? Grass dries up in dry weather, but it bounces back. In my experience, mint just dies when it gets too dry. Plus, it dies back in freezing weather, while grass does just fine.

Dikiyoba kills succulents on a regular basis. Dikiyoba is reasonably good with other plants, though.

And, again the rate of shaping failures is not ridiculously high.

Uh, the narration contradicts you there.

"You enter the Purity Workshop B, one of the Shapers' factories for the creation of the tools and chemicals they need for their work. Like most such places, it is underground. That way, when the horrible accident happens (and it will), everything can just be sealed up under countless tons of stone. Then they can move elsewhere and start over."

Dikiyoba.

Stealth is useful in certain occasions, since it lets you get into areas full of enemies too high level for the PC to fight, and because in some places it lets you choose when and where to fight an enemy. Really, the best use of stealth and leadership is to weaken your opponents before you fight them.

Dikiyoba.

"Seal it up and forget this ever happened instead of risking our lives" instead of "Well, we made this mess, let's get together a party of glaahks and show that thing who's boss" ... there's a disconnect there.

It's worse than that. G1 makes it very clear that Shapers will seal places off even though people are still inside, rather than mounting a rescue attempt or sending in reinforcements. Of course, one of the potential disasters of Shaping is the creation of new, horrible diseases, in which case sealing a research facility off rather than sending in more people makes a fair amount of sense (at least in the short term, until further research can come up with ways to cure or destroy the disease, or prove that it can't live for very long on its own). For rogues and pollution? Yeah, immediately sealing them off doesn't make much sense.

Dikiyoba.

Cats that drink your booze are not nice, and probably won't last very long,

Plus, they're so finicky they'll probably demand only the most expensive booze.

Well, that's a lie. Cats are finicky, but there's no guarantee that what they're holding out for is especially good. One of Dikiyoba's cats will only drink water from the toilet bowl.

The number I've heard is 200, in optimal conditions of variability, and around 500 in more typical situations. That's for humans though, I guess we don't know about serviles. Though humans were made from serviles. . . *shrug*

50 is an old number. It might be higher in newer studies now. Or the number may depend entirely on the population in question. *Dikiyoba shrugs*

But maybe two dozen serviles being perfectly viable breeding stock for four or five generations on Sucia?

Probably. Looking only at genetics, it only takes 50 or so individuals for there to be enough genetic variability for the population to continue indefinitely, and serviles move between villages often enough for all three sects to count as one population. But we can't come up with a meaningful estimate for how many serviles were on the island and survived the initial Barring to begin with; all we know is that it was enough.

Dikiyoba.

The way carding works in the US (or at least in Oregon) is ridiculous. It was the most stressful part of being a cashier for me, given the ridiculously harsh penalties for letting someone underage go uncarded, the obvious offense some people took at being asked to show their ID, and my difficulty in estimating someone's age. Plus, if I carded someone unexpectedly, it would usually slow the entire line down if they had to search for their ID or didn't have it on them and had to run out to their car or find another cashier to vouch for them or whatever.

Really, everyone who buys alcohol or tobacco should have to show some form of photo ID. Of course, that would require making sure everyone has government-issued photo ID several months before they turn 18 and can easily update it or replace it when necessarily, and that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

Dikiyoba.

There's the Dumping Pits.

The Dumping Pits is mostly working as intended, and was put out of operation by rebels. So it's not a SVH. There's also the Purity Workshop, which is rundown and infested by rogues, but not hit by catastrophe. (At least, not yet, as the PC notes. The fact that all Shaper facilities eventually create a disaster and are then sealed off is canon.)

There are also the five Shaper infiltrators in Burwood. One is corrupt (uses canisters). Another is arrogant (wants to take on the entire drakon fortress by himself). One is very competent (clears rebels out of a town and keeps them out). The other two are fairly neutral, not doing anything noteworthy either way.

There's also the challenge zone boss, as a rogue Shaper-type that has not been suppressed.

The challenge area in G5 is the work of a rebel lifecrafter, and exists on the boundary of the warzone. That's not the Shaper's fault.

Dikiyoba.

The poster child for this disease is the 95% confidence level as a standard for significance. In a lot of fields, that's considered a gold standard. In fact, it's nearly worthless. It means that every twentieth study gets published, with significant results, even if there is absolutely nothing there but noise. There are a lot of important topics on which there are a lot more than twenty studies being done at any given time.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The goal of research is not to eliminate the noise but to find as much of the signal as possible. The 95% confidence level is a compromise between reporting false positives and reporting false negatives. Some scientific disciplines apparently do better with a higher confidence interval that produces less false positives but more false negatives. Some scienfitic disciplines do better with a lower confidence interval that produces more false positives but fewer false negatives. (Also, just because 95% is the gold standard for a field doesn't mean that all of the studies in that field will be at that confidence interval. Many studies will be able to reach a higher confidence level, sometimes by a lot. 95% confidence is just the lowest you can go.)

Some noise mixed in with the signal is inevitable. That's why research isn't accepted as fact until its results have been duplicated multiple times. When there are 20 studies on the same thing and 19 say one thing but 1 says the other, it suddenly becomes much easier to separate the signal from the noise. Much better to have the process of finding the signal be muddled and confusing than to have standards so impossible to fulfill that no one finds any signal at all.

Dikiyoba.

Congratulations, Trenton.

Dikiyoba doesn't drink alcoholic beverages. Dikiyoba just can't stand the taste.

Eh, sliths can probably get by on an all-fish diet a lot better than humans can.

I would be fine with giving up fungi. Especially since I don't eat any fungi to begin with.

So no beer or yeast breads for you?

Dikiyoba.

wait is disliking posts really a thing that can be enabled

 

if you dislike a post does everyone see that you dislike it the way they can with likes

 

i could go in there and check but i'd rather increase my post count

Yes, no, and you are a terrible, terrible spammer.

Dikiyoba.

Yeah, and isn't A:EftP on there? That's not exactly what I'd call an "old game">

According to Wikipedia, the company is just gog.com now, rather than Good Old Games. Kind of like what happens to most TV channels, but not as ridiculous.

Dikiyoba.

As long as the two or three creations you make are reasonably good, you should get through the game just fine.

Dikiyoba.

The MBTI is my choice of reference for almost everything related to the behaviour of people.

Again, Meyers-Briggs is not a useful tool for figuring out people's behavior. It turns up occasional insights and generalizations, but it's not something you want to take seriously. It has too many exceptions and too little scientific evidence to back it up.

Also, in the SW MBTI test prior to the one Dikiyoba created, Dikiyobs scored as a ST, not an NT.

That assumes that Dikiyoba is an NT while Nalyd is not and, more importantly, that the Meyers-Briggs test is a scientifically valid way of describing personalities, which it is not.

That description of masala dosa sounds pretty good.

Dikiyoba tried a slice from a loaf of rice bread once. It wasn't very good. Too dense and with a strong, funny taste. But Dikiyoba sometimes has trouble finding wheat bread that Dikiyoba likes.

I'm skeptical that all 3 versions come out at same time.

The iPad version might come out later (because the iPad versions of other Spiderweb games are only available at the iTunes App Store), but if Jeff is distributing games through Steam and other places now, it makes sense to release the Mac and Windows versions at the same time, even if the Mac version is finished first.

Dikiyoba hopes simultaneous releases will be the end of any differences between versions, like the drayk damage type in G4. Apparently, drayks do physical damage on the Mac version, but fire damage on Windows. Game strategy shouldn't change depending on whether you are playing on a Mac or PC (or iPad, now).

There is a fifth character class, and male and female versions of all characters are available.

Yay!

The game won't be out until Fall, and I'm shooting for a simultaneous Mac and Windows release.

Woohoo!

Dikiyoba.

Congratulations, Kelandon.

Dikiyoba.

Congratulations, Triumph.

Dikiyoba.

Because the show does enough things right that it has potential, because pointing out when a show makes mistakes is the only way to get better shows that don't make those mistakes, because I'm surrounded by fans of the show who want to talk about it extensively anyway, and, most importantly, because extensively analyzing things is fun (and also informative).

Now, why do you care what Dikiyoba does with Dikiyoba's spare time?

So...was I just totally oblivious to foreshadowing, or was Twilight's transformation quite out of the blue?

It was a bit sudden, but not too bad. The series relies on episodic plots, none of the characters have much knowledge of alicorns/princesses, and it's well within Princess Celestia to not tell Twilight Sparkle anything until she feels like it. It was sudden but much less out of the blue than Twilight's brother or even the Crystal Empire.

But that, unfortunately, was one of the few things the episode got right. The plot frame was not only rushed by just plain wrong. The episode should have started with Twilight recieving the incomplete spell and proceeded chronologically, rather than opening with the discovery of the switched cutie marks and then revealing the incomplete spell through flashback. Twilight's plan for fixing the cutie marks felt rushed, mainly because she thought up the solution to it the very first time. And then Twilight's transformation was flat and cheesy. No one wants to watch five minutes of "YAY PRINCESS AWESOME!!!" It's boring. There should have been some negative consequences, real or perceived, to Twilight's transformation. After all, being promoted from student to major leader is going to bring about a lot of changes, and Twilight tends to be neurotic. The negative consequences wouldn't have had to be a big part of the episode, just hinted at or perhaps revealed at the end as a cliffhanger.

Also, cutie marks are still friggin' creepy.

Dikiyoba.