Prince of Kitties

Thanks, I hadn't noticed that. The Sylo theme is a lot nicer IMO.

I'm kind of serious though, I think the "Like" button is partly responsible for the inane nature of most Facebook discussions. Not that posts here shouldn't be inane, this being a games forum and all... But still. P.S. I also dislike "karma" systems on bulletin boards. I don't know about other people, but on such boards I sometimes find myself hoping that my posts will recieve high karma ratings, and I worry that such thinking would tend to skew friendly discussion into something much less pleasant.

I have no idea how the new boards compare to UBB technically. They do seem more functional; OTOH the default skin is kind of distracting and makes stuff hard to read (and there don't seem to be any alternative skins).

Wait what's this? We can "Like" posts? Like on Facebook? That's just wrong.

For some reason, that really made me laugh.

Congrats! And ZOMG FLUFFY PONIES.

Not sure about Avernum... But I used to listen to Nightwish when playing Exile.

Harehunter: the world is an ugly place, and does its best to burn away people's empathy. Never let yourself succumb to that. Never let yourself for one moment believe that it's naive to do the right thing. That's not wisdom, that's jadedness. (But I'm 23, and I waffle between anger at the world and anger at myself. You can ignore me if you want.)

Both. Depending on circumstances, one side or the other may dominate. I do vaguely agree with Hobbes re the social contract. Partly as a a matter of protecting those in whom good dominates from those in whom evil dominates, in general; and partly because this society's relatively advanced technology base complicates things a lot. Distance enables abstraction and objectification, and kills empathy; and ideally the law should compensate for that.

Oww. My brain. Can we bury this thread? Preferably six feet down?

Originally Posted By: Slenderman. I have a bunker with crap loads of food if the earth ever decides to turn off it's gravity and fling us into the sky. Screw the bottomless pit. Something tells me that wouldn't work very well...

While I'd hesitate to call it malice, the attitude towards the poor that I've observed seems to go well beyond ordinary ignorance. I am pretty sure it qualifies as a kind of social Darwinism; and it certainly involves willful ignorance at the very least.

"I don't know how the afterburner works, but it is 200% efficient!" "That's really impossible." ... I love Futurama.

Originally Posted By: Jewels in Black How far did you get? I didn't start watching New Who till David was on the set and I distinctly remember thinking it was way better than it started. A little into the second season. Then I skipped over a lot of episodes, then I stopped watching. I was very annoyed that they got rid of Christopher Eccleston... In retrospect, that was probably because angsty 18-year-old me loved his tough-guy exterior. These days I prefer heroes who have less Manly Stereotype about them. Looking back: - The romance between Rose and the Doctor strikes me as fanfic-ish, and generally just cliched and way off. Also weird and creepy, especially for a "family friendly" show... I mean, the Doctor is an ancient, alien time traveler, and Rose, though resourceful, was really young and naive. - The plots were all over the place, often literally, and character interaction tended towards hyperactive. - Too much deus ex machina, too much unexplained coincidence. At times the Doctor seemed to get things accomplished while stumbling over his own feet. Mind, that's a terrific missed opportunity... I mean, he's a time traveler. He can go forward or backward in time to set things up for his past or future self, so that he comes out on top in seemingly impossible situations. Repeated failures to incorporate that into the plots make me a sad SF buff.

Fail post is full of fail! I followed "New Who" for a while, but eventually gave up. Too much cheese, too much silliness, Britney Spears soundtracks didn't help. Had some great stuff though, e.g. almost all of The Empty Child.

Originally Posted By: Lilith that only helps if the bigots aren't in the states that are disproportionately well-represented in the senate True. Originally Posted By: Immunity to Normal Scorn —Alorael, who thinks the problem of having the courts prevent tyranny of the majority is that the Supreme Court, as the extreme example, has lifetime appointments. Its members are likely to be among the longest-serving individuals with political power, and because mores change with time and generation, and often among the more conservative (not politically, but generally) minded people. The court lags behind the legislature, which has to appeal to people right now. That can be a good thing if "appealing to the people right now" translates into "getting rid of the filthy [insert minority here]". Time sometimes brings progress, but not always.

Originally Posted By: ξ ... the party in the minority has a responsibility to do more than say no to everything the party in the majority wants. This. Very much. At the risk of sounding biased, certain politicians need to stop putting their beliefs ahead of actually getting stuff done. That said, I'd rather have the current situation than have e.g. Party X using its control of all three branches of government to criminalize homosexuality, while Party Y sits around incapable of doing anything about it. (Yes, I know the courts are supposed to help with that; but let's face it, all presidents love to appoint political allies to the Supreme Court.) Re states having equal representation... Not sure if I think that's good or bad. To be blunt, while I don't like the idea of rule by a political elite, I am also terrified of what a bigoted majority could do if given the power. Never underestimate the destructive potential of ignorance and bigotry.

BTW, I think time dilation must be the most underappreciated plot device ever. Joe Haldeman used it, Orson Scott Card used it, Ursula Le Guin used it all the time. It's fantastic, it's weird, it's awe-inspiring... And I have never, ever seen it on TV or in movies. Very strange.

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim Originally Posted By: Miramor Stars are really, really far apart. Even if you're moving FTL. I know they're far apart, but I also know they are all over the place. The reason the night sky isn't as bright as day, is that the stars are so far apart that the light of most of them hasn't reached us yet. A hypothetical starship would probably have to be moving at huge FTL speeds (billions of light years per second, assuming "normal" time onbaord) to be in danger of hitting anything. (High relativistic speeds, with billions of years per second worth of time dilation, would also do the trick.) Quote: Unless this is some very strange physics thing, this doesn't sound right. Almost like sailing in a straight line around the Earth and not hitting any land masses just because you're traveling ridiculously fast. It's because "hyperspace" usually refers to higher-dimensional space - at least one dimension other than the usual three. If you took away one dimension, and turned 3D space into a 2D plane, a starship in hyperspace would be moving somewhere above or below the plane. Stars would (probably) be confined to the plane, so the starship wouldn't be in danger of crashing into one.

Imagine what a Republican-dominated Senate could do with that though!

Stars are really, really far apart. Even if you're moving FTL. On that note, every SF television series ever gets wormholes completely wrong. A proper wormhole would let you see through it to what's on the other side, and would look more like a huge lens than a tunnel. Edit: also if you're in hyperspace, you're physically displaced from where the stars all are - just in a direction that can't normally be perceived. Assuming at least that there aren't any stars in hyperspace...

I badly want to rewrite CBoE in a cross-platform interpreted language such as Python (and call it CrossBoE, har har). But at this point I just do not have anywhere near the required skillset... And even for a highly skilled programmer, porting legacy procedural code to a modern OO language would probably be nontrivial.

Originally Posted By: Mud on your hands! In fact, except for taste it doesn't really matter if food is spoiled. What matters is if it contains pathogenic microbes. Those can't magically appear in your stomach, though, and if they were there they'd usually rather invade you than ruin your food. *raises hand* What about putrefaction products? Some of the amines are quite toxic IIRC.

The problem is that there's an enormous history of abusing voter ID systems and such here, in the name of harassing and disenfranchising voters. The tendency is to create artificial hurdles to inconvenience minority voters. (See also the idea of requiring a literacy test for voting.) I was going to say the idea sounds superficially reasonable, despite being awful in practice, but Lilith punctured that notion... Originally Posted By: "Lilith" i mean i'm coming from the position that nation-states are inherently illegitimate and the only fair government is a world government, so take that for what it's worth I'll vouch for that... From a position of reasonable anonymity. Nation-states are jealous creatures.