Prince of Kitties

Ah I see. Mine is the OEM version (which also has the annoying limitation of being licensed for a single machine).

PAE allows 32-bit OSes to use more than 4 GB of RAM. Windows 32-bit desktop versions just don't support that aspect of it. ... And good gods, environment stuff on Windows NT is terrible. It's a wonderful desktop OS, but it's really not designed for software development stuff.

Originally Posted By: Dantius The Victim's Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind by Bruce Bawer. Title says it all: a critique of the New Left from the left. It alternates between well-thought out, reasonable, and powerful arguments and a polemic screed. Really the only two chapters worth reading are the ones on women's studies and LGBT identity (he happens to be gay himself). The one on Chicano studies in also OK, I guess. Most of the other chapters almost border on concern trolling, but his overall point is still both correct and very important. Say, that sounds interesting. Having spent some time embroiled in WS stuff, I've become something of a believer, but I have to say I have my doubts; particularly concerning the consequentialist ethics, and also the idea that I am incapable of understanding certain things, and must therefore take some statements on faith. I wonder what Bawer makes of such things.

Wait really? I bought a copy of Windows 7 and it was 32-bit only...

Also, you're limited to 4 GB of RAM (minus whatever your hardware maps out) with Win32. Win32 does support PAE, but Microsoft apparently decided not to support large amounts of RAM on desktop versions (probably because of driver compatibility issues, maybe also because there was more money in making people upgrade to 64-bit versions). (Though in all likelihood, not many people need 4+ GB of RAM.)

In theory it's 1/100 chance of dying. In practice, the RNG seems to be a bit lopsided; I'd say it's more like 1/20. Even so, Luck is extremely powerful based on that alone (never mind that it also affects hit, dodge, and disarm chances). However, I will note that Luck has no effect on resistance to slowing or cursing - nothing does, actually. So high-Luck characters can still be cursed and slowed until powerless, and eventually killed off. tl;dr: Luck is good, but it alone won't get you through a difficult scenario - especially if the designer puts special nodes to good use.

Remember when the BoE sources were released though? They were barely human-readable. It took a Herculean effort to fix them up and make them work.

Another observation: by far the most dangerous creatures at lower levels are fire breathers. And by far the most dangerous of those are Ruby Skeletons, each of which can spam 4 heat rays per turn for 20+ damage each, thoroughly roasting my PCs. Resist Magic helps, but not for long. Not really sure what strategy works best for this. Maybe creating force walls and then hauling rear out of breath range? Being able to hide PCs would be nice, but Sanctuary doesn't work for magical attacks.

Oh, regarding mockery of social sciences. I think the social sciences are necessarily going to rely more on empirical evidence than the hard sciences, since anything involving human beings has far too many variables to account for. That doesn't mean they don't work. (Actually applied social sciences have probably saved my life at a few points.)

Originally Posted By: "Upon Mars" 1.My theatrical background provided me the first possible answer: Theater is all about stage, actors, objects and ultimately the non-existence of the stage, actors and objects, which is why theatre can be so excessive, so brutal compared to a screen, photography or a painting. The medium of the screen, paintings and TV makes this excess of meaning (that a physical chair is not just a physical chair) impossible : it depicts reality, I even claim that it creates reality, because the object depicted is not physical so that it can be carried into your mind wherever you go, that it precisely doesn't allow you to continue the way you did before, which is the opposite of theatre where people are allowed to return to normal, that the thing which happened on stage has never really happened. So in conclusion if law is depicted as swift on the TV, even if you don't believe in it the very medium through which it has passed has presented it's self as true/real. IOW, theater has more impact because it forces you to imagine the setting? I suppose that makes sense, if I am understanding you correctly. I'm not sure it's universally true for everyone, though. However, I must at this point go OT and say that I strongly dislike the phrase "creates reality." Not because it's technically wrong - "reality" includes our beliefs and behaviors and perceptions, since those are very physical properties of our bodies - but because it is extremely easy to abuse, and tends to create misunderstanding. Tell someone who isn't a philosophy major about "creating reality" and they'll think you're talking about changing the laws of physics. (And it doesn't help IMO that some philosophy professors I've met have actually talked about exactly that - that the laws of physics are purely subjective social constructs, and can vary depending on our beliefs.)

Myth of the black rapist. Edit: other offensive favorites of mine... - "All sociopaths are brilliant and/or geniuses." - "Sex is the best weapon a woman has."

So lately I've been messing around with 2 PC parties. One dimwitted musclebound fighter, one pencil-necked geek mage, a la Kalam Mekhar and Quick Ben. This sort of duo sounds silly, but is staggeringly effective. The mage just stands back and throws bless and haste spells, and the fighter goes barreling around kicking rear; as long as the caster can hide somewhere safe, the party is all but invincible. I can see a few shortcomings: - Uneven EXP distribution. Can be mitigated by giving the mage intrinsic disadvantages, but I don't really like doing that. - Inability to effectively split up, because the mage can't hold his own. - Lack of versatility. A single mage will not be that effective with ranged spells (at least at low levels). I kind of wonder what the best strategy is for training such a party as the PCs gain levels though...

I'll admit I'm a bit confused by the whole idea of PDNs (what does that stand for?). When usernames and avatars are changing frequently, it can take a while to figure out who's who, which creates (IMO) unnecessary cognitive overhead. (You might notice that I have kept the same username since I first started posting here. Granted I don't post that often, there is a reason for this.) Re immaturity, the internet seems to bring that out in just about everyone. I suspect that, as with most internet phenomena, it's a matter of abstraction; it's easier to come off as rude, silly, etc. when you're typing responses to an abstract series of text strings, than when you're talking to a concrete person's face. (If you don't believe me, think about software piracy. It's a lot easier to do unethical things when you're not getting any feedback from the victim.)

Ghasts, because their BoE bitmap looks like a blue-tinted gorilla wearing lipstick and nail polish.

Prefer creating single characters. Yes, I'm attracted to the romantic notion of the solo jack-of-all-trades hero, despite the idea being OMG FASCIST, like most fantasy and most music that isn't jazz. Ahem. I do like having NPCs that can join the party though. And on occasion I've create two and three person parties, for BoE scenarios where I feel like a singleton would get lonely. (Yes, I left my sanity at the door long before I showed up on the Spiderweb forums...)

Re SCP: Containment Breach, the background seems a whole lot more interesting than the game itself. No doubt I'd be pretty disturbed if I met the Pillsbury Doughboy from Mars IRL, of course; but it's hard to convey that on a computer screen. (Come to think of it, I'd say that's the issue with a lot of horror. Shocking imagery is useful, but without shocking concepts, it's dead in the water.)

Groovy! Time to finally play those games in earnest...

If you're using CBoE on Windows Vista/7 with a software restriction policy, and so want to run CBoE from C:\Program Files as limited user... I'm not entirely sure, but I *think* setting the "UAC virtualization" option on the EXEs might work. That should redirect everything to a folder somewhere in your user's home. But yes, it would be very good to have out-of-the-box multiuser support (especially for people running as limited on WinXP). Edit: and when it comes to computer security, a little OCD is not necessarily a bad thing.

Hmm. Interesting idea, would probably come in handy if people started writing BoE scenarios again. But sadly I don't see that happening without big improvements to the scenario editor.

I was happy with Jackson's decision to remove Bombadil, though I would have liked to see the barrow-wight. The Scouring of the Shire, though, I was not so happy to see removed. I've always felt there was something really harrowing and accurate about it - a grain of uncomfortable truth lodged in the fantasy archetype. Then again, it's been quite a while since I read any of the books. I tried to pick up Fellowship recently, and ended up putting it down because Tolkien's fairy-tale style really grated on me. So it's possible that I'm seeing things through the rose-colored glasses of my teenage years.

I think we may actually be pretty inhibited, at least when it comes to violent impulses, compared to how we were in e.g. medieval or Renaissance Europe.

IIRC that's not true for all proteins and all people, though. e.g. gliadin (in wheat) manages to get into the bloodstream in some people (thus Celiac disease). Or have I got that wrong?

Maybe prions don't. Most of them affect the nervous system, and the gut has an incredible amount of nerve tissue. Perhaps CJD and the like get to the brain via the enteric nervous system?

On that note, I'll mention that when people start to fear that they might become murderers, that's labeled as OCD - and treated by behavioral therapy that inures them to that fear. Kind of stupid when you think about it. And our society does take most of the blame, IMO, because it is a cannibalistic society. "Normal" people think nothing of buying a laptop computer, which is actually made by an incredibly long chain of debt slaves, wage slaves, and just plain slaves. The worker who put the keyboard together does hundreds every day; in another ten years she'll have lost the use of her hands entirely. The tantalum capacitors were made from minerals mined in Congo, and each counts for several rapes and murders. The machine I'm typing this on is responsible for quite a lot of death and misery, and by extension so am I. If you're reading this, so are you. With such complete lack of caring drilled into us from day one, is it any wonder that a few of us take it a step further?

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith Normal people don't react to negative factors in their life by turning into sociopaths and then massacring people Normal people become killers all the time. We just pretend they aren't normal after the fact because it gives us an excuse to treat criminals and people with mental disorders as less than human as well as having to avoid worrying about whether our society enables or encourages violence or if we might become killers too in the wrong circumstances. Dikiyoba. I think, more importantly, it prevents us from worrying about whether we might become murderers given the wrong circumstances. The idea that one does not have Free Will is bitter medicine... Necessary, but bitter. Edit: though to be fair, I have a somewhat... unusual perspective on such things, mostly due to what sort of person I am. I might be entirely wrong about the above. Edit again: My apologies, Dikiyoba; I missed your last sentence. Basically I agree with you completely.