Prince of Kitties

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith I don't see why anyone should care what he has to say. Because listening to him, however unpleasant an idea it is, could give valuable information about what goes on in the heads of violent nutters like him... Valuable because it might make it easier to recognize people with such tendencies, and intervene before they commit violent crimes. IOW: it's not a matter of rehabilitating him, it's a matter of gleaning information so that innocent deaths can be prevented in the future. Edit: House of S got there first. Anyway, if rehabilitation is a side effect of figuring out what's wrong with him, so much the better... But that's not the main focus.

Desperance? The people who were trying to make a free BoE alternative (Pygmalion or something) and never got anywhere with it? I didn't know they had forums. Serious or not serious, that is quite disturbing, assuming it's correct. (No, I don't think you're lying. I just don't like to assume the worst.)

Wait, what? How long ago was this? That is serious business of the extremely bad kind. FWIW, I'm kind of new here, and not a frequent reader/poster. But from what I've seen of current Spidweb, I don't think the mods would tolerate sexual harassment of anyone. I have seen a (single) situation where people seemed to forget that a poster here was a minor, but I don't think that elevated to the level of harassment. So, I hope you'll forgive me for being somewhat doubtful.

I don't believe so, though it's been a while since I've played BoE with a high-Luck party. (Anyway there are ways of dealing with that. Special spells can reduce Luck, and I know of at least one scenario that makes use of this. )

Actually I was thinking quite deliberately of potential effects on game balance, with "Perfect Aim" anyway. Particularly game balance in terms of what PC skills are actually useful. "Perfect Aim" would (I think) make dedicated archer PCs a more reasonable proposition, without making them terribly overpowered.

Not good enough to take on 20+ Giants with 4 Strength though. Actually, this is one of the reasons I think ranged attacks should probably be buffed up a bit in OBoE. As things stand, high-level parties have to have a way to keep their fighters alive when going after archers/spellcasters/breathers. This generally means Luck (and if possible Protection spells). Whereas if archery worked as well for PCs as for NPCs, (ab)using such tactics would be less necessary. And while effective archery may not be realistic, it is a great deal more realistic than Luck-based character shields.

In Freud's defense, he at least tended towards provable forms of wrongness (at least from what I know of his ideas). That's much better than can be said of some schools of psychological thought, IMHO.

I'm not sure if it's even possible to implement stuff like this without breaking compatibility with old save files. In case it is, though, I have some ideas... Advantages Faerie Blood (+20% XP): PC has faerie ancestry, incurring partial (50%) resistance to Magical type attacks. Does not incur any resistance to magical effects such as cursing. Perfect Aim (+15%): When a target is within range, PC will never miss with missile weapons. Note that this does not imply that any damage will actually be done, only that the missile will always hit. Fast Reflexes (+15%): PC has a 25% chance each turn of getting an extra action point. Night Vision (+10%): Gives PC constant light of radius 3 squares, even without a light source. However, PC's eyes glow as a result, so creatures within the light radius can see them. Also, the light effect does not apply in light-sapping dungeons. Disadvantages Poor Spellcaster (-10%): PC's spell points regenerate at half the normal rate. Weak Will (-15%): PC lacks the willpower to resist or maintain magical effects. As such, PC's chance of saving versus bad magical effects is halved, as is the strength of friendly magical effects such Bless and Haste. ... How do these sound? Reasonable? Stupid? Am I beating a dead horse, seeing as no one is making new BoE scenarios?

Ugh. Just had my PC die in the Giants encounter on the bridge in The Zakhazi Run... There was one Giant left. One. But he got one lucky hit, and that was it for my poor Nephil. NOOOO. Yeah, anyway... Luck is really important, and should probably be boosted first thing, because it's even more effective than HP and armor at keeping PCs alive.

Sorry, I should have kept my mouth shut. If we're going to roll out the old "all viewpoints ultimately being equal" line, then consider me done with this thread.

The Boston Herald is basically a tabloid. This looks legit though. I wonder exactly what kind of dark matter it is. If it's a cosmic string, that might give more credence to the big bang/cosmic inflation theory, no? (Edit: this being in response to Sylae's post above.)

No, it isn't a particularly tolerant thing to say. Maybe "sociopath" isn't the right word, though I've met some conservatives who definitely put on a good show of it... My point is, some of the answers associated with a modern conservative viewpoint require at best gross and willful ignorance, and at worst a callous disregard for other people's suffering. e.g. that people who can pay for it should receive a higher standard of medical care. Which implies that people who cannot produce the money should receive a lower standard of care. That is fundamentally messed up. One gets tired of tip-toeing around such things.

A lot of those questions are either poorly phrased, heavily weighted towards the Fascist end of things, or just plain stupid (like the astrology question). That said, it seems to me that you'd have to be a bit of a sociopath to give mostly conservative-type answers. And I don't think that's necessarily a reflection on the test, as poor a test as it is. P.S. I got -7.88 Economic, -5.90 Social, though some of my answers don't really fit into the framework of the test.

In other words, be bad guys? I'm sorry... that's just... why? *facepalm*

This is a Big Deal IMO. Physics has been operating way out in the theoretical boondocks for a while, and I think it's nice to finally have some results, as opposed to more talk of superstrings and eleven-dimensional space and other as-yet-unprovables. Of course, I'm not a physicist, and know very little of string theories; for all I know we could be on the verge of a working unified theory, etc. But the public will respond better to hearing about a new particle than hearing about a new twist on some theory... And more to the point, I think, physics students will be more excited by the possibility of discovery than the possibility of endless theorizing. The above being all IMHO of course... Suffice to say I'm very glad to hear about this.

As I said, I never played any of the games.

Disclaimer: I've never played any of the Mass Effect games. I saw the endings for ME3 on Youtube and thought they were stupid and logically flawed (which they hid behind gratuitous audience manipulation). OTOH I have to give the writers points for killing off the hero. This will probably sound weird, but I feel that not giving the fans everything they want indicates some level of integrity on part of someone involved in the game's development. (Kind of like that Firefly episode with Jubal Early. The one where Early does not get his just deserts at the end. I happened to absolutely flat-out hate that episode, for a number of reasons... But I have to admire Whedon for refusing to give the audience the satisfaction of seeing Early killed.)

Unfortunately that compactness has a downside. Move that 68k assembly to OS 9 on PowerPC, and suddenly you have bugs that can trash other programs' memory. Leave WriteNow open for too long on a PowerPC Mac and chances are something will eventually crash. (Probably the OS, what with the lack of memory protection.)

Remember WriteNow, the Classic Mac word processor? That was written in pure 68k assembly. Had most of the features of Abiword, IIRC, only it was 50 times smaller (at least).

Cairo Jim: you could always try messing around with Angband.[/i] The code base is very readable, and can be modified to e.g. add or remove features without knowing much about C or programming in general. The flip side, though, is that Angband makes relatively little use of "advanced" C features like arrays and pointers. It can help get your feet wet, but it won't teach you how to actually create code, let alone do so properly in C. That said, there's a saying that most Angband developers didn't know C before they started working on Angband. As for CBoE, its code base is absolutely indecipherable to me, and I'm frankly in awe of the people here who have been working on it. Part of the deal is probably that it was coded Back In The Day when every ounce of memory and CPU power was worth saving.

Masters of War is quite possibly the best rant ever. Now I think I'll take Hoary Cliches for the next one please. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea... Those first five lines have inspired people ranging from Paul Linebarger to Neal Peart to yours truly. In a way I take those lines out of context; I find they conflict, in a way, with the rest of the poem. But the measureless caverns, and especially the idea of a "sunless sea," create an atmosphere that I would almost describe as post-apocalyptic. (I always imagined a sea on which the sun never rises, because it has been dead for a billion years; and the sky overhead filled with the murky light of supernova remnants. A sea at the end of the universe. But that's just me being an incurable SF fan.)

Originally Posted By: Actaeon (Yet another question is what movie Miramor is referring to.) Hint: it involves vampires. And slavery. And a "secret history" where vampires are largely responsible for slavery.

This sounds like the second most insulting thing ever. I think I'll pass. (Coincidentally, the most insulting thing ever just came out in movie form.)

(Warning: this is going to sound whiny.) How does anyone compile cross-platform applications on Windows? Build systems don't play nice, compilers fail to see libraries and development headers, the PATH variable accumulates all manner of cruft to no avail... It's like this OS is designed to be as unfriendly as possible to cross-platform software development. All I want is: - A way to use build systems like CMake and GNU Automake with a minimal amount of fuss - A way to make whatever build system I use actually note the presence of development headers, without bloating up my system PATH variable Or more simply: - I want compiling C/C++ applications to be as simple as on Linux or UNIX. Just install dependencies and development headers, run the build system, and compile. Is this in any way possible?

On the other hand, if you think an antivirus is the way to go, you could try Panda Cloud Antivirus. It does its heuristic stuff on Panda's servers when you're online, which should theoretically reduce the overhead on your machine. (In practice, I found that the shiny DirectX based 3D interface slowed it down considerably. Gods only know what possessed them to make their GUI over like it was some kind of toy... But if you have a nVidia or ATI graphics card with dedicated memory it shouldn't be a problem, ha ha.) And I'd better stop commenting on this thread before my pathological obsession with computer security starts showing.