Dantius

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan [cue lame Australian joke]

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy looks quite good, but I haven't gotten around to seeing it. Ditto for Margin Call and Moneyball. I say Tintin in theaters for nostalgia's sake. It was pretty much Secret of the Unicorn in movie form, so there wasn't much original content added. I'm not really a big fan of watching new movies in theaters when they come out, and by the time that I decide that I've heard enough positive feedback to warrant me seeing it, it's gone.

There was a medium hubbub about a year or so ago when a few of the higher-up members took issue with Avadon's portrayal of gender-roles, namely that both "physical" classes were males, and both weaker, magic-oriented classes were female (and your companions followed this divide, too). I don't think there was much business lost, since Avadon sold waaay better than any prior SW game. There's also some periodic complaints that Agents in Geneforge have to be female but those are generally low-key whining among people who already bought the games, so that wouldn't affect sales much either. So no, I think it's something that people might applaud being fixed, but nobody buys/does not buy Jeff's games based on gender roles.

Let's remedy that!

Ew, that skin is hideous. Ugh, after trying them all out, the only skin that doesn't make the logo stick out like a cancerous tumor is spidweb_theme. Good thing that's the default, then.

Also, in terms of caloric efficiency, meat is a bad food source, since it requires way, way more calories of grain/whatever to produce a given caloric value of mean, even if that meat may be tastier. Although, come to think of it, it might still be necessary in small quantities for amino acids and proteins that you wouldn't get from mushrooms. So the idea of "Let's eat meat instead" as a magic way to get out of a famine is really, really not going to help you.

Originally Posted By: Custom PDNs for all! I wonder if anyone has ever been given that title without actually being banned. You know, just the mods tormenting us with their powers over titles. Yes.

erik

Originally Posted By: Goldenking Don't give Stareye any ideas, or we may find that the Avernum -themed titles vanish, and in their place are a uniform title for all post counts - Stareye's Servant. Or one worse- "NPC" Oh god the horror. *i would just break into our houses and rob us blind while we stood like statues in the main room with words above our heads. And then he'd sell it all back to us.

A million posts for Pizzabella? I mean, when you set the bar that high, he might as well just give himself the custom title to spite you.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Synergy hasn't been a mod in a long time. Other global mods are Khoth, Niemand, and Student of Trinity. Of course, a lot of mods are no longer around, or are only around on very rare occasions. Dikiyoba. Huh. I guess I just lumped Synergy and Randomizer together because of the item lists and presumed that they were both beta testers and therefore both mods. Surprised I forgot SOT, though.

Your foolish devotion to that ancient religion have not helped you conjure up the stolen Avadon II demo, nor has it given you the clairvoyance to find the pirate's hidd- *GHRK*

Originally Posted By: Darth Ernie there are sixteen mods?? Us non-mods can't see user lists, Slarty. Let's see how well I can get this: Jeff and Stareye are admins, and Alorael, Slarty, Diki, Tyran, Lilith, Kelandon, Aran, Ephesos, Toby-Lynn, Synergy, Celtic Minstrel, and Randomizer are global mods, and IIRC Bain and one other person are like sub-global mods.

I had a custom title? And I missed it?

Originally Posted By: Nioca Also, the base titles have changed again, back to Avernum titles. Well, that's at least a step up from the Avadon ones. Though to be fair, titles from any series start to get sweet once you pass a few thousand posts, so that's a small comfort to console myself after being stripped of the "Shaper" title...

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S *snip* Well, that makes sense. I suppose Square Enix would have to practice blatantly ripping off other people's work and publishing it as a new game before they started ripping off their previous work and publishing it as a new game. After all, they're been milking FFVII for what, ten years now? Fifteen? And don't even get me started on Zelda games. They aren't even trying to hide it anymore...

Originally Posted By: Harehunter "Inheritance" - Paolini It may take me a while, but I'm going to try to squeeze it in. I actually finished that yesterday. It might be a long read, but it goes quickly. Click to reveal.. I was disappointing by the ending. So it turns out that a deus ex machina that was vaguely alluded to in the first book winds up resolving everything. Boo. I wanted Murtagh to throw Galbatorix into a bottomless pit after being ordered to kill Eragon by the king. I mean, you might as well complete the circle, since it's pretty much been apparent that it's a blatant copy of Star Wars since the evil ruler's second in command revealed the hero's unknown royal parenthood after defeating him in single combat at the close of the second act. Honestly, I don't understand the LOtR comparisons earlier in the thread at all. They don't really match, and when there's another, better-known cultural phenomena that it is so obvious "fanficton of" (to use Slarty's least favorite term ), I'm frankly shocked that nobody else brought it up earlier.

(SOT, I don't think you can ask multiple questions to the same crone. If you want to use three responses, you have to ask each crone in turn. So you're pretty much in the same boat I am: there's a 1/3 chance that, after two questions, all you'll wind up knowing is that the last crone you can ask a question to is insane,and it's tricky to derive a meaningful answer from insanity)

(This is the solution I came up with when I was first asked the problem by someone else. It gets you out 5/6ths of the time, but it might be possible to improve that, I just could't think of the right final question to ask. Maybe someone here could improve on it) Click to reveal.. There are actually, by my reckoning, three possible answers that a crone can give- true, false, or refuse to answer. For instance, if I asked "What color is the sky?" then they would remain silent, because that's not a yes/no question to them. So all I need to do is find a question that some crones would see as true/false, and some would see as unanswerable. The one I came up with was: Click to reveal.. If a response of "no" is equivalent to the numerical value 0, and a response of "yes" equivalent to 1, then what is the probability that you will raise the same hand as the Random crone to any given question I ask you? The two crones that answer in a deterministic manner will be unable to respond, because the answer for them will be 1/2, which is not an option. However, the Random crone will ALWAYS answer the same as herself, so she will be able to raise a hand. Therefore, the crone who raises her hand AT ALL in response to that question is Random If the random crone is first, then ansk a trivially true question the the second crone, if they raise their left, the order is {X,L,R}, otherwise {X,R,L}. If the random crone is second, the ask the third a trivially true question, left raised gives the order of {R,X,L} else {L,X,R}. If the first two both refuse to reply(only a 1/3 chance of that), then you could guess {G,not G && not X,X} and be right 50% of the time, or you could be cleverer than I and come up with a question that winnows out the identity of one of the prior two crones, since you know that the third is Random. Feel free to build off that.

Since I know the answer to this riddle, I will only voice my disappointment that you didn't opt to use Sheogorath instead.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Hitchhiker's trilogy? Yep, all two good ones.

I would have gone for the Click to reveal.. GlaDOS==EDI "I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees. That was a joke" one, personally.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S "Fanfic of" "Based on" "Inspired by the same mythology as" ...these are totally different terms. Don't throw them around as if they are one and the same. I was under the impression that they were, but you would simply use each term depending on the quality of the literature in question: for instance, Paradise Lost might be "inspired by the same mythology" as the Bible, whereas Left Behind would be a bible fan fiction. I mean, other than quality of the derivative material or age of the derivative material, I find it difficult to come up with any kind of object standard for sorting them into those categories, unless you're using some strange literary version of the Axiom of Choice I need five degrees in English Literature to understand...

Originally Posted By: Kreador To be sure, the blatant antisemitism was also present in Wagner's work. Just harder for some to recognize because it's in German. What Diki said. Also, how would it be harder to recognize? The villain of he first opera, Alberich, is short, dirty, greedy, and has a long nose. I'm pretty sure you don't have to speak German to know that's an anti-Semetic caricature.

Originally Posted By: Micawber Not sure anyone has ever described the Ring cycle as fanfic though... That's because the Ring cycle added elements to its source material (namely some of the greatest music ever composed) that increases its artistic merit, while LotR simply did the same thing to Wagner/Norse mythology that Inheritance did to it: pillaged characters, backstory, and plot wholesale from its predecessor, switched around some names, and then deleted some of the more controversial themes (in the case of LotR, it was the blatant anti-Semitism, and in the case of Inheritance it was the sentiment that "EVERYTHING NEW IS TERRIBLE AND BAD"). I could swear we had this discussion the last time an Inheritance book came out.