Dantius

Darkness and woe, correct.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer In Chicago they just opened a window for air conditioning. Why would you do that? It's like 90 and humid here in the summer. Although I guess that would count as "conditioning" the air in the building, I suppose.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba You can use Google to help understand things better, or just move on to discussions that you do understand and participate there.. Yeah, both Google and Wikipedia are your friends. simple.wikipedia might also help, too, for some of the more technical topics where the regular Wikipedia articles get technical fast. As a rule of thumb, if you don't feel you have a solid grasp of the topic after a few minutes of looking, don't participate in the discussion- it helps keep you out of the hair of other members who might not appreciate having their discussion interrupted by someone who doesn't know what's going on. For the record, I don't intend these comments as insults, but as a few helpful tips to help you get acclimated towards the forums and their general atmosphere. You'll do fine, it just sometimes takes a while to get used to the particular culture of a specific messageboard, especially a small and insular one like Spiderweb.

Wait, so saying "Leviathan" now no longer carries the connotation of reading Hobbes? Well then, to clarify, I was referring to Hobbes' Leviathan, which I thought the comment on enlightened absolutism would have suggested. In my defense, some of the books written in that time period had ridiculously long titles and subtitles, and writing them out would be a pain. Nobody wants to say "Hey, I just finished reading The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe" when they could say "I just finished reading Marlowe's Faustus". Then again, serious history books and academic papers today do still get titled like "[statement that's not really witty]:[What the paper's actually about]", which is still stupid, so I guess we haven't improved much since the 1600's.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus We have AC in our schools here in Pennsylvania... I'm not surprised at all, especially seeing as direct current is only used in batteries and smaller circuits nowadays- ComEd and the big power companies delivering to schools and homes and businesses all do AC.

I just bought and started rereading Leviathan. I expect that this will make me [thoroughly pessimistic/start arguing for enlightened absolutism] for a while. Wait, no, I already do that.

Ha! I was right! I feel so vindicated right now!

I think that either 128 or 256 gives an "invert colors" function that turns white to black and black to white, IIRC. There were at least several uberitems in Geneforge (Puresteel Soulblade for example) that were just a regular graphic with colors inverted.

In before Ephesos makes his "Weather != Climate" post.

Why are we even having this argument again? PRATT- just because teachers get summer off doesn't mean everybody else does.

Originally Posted By: Lier Beneath the Silent Skies But. . . but. . . we don't like him! FYT.

Originally Posted By: Lilith i like how pretty much every dialogue option that begins with "I am a Hand of Avadon" involves you being a huge jerk to someone The game needs more Renegade Interrupts, that's for sure. Actually, just about every game I can think of would benefit from Renegade interrupt- *gets punched*

You stop earning XP from cheats when you hit level 45, which is still not even 3/4ths of the way to the level cap, and you still can't do plenty of things at that level, like take down Unbound, for instance.

Any reason not to simply merge 4, 5, and 6 in one fell swoop? Seems to me it'd be easier to do all at once.

Or English, apparently.

Chicago. It's usually above 80 in the summer, and it gets above 90 in August. Plus, it's usually quite humid due to the gigantic lake that's right next to us. Of course, being Chicago, there are some legendary winters- I got 18 inches of snow in one sitting this year, and it drifted to 26 inches on my driveway. Shoveling it was... unpleasant, especially considering the fact that my driveway measures about 20x80 feet.

I prefer winter. Summer where I live is just terrible, far too hot and humid for my liking, and since I love to garden, that means that I spend 6-12 hours every weekend working in 90 degree weather, which is not too pleasant. So I don't really find summer a very pleasant time of year for me, there's just too much work to do. And while I'm at it, spring is far too wet, as well- we just got pounded by rainstorms today, and my basement started to take on water, which is a disturbingly common occurrence in my house. Plus, I've never really seen the supposed "beauty" of autumn- dead brown leaves don't hold much aesthetic appeal for me. So that leaves winter, usually the time of year I get to slack off in my work a bit and relax, and you're not really expected to do anything outside except shovel snow. Besides, I quite like the look of everything covered in clean snow- it's a very refreshing feeling.

Yeah, that's ironic coming from a physics professor. Talking about advanced mathand science here seems to get a positive response from enough members here to merit continued discussion, and discussions on higher-level theology tend not to degenerate into "OMG ATHEISTS R HITLER" esque flamewars in my experience.

What, no Invalides? That's my favorite Parisian landmark. Well, that or Sacre Coeur. Although given my profession, it really should be the Eiffel Tower, but I tend to save my admiration for Eiffel instead of his tower. Have I mentioned how Eiffel was a genius? He really was. The entire tower is literally perfect, from an engineering standpoint. Nearly perfectly efficient use of materials (were the metal melted down over the footprint, it would only be about 3 inches thick!), combined with incredible load-bearing capacities and a very pleasing aesthetic appeal, too. Fantastic.

Maybe this thread could be moved to the Gendforge forum? It's not really General material...

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: FnordCola if the sole basis for getting a public maker of predictions committed was to show that they had been wrong in harmful ways, the fields of economics, political punditry, and popular psychology would be entirely empty not really seeing the down side here First they came for the Austrian economists, and people were like "Okay, cool."?

The Slactivist commentaries on LB are several times longer than the book itself. They are also filled with win- I read them a couple years after I read the book itself, and the criticisms were spot-on.

Originally Posted By: Niemand Let's not forget that Russia is supposed to be supported by its powerful ally, Ethiopia. When I read that bit in the book, I got this odd feeling like the authors initially wanted to put something in about voodoo magic or pagan rites or some other racist nonsense as a justification, but the editor just put his food down there. I really can't understand why else they would include Ethiopia in it at all, since the other pairing I've heard of outside of Left Behind is Russia and Germany, which makes much more sense. Well, more sense than Russia and Ethiopia, that is.

Ah, apparently the Rapture's time has been moved to midnight in Jerusalem. The one fixed date and time does make more sense, but the switching doesn't exactly lend credibility to them. Besides, don't the PMD's think that there's going to be some big nuclear exchange between Israel and Russia a few years before the Rapture happens? You'd think that's not the kind of thing that we would miss...

I'm kind of unclear as to the difference between God "rapturing" people and god simply killing them and their souls going straight to heaven/Purgatory. If it's the latter case, why not simply kill everyone in one fell swoop, sort 'em into heaven and hell, and skip out on the whole tribulations bit entirely?