The Almighty Doer of Stuff

You can add most university degrees without much effort or accountability. You can start your own college consisting only of yourself and grant yourself all the degrees you want, and the only problem is if people look into it they'll see the letters are not attached to any actual education, but they're not legally restricted. So you can be "Alorael, Ph.D., Psy.D., M.D., D.M.D, J.D., D.Th. O.D., B.A.M.F." if you like. Just don't accidentally add any letters that actually require a specific licensure.

Well, after trying to play BoE for the first time since upgrading to Linux Mint 17.1, all three BoE applications seem to run fine in Wine. I don't know what happened or why it won't run on my mother's Vista laptop though. Maybe it had to do with the 32bit vs. 64bit stuff. I was running 32bit because I had a 32bit OS on my desktop, but the desktop and (I think) the laptop both have 64bit hardware. Only two very minor issues I noticed: 1. The BoE splash screen doesn't work right. It will display the Spiderweb Software splash for most of the duration of the music, flash the splash screen of the leather-clad man for a split second, then go to the menu. This doesn't particularly bother me because the music is rather clipped and terribly grating and I just turned it off. (Interestingly I found the same music along with other similar bits on the B. Kliban cats official website.) 2. When selecting the Preferences option to not run the program full-screen, it shrinks the window to fit the play area just fine, but the Main Menu is clipped off the right side by several pixels.

You can play and win pretty much any Spidweb game with a poorly-designed party, really. Jeff doesn't like making people get two-thirds of the way through the game and have to start over. It's bad for business. It becomes less feasible on higher difficulty levels of course, but really even on Torment min-maxing is for fun and challenge, not necessity, despite the impression one might sometimes get reading this message board. As for me, I'm playing A1 with one dual-wielding fighter and one spellcaster. I'm having little trouble so far. I forget what difficulty I'm playing on though. I know I got a good way in on Normal difficulty, although it's possible I switched to Easy after the long forgot-what-I-was-doing break.

I've read people insisting that it's actually impossible for non-white people to be racist, and they get a lot of attention in doing so. It frightens me because I want to be an ally but there are too many vocal people who will shout me down if I say anything.

1.) Live for as long as I comfortably can, hopefully doing assorted things during that time. 2.) Die.

Do you meet the minimum system requirements? Is Wine up to date? Here's the site: http://winehq.com/ Current version is 1.6.2. You can see your version by opening the Wine configuration app and clicking the About tab. Whether it's Linux Mint or Ubuntu probably makes little difference, as most of the underlying architecture in Linux Mint is pulled from Ubuntu. Are you getting any error messages, any at all? At what specific point does it hang? When you say "hang" do you mean the installer freezes? Does Wine freeze? Does the whole computer freeze? Does it quit spontaneously?

No, it wasn't you, it was the subject in general combined with aforementioned mental and physical illness giving me hell these past several days.

Tevildo: Urk. I'm afraid that just because I'm white, it doesn't mean I have time or energy to fight actively for every disadvantaged segment of global society. I'm sorry, but just because one people are miserable doesn't mean I'm not justified in being miserable too. The fact that I grew up listening to The Four Tops (I just bought one of their CDs for the first time) doesn't mean I'm obligated to throw my entire freaking existence into getting the black folk out of poverty. Maybe struggling hard every day to overcome crippling, invisible mental and physical illness, not to mention being as queer as queer gets (the only category I fit in doesn't exist anymore on Google as of a couple weeks ago), isn't enough to make my empathy good enough, I don't know. But I don't tell anyone they have to go and wear a shirt that says "I <3 Schizos" while doing outrageous stunts to benefit NAMI in order to be my goddamned friend. That's a horrible, insulting, and degrading, not to mention presumptuous, thing to ask of anybody. They just have to say, "I don't understand, I know I can't understand, but I care about you and want you to be happy." That's reasonable. I sign petitions and occasionally make calls to senators and that's all I'm going to do and all I can do because my life is hard too and the fact that I have monetary comfort doesn't change that. Get the NAACP after me with a lawsuit if you want. I'll curl up in a ball and scream and cry and attack the bloody bailiff until they drag me out, and I won't be doing it "just for attention." Sorry for going off the wall but when people start talking about "categorism" it gets to me before too long.

The Fluffy Turtles are still watching, waiting. There is no "safe place". When you leave your sanity at the door, it will not be there when you get back! BEWARE!

Well, I'm afraid I don't like them apples very much at all. Coincidentally, though, one of my great-great-grandparents was also Native American. I never met her though because of course very few people ever meet their great-great-grandparents. Otherwise she'd probably slap me silly.

I think if you look carefully there was discussion of cultural appropriation. The thing is "whiteness theory" is central to most forms of cultural appropriation. As for the Washington Redskins, here's a bit of appropriation: the word "redskin" is similar to the word "gay". It was chosen by the people it represents, and then was appropriated by people outside those groups to use as slurs. Also, the "racist" logo was created in close collaboration with Native Americans and appears to be a realistic face with realistic attire. Both name and logo were intended to honor Native Americans. Wikipedia says that at the time the name and logo were chosen, the coach and four players were Native Americans. The controversy is baloney.

Avernum: Escape from the Pit runs flawlessly in Wine on Linux Mint for me. Do you have the latest version of Wine? Did you set the file to be executable and just run it in the Wine Program Loader? That's all I had to do.

You can sell items via junkbag that you can't individually, actually, so be careful with that.

Tor's second wife refers to herself as "Carol, of the Hamer clan" which presumably means that was her last name. As for archmagi, Aimee, Solberg, and Patrick all have last names as well. Eric Threescars seems to have acquired a last name in the original manner, which is that as towns grew in size, people had to differentiate between Jimbo Baker, who made bread, and Jimbo Smith, who made metal goods. Eric, however, was most visibly differentiated by his three prominent scars, which he takes as a mark of pride. Avernum seems like it may be in the middle of that period when last names were growing in level of use. Gunston and Hamer are probably the names of towns on the surface, and Hawthorne is a thorny tree with supposed cardiac health benefits when consumed. Maybe that's a testament to the original Emperor Hawthorne being skilled at organizing defense and having physical fortitude, all three names passed down through family lines. On the other hand, Redmark and Fartraveler are most likely given to the bearers based on some characteristic of themselves. Padraig, of course, is literally Irish for Patrick, so maybe he's renowned for being himself and sticking to his values or something?

Exorbitant, conflagration, troglodyte, rakshasa, simulacrum... gifts...

Jeff, the developer, does not really read these forums unless he's looking for bug reports for new games. By all means email him though, he loves fan mail that doesn't tell him to do or change things.

I don't know about other games, but in A:EftP, you CAN sell ale, blankets, towels, wine, papyrus, etc., and pretty much anything not total rubbish, for money. You have to put it in your junk bag and sell that, but you will get a few coins if you sell enough of them at once. Just not enough that you could sell them one at a time.

[spoileralt=Spoilers about A3:RW, don't look if you don't want to know!]In Exile and Avernum 3, and presumably the upcoming remake, there is a small house called the House On A Hill which you find, abandoned. You can take it over and store your stuff there. There is also a large house called Hawke's Manse which you can purchase in one of the citiies. Conceivably Jeff could add a bit more functionality to it if enough people beg. He added a lot to it between E3 and A3, anyway.[/spoileralt]

http://www.almightywebsite.com/img/ByoonifulWock.jpg This is the Byooniful Wock, the only thing I asked for for Christmas when I was four years old. It's a chunk of granite chipped off someone's tombstone. My mother happened to pass a tombstone shop in New Hampshire one day, and there was a big pile of chunks of granite scraps there with a sign that said "Free", so she grabbed a bunch, wrote "Vincent 1991" on the smooth side in gold ink (you can sorta see it in this photo) of this ~5" piece, and put it in my stocking. I saw the speckled pattern and assumed it was bird seeds, and tossed it aside. So it's my first pet rock, now in the dozens. I sometimes take it to bed. It's nice taking rocks to bed, they absorb my body heat so when I get up in the middle of the night and then go back to bed, it's still warm.

I have many pet rocks. Most are sitting in a pile on my window sill, and most have names and personalities listed in my infamous Toys, Rocks, Etc. spreadsheet. If I feel like it tomorrow I'll take photos but for now I'm pooped. I've been walking all day at the Boston Flower and Garden Show, and I didn't get a souvenir, but when I got back to the train station there was some confusion in figuring out where my ride was parked, which is good because in the process I found a really nice rock on the tracks! So that rock is my souvenir. My mother thinks it was quarried in New Hampshire. Looks like black-green granite with some pinkish stuff on it. I have another similar to it but it has four colors and this has two in a more amusing shape. They're probably siblings since I found that on the tracks at another station.

...How about milk-flavored bacon?

I forget where specifically I learned this, probably Oddities on the Science Channel, but I believe this is a misconception. In sideshow/carnival/circus speak, a freak is someone who has a naturally shocking attribute such as someone with a deformity or who cannot feel pain, and a geek is someone who learned[//i] to do something shocking such as biting off chicken heads, eating light bulbs, doing something painful without flinching, bizarre body modification, etc. "Nerd", I think, is not actually a sideshow term at all.

My last ratings, BainIhrno, were the BoE scenarios "The Foolish Giant" and "Pilgrimage to Thrakos". I'm trying to rate this scenario but it is buggy and I have encountered a fatal bug. Excalibur, I'll PM my notes to you. I will rate this after you clean it up. I'm enjoying it so far. Is there any way for me to move the party in the outdoors? I looked in the Character Editor but saw no way to move my party out of the tree they're stuck in.

There are a few others, although not many and no one else uses them quite so frequently. Honestly I've always been suspicious of Justifier but I think someone told me once they were original graphics. My graphics are hand-drawn although I'm afraid they're not as nice as those by, say, Tim Farland or Luz Piazuelo. Also worth noting is Jeff Vogel released the Blades of Exile graphics under GNU GPL 2.0. He did not do the same for Avernum and Geneforge graphics, or even E1-3 graphics that are not included in BoE, if we want to be sticklers. E1-3 are freeware but not FOSS.

Terror's Martyr and the Fizz brothers, and a couple other people, made heavy use of copyrighted and trademarked images too. EDIT: Also, while we're talking about graphics, the Indoor Floors images do not display. I'd guess it's a matter of broken file paths.