The Almighty Doer of Stuff

It's not like I'm your boss and I'm paying you or anything. Take your time...

Is it possible that Motrax was not speaking literally? Perhaps he and the other four fled into Avernum during the slaying of the dragons, which basically would have amounted to banishment, even if it was implicit rather than explicit. Also, I love the sliths and the dragons because they are scaly and fancy. I occasionally try to find a lizardman stuffie, to no avail.

Doesn't sound like depression to me. When something negative happens that we don't expect, it is normal to feel sad. Sadness is not bad. It becomes depression when it starts to color your whole life for an extended period of time, but as you said you've decided you're going to pick yourself up and persist and keep trying to move forward. That's a good thing. As for crying, it's not the worst thing you could ever do. You could be engaging in serial murder or something. Even that would not be the worst thing you could ever do, awful though it would be. Crying is normal although what is also normal is that people grieve in different ways and at different paces (and that grief can follow any loss, whether it be a spouse or just a bit of pride), so it's not necessarily something to worry about if you don't cry exactly the way and at the time you want or expect to.

I've struggled with mental illness my entire life: My diagnoses are ADHD, Asperger Syndrome, Bipolar Disorder, and anxiety, in chronological order of diagnosis. I'm a clear diagnosable case of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Chronic Overeating/Binge-Eating Disorders, and on occasion I've asked for such diagnoses, but my psychiatrist refuses, based on the fact that at heart those are all just various shades of anxiety issues and the treatment for all of them is exactly the same as what I'm doing now. And he's right. "What I'm doing now" is kind of interesting and unusual, I suppose. Since September of 2013 I've been a student at a school that teaches self-help, coping, symptom management, and life skills. It's been rather eye-opening. I have and continue to suffer from periods of severe depression, including suicidal ideation and, on one occasion shortly after my diagnosis, a half-hearted attempt, due to my bipolar disorder and generally my situation in life (living with an overbearing mother at 26 years old, limited social life due to inability to drive, limited financial resources, etc.), but with the skills I'm learning at my school I'm able to minimize their effects or just roll through them when I can't. I can cope with my anxiety, social awkwardness, manic symptoms, and short attention span effectively as well. I was distraught when Ashley, my first love, broke up with me last April, but with that broken relationship dynamic out of the way I've recovered from my symptoms by leaps and bounds. I'm now at the point where the staff are enthusiastically preparing me for a highly-competitive certification course to become a Certified Peer Specialist, which would basically allow me to do much of what they do for money. Massachusetts law mandates that organizations and agencies which work with people with disability, especially mental illness, must occasionally hire "peers", people who are not just "ivory tower" college-educated professionals but who rather have lived experience recovering from their disabilities. This is partly because it makes people in recovery feel more comfortable, like we're not being "studied" and as examples showing that yes, it IS possible to feel better and do something with your life. In days gone by, someone like me would be thrown in a cage forever and forcibly drugged or lobotomized. We as a society are trying to move past those days, which is good. So I'm getting closer and closer to moving from strictly "patient-status" into "therapist-status". It's kind of frightening, but exciting. It's also frustrating, when my friends accuse me of psychoanalyzing them. I just happen to be very self-aware and I want to help them be self-aware too, because I care. The staff are helping me navigate these feelings in a way that allows me to offer help when it's welcome but to step back a bit when it's not going to be helpful. I'm not all the way there yet and I'm still a student, not ready for the certificate course, but I'm getting closer. Part of what I attribute my success to is that my treatment team don't let me "play the victim". I have autism but I was never simply allowed to indulge the associated neuroses; I was forced to socialize, forced to do things in ways that are not neat, standardized, and totally arbitrary, and my brain actually rewired itself to get used to uncertainty and a bit of chaos. I have bipolar disorder but I was never allowed to just say, "Oh, I'm depressed, it's not my fault and I can't totally control it, therefore I'm hopeless and should be allowed to do nothing all day until it goes away;" I was forced to be med-compliant and learn ways of managing my emotions and continuing on with life regardless. I was never allowed to just accept the limitations that my illnesses set, because as it turns out very little of what seems like limitations, really are limitations; they just need to be worked around and compensated for, and as a result of the no-BS approach, although it took a LONG time and a LOT of persistence from my treatment team before the rewards became apparent, I can live a mostly functional life. I'm going to be working some day! People think I can do it and I think I can too, and that's liberating and it feels great. It can be pretty frustrating seeing my friends and family saying and doing things which I've learned are "unskillful" (that's the word people working in mental health recovery use for behavior that is unhelpful for a person's wellbeing and life goals, such as hair-trigger tempers, substance indulgence, self-pity, blaming others, etc. because there are "skills" that can be learned and practiced to mitigate these behaviors). I complain to my treatment team that such-and-such friend is telling me I have to censor myself all the time to avoid "triggering" people with PTSD/lack of societal privilege/addiction problems or such-and-such relative is refusing to use assertive communication, and in days gone by when I would complain about something someone else was doing, they'd get an exasperated look on their faces and try to indirectly coax me to change. Now they just say in hushed tones, "Yeah, you're right, you're not responsible for other peoples' triggers because like you say they're not permanent scars but obstacles to be worked through even if they think otherwise, and you're right, your mother isn't being respectful of your need for privacy and recuperation, but the thing is you're here learning and other people don't have that opportunity or are just not as far along as you are. You're operating on such a higher level of functioning than most people despite your so-called disability, and it may be worthwhile to keep that in mind and try to be subtle." That shocked the hell out of me the first time they said that: "operating on such a higher level of functioning than most people" and directly acknowledging that people have a lot fewer "excuses" than they think they have, after a lifetime of everyone telling me I was somehow "broken" or "doing something wrong" like there's a right and wrong way of doing things. I had idly daydreamed about helping people before but when I heard that hushed acknowledgment that few people in recovery are really ready to hear, I realized I have something to offer, the aforementioned "lived experience" successfully working through mental illness (a neverending process mind you, not a finish line) that people want to see when they're struggling. So I'm working hard toward that. My treatment team has a lot to be proud of, because I definitely didn't get here by myself; in fact I was the one obstructing myself most of the way. But I definitely do still have symptoms that overwhelm me sometimes. It's a constant struggle and always will be, but it's a struggle I'm gradually getting used to maintaining sure footing in.

Business in Silvar?

I'd love a shop that let you set a separate flag, besides treasure type, to determine what shop and how often it would appear. That way you could have an item that will ONLY appear in the magic item shop and not from mob drops. I think I tried to do that a couple times and was disappointed.

In "the ideal nation" the state would serve only the will of the people. The trick is making sure that happens.

Actaeon: It seems you are correct. In that case, plan B: 1, Throw Actaeon into a volcano, and report it in the Glenwood Springs Post Independent with photographs. 2. ????? 3. Profit! Alternately Excalibur's idea is good but a few comments: No guns ever for anyone under any circumstances? Someone's going to smuggle one in at some point. First of all the military should have them, and I would be inclined to give some to the police with strict regulations such as that only a small squad of highly-trained specialists should have them and take them out of the station only in extreme emergencies. Also, I'd like to emphasize mental health services as an integrated part of a government-single-payer, not just universal, health care system.

My ideal nation would take the same geographic area and control of resources as the USA. I would have absolute, unquestioned power over everyone and everything. My first action as despot would be to detonate the country's entire nuclear weapons stockpile where it sits, simultaneously. There would be no further action needed, nor any further conflict, because the entire planet will have been reduced to a cloud of radioactive dust.

Yo. Here is a recent photo of me, taken for my OKCupid account and for Facebook. I like the way I look here. The photo is blurry and fuzzy because it was taken with a dumbcamera on a dumbphone though. Also, because I feel like it, this was my late father in his 20s. I LOVE this photo, which has recently been cleaned up by my talented cousin. EDIT: hold on permissions EDIT: nope not permissions just forgot to include the photo like a dummy

If you enter "Aba boot bucker" into the Ermarian box on the right, the box on the left displays something slightly interesting. http://ados.ermarian.net/mrq/ This translator is certainly in the spirit of Mr. Q. If this user is in fact the real Mr. Q, we would do well to not only issue a broad IP ban, but also contact the CIA and let them know where his IP originates. They have been searching for him for years, to no avail, due to his extreme evil wiles. He is so brazen that he would not attempt to use a proxy, so we can expect the gruesome deaths of numerous CIA agents, but it is a price the world will be willing to pay to eradicate a terrible menace such as Mr. Q. (Be warned, Mr. Q is neither politically correct nor polite, and his views do not necessarily reflect my own. In fact, in order to get onto my website in the first place, he implanted a capsule in my chest that while I was sleeping that, should I ever take his site down, will be activated by a button on Mr. Q's bathroom counter and leak hydrochloric acid onto my organs. Curse you, Mr. Q!) If this user is NOT the real Mr. Q, he would do well to change his username, lest Mr. Q become angry with him and do something horrible to him, like flooding his email inbox with numerous inoffensive but frequent hobby-based newsletters!

I joined about 13 1/2 years ago, fascinated by the BoE community but unable to take my ideas to fruition. My semi-retirement from these forums was partly due to the lack of interest in Blades, my creative work in the end unable to find an audience. It also had to do with the general dry nature of discussion here, most threads being either frivolous or full of arguing over semantics. I still pop in occasionally to see threads like ES's, but when Ghaldring hijacked it I stopped reading that too. I do very much appreciate the hard work of the Baldes community, though, including Jeff Vogel himself who initially sparked my desire to tell stories. I read all the articles, played some of the popular scenarios, and did my best to plan my scenarios, even though bringing them to fruition proved too frustrated within the medium. Jeff and the community gave me the experience and knowledge to eventually realize my real calling was not the creation of games, but simply the telling of a story. I'm working hard on my novels and, although I still have a lot of reading books to do to polish up my style, I'm finding it's exhilarating and satisfying. It is kind of strange that a serious author would take most of his inspiration from video games and neglect the reading of actual books, but, although I have started reading books again, video games are what formed me. I'm rambling again, but returning to the subject of community activity, I really do think the loss of interest in Blades was a huge factor in the decline of message board activity, among the other things mentioned in this thread. A community developed with the intent of creation, and when those with the creative vision moved on to other things, so did the community.

Hey, what happened to that Geneforge arcade game someone made?

Artemis runs fine in Wine. That's how I played it the couple times I did. Then again, there may be a new version I don't know about that doesn't. Worth trying anyway.

Either way for both of your points, it's still a holy symbol in Hinduism and pretty cool to boot. In fact in Asia it's still the primary symbol of Hinduism in general. Hitler just kind of stole it, which is why the Om symbol is used instead in the West.

Cool! (I see a swastika on the blade of Demonslayer.)

Those names are like naming a dog "Spot" or "Fido".

I put Jeff Vogel in there a long time ago.

you want to make a music video featuring art from a video game and through the fire and the flames by dragonforce are you the one who made that green day one a while back next you'll be saying you want to make one featuring my immortal go for peppino the italian mouse by lou monte because you don't see enough of those you can have pictures of giant rats from either of those series in it or something

I use the same password for all my message boards, my diet website, and nationstates (silly things that don't matter) with minor variations for stupid character restrictions. Everything else has unique passwords. Minecraft has a string of words, and Facebook has a much longer string of words because for a while someone kept compromising my account over and over again despite repeated password changes. I even scanned for malware and found none. I think it was one of my political apps. I trust the organizations involved but there might have been security holes in the apps. Alternately it could have been the NSA disagreeing with my political leanings. All I know is when I deleted the apps the fraudulent access stopped. Nobody else seems to have complained about it though. Maybe I'm just special.

So there won't be any more messages in Sopris chat from a user called "Sylae_is_too_lazy_to_log_in" after Sunday?

I believe that has been answered already.

Why might we? EDIT: While I'm posting, I should say that the redesign and reconstruction of the Welcome Center is underway. If you join our server during this time, please have patience. If you need newbie gear, just ask whoever's online. They'll probably give you some stone tools, food, and an iron pick. When the Welcome Center is complete, there will be free newbie equipment there. Thanks!

Sorry to bust your joke, SoT, but because you're confusing my favorite Iffy on the entire message board, I'll let him know: "Bob" is the generic, joking name for a central giver of quests in a story or video game. There are many Bobs in the BoE scenarios, of course.

You'd have to open up the Avernum 1 executable with a resource editor. Tyranicus would know how to do it, I'd imagine, since he extracted the Spidweb games' music snippets and put them on his website. Older Spidweb game sounds were built right into the executable rather than included as separate sound files. The Avernum 1 data folder contains only graphics files (not even all of them) and some encrypted data files.