Profile for Talent in a Previous Life
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Talent in a Previous Life |
| Member number | 3098 |
| Title | This Side Towards Enemy |
| Postcount | 961 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
Recent posts
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| The Empire Always Loses: Redux in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, December 6 2006 10:56
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That is the game's raison d'etre, yes. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: Never Proved to Be a Contributory Factor to Stomach Cancer Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| New Bond Movie in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, December 6 2006 10:55
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I'm a big fan of the new one and I'd also say he's much closer to the original version. Because he's played as a psychopath. I never liked Moore because it was like a spoof, whereas with this one they've essentially decided to try Dalton with decent scripts. It's much less overblown, much less cheesy and for my money much better than the recent stuff. Much less suitable for Saturday afternoon telly than some of the others, of course, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: Never Proved to Be a Contributory Factor to Stomach Cancer Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| All good things must come to an end... in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, December 6 2006 10:48
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So I return after an eighteen month hiatus to see Nethergate 2.0 is being developed? Great. And Alorael's leaving? Suddenly Christmas has come early. You just have to spoil it, don't you? Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: Never Proved to Be a Contributory Factor to Stomach Cancer Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Nethergate 2.0 development "announced"! in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, December 6 2006 10:37
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This is good. I'm slightly apprehensive, because this is the only Spidweb game I finished to find out the ending rather than out of a sense of obligation, but very pleased. I just hope that it's not a faithful conversion - the more new and changed stuff, the better - provided the Romans don't become decent spellcasters, I'm happy for any surprises. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: Never Proved to Be a Contributory Factor to Stomach Cancer Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 17 2005 08:28
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RiB could too be Homeland II. Homeland is only explicable as the product of an indescribable hatred of PC users. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: Never Proved to Be a Contributory Factor to Stomach Cancer Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Human nature in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 17 2005 08:19
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quote:Telling somebody to think something using a convincing basis is not a crime. Adverts only become a problem if they're actively spreading disinformation and nobody counters them effectively. Since in general campaign advertisements from each side are roughly equally retarded, I don't think that'd be an insufferable problem. For the record, when I voted I had two things to vote on. I had to vote for a candidate for the county council and another for the Houses of Commons. The British system means we don't have to elect a president or similar. These state propositions and whatever would never find their way on to a British ballot paper. If we're electing our representatives they ought to be able to make the decisions themselves. We do occasionally have referenda but those are on really big national issues, the next one of which will probably be the one on whether or not to adopt the Euro as our currency. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| "Blades of Geneforge" in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 17 2005 08:10
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quote:Would it be an acceptable substitute to put 90% of the internet's hentai in one thread? Secretly, Alorael loves having to lock RWG topics. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| New sci-fi genre in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Thursday, July 14 2005 13:08
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I've read Macleod and Reynolds. I've read all the books from the former, and I think Newton's Wake is easily the weakest, and from Reynolds I've read Absolution Gap. However, I'm not sure either of those are sufficiently different from vanilla space opera to be considered a new genre. Only the 'raising vast questions about the nature of reality, etc.' and 'tinkering with the laws of nature at some level' seem to be less than standard elements of space opera, and I'd argue that the only reason 'extremely crazy things' don't tend to happen in normal space opera is because normal space opera tends to be boring repetitive tripe. My tastes in sci-fi do not run towards the epic in scope. It's all a little bit too much the sci-fi equivalent of sword and sorcery tales and I'm not really interested in intricate physics. It's not that I couldn't enjoy a book in this genre (I liked Absolution Gap, for example,) it's just that it would have to be sustained by the writing rather than the themes. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Showering in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Thursday, July 14 2005 13:00
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I'm fairly sure that during my youth I must have once managed to go a month without bathing. I was a horribly scruffy child. I still am, but I get nasty sweat rashes if I don't shower regularly so I'm pretty unlikely to miss more than a day except where washing facilities simply aren't available. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| How many hours of sleep do you get per 24 hours, on average? in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, July 13 2005 04:06
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I suspect they would have. I wouldn't think that would bias the results too much (although I'm not the biologist round here) as I can't imagine that even a near lethal dose of caffeine would help you so much after a week without sleep. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| If You Had A Billion Dollars... in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, July 13 2005 04:03
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I would have to find another billionaire and have a race to see who could squander their fortune first. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Harry Potter in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, July 13 2005 04:00
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quote:You've got a gift for sophistry, I'll admit, but the reason there have been a number of longish (if generally rather more tightly-focused and coherent) replies to you is because you've made massive posts full of some of the most specious arguments I've seen in months. If you haven't got a leg to stand on but continue to deny this, you should expect your error to be pointed out in painstaking detail. quote:[/b] I agree that fundamentalist sounds slightly too pejorative and inaccurate in this case. The more appropriate term here would be loon, would it not? Rudeness aside, if you come to a message board and post an opinion, it's not an amazing occurrence for this opinion to be questioned, especially if people disagree with it. Sure, you're not doing missionary work here but if you really thought that you wouldn't spark a debate of some kind, you're hopelessly naive. quote:[/b] I'm going to have to echo Drakefyre here. I don't know what you are trying to say. This isn't because my ideas are too deeply ingrained - I'm quite capable of seeing where somebody's coming from and still disagreeing strongly. My problem is that I either skimmed over it whilst searching your posts for a point or, more likely, it's a mythical and wholly insubstantial creature anyway. Are you saying it will lead children to the occult? If so, you've given us no evidence the occult actually exists. Are you saying it will draw children away from Christianity? If Christianity is that unappealing, it has a problem, but that doesn't make Harry Potter satanic and dangerous. Are you saying that the problem is that the book is part of the multicultural world agenda to corrupt children and do evil and commit whatever atrocities it is that vast occult conspiracies do these days? If so, I don't see much point in arguing with you. I was going to comment on the article you posted, but I'm bored and hungry and Alec does a much better straw man and analysis job than I do. I also can't be bothered to read the links, since I'm no longer Christian so as you point out I'll be unlikely to be convinced by their arguments. Anything else I've left out was omitted because it was hard to disagree with or I was bored of typing. Yes, this post is too long and you don't want to continue the argument, but if you expected to get the last word, you vastly overestimated our willingness to stop flogging a dead horse. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Election Primary Results/Vote Reassignment in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, July 13 2005 03:14
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quote:Trotsky-fascist! -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| "Blades of Geneforge" in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, July 13 2005 03:09
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Therein lies the problem. With BoG it would be much harder to just cast away all the baggage of the world, as tends to have happened with the best BoE scenarios, because whereas with BoE you have a fairly derivative fantasy setup to start from, Geneforge's explicit differentiation between Agent, Guardian and Shaper (which is a vastly greater difference than between human, slith and nephil) and use of shaping creatures as a central part of the engine means that its much harder to make something that's not constrained by Jeff's plotlines. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Human nature in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, July 13 2005 03:05
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Sin, on the other hand, is something rather less than a theory. It's an abstract idea and even for those people who do believe in it, there are an infinite number of ideas as to whhat it is or is not. Myself, I would deny the very concept. Greed, excessive pride and their ilk are still wrong in my worldview, but they're wrong because humanity says so. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| RPGs in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Wednesday, July 13 2005 02:49
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The Fallout games would have to be my favourite RPG series. Probably Icewind Dale would come next, but whilst I liked the setting and the engine, its over-reliance on combat instead of atmosphere hurt it in comparison to the Baldur's Gate games. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 4: The Stone of Night in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 10 2005 08:42
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Avernum 3 wouldn't have been too bad except for the abysmally easy combat system. When I got far enough to realise how little difficulty it was going to cause me, I couldn't be bothered to go back and play on Torment. Then I carried on through the Alien Beasts before getting bored just before Rentar's lair and giving up. So some of my distaste for it stems from my own mistake with the difficulty setting, but I don't think it holds a candle to Avernum 1. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| London Bombings in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 10 2005 08:06
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There's also the fact that Saddam had himself made substantial alterations to the Babylon site and Iraqi troops were billeted close by. Blame cannot be apportioned solely on any one group. Nothing lasts forever, anyway. When you consider everything else occurring in Iraq, moderate damage to an ancient city that's been relatively well excavated barely merits a footnote. It is after all probably the least destructive sack Babylon has ever seen. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Harry Potter in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 10 2005 07:59
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Never heard that one. But you have a point. Occasionally, as in the case of Cinderella, the stories were even just examples of astonishingly crass innuendo. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Harry Potter in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Friday, July 8 2005 02:10
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Fairy tales were originally much more likely to be about the things deep in the woods that were to be avoided - much more Grendel than Goldilocks. They were only made more 'wholesome' because of their bowlderisation from the 19th century onwards and in some cultures, such as in Russia, this never happened so you're left with much darker tales. Which, provided a child is able to distinguish right from wrong and fact from fiction, is no bad thing. We do not need to be tightly wrapped in cotton wool. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| Were we prepared? in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Friday, July 8 2005 01:57
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I'd have to agree that there's only so much you can do. It's nearly impossible to stop the bomber getting through forever. All you can do is try to minimise the number of times it happens. Certainly, it's worth noting that (whilst we don't as yet really have any clue how many died on the bus) the death toll is certainly not going to reach three figures. That demonstrates how effective the reaction immediately after the explosions was. That at least has to be a sign of hope. There are plenty of non-Muslim terrorist groups, although I don't think you can really say that any of them have the reach of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates/subordinates. For example, the Madrid bombings were mostly blamed on Basque separatists as a piece of blatant electioneering, which backfired and led to the government losing the wave of sympathy and the then imminent general election. Part of the problem is that Islamic theology is easier to twist to justify terrorism than most other religions, part of the problem is that Islam has a large amount of followers and Al-Qaeda is rather more internationalist than most other groups. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| London Bombings in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Friday, July 8 2005 01:38
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I'm absolutely fine. I live about 65 miles away from London and my absence was purely due to a brief holiday I was taking. I was at Stansted at about 10AM and saw that the trains to London weren't running, but that's as close as I got. I'm sure whichever extremist group, whatever its connection to Al-Qaeda (because it's an extremely decentralised group, they simply couldn't run a tightly organised group of such a size now) will claim Iraq as a reason. I really do doubt that it was a significant factor, however. Bush's comment that it is happening because "they hate our freedoms" is actually broadly accurate. They hate Christians, in all their forms, they hate Hindus, and Sikhs and probably almost every Muslim who doesn't follow the same interpretation of the Qu'ran as they do. They hate our cultural mores, our wealth, our power. Essentially, they just hate. Behind the religion and indoctrination, those who actually carried out the attacks, as with terrorist footsoldiers across the centuries, are more than anything likely to be fueled by pure atavistic fury at anything which they can identify as 'other.' Kingy, I don't think I can agree with you about the fighting in WW1 and WW2 was more noble. Not only were most of the casualties caused by long-range artillery fire, but the very concept of the noble death is a myth. Death simply cannot be glorious, it is by its very nature wretched. One can make an argument that it is necessary, but this is appalling because somebody deliberately planned a co-ordinated attack to kill large numbers of civilians, not because they did so and made no attempt to give away their positions. [ Friday, July 08, 2005 01:43: Message edited by: Unpleasantness for its Own Sake ] -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| What do you believe.... in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 3 2005 10:32
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I'm no happier that an engaging personality is the most necessary trait than you are, but you can't place all the blame on the media. 'Twas ever thus. How many demagogues were not 'people-people' (that's got to be the daftest sounding plural ever) or went round telling their audiences unpopular truths? None who got anywhere. This is going to happen in a democracy, because it's infinitely easier to showcase somebody's personality in an election campaign than to showcase their skill as a legislator. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| I will be gone some time in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 3 2005 10:28
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It's a variation on a Scorpius suggestion, which ought to give it some added cachet, but it could be worth sticking a link at the top of the forum with suggested posting guidelines (I'm sure somebody can draft something in half an hour) and possibly a few extra links for people who want to introduce themselves to the community, or express their beliefs on which game is best, or post pictures of their cat, or try to link us to goatse or any one of a million other things. I don't mean a sticky, because UBB can't do that. I mean something like we used to have on Misc. If nothing else, Mr T would approve. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
| TM Banned? in General | |
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This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
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written Sunday, July 3 2005 10:23
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quote:You ever thought of stand-up comedy? I don't know of any fundamentalists Christians flourishing in that, so there could be a gap in the market there. -------------------- Voice of Reasonable Morality Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |