Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
Recent posts
Pages
| Author | Recent posts |
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| Artila Eye in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, June 5 2005 06:21
Profile
Even with merely modest luck, by the end of the game you can pick up half a dozen of the things. That's actually good, because combining them with silver necklaces is the only way to turn a decent profit on forging items, as opposed to just selling the components. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| I just had to post this - it's awesome in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, June 5 2005 06:16
Profile
The idea is to calm your public-speaking jitters and remove your fear of your opponents, by imagining them as ridiculous. Of course it is often unnecessary if they speak before you do. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who are you? and What's your IQ? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, June 5 2005 06:10
Profile
What did I learn in my undergraduate education? Well, since I immediately went on to graduate school and stayed in the academic world after that, the actual content of my physics courses really was important to me. Partial differential equations and the calculus of variations have been my bread and butter. But I think I learned more general things as well. I took a two-semester 'history of western thought' course that has kept me in the loop for a very wide range of discussions for twenty years. I took a bunch of English lit courses, and learned to write a lot better -- the best way to learn to write is to write a lot of papers and get them critiqued. I took enough pure math courses to absorb something of what truly rigorous thinking is like. There are good reasons why rigor only happens in math (like the fact that rigor depends on meaninglessness), but it makes you valuably more hard-nosed about all other kinds of thinking, to have seen the mathematical elephant. [Archaic reference to US civil war slang, as gleaned from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage: to 'see the elephant' was to see combat -- something unforgettable but impossible to describe.] And physics itself is a great way to learn critical thinking, because it teaches you two wonderful basic facts about the universe: that things are often a lot simpler than they seem, but that there are also an awful lot of subtle ways of being simply wrong. These are platitudes if all you do is mention them, but if they infect your instincts, like benign viruses, they make you a different kind of person. A really good undergraduate physics education can be, at least for some people, a sort of psychic geneforge. Here, though, is my concern. All these great transferrable skills, that can be picked up from a good undergraduate education, come as side-effects and by-products, of a curriculum which is not explicitly devoted to them. Could we perhaps do even better, for more people, by deliberately and explicitly training the 'side effects'? -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What da heck happened to Parry? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, June 4 2005 04:52
Profile
To summarize those earlier threads: Parry is different now. There are no Ripostes. Your chance of totally blocking an attack, with that 'tching-tching' sound effect and all, is now about what your Riposte chance was in G2. It happens quite rarely until you get to very high levels in the skill. So it isn't the skill's main effect any more. What Parry does now, mainly, is act as weightless armor. It invisibly reduces the damage you take. This is pretty good, actually. So the bottom line is that Parry is an effective skill, which Guardians especially should take advantage of. It just isn't the gamebreaker it was in G2. And it definitely is not worth sacrificing all your other attributes, when you are initially building your character, just to start the game with a ridiculously high Parry. In G2 that was the dirty trick that made Guardians extremely easy. Doing the same thing in G3 will probably leave you suffering badly on Harmony Isle. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Worst Game EVER! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 3 2005 17:10
Profile
When I was about twelve, back when 16K of RAM was a big deal and there were no hard drives, my brothers and I had to mow a cemetery lawn, and hated the job. So I made a video game, on our TRS-80 computer, in which you had to mow a lawn full of tombstone obstacles, with a lawnmower that you couldn't fully control, and with gophers that would appear and make unsightly holes if you didn't get to them and mow them down in time. For every gopher hole or damaged monument you had to pay for repairs, and your pay for each patch of grass cut was minuscule, so there was no way to finish without being hundreds of dollars in debt, after a tedious and frustrating time trying to get to that last patch of grass before a random swerve of your mower took out another tombstone. The game's one redeeming feature was mowing the gophers; but the random element in your motion made this very unlikely, and if you were too late and hit a gopher hole, it cost you big time for damaging the mower. This game was designed to be as horrible as possible, and I was also fortunate enough that the pitiful graphics and slow operation played along with this plan very well. So I think it must have been pretty far up there for video game badness. We played it and played it, and showed it proudly to all our friends, and I had to make about three sequels. [ Friday, June 03, 2005 17:12: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Warped Creator in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 3 2005 12:45
Profile
Venom batons are also nice to use on the Creator, so that it keeps on taking damage while you are dealing with its worms. Searer is even better if you've got it. I'd prefer a ranged attack on it, because its melee attack is pretty strong in retaliation. Daze might be good, too, to hold the worms still while you whittle down the Creator. That's all I can think of. This is one of the trickier battles, as it should be, so you can't afford to make many mistakes fighting it. I don't know of any miracle strategy that makes it easy, but if you keep your nerve and your wits, and manage to keep landing hits on the Creator occasionally while dealing with the worms, you'll eventually triumph. It can be done with a singleton Guardian on Torment, so it should be quite possible for your character. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What item collection quests are there in this game? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 3 2005 07:42
Profile
Nope. You may want to save red Beautiful Crystals for forging into Icy Crystals, but just sell the rest to anyone you find. You probably want to save all your gems to make wands and crystals with, but otherwise you can just sell them to anyone. Merchants in G3 all have infinite cash, reflecting the active economy of the Ashen Isles. This also means that stuff you sell is promptly resold, and gone for good. I never found the Loyalist research notes quest. Who gives it? [ Friday, June 03, 2005 07:43: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The games people play in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 3 2005 07:32
Profile
My three-year-old daughter constantly asks me to play Pangea Software's 'Ottomatic', which she knows as 'the robot game'. It's a first-person-shooter, but not a very difficult or graphically violent one, and pretty hilarious in its pitch-perfect representation of all the stock elements from golden-age sci fi. I like it a lot myself, because it is fun to look at, and has a lot of different things happen in it. The only example I know of FPS as art. Fun at a similarly painless level is the same company's Cro-Mag Rally. These are both pretty old Mac shareware games that you can download and try. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| ok, what;'s wrong here ... in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 3 2005 06:15
Profile
You're not doing anything wrong. There are pockets of extreme difficulty in the game, where you have to either come back later, or unload most of your reserve of good pods and crystals, and use expert tactics in doing so. Holes in the ground almost always lead to areas of greater difficulty. The second set of tests in the Testing Ground, the ones that improve the bracelet: these are just really hard, and they get steadily worse. The Servant Mind does tell you that you are probably too frail for them; you should listen, and put them off for much later. Getting through all of them is very worthwhile, at least for Shapers, but the rewards for only completing a few stages of the golem trials are probably not great enough to make it worthwhile pushing yourself to beat them at low levels. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| ever felt anyone envys you just because you are intelligent? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 3 2005 06:08
Profile
I have had the funny experience of finding, after some years working around a lot of undeniably brilliant people, that now I find very smart people everywhere. My suspicion is that I was forced to get into the habit of listening to people better, and expecting to be able to learn from them. And lo, this works wonders in general. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Insults in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 3 2005 06:01
Profile
There was a good one for your list. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who are you? and What's your IQ? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 17:59
Profile
I don't think that is or should be the actual goal, but I think it is the failsafe achievement that universities get by on making. It ought to be possible to do better than this, though. I somehow learned some important things in college. Everyone should have this opportunity. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What item collection quests are there in this game? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 15:33
Profile
Dried Herbs -- on second island (Harmony) Research Notes -- if you talk a bit rebel -- on third island (Dhonal's) Shaper Equipment -- on fourth island (Gull) I think that's it, actually. In other words, most of these quests come rather late in the game. If you are really keen, you can save all the relevant items and drag them from island to island until you finally get to cash them in one giant spree of money and experience. Or just kind of forget about them. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who are you? and What's your IQ? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 2 2005 13:57
Profile
Well, I guess my main point wasn't just to lower the karmic burden on professors, but to point out that professorial suction is largely a product of the university system, rather than of individual wickedness. It certainly seems as though the system could use a profound overhaul. Trouble is that to do that, the first thing one would like to have is a clear idea of what universities are supposed to be trying to do, in the way of undergraduate education. As several people have already pointed out, a system that originally served to boost a few doctors, clergy, lawyers and scientists into post-graduate studies, and otherwise turn upper crusters into liberally educated young gentlemen, is now being asked to give half the population or so technical training for white collar occupations. And it isn't obviously doing that great a job at it. On the one hand, science and humanities departments have been joined by schools of business and management, whose academic credentials are frankly very dubious even in the top-tier places. On the other hand, traditional academic departments can hardly pretend that their subject matter is directly related to anything people can do for a living (at least not without a lot more than a bachelor's degree). So they claim to provide crossover training in 'critical thinking' or 'communication skills': paraphrasing Petrarch is supposed to help you to paraphrase your pointy-haired boss, I suppose. That's not a completely implausible claim, but it's not exactly easy to verify, either. Lots of room for emperor's new clothes situations. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Two questions in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 13:40
Profile
Ahh, I'm blanking on his name, but he's that guy who lives in the cross-shaped building in the woods, in the zone with a bridge and lots of mine chains. He wants you to give him those mysterious notes from the mines. (There's a better deal for them later, though.) -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Two questions in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 12:37
Profile
1. Yes. Rob the mine-meister. 2. Click on the word 'abilities' at the top right of your stats page. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who are you? and What's your IQ? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 11:33
Profile
In defense of professors, it should be noted that university professors are not trained in teaching, and usually have no easy way of getting such training even if they want it. More importantly, professors at universities that want to position themselves as research institutions are not really being paid to teach. Their research comes first, by a long margin. Universities can generally count on getting about the same income in tuition from undergraduate students, regardless of how good the instruction quality is. Competition for research grant money, on the other hand, is very fierce. And universities get a lot of this money: they charge affiliated researchers a flat percentage of all research grants, on the grounds that this covers all the institutional infrastructure that the research is going to be using. So, financially speaking, a university needs successful researchers much more than it needs good teachers. And it grants or denies tenure accordingly. This means that professors are under a great deal of pressure to produce research papers and winning grant applications, and rather little pressure to teach well. There are some institutional exceptions to this rule, but many institutions that claim to be exceptions to it are not really so in practice. Teaching takes an ungodly amount of time, especially when you're new to it, or at least new to the particular course being taught. It can take up to six hours to prepare a single fifty minute lecture for the first time, and revising it when you're teaching the course again can still take a couple of hours. Then there is all the administrative overhead of running a course -- setting and grading exams and homework, maintain web sites, etc. Finally, professors have to spend a number of hours each week in committee meetings, because a university department is like a small corporation that is run more or less as a direct democracy of faculty. The bottom line is that junior professors running for tenure struggle constantly to accomplish their teaching obligations with the least possible investments of time. Those who let teaching take too much of their time find themselves looking for work again. And the academic job market is extremely tight. Helluva way to run an educational railroad, isn't it? -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What do YOU want to see in G4? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 10:38
Profile
There are Shapers and then there are Shapers. That is, there are foot-soldier Shapers like Erika, stuck in the Main Army Camp, junior executives like Diwaniya, and mighty lords like Rahul -- who actually has the title 'Lord'. Just how does Shaper society organize itself? What does it take to get onto the Shaper Council? Is the system a meritocracy, or is it an aristocracy of some sort? I wouldn't be at all surprised if the actual rulers of Shaper society had shaped themselves into superiority, and then concealed this violation of taboo from the masses of lesser Shapers. This kind of corruption at the top of Shaper society might go a long way to explaining why so many Shapers seem to go off the deep end, doing reckless things in pursuit of personal power. It might also open up an interesting new kind of factional conflict: honest Shapers versus corrupt elite Shapers. The elite Shapers would actually turn out to have far more in common with their Drakon enemies than they could ever afford to admit. And the 'honest' rank-and-file Shapers in turn would have some common ground with the ordinary humans and serviles who just want to throw off the unnatural Shaper yoke. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| How Old Are You? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 08:17
Profile
C.f. the classic eng school quatrain Beer before liquor: Never be sicker. Liquor before beer: In the clear. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ideal Shaper Build? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 07:50
Profile
That would be it; I only played one Rebel game. Thanks. I can't remember now whether I wore it or not. Probably. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ideal Shaper Build? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 06:09
Profile
Hey, where in G3 can you get the Forbidden Band? Maybe I saw it once in an earlier game ... or did I? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who are you? and What's your IQ? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 04:20
Profile
Well, the Schroedinger equation has been experimentally confirmed a bazillion times; in that sense it can be called 'proven' (albeit, for those who have absorbed Hume's critique of empiricism, only in the archaic sense of 'probed'). It would be right to emphasize that it is not just something we believe arbitrarily, or assume in an unfalsifiable way that forces all our observations to conform by definition. But as a strictly logical structure, I don't know any way of obtaining Schroedinger's equation nontrivially from other ideas. (Here I'm talking about the most general form of Schroedinger's equation, which just sets the generator of time evolution equal to the Hamiltonian over i hbar, without assuming anything about the Hamiltonian operator except Hermiticity and self-adjointness. Once you've got that very basic framework, which is even assumed in many formulations at quantum gravity, you can indeed set about deriving the particular Hamiltonian for a single non-relativistic particle, from a variety of deeper principles.) -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ideal Shaper Build? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 04:11
Profile
How could I forget the Gruesome Charm (shudder)? But it's completely worth it. Just try dropping it before hitting an Endurance canister. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Alwan is a disgrace in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 2 2005 04:08
Profile
Ah, I was forgetting that we now have an influx of new Windows players. But I don't think mentioning those few cryptic names is really much of a spoiler. Anyone who even knows what they might mean knows enough to already know that things like that are bound to be in the game somewhere. Here, though, is a SPOILER answering DV's question: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It takes a Mech of 20. I'm planning to bring every doggone Mech-raising item in the game in with me in my backpack, and put them all on just for the spawner job. That's +2 each from Tinker's Gloves and Infiltrator's Ring, and +1 each from Infiltrator's Charm, Shield, Vest, and Cloak, and +1 from Tinker's Bauble, for a total of +9. So you only really need a measly Mech of 11. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Help with the Agent in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 1 2005 23:05
Profile
Don't wait in order to save your enhancing stones, because there are lots more ahead. Go ahead and enhance a bronze sword -- by the time you find an iron one you'll also have found more stones. If you happen to have a really good item that you're going to want to use for a long time, though, you might wait until you get hold of a really good enhancement for it, because you can only give it one. The market value of the enhancing stones is a pretty fair measure of their value, and the best ones are worth 500 to 1000. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |