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
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Plato vs. Aristotle in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 13 2007 07:03
Profile
Picking up on this thought, we really ought to distinguish Platonism and Aristotelianism from Plato and Aristotle. Assessing Plato's blame for Platonism is a mug's game, but deciding which of the two is more important is probably not. Of course Platonism and Aristotelianism only existed as monolithic entities to a certain level of approximation. Past this point, pushing to finer levels of detail is a slippery slope towards having to mind meld with everyone who lived before 1700 CE. If the limitations of the concepts are recognized, they may be useful. About blueprints as formal causes: I think this is a common example. I don't know how accurate it is as a rendering of Aristotle, but I accept it. To me the key point in it is that a blueprint is an idealization that suppresses fine detail, and in that sense a sort of opposite to material cause. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Plato vs. Aristotle in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, April 10 2007 09:55
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Well, the efficient and final causes cover the two directions of time. Normally in physics one only recognizes efficient causes, that an event is preceded by its cause; but in human terms the purpose of an event is often the answer one wants when asking, Why did it happen? Why did the nail pierce the wood? Because I hit it with a hammer. Why did I swing the hammer? In order to drive the nail. The material cause is your basic reductionist approach: what something is made of is its explanation. We do often accept accounts of composition as explanations. This kind of cause has nothing to do with time, but it does involve telling a story. Analyzing material cause involves unpacking a term or concept, looking at it in more detail but narrower scope. The material cause of a forest is trees. My own idea of what the formal cause is does not seem to be all that clearly explained by Aristotle, so either I'm reading him wrong, or he (or one of his transmitters) garbled this one. I take formal cause to be along the same axis as material, but in the opposite direction. You step back, deliberately losing sight of such obscuring details as composition, and look to a wider context, in which the thing you are explaining plays some comprehensibly simple role. The formal cause of the trees may be the forest. And certainly this kind of thinking is sometimes what we want when we ask Why. So I find Aristotle's four causes to cover both directions along two orthogonal axes, and in that sense to be mutually exclusive. I think they are collectively exhaustive because I've never heard of any recognizable sense of cause that they didn't cover between them. And because I have a sort of crackpot pet theory that scale should be considered a dimension somewhat like time, so that it would be natural to have four kinds of cause. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Plato vs. Aristotle in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, April 10 2007 03:51
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Here's an example of what I like about Aristotle: Aristotle's four kinds of causality. This is a typical Aristotelian list. But I am somehow persuaded that this one really is, as they like to say in Mackinsey, 'mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive'. And to establish such a MECE list for something like causality is pretty profound. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Where will G5 be? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, April 9 2007 10:34
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It's possible Terrestia is wilder and less settled despite having been settled by Shapers first, and therefore holding the Shaper capital. What we've seen of Terrestia is a pretty inhospitable place, long on fens and wasteland, short on endless fields of grain. So perhaps Terrestia is just worse land for settling. Advances in shaping made after Terrestia was settled might have allowed a more fertile second continent to be developed very quickly. Or perhaps there were recent wars or disasters on Terrestia, which the other continent escaped, but from which Terrestia was still trying to recover when the Rebellion began. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| To Destroy The Foe in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, April 9 2007 00:08
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Geneforge remains vague on whether all creations are made of essence. Some evidently are: your own come out of thin air in an instant, and you can reabsorb them as quickly. You can sometimes absorb someone else's creation; but as a rule, not. Spawners also make creations out of thin air. Some creations are made slowly in enormous vats that require huge power supplies. Some creations fade away after a while; others live for decades or longer. Some creations are shades. Some creations reproduce. There is clearly a huge range of degrees of solidity and permanence in creations. My bet is that Ghaldring and his cohorts, at least, are as permanent and substantial as any human. I doubt the Unbound are vulnerable to essence unravelling, either. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| GF 1 - Shaper Crypt in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, April 8 2007 09:55
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Yes, it is, but you may have to rely on engine limitation exploits. With enough quick action and AP, you can shoot, hide, double-tap 'f', and repeat, killing anything eventually, without ever giving it a chance to attack. I mean, you might as well cheat. Also, haste yourself to at least 15 AP, and never leave combat mode when moving around, except for just long enough to quicksave. This cuts down dramatically on the rate of encountering wandering monsters, and lets you save your strength for the things that have loot. For the original poster: the Inner Crypt makes the Shaper Crypt look like a walk in the park! But beware: the two Crypts are by far the most difficult areas in the game. If you beat them before finishing everything else of significance, then on the positive side you'll still have some chances to enjoy your hard-earned power. But on the negative side, everything will seem rather anti-climactic. If you haven't yet reached either Goetsch or the Geneforge, then you have quite a few high-level zones left, and you might want to consider clearing some of them first, then coming back to the crypts. [ Sunday, April 08, 2007 09:59: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Plato vs. Aristotle in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, April 8 2007 05:13
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Plato and Aristotle do seem to share an unwarranted confidence that they are enunciating final answers. That's inevitable, I suppose, in the rush of excitement over learning so much, so fast. Learning that things are harder than they seem was and is a slow and painful process. And overconfidence in answers were far from easy, but still far easier than the answers that turn out to be needed, was no doubt a major intellectual impediment for a very long time. Even this impediment was surely outweighed, however, by the incentive value of the hope they launched: that humans could understand the world. To call Plato and Aristotle worthless is just silly. They were truly onto a lot of very important things, and they made excellent first days' marches down a road whose end is still not in sight. Many of their contributions endure, with undiminished value, to this day. Today's natural scientists, far more than post-modernist jabberers, are their heirs. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Why does Ahkhari... in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, April 5 2007 07:40
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There was some deal about how they did need a human lifecrafter to work some equipment. I took it that some of the basic mechanisms had been made by humans back in the rebellion's good times. Perhaps the fact that only a human could operate some instruments was just an awkward design limitation, or perhaps already at that stage there was some distrust between humans and drakons. In either case, the drakons hadn't been able to afford the time to strip the human-only stuff out and rebuild everything drakon style, even if they could. Then presumably whichever human was originally supposed to take part in the great decanting either got killed or defected, and it's left up to you. I also wish, though, that this had been spelled out more clearly in the game. It would have been a neat touch if you could have somewhere met a mad fugitive lifecrafter who had lost faith in the rebellion after playing a major role in the early stages of the unbound project, who might have warned you about this button issue. They could have tipped you toward the Trakovite ending, or something. And it would have been cool if good old Tuldaric could have taken this part. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ideologies of Geneforge (4) in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, April 5 2007 07:27
Profile
quote:So gazers hang out with their buddies. There still ought to be cute little soccer-ball-sized baby gazers, whose stare would give you an itch or something. Where do you get the idea of semi-independent multiple minds? More gazers seem monomaniacal to me, as though they had rather less than one mind. And I still like the idea of the spherical eggs. Really, though, we just don't know anything about this. We have one gazer's claim that gazerkind reproduces biologically. I can imagine it lying out of sheer perversity. What do we know about any creation reproduction, for that matter? A drayk in G2 claimed to have been 'born to two drayks', if I remember right; and there are young drayks in G3 on Gull Island. There is also a clawbug mother in G2, with eggs or hatchlings to defend, I think. [ Thursday, April 05, 2007 07:29: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Problems with Help the Rebels quest. in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, April 4 2007 11:45
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I liked G3, too, but in general it seems to be the least respected game of the series. If you liked G3, you should really like G4, since it raises the bar for the series in quite a few ways. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Where is the Key to Metal Works - G3 in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, April 4 2007 11:42
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Just don't use exitzone when you're underground. You'll be sent back to the start, at the school, which can be quite a pain if you were on a later island. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ideologies of Geneforge (4) in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, April 4 2007 10:49
Profile
Baby eyebeasts! Yikes! Now that we know that gazers reproduce sexually, we do have to ask how their young develop. Do gazers lay eggs? I'd bet they might, on the tenuous grounds that they were developed from vlish, and vlish love making nests. Plus a gazer egg just seems ideal. It would be perfectly round. And just imagine the happy moment when the gazer hatchling breaks its shell, by squinting out its first cute little Kill ray. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Happy Passover in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, April 4 2007 09:28
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He ain't finished yet. The lamps in jars guy was Gideon, not Joshua. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Mhff... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, April 1 2007 10:38
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'Canned by TM' would be a distinction worth preserving. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| your favorite geneforge in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, April 1 2007 07:38
Profile
I think I'd rank them as G4, G1, then G2 and G3 in a dead heat. I like them all, and consider G2 and G3 fine games. G1 stands out as being the most original because it was first, and G4 for lifting the series to a new level of sophistication. To me the differences between the four games, and even their limitations, seem to work well as the natural development of the big story. In G1 you explore a static and limited world, and this fits the story of stumbling into old secrets on an abandoned and forgotten island. G2 is a big sprawl, and five factions pursue divergent plans while the PC plays combat tourist; but this feels exactly right for the mad scramble after the great secret has been released, when everything is up for grabs. Then G3 goes entirely the other way. Open war on a series of small islands reduces the luxury of wandering to choosing sides and fighting one battle at a time. You're on a frontier where neither side has much support to offer you, but the tourist has become a soldier, one way or the other. Then in G4 you're right in the middle, after both sides have suffered and adopted desperate measures, and there is finally some sense of operating in a dynamic world, where not everyone else is just standing around giving you dialog options. To keep up the momentum, I would think that G5 should contrive to make both sides more capable, so that you're part of a real clash of titans, instead of just a rebel remnant fighting exhausted shapers. With all those titans present, a lot of thought should go into making it clear why and how the initially negligible PC becomes important. "You're the only shaper/lifecrafter available" won't cut it any more. And with stalemate settling in, political divergence again seems likely, and it might be nice to have more factional complexity. Perhaps you could meaningfully promote radical or moderate sides in either camp, as well as the Trakovites. [ Sunday, April 01, 2007 07:47: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Gazer/Eyebeast Immunities in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, April 1 2007 05:28
Profile
If Gazers in G4 are overpowered eyeballs of death, then Gazers are still the old Gazers. [ Sunday, April 01, 2007 05:29: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Has anyone tried this? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, April 1 2007 05:23
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Jeff's writing our games. Don't pester him. [ Sunday, April 01, 2007 05:24: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Google TiSP in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, April 1 2007 04:18
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Apparently the internet is a series of tubes. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Now is the time ... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, March 31 2007 20:29
Profile
Hmmm; isn't liver failure apt to be a progressive thing? If 1% of people develop it after X months on the drug, doesn't that mean that more and more people will develop it the longer they stay on it? And liver failure is pretty nasty. People may naively exaggerate the safety of approved drugs, but a safety level comparable to household tools would already be something for which to be thankful to regulators. Otherwise, ingesting bizarre chemicals is just molecular Russian roulette. [ Saturday, March 31, 2007 20:30: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, March 31 2007 20:20
Profile
Try Stanislaw Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot. Despite the character's oddball name, these are pretty much serious stories, with a little bit of lightness. Not much politics, but you've got the rest. If by 'not at war' you mean only 'not mainly about a war', then you can't do much better than the Vorkosigan saga. Most of the books are pretty military, but not exactly about war. [ Sunday, April 01, 2007 08:22: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Has anyone tried this? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, March 31 2007 10:14
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That is indeed classic pesto. Should be great. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| [GF3] Tips for higher difficulty settings? Also, batons and Daze? Also, tip @ Rahul. in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, March 30 2007 10:20
Profile
Hmm, I guess it isn't a hexagonal grid after all. Here all this time I've been sure it was, because things all seem to behave hexagonally when you're trying to crowd around an enemy or pack a bunch of creations into a small space. But I guess what it is instead is just a much finer grid than the size of your characters, which behave as hard disks. So packing is hexagonal because that's how disks pack in two dimensions. But then is everything the same size? I don't think I've ever been able to swarm a drakon with more than six smaller creations, but maybe I've just never tried hard enough. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| [GF3] Tips for higher difficulty settings? Also, batons and Daze? Also, tip @ Rahul. in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, March 30 2007 06:01
Profile
Between the different factions, the different classes, and the different difficulty levels, these games do offer a lot of replay value. Heck, even trying a different style of playing a Guardian, or a different mix of creations as a Shaper, can give you a different enough game to be fun again a few months later. After Delicious Vlish raved about his missile Guardians, last year I started trying all the games over again with them, and it was great. But I got too busy near the end of G2 and never got back to that. The fact that the Guardian is quite tough on Torment makes it fun, once you know what you're doing. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| [GF3] Tips for higher difficulty settings? Also, batons and Daze? Also, tip @ Rahul. in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, March 30 2007 00:10
Profile
Raising dexterity and missile weapons boosts the effect of all batons (and wands and crystals): you miss more rarely, and you do more dice worth of damage. I believe the great thing about submission batons is that their damage dice are bigger. So if you have a high total missile attack factor, you can really do a lot of damage with a submission baton; if your skills are low, the difference from an acid baton will only be a few points. Whether this directly affects the stunning, I don't know, but I think at some point you can get stunning with any weapon just from applying a lot of damage quickly. I'm afraid I'm not reliable about these kinds of details for any one game anymore, because the four games kind of blend together in my memory, and there have been a lot of little changes at this level. But the bottom line is that submission batons are well worth it if you have enough missile skill. Reapers are quite decent even if you don't have high missile skill, and they're lethal if you do. My memory may be failing here, but I think that the statistics you see in the game are misleading, because in addition to the direct damage from the baton and the thorn, there is the 'reaping' effect, which is very nice. Walk into the first reaper turret you find to see that it looks like. Save first. [ Friday, March 30, 2007 00:13: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| [GF3] Tips for higher difficulty settings? Also, batons and Daze? Also, tip @ Rahul. in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, March 29 2007 20:38
Profile
Moving one space costs 1/2 AP. There's no movement grid visible, but there actually is one, and it's hexagonal. And although you can have 1/2 an AP, the game always shows your AP rounded down. So if you have 9 base AP and get +50% from speed, you can actually take one step before your AP drops from 13 to 12; but if you have 8 base AP, then the slightest move drops you from 12 to 11. And so on. This is why it will sometimes seem as though you can move a step at no cost, and sometimes not. I always found submission batons worthwhile. Their stunning effect takes away enemy AP, making them take longer to get to you. If you have speed and hit with several shots in one round, your target may not be able to attack afterwards. But the acid effect is still sometimes useful, so it can be worth keeping a few acid batons till the end. Or at least until you can get the oozing blade. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |