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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| Shield? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 6 2007 05:44
Profile
Don't worry, all the other characters and monsters in the game can see the shield fine. It's only the players who can't see it. Unless they are truly wise. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Lost Souls in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, February 5 2007 11:04
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Lost Souls is not a bad game. Over the years I have played all the demo levels twice. I have never liked it enough to pay for the rest, however. It's not really complex enough to warrant sixty levels, or whatever it is. It gains a certain camp factor from the fact that the "lost souls fighting in Hades" theme never gets around to explaining why everyone has turned into a chesspiece. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Object description in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 4 2007 22:16
Profile
Hey, who ever reads those 'licence agreement' panes, anyway? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Object description in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 4 2007 11:13
Profile
True, Macs have no virus problem. But those "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads don't mention the little Mac problem with peripherals and evil spirits. Two-button mice are the worst. With my iBook I play it safe, and stick to the trackpad. But my office desktop has a wireless Mighty Mouse. Four buttons and a micro-trackball. I am so playing with fire. On the other hand, having your screensaver drip blood is still better than NAV. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Episode 3 Continued in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 4 2007 11:01
Profile
"Anschluss" is a very common word in German, referring to practically any kind of "adding on" or connection. A USB port, for instance, is a USB-Anschluss. It's only in English that the term refers obviously to the annexation of Austria by Hitler's Reich. As to Mr Tullegolar's so-clever references to the "Concluding Resolution": grow up. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Object description in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 3 2007 12:22
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Those cheap exorcisms never last. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| George Bush in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 2 2007 01:00
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quote:I think this is simplistic. It's not as though every X dollars spent supporting US troops in Iraq means one more person conscripted from their job testing game consoles, and sent to a chain gang in the depleted uranium mines. If armored divisions could be turned into school districts as easily as swords are beaten into ploughshares, then a peaceful Iraq might have been given some good schools for the same money. But a peaceful Iraq could build its own schools, while right now it needs peace before primers. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| George Bush in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 1 2007 12:49
Profile
Criticizing the Iraq war on the grounds of its cost in dollars is actually kind of obscene, if you think about it. If Iraq were now peacefully democratic and nobody had been killed since the Republican Guard laid down arms, billions would have been well spent. And the appalling actual death toll would be just as catastrophic if it had cost 10 cents. So the dollar cost is morally negligible in comparison with the human cost. But if Alec is saying that arms companies have fomented the Iraq war for the sake of this morally negligible profit, then I'm prepared to believe they could sink that low, but I don't follow the argument. The makers of tanks and rockets don't get paid for having their products destroyed. They get paid if the products are replaced, but that's not automatic, especially if a high loss rate is making the products look bad. So I'm particularly missing the logic of how an RPG destroying a tank in Iraq would profit Haliburton, which doesn't even make tanks. As a merely trivial point: an RPG can temporarily disable a modern tank with a lucky track hit, but it is just not big enough to destroy a modern tank. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Rememberance of Things Past in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 1 2007 09:10
Profile
The first Pentium was 1993. So the 486 computers, which seem so lame now, are around 15 years old. On the other hand our old 700 MHz iMac G4, which is five years old, still seems quite up to date. We don't play very demanding games on it, but it runs a few games with quite impressive graphics very well (clever programming on somebody's part). I guess the main point is that it runs the current version of Mac OS X, so it looks just the same as the latest Apple machines. So is it that computer obsolescence only really starts to cut in hard sometime after 5 years, or that computer obsolescence has slowed dramatically now compared to 10 years ago, or that 21st century Macs in particular have attained a sort of quality plateau where obsolescence is slower for them than for other machines? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Rememberance of Things Past in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, January 30 2007 21:50
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Actually, Salmon = sarcastic old geezer. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A New Series in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, January 29 2007 05:58
Profile
quote:Who knows? I can imagine how dyslexia might lead to, and then be compounded by, a general ignorance and apathy about spelling, enough to produce the observed effects. But most dyslexics must be able to overcome those effects, because I don't think I've seen anything quite like upon mars's writing before. About Microsoft software: I also find that a lot of Microsoft products seem to put the user on rails, which often don't lead where I want to go, but are then very hard to escape. This bugs the heck out of me, but I think it's a choice of target audience rather than a design flaw. Since choosing among many options is one of the hardest things about working with software, suppressing options that most people don't want makes it easier to do what most people do want. Making it easy to do the things most people want to do makes most people happy. Making it hard to break that easiness makes most people robustly happy. Mac and Linux products are generally a lot less controlling of the user, which I like, but which many people may not. In iWork, Apple's idea of streamlining common tasks is to supply a bunch of templates. It's easy enough to just not use these. But if you do use them, your experience is apt to be even more rigid than with Word or PowerPoint. So I don't know if this approach will make anyone happy. What is it about Keynote that makes you prefer it over PowerPoint, Kyrek? I've used both quite a lot, and found them both pretty good. I use Keynote now mainly because it's cheaper than PowerPoint, though I also really like the easy input of images from iPhoto. Aligning things is a little easier too, but I sort of miss the considerably more sophisticated PowerPoint drawing functions. [ Monday, January 29, 2007 10:19: 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 Chosen Ending - Geneforge 5 in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, January 28 2007 22:18
Profile
However the series ends, whether it lasts to G6 or ends with G5, I think it has to end with a bang. We've had four games all ending with major escalations, all of which turned out to lead only to new stalemates. Eventually I think Jeff has to pull out all the stops, and let the PC either crush the Shaper empire for good, or establish it in unprecedented security and wear Ghaldring's guts for garters (of Skulduggery). Or successfully plague both houses and achieve some kind of Trakovite/Awakened dream. Or rule the world personally. Something that people will really want to see happen, finally, after all this time. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Physics Solution in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, January 28 2007 09:01
Profile
Ya gotta love vacuum collapse. But now I'm kind of in a dilemma. On the one hand, simple little models are ghastly frauds. Dragging generations of students through exercises like this one only gives them the impression that science is an arbitrary ritual where we ignore reality in favor of made-up games. No wonder the lay public has such a naive view of genuine science, which really does try to understand the real world, and is therefore enormously more difficult than people imagine. On the other hand, simple little calculations like the one intended for this problem are glorious triumphs of the human intellect. People like Plato and Aristotle would probably gladly have given body parts to see what today every high school kid is dragged through willy nilly. So is schoolbook physics triumph or travesty? I'm really of two minds. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Physics Solution in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, January 28 2007 01:47
Profile
Square root of (0.3 g). 5. Meters. A better question is to list as many reasons as you can think of why those answers would be wrong for any realistic scenario. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Join the Club? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, January 27 2007 13:01
Profile
I hereby declare myself Grand Mugwump and Supreme Dictator-for-Life of this club. (I'm not making the same mistake twice.) By the power invested in me, through the august office(s) I now hold by merit of preemptive claim, I disband the club. I raze it to the ground, disgruntle its fortifications, sow its fields with salt, and spit on its grave. And no saying it's alive again, or I'm going home! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Your most amusing G1-3 stunts in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, January 27 2007 04:59
Profile
quote:Hmmm. Perhaps Shaping is related to kabbalistic magic, in which permutations of letters were thought to hold the power to animate golems, and who knows what else. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Chromite!! CHROMITE, baby!! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, January 26 2007 10:12
Profile
Hint: take every 17th capital letter in Alorael's last 905 posts, in order. Putting them together and inserting spaces and punctuation as appropriate, you will discover Something Amazing. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Join the Club? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, January 26 2007 00:56
Profile
Even in G1, it was never explained that the level gain was a delayed effect of canister use. You could tell yourself that, but the game didn't tell you. I gave up hoping for a levelling explanation in G2 and G3, since there the "no canister, no modification" game is a very reasonable one, and since the games are full of heavily modified NPCs, all supposedly struggling fiercely, but all actually sitting pat while the PC overtakes them in power by killing rogues. That leaves "you're a historic prodigy" as the only possible explanation for the PC's meteoric ascent, but then this doesn't jibe with the fact that NPCs who really ought to recognize a historic prodigy still treat you as an apprentice twerp. But in G4 there was such a neat possibility to take the conventional RPG conceit of levelling into the game itself, and I'm disappointed Jeff passed it up. I tried to sell him on it during beta testing, since it would only have needed one added line of dialogue. He didn't bite. It's a shame that in games that do so much of other interesting stuff with the theme of gaining power, the greatest source of power is left as an unexamined (and rather ludicrous) genre convention. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Join the Club? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, January 25 2007 00:37
Profile
Granted, the rebels' current Geneforge-creation capabilities seem rather below those of Sucia Island in its heyday. Since Tuldaric is mysteriously MIA, the closest thing to a Danette that the humans or serviles seem to have left is Litalia. The tasks she feels up to seem to be things like reverse engineering Wingbolts: sophisticated shaping challenges, but hardly in Danette's league. And it's clear that the Southforge rebels are under a lot of pressure from the Shapers, enough to hamper Geneforge creation efforts. But the Southforge Geneforge was built in happier days for the rebels, before the Shapers closed in. It's pretty clear that Southforge Citadel used to be a very secure base, far from the front lines, and that its Geneforge was built back then. And the whole point of the Geneforge story, the bell that can't be unrung, is that it doesn't take a Danette to make the second Geneforge. Once the basic ideas are out, and once it's known that the thing is truly possible, people of much less genius can follow her path. It does seem possible to me that the human side of the Rebellion acquired its knowledge of Danette's achievements through the drakons. Ghaldring does seem to have been the only gifted rebel survivor of the canonical ending to G2. And I'm sure the drakons are not above deliberately weakening the human/servile 'forge. So, yeah, I'd accept this scenario as a possible explanation for Geneforge Junior. I still find this a doubtful scenario, though, just because everyone you meet in the game, Rebel and Shaper, human and drakon, all speak about the rebel Geneforges as though they confer really significant powers. And it is evident that the Rebels have been producing Geneforged Lifecrafters for some time: the PC is not the first Lifecrafter, but the last. So even those Rebels and Shapers who have no direct knowledge of how the southern rebel 'forge worked would seem to have had direct experience of its products. None of the characters who are thus impressed with rebel Geneforging is likely to be awed by firebolts and fyoras. So to me the only plausible resolution is that the Southforge Geneforge actually does have immense effects. They just take time to develop. The ability of the PC to gain levels so rapidly, through adventuring, is the Geneforge at work. People who have not been Geneforged cannot multiply their health, energy and essence by killing rogues and disarming mines. And that is why it never occurs to Alwan, for instance, that he and his handful of lieutenants could easily whup the drakons, if they just farmed the Barrier Zone for some experience first. They couldn't. You can, thanks to the wonders of modern geneforging technology. (You have to overlook the fact that Alwan gained quite a few levels by adventuring in G3. Well, he never gained enough levels then to stop being a total wimp.) -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Chromite!! CHROMITE, baby!! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, January 24 2007 10:47
Profile
Well, Pakistan is an acronym. That probably explains it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Join the Club? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, January 24 2007 08:30
Profile
I really wanted Jeff to insert some explanation about this. He does have someone mention that the Geneforge you used was probably not much like the original. But I wanted an explanation that said that the new generation of Geneforges had been designed to minimize the insanity risk by acting slowly, and in combination with the subject's own actions. Thus, keep casting spells, and over a few months the Geneforge's effects will gradually make you an awesome spellcaster; etc. This would then finally give an explanation for why, unlike all the NPCs, the player grows quickly to godlike power by simply hacking around and fighting stuff: gaining experience levels is really the gradual, delayed effect of the Geneforge. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Halo Suit of the Modern World - Fraud? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, January 21 2007 22:17
Profile
One problem I see is really being bulletproof. He claims to have tested it, but it doesn't say what kind of bullets he used. Modern military bullets are much harder than hunting ammo, to penetrate stuff on the way to the target; whereas hunting rounds are actually designed not to penetrate well. (Exposed lead tip for the hunting bullets, partial steel core for semi-armor-piercing military bullets.) -------------------- 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, January 20 2007 12:42
Profile
Hmm, Vance is indeed another expert at judicious crypticity. Is the effect similar to Gibson's, or quite different? I'm not sure. Vance does a lot of name-dropping, where you never have much idea who or what or where the named things are or were. That works well for the Dying Earth, where the immensity of history leaves everyone resigned to not knowing most things. And he has lots of magical effects which are never explained in any comprehensible fashion. The crucial thing is that how these work never has any consequence for the plot. For instance. At a couple of points Cugel the Clever wields, or faces, a weapon in the form of a 'tube that projects blue concentrate'. Vance tells us nothing of how this substance is 'projected', or how it affects its targets. He acts as though telling us its color counts as an explanation. This must break several separate rules for good writing, but to me it works very well for Vance. I get the rough idea that Cugel is blowing clouds of caustic blue stuff at people, and, more importantly, that neither he nor they have any clearer idea than I do of exactly how this works. And that's the distinct flavor of the Dying Earth, that everyone is inured to coping with stuff they don't understand. Okay, I guess Vance is a lot like Gibson, just on downers instead of uppers. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| wikipedia forever? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, January 20 2007 12:15
Profile
But as a nice discussion a while back about peer review brought out, even peer review is only worth so much. I know truly bogus papers that have been published in prestigious journals (even, gasp, Nature). Usually peer review consists in one or two unlucky souls having to read your paper and write a brief review of it, with thumbs up or down, for the journal editor. If you are lucky enough to hit a couple of referees who are both dim and mellow, you can get bad stuff published in a good journal. Of course there are lots of journals that no serious scholars or scientists read, because they are low-ranked journals that rarely publish good stuff. And good academics usually don't have time to review bad articles for bad journals, or to write articles for journals that no good academics will read. So there are plenty of bad peer-reviewed journals, which have only bad submissions to choose from and whose peer reviewers are particularly likely to be dim. You have to know which journals, and what book publishers, are good, and which are not. And to catch the exceptional bad works that do get put out by good sources, you have to know how an article or book was received by the community of researchers in its field -- whether it was applauded, derided, or shrugged off. That isn't always easy to know if you're not part of the community. The same thing goes for personal authority. Some professors are idiots. A professor with a long publication list in good journals, with a chair at a prestigious university, and with prizes from major academic organizations ... is very probably right. But still not necessarily. And so I use Wikipedia a lot, even for looking up topics in my field. It certainly isn't flawlessly reliable; but nothing else is, either. It's a good first place to check. But for internet arguments, I'm not sympathetic to appeals to authority of any kind, anyway. Citing authorities, however august, usually just by-passes the most interesting issues. [ Saturday, January 20, 2007 12:23: 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 Friday, January 19 2007 10:33
Profile
Sometimes not explaining is good, though. If it's done right. quote:Reading Gibson the first time gives you this buzzy feeling of not having any idea what's going down, but it's okay, you're game to fake it. Just hustle quickly through the next few pages, and we'll pull it off, definitely. Which is a great effect because a main point of that trilogy is creating a world in which most of the characters, and most of the population, are hustling like that, all the time. Re-reading him, trying to see how he achieved that effect, I was surprised at how much explanation there actually was. I concluded that a little non-explanation goes a long way. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |