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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| Are FRPGs inherently gerontocratic? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 14 2006 09:25
Profile
Well, but why do artifacts become less thrilling if they aren't ancient? I guess I agree that they do; the exact same item would be less cool as a recent discovery than as an ancient relic. Why, though? As to people, I didn't think of the idea that those ancient dudes have had time to work up to experience level 8000. But I'm not sure this works, since the ancient ones were generally already super-powerful back in their ancient heydays, and usually haven't been doing much of anything to increase their power over the intervening ages. Heck, even the mighty ancient ones themselves often seem to have slipped a lot, and are typically working now to regain their former power. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| I Guess I Just Don't Get It in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 14 2006 08:43
Profile
Yeah, Geneforge III isn't really that hard a game. You're probably just burdened with expertise from other games that is counter-productive for this one. There are a few basic principles to get down, but then it's pretty straightforward. The fact that crystals take only 3 AP is vital in the early stages of all the Geneforge games, since that lets you get two attacks. Basic buffing spells (Bless and Shield) are much more effective than in many games. You can explore in combat mode. It is slow and tedious with a large party, but frequently lets you get the jump on rogues. Two speed pods in a row give you 12 AP instead of just 10; that lets you step up, attack, then hide -- or fire four crystals in one turn. Acid is good because it will keep wearing down a boss while you deal with things like worms. Encumbrance is always a challenge, but one that can generally be met by discarding stuff that you're never really going to use anyway. If you're a Shaper, some people love keeping creations for a long time, but the power-gamers keep constantly retuning their creation armies, because you're always close to parity with your enemies, and a little edge can make a huge difference (killing a worm with one attack, for example, versus needing a second to finish it). If you're an Agent, forget completely about Shaping; keep cranking Spellcraft, Battle Magic and Quick Action so that you always act first and kill with each shot (at least usually); and use all the cunning you can to keep your enemies at long range. If you're a Guardian, GF3 is a bit harder, especially on the second island. Use more stuff, since you can carry more. Bringing both Alwan and Greta will help a lot, and once you get some good armor on the third island things will get easier. It's fine to use a low difficulty setting while you're learning the ropes. I learned how to survive on Torment by learning how to breeze through Normal. Starting on Torment would have been much too frustrating. You might want to play GF1 and 2 first, if you haven't already. They have the same basic engine, but with fewer bells and whistles. G1 especially is a cool story, too. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum V in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 14 2006 04:56
Profile
quote:He had had a rough day. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Are FRPGs inherently gerontocratic? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 14 2006 03:45
Profile
The existing similar thread invokes Tolkien, and after thinking about this, I decided that Tolkien really stood for something a bit different from the issue of conservatism versus revolution. After all, Mordor's existing social order gets about as much description as that of Gondor. And it's even more ancient. Tolkien seems to me to have equated ancientness not with moral good, since Sauron was an ancient in good standing, but with quality. All the really powerful things, people, or institutions in Tolkien's world are old —often absurdly so. And I think that this is also a typical pattern in RPGs. Ancient wizards, ancient artifacts, ancient demons: good or bad, if it's not ancient, it's crap. This hardly agrees with recent history. Ancient artifacts are cool paperweights, and that's about it. So why do people still like the premise that anything ancient could threaten, or save, the world? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Are fantasy RPGs inherently conservative? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 14 2006 03:33
Profile
I suppose it probably is more often the case that the evil side is threatening the established social order. This is probably because an established social order must have a lot of characters in it. If the player had to fight them all, the GPU would explode — or the player would get bored and never buy the expansion packs. Whereas the social order can be threatened by a few big polygons, and killing big polygons builds a desire to kill bigger polygons in the sequel. Of course, a game could try to leave out the social order completely; but asking the player to save thousands of faceless peasants is cheaper motivation than creating a few NPCs worth saving. (Make that, quite a few worth saving: your motivation has to suffice for killing hundreds of bad polygons, without worrying that maybe orcs have needs, too.) So you always end up fighting the few, for the many. And since your game can't properly represent the many even as good guys, the many are loyal subjects of some Good King Polygon. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| easter is comeing in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 13:09
Profile
Yeah, I just heard about this new gnostic gospel, though the story said it has been around for thirty years or so, just not recognized by scholars. It will be cool to see what this one is like. It doesn't seem to be anything fundamentally new; it sounds pretty standardly Docetic. Patristic literature has lots of references to books that (according to the people whose views became established as orthodox) hijacked the names and stories of Christianity for otherwise alien philosophies. I think of early Christianity as one of the first human attempts at a trans-cultural religion, and I guess it shouldn't be surprising that there were security issues. If anyone can be a Christian, who gets to say what is Christian? From my reading of a few patristic sources, this early 'spoofing problem' would seem to be responsible for the hierarchical structure of the early Christian church, and for the oddly un-harmonized canon of Christian scripture. A spoof of the Word of God is a serious trusted system problem. The third-to-fourth century solution was to recognize books on provenance, rather than content. Today, whatever independent information about provenance was once available is long lost. On the other hand, centuries have established the look and feel of the orthodox Christian brand, and it's easy now to recognize something that doesn't fit. What value do any of these ancient documents, the orthodox canon included, have as evidence about what actually occurred? That's a whole different question, of course. FWIW my personal answer is, Enough to support belief, not enough to compel it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| wat is better? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 12:34
Profile
Sometimes spelling or grammar is so gruesome it's painful to read, but extreme fussiness is unnecessary, and even self-defeating. The very best English prose generally violates quite a few supposed rules. Above a minimal standard of adherence to convention, the only real rule is clarity. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| easter is comeing in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 11:45
Profile
quote:I'd be interested to learn your conclusions. It's a very interesting story, with quite a few rather odd details. It actually says a lot for the early Christians' concern with authenticity, that four distinct versions of the story were faithfully kept, rather than being merged into one official account. And even on the most sceptical reading, none of the versions seems all that much embroidered. Even the resurrection is recorded in such indirect and prosaic ways that one tends to think that something odd must really have happened, even if it was just a bizarre accident or conspiracy, rather than assuming it was entirely made up. There is lots of room to criticise details or speculate about omissions, but there seems no reason to discard the passion narratives as complete fabrications. And that makes them a uniquely detailed ancient record of some events that, whatever they really were, turned out to be of disproportionate historical importance. The part of the story I don't understand is why Jesus didn't just loudly disclaim any interest in overthrowing Roman rule, and live to preach another day. The whole New Testament consistently disavows politics, and one has the impression that Jesus could have beaten the rebel rap in complete honesty. Somehow this doesn't seem to have been an option, but I don't understand why not. The closest I can come is to suppose that, by the time he got as far as being accused, an apolitical stance wouldn't have been good enough for the Romans: perhaps he would only have gotten off by explicitly endorsing Roman rule, and that he couldn't do. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum V in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 11:09
Profile
They drove him to the levyn but the levyn was dryn. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Changes for Better or Worse? in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 11:02
Profile
I never played the original Avernum trilogy, but I can see that the scale change is a big effect. I kind of like it, though. To me the A4 cave system is big enough to feel like a huge cave system without being so big as to be just a generic fantasy setting that is -- oh, yeah --supposed to be underground. Underground should feel a little confined. To me it's a very credible feature of the world that what everyone thinks of as a major journey is really quite short as the crow flies. There ain't no crows. I agree that it feels as though the total Avernum population must be under 1000, maybe well under, even after making due allowance for many extra people being somehow offstage. This is fine with me -- a larger population than you can ever interact with doesn't add anything to a game, anyway, and it's cool to think of Avernum as being a sort of a scattered village of the Empire's worst hard cases. But the game still talks in several places as though Avernum is a large nation state. That doesn't really fit, now. I think it would be better if some of the speeches got tweaked a bit to allude to Avernum's actual modest size. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hell freezes over. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 10:40
Profile
Sadly true. The game runs, but the Aurora engine was not ported. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| for those of you with humor in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 10:30
Profile
Once I got my brother to record a phone message with me, so that two slightly-out-of-sync-but-similar voices said something like this: "HE ISN'T HERE ANY MORE. ZOOL INHABITS HIS BODY AND WE CAN'T FIGURE OUT THIS PHONE!". This creeped out my minister friend too much, so I changed it. By speaking very quickly, I fit in: "Your disembodied voice has reached my disembodied voice, by the medium of a machine whose sole contribution to the discourse is an automated request for information reminiscent of a POW confession: name, number, and text of urgent message." Too many people were not leaving messages after that, so I went the other way: "Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout. "Itsy bitsy cockroach called while he was out. "Didn't leave a message; wasn't that a shame. "So itsy bitsy cockroach was never heard from again." After a while I got bored, and our phone messages have been prosaic for years. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Geneforging in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 10:06
Profile
quote:In this spirit, I believe that a lot of radical genetic technology will inevitably be developed and deployed. As somebody once said, you cannot unring a bell. There will be miracles and wonders, and there will be problems. Everything will change, as usual. Og looks at the rocks that made the sparks, and thinks about putting them down. As if. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hell freezes over. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, April 7 2006 09:51
Profile
The main choice is between Apple's dual-boot system, where you have to choose one OS at each start-up, and virtualization systems that let you run both OS at once (typically with some performance loss, but possibly not much). I happen to like OS X more than Windows XP, but it's possible that some day there will be a Windows-only program I really need, and then it will be nice to have the option. In that case I'll probably want to run that program plus all my usual Mac stuff, so I'll want a virtualized solution, not BootCamp. Unless I decide to get into making NWN modules or something. I've already had the shock of seeing XP on my Apple cinema display, because a student plugged his Windows laptop into it last month to give a PowerPoint presentation. What I like best is just the Mac interpretation of the Windows logo. That's so perfect. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Geneforging in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, April 6 2006 17:36
Profile
Genetic engineering is actually quite different from breeding, even though the effect of breeding is to modify genetics. Breeding is Darwinian. Genetic engineering is creationist. The other big thing to realize about genetic technology is that it isn't just about changing genes. It's about figuring out how organisms work, by figuring out what their genes do. Genes by themselves don't do anything. Their presence in cell nuclei makes different kinds of proteins form, and the proteins drift off and make things happen. So if you know what proteins do what, you could try to just inject them. Well, Thuryl could probably have given this more authoritatively. But I believe these are basically accurate points. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hell freezes over. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, April 6 2006 17:22
Profile
And in other news,  .-------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Skill at Gaming in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, April 3 2006 12:22
Profile
I have occasional flashes of inspiration that make me feel clever, but often get stumped by various games. At my age, my geek-tosterone levels have fallen to the point where I have no shame about consulting walkthroughs. And often I find that the answers there are things that no reasonable person could discover without investing way more time than I can spare. So then I feel clever in a higher, better way, almost like real life. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Modern day classics in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, March 31 2006 12:18
Profile
Kelandon stated that race exists, not that everyone everywhere has always agreed on how to classify everyone's race. The 'straw man' fallacy is a fallacy, you know, not a brilliant debating tactic. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| I've made a script / story in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, March 27 2006 13:11
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It's really too bad I don't live to see how it ends. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Modern day classics in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, March 27 2006 13:05
Profile
I didn't think the sixth book was bad at all. It does look a bit as though Rowling has painted herself into a corner, but that's just how a book 6 should look in the best case, so I'm assuming she'll pull it off in the end. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Modern day classics in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, March 27 2006 10:10
Profile
I'll buy Harry Potter, and Stephen King. Not sure about the others. Stanislaw Lem. Requiescat in pace. [ Monday, March 27, 2006 11:44: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Rate Galactic Core. (1 Meat/1 ur mom lol) in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, March 24 2006 10:47
Profile
Well, I suppose it was never taboo. That's a selling point. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Rate Galactic Core. (1 Meat/1 ur mom lol) in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, March 24 2006 08:26
Profile
Anyone know how sales of actual Spam have been affected by the hijacking of the term? I can imagine lots of college freshmen buying cases of the stuff on their first solo flights behind the wheels of a shopping cart. "Those guys back at the dorm won't believe someone named a luncheon meat after junk e-mail!" -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum V in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, March 23 2006 08:13
Profile
Caves are really like that: little inconspicuous holes occasionally lead to enormous new areas. For instance, everyone should visit Carlsbad Caverns, in New Mexico, if they possibly can. And if you go, register online (far in advance) to take the 'Hall of the White Giant' extra guided tour. (The other extra guided tours are also worth taking, but it is the best.) You'll walk to a nondescript corner of the public access route from the surface, wait until no-one is around, then duck into a crack in the wall -- and be gone for hours. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Captives of the turtle pit, hear ye, hear ye! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, March 22 2006 22:49
Profile
Argh* and Ed were so unstable that I wondered whether they weren't masquerades. In the end I figured it would be equally weird either way, and didn't matter anyway. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |