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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| Need Help with surviving in G3 in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 25 2006 11:06
Profile
I played a melee Guardian (that is, one with lousy missile skills), without canisters, and without much in the way of creations. He had it very tough on Harmony Isle, and had to use lots of pods and crystals and wands to survive. But I made it to Rahul's castle as quickly as I could, snuck into his bedroom, killed his pets with wands and haste and slamming the door each round, and stole his armor and weapons. The armor made a big difference; from then on I had no major problems with the game. In fact I didn't keep that particular armor all that long -- I believe I went with the Crystalline Shroud as soon as I could. The point was just that Rahul's was the first really good armor I found, and it seemed to tip the balance. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| medieval times or modern times? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 24 2006 00:14
Profile
I always used to wonder why the medievals seemed so awed by their classical forebears. Then I went on a tour of Turkey, and saw Hagia Sophia and a lot of Greco-Roman ruins, including Ephesus. Then it all made sense: the Classical era had really been a lot better in many ways. I also got a look at some medieval Japanese swords in the National Museum in Tokyo. By that time I had seen a lot of medieval European swords, and they looked dull-edged, dull-surfaced, and kind of uneven. The Japanese blades from the same era looked as though they could have come out of a factory today: sharp corners, sharp points, sharp edges, everything perfectly straight or smoothly curved, and the whole surface mirror-polished. By now I seriously wonder whether the subsequent ascendancy of western Europe was somehow due to its previous unprecedented decline. Was it perhaps only the long-lasting effects of its cultural collapse in the Dark Ages that motivated its radical transition to modernity? On the other hand, it's not that the medieval Europeans were dumb. They were people like everyone else, dealing with a bad situation. So if you look carefully, you do find that they were trying lots of clever things, and making some progress. They just had an awfully long way to go before getting back in the black, compared to the rest of the world or their own ancestors. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Conservative Shift in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 23 2006 12:56
Profile
But both Blair and Clinton are widely said to have won power by leading their parties rightward, towards the center. That suggests that the center moved right. And the Canadian Conservative Party has just taken power; but the Liberal regime before them was about the most fiscally conservative government in the industrialized world, with an actually balanced budget for many years. Lately I have been impressed by the 'Nixon in China' theory of democracy. Only Nixon could go to China, the theory goes, because only he had an unassailable reputation as an anti-communist. The principle represented by this episode is that policies tend to get implemented by their natural opposition, who can seize middle ground by stealing the most reasonable planks from their opponents' platforms. I'm inclined to think this is a good thing, actually. But for the present discussion I think it indicates that the most telling sign of rightward shift -- or its absence -- would be in the behaviour of leftward parties. [ Thursday, February 23, 2006 12:58: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Signatures in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 23 2006 12:44
Profile
Gee, maybe Brett can shed some light on the quote's provenance. That would be great; I've been wondering about it for about ten years now. It seems to be a sort of minimally-successful meme, though, propagating around the internet at a very low incidence rate, so he may well be no better informed than I am. But here's hoping; Brett's been seen here not too long ago. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Describe in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 23 2006 01:09
Profile
quote:I presume that Thralni's addressee is too drunk to post. [ Thursday, February 23, 2006 01:10: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Signatures in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 23 2006 01:01
Profile
I saw mine once years ago, at the end of an e-mail message, attributed to Niels Bohr. I never heard from the sender again, have never found the quote anywhere else, and have never been able to confirm that Bohr said it. I keep it now partly in fading hope that someone will recognize it and tell me where it really comes from. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Windows version in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 23 2006 00:54
Profile
quote:Evidently Arctic doesn't like stale cookies. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Learned Pinner's Getaway in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 22 2006 12:37
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What is it with Shapers and water travel, anyway? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ain't Gonna Happen in Geneforge... in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 22 2006 12:36
Profile
Here we see the downgraded form of the previous plushie idea. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| a stupid question in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 22 2006 12:32
Profile
"Prnt Scrn" is short for "Pirant Securin", which is a last-ditch security measure against malware. Implemented on all Windows keyboards since 1983, pressing this key sends a tightly encoded virus report to Microsoft, then dissolves the mother board. Dikiyoba should be sternly rebuked for encouraging you to do anything so irrevocable just to print the screen. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Windows version in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 22 2006 12:22
Profile
Well, if everyone up to 5000 had 1000 posts, all together that would be almost as much as Alorael, which is absurd. Therefore there must be many low-numbered members with surprisingly low post counts. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Eep! Christians! (Split from Christian Radio) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 22 2006 12:09
Profile
Infant formula has been deadly in Third World countries where it was mixed with contaminated water, where people were too poor to afford enough of it to keep a baby healthy, and where endemic diseases make the antibodies in breastmilk vital. Some manufacturers, particularly Nestle, seem to have been pretty ruthless in their marketing of formula despite these conditions. If you get enough of it, and live in a healthier environment with clean water, there is nothing wrong with formula. I learned physics in grad school, not physic; but I think the main thing I learned there was just how enormously harder it is than I ever thought it was, to be right about anything. Trying to extrapolate future results for my family, based only on the tiny data set of my own previous experience, now seems reckless to me. About hospital births. In Massachusetts, four years ago, they took our daughter away for about an hour for a bunch of tests very shortly after birth. Thereafter she was all ours, and they sent us home four days later; so I don't think we needed more time for breastfeeding. Normally it would have been two days in hospital, but we had a Caesarian section. And that is a significant difference with hospital births. Obviously they don't do C-sections at all, outside hospitals (lay off, Macduff); but in upscale American hospitals, they do really a lot of them. In ours it was about 25% of all births. On the one hand, after quite a few hours of labor there were signs our daughter was in trouble, and I'm very glad we had a Plan B to go to. On the other hand, the very high rate of C-sections is probably driven by liability concerns at least to some extent. [ Wednesday, February 22, 2006 12:17: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Eep! Christians! (Split from Christian Radio) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 22 2006 02:08
Profile
Breastfeeding was in eclipse for a decade or two, a couple of generations ago. For many years now, though, it has been heavily promoted by the mainstream medical establishment. So much so that, when our daughter was newborn, I started summarizing what we were being told by all the doctors and nurses as "breastmilk makes kids bulletproof". In fact, they made it sound so good that I couldn't figure out why they would always use constructions like, "If you choose to breastfeed ...". Why the "If", I wondered. It seemed like a no-brainer. It turns out that breastfeeding can be extremely difficult. You might think that millions of years of evolution would make it work easily for practically everyone, but no. Babies need to learn how to do it, and some don't seem to learn very well. In past ages, they would simply have died; today, if the kid isn't getting enough breastmilk in after a few days, they get a bottle. And from there there's usually no going back, since the mother's milk production is stimulated by consumption. If the kid doesn't take enough out, the milk stops coming. There is also a learning curve for mothers; it can be tricky. And extremely painful. Many mothers have no trouble at all with breastfeeding, but many mothers who are very keen to breastfeed their babies end up relying on formula despite their best attempts. Formula was never actually that bad, though; it really just lacks antibodies. The problem is only that it is expensive, so poor babies on formula may not get enough formula. In a lot of US grocery stores, it is kept behind counters, instead of on the shelves, and you have to ask for it. If it is put out on the shelves, it is heavily shoplifted. I have this directly from the store clerks whom we had to ask for formula when we couldn't find it on the shelves. My wife kept up breastfeeding for about nine months, but there was never enough for our daughter to live without formula supplement. This was okay, though, since she got enough to get a lot of antibodies. WIth regard to 'studies' showing things about the efficacy or hazard of immunization: what studies? Plenty of studies are the sheerest crap, and totally worthless as evidence of anything. Conducting a study with credible implications is incredibly difficult. [ Wednesday, February 22, 2006 02:20: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| my world(would appreciate ideas) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 21 2006 10:04
Profile
Coincidence, ha. It's a conspeeracy! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| To sink or not to sink, that is the question in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 21 2006 05:12
Profile
Perhaps you can hate by faith? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Denied! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 21 2006 05:08
Profile
quote:Actually RWG is reasonably healthy anyway. For the SubTerra board, as far as I'm concerned it's just a matter of keeping it fresh and fattening it up. My proposed new motto for the SubTerra forum is that classic chitrach quote. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Denied! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 21 2006 05:03
Profile
The 'ceterum censeo' beginning is good, as is the gerundive construction, since that's how Cato did it. I don't mind an acronym, but it should be a Latin one. LRA, I suppose: Ludi Ricardi Albi. Ceterum censeo forum Ludi Ricardi Albi deferendum esse. Is that right? Perhaps we should get a nihil obstat from Kelandon, then an imprimatur from Icshi. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Denied! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 21 2006 01:13
Profile
Let us take a roll from the scroll of Marcus Cato the Elder. We should all take to ending every post, in whatever forum, on whatever topic, with 'RWG should be moved to the bottom of the boards list'. Perhaps a Latin translation would be even cooler. Less effective, but obscurity is our creed here in RWG, so why not? Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word. Or mostly. Kelandon? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Denied! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, February 20 2006 23:45
Profile
They re-order the forums, yet RWG is still denied its rightful place at the bottom. And after all we did for SubTerra in our recent subliminal infiltration. It's the ingratitude that bothers one most. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A4 Bugs in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, February 20 2006 04:31
Profile
The parry 'bug' seems real to me too, though I don't know whether it's actually a mistake, or just that 'parry percentage' is a misleading stat. That is, perhaps chance of parrying is affected by a bunch of variables besides the base stat that gets reported to the player. I just had an interesting experience with Dorikas. My party cleaned out everything else in his base first, then did a good enough job whaling on him that by the time he started panicking us, he was also panicking. So everyone just ran everywhere, and somehow my Priest wound up standing face to face with Dorikas, up beside his exit portal, far away from everyone else. I was half expecting her to run off with him. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hanged? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 18 2006 03:37
Profile
quote:A generally very conservative evangelical Anglican priest I know, who teaches theology (or something related, anyway) at a Catholic university, has made essentially Kelandon's analysis of the original text, and drawn precisely the above interpretation. Other professional theologians make different interpretations, of course, but he is by no means an isolated wacko. He's a pretty mainstream guy, well known in evangelical academic circles. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hanged? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 17 2006 00:55
Profile
In fairness to Paul (if this author really was Paul), he stressed elsewhere the basic principle that Christians should do nothing to offend or disturb people unnecessarily, for fear of scaring them away from the faith -- even if this meant refraining from actions that weren't intrinsically wrong. His most explicit expression of this point was in the context of eating meat from animals sacrificed to pagan gods. He argued that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with this, since the gods weren't real gods. But an unsophisticated onlooker might conclude, from seeing a Christian at a pagan feast, that Christianity wasn't worth taking seriously. For a pillar of a local church to dress her hair like a prostitute would similarly be bad PR, and for an evangelical organization bad PR is a sin, even though there is nothing intrinsically sinful about hairstyles. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Geneforge 4: "Not a Shaper" in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 16 2006 00:33
Profile
quote:And there will be bitter complaints from Geneforge fans, about the corruption of their series by hateful Avernum elements. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hanged? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 16 2006 00:10
Profile
quote:"Incompletely correct." Alec, do you have to ride such a high horse? You said nothing that contradicted my remarks, yet you cast your response as a schoolmasterly correction. And your response to me was your mildest. Your articulacy, erudition, and analysis often seem to attain academic standards. More than one has a right to expect from a message board. But perhaps you could also bring the attitude up to match? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Return of Barzhal? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 15 2006 23:03
Profile
On the Shaper boards you get banned if you ask for help making your own geneforge. Read the FAQ. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |