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 |
|---|---|
| A New Revelation, Hardly Worth Mentioning in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, December 8 2005 15:24
Profile
quote:"Where'er", pronounced "where-air", is an abbreviation of "wherever". It's a fairly standard dodge in verse, since it cuts a syllable. It crops up from time to time in hymns, for instance. So maybe the online anagram maker is just dyslexic. A lyric loin. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Questoins Questoins in Nethergate | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, December 8 2005 15:07
Profile
I was similarly shocked some time ago to see Alorael's 'real' title, when he had always been an italicized Blademaster before. I still find it odd that this title is in the second person. Alorael could avoid the stigma of his next title by becoming a moderator everywhere. Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice. Anyway, he's already most of the way there. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A New Revelation, Hardly Worth Mentioning in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, December 8 2005 14:52
Profile
Nobody who cuts his own hair with a Thompson will get any arguments from me. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A New Revelation, Hardly Worth Mentioning in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, December 8 2005 00:07
Profile
Well, this has all been so much fun, I can't wait till our margaritomancy thread. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Physics questions. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 7 2005 02:18
Profile
Relative to what? I repeat, it's a Reynolds number thing. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Physics questions. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 7 2005 00:50
Profile
Actually the streams I have seen pouring out of punctured water containers have always looked pretty laminar. A Reynolds number thing, evidently. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A New Revelation, Hardly Worth Mentioning in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, December 6 2005 10:47
Profile
What? There's no typo ...! EDIT: Oh, I see the problem. There was a glitch in the recoding scheme as transmitted to the implants of those to whose implants the wisdom of our secret hierarchs has vouchsafed it. A patch is available to those implants to which it is likewise in its turn vouchsafed. (Those hierarchs, always with the vouchsafing. Or rather, their wisdom, always therewith. One suspects that this "wisdom" of our secret hierarchs is in fact some kind of meta-implant, allowing them to be informed, and needless to say, at need controlled, by the secreter hierarchs. Or rather, by their wisdom. Yes. Of course. So mote it be.) [ Tuesday, December 06, 2005 10:57: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Names in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, December 6 2005 00:51
Profile
quote:The advantage of this, I suppose, is that it gives you an excuse for any spelling mistakes in the creation names: "No, see: my Fyora is named Fryoa!", etc. Myself, I'd have to use Glahk and Battle Apha as well. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A New Revelation, Hardly Worth Mentioning in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, December 6 2005 00:38
Profile
As I am a great believer in the fundamental arbitrariness of all coding schemes, I will change my moniker to an anagram of RW by redefining the meaning of its current characters. EDIT: There, it's done. Do you like it? [ Tuesday, December 06, 2005 00:39: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Physics questions. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 5 2005 00:48
Profile
This is a surprisingly good question. Surprising, that is, until you come to appreciate that most questions about hydrodynamics are good. It's a very tough subject on several levels. The answer in terms of hydrodynamics is really that it is the pressure change that has caused the velocity change, and this is why the two go together. A pressure difference accelerates or decelerates a fluid. So to understand why V_1 > V_2 implies P_2 > P_1, think of a ball rolling into a bumper, and slowing down as it compresses the spring. When the ball has gone a little further and slowed down some, the spring is also more compressed. What makes it easy to get confused is that fluid velocity can in turn affect pressure. A net spreading pattern of fluid velocity makes for a drop in fluid density, which lowers pressure. A net convergence raises density and pressure. So figuring out what velocities and pressures are everywhere in say, a pipe, is very subtle and difficult. It's a vicious circle that you have to settle all round. (Welcome to the world of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations, where dead numbers go if they were bad.) To solve these problems, at least approximately, people often use tricks to deduce what a steady velocity pattern might have to look like. Some of these tricks are clever; some are just knowing the final answer and talking fast enough to give a false impression of understanding why it comes out that way. Whether your trick is clever or deceptive, once you have an idea of the velocity pattern, then you can use the relation between pressure and velocity to work out what the pressures must have been, to maintain such a pattern of velocities. This is reasoning backwards, in comparison to physical causality, where it is the pressure change that has caused the velocity change. But if you did somehow get the velocity pattern right, then this working backwards will indeed give the right answer for the pressures. All of that is the hydrodynamic answer. There is a deeper answer, in principle, in terms of the motion and collisions of the particles that compose the fluid. I haven't gotten around to thinking this through completely myself, though. And I've never heard anyone else give a convincing answer, in terms of air molecules, to questions like why an airfoil generates lift. I'm sure it can be done, and I'm almost sure that it has been done; but very few physicists know about it. [ Monday, December 05, 2005 00:54: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Beta Testing Testing One Two Three Four in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 5 2005 00:19
Profile
As I remember from my old pen-and-paper dungeon mastering days, it is inherently very difficult to maintain a steady level of challenge as a party rises to high levels. It is almost as difficult to build gradually to a crescendo. The problem is a basic scaling, I believe. It is not just that a party gets better at everything as it advances: it gets better at more and more things. And as its reserves of depletable stats and resources get deeper, its growing range of options includes dumping everything in one tremendous assault, then making a fast pit stop to recharge at a secure base. So the challenge of challenging a party grows very nonlinearly with level. There are of course possible ways of dealing with these problems, but most if not all of these involve constraining the party in ways that the normal rules do not. In games that are basically power-fantasies, taking away capabilities that the party has earned automatically means that your delivery of player satisfaction is starting from a hole of resentment. And many of the extraordinary constraints that a gamemaster might impose would make the game more difficult by making it more tedious, which would also be self-defeating. It can still be done, at least on good days; but, again in my experience, success in sustaining high level challenge requires knowing your players and tailoring the game to them. Puzzles, for instance, can always work because they test players directly; but there is nothing worse than a puzzle that is just too difficult for the players, and it is extremely easy to invent impossibly difficult puzzles. Imagining that such puzzles are tests of intelligence betrays unfamiliarity with intelligence. Long story short: in a popular shareware CRPG I think it is virtually impossible to avoid bumps and bogs in the development path of effective party power. So cut yourself and the designer some slack, and if you want to keep a steady uphill grade, change the difficulty level to smooth things out. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum IV, goog... what next? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, December 4 2005 06:12
Profile
Geneforge and Avernum are entirely separate worlds. They just shop at the same place. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| overclocking in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 29 2005 01:13
Profile
Tentacle monsters can be so condescending. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| what is your group make up? in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 29 2005 00:57
Profile
Well, I still have a few big fights left to go, but so far I've been very happy with two melee fighters, and missiles really only used for preliminary softening up or as an alternative to doing nothing for casters conserving spell points. I've had a few episodes of challenging group dynamics, but nothing hard to deal with. My two cents are: Don't try to fight in a compact bunch. Let the infantry do its job of closing with the enemy, even if they waste a round just getting there, while the supporting fire stays at extreme range. [ Tuesday, November 29, 2005 00:57: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Tell Me in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 28 2005 11:57
Profile
quote:Uh, you are here. Or you were. So it can be found right here. Where we are. Of course, I have practically no idea what this means in any objective sense. This forum is doubtless held as a pattern of electrons on some server machine, somewhere. Or perhaps on several. That would even be smart. Wherever it is, your own electronic presence has coincided with it -- however it is that your electronic presence, for its part, may actually work. A strange and indirect answer, but is it actually so different from a really serious answer to a question like "Where is my pencil"? Hmmm. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| what is your group make up? in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 28 2005 00:38
Profile
Hmmm, maybe it's just that I never played the previous Averna, but I've been doing fine with what seemed to me to be the obvious default party: a slith spearer, a human swordsman with a half-hearted sideline in archery, a pure human priest, and a nephil mage with decent tool use. I had to run, sometimes with a single surviving party member, from a couple of fights in the first half of the game; but since then, my team has pretty much been collectively the meanest so-and-so in the valley. I am just heading into what should be the second-last big fight. This boring, standard party seems to benefit, almost disappointingly well, from balance. I conserve spell energy by letting the fighters gradually chop things up whenever this seems safe to do, but I can go Hadoken at need. I'm starting out again with a couple of singleton campaigns, one with a Divinely Blessed warrior/priest, and the other with a nephil mage who will try to play like an Agent. So far the lone mage is totally storming the very beginning of the game, but I seriously wonder how viable he will be for the long haul. The warrior priest has a nice sort of mixture of skills, but I'm a bit worried how he'll do without some of the mage spells. I have only played on Normal difficulty. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Sci-Fi and fantasy authors... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, November 27 2005 12:06
Profile
Where does C.J. Cherryh stand? Apart from the fact that almost all her books consist of a young male human coping with powerful aliens represented by a mysterious older female. And that she has no idea how to end a story, except with a sudden burst of violence that could just as well have happened four hundred pages before. Somehow I remain impressed with her. Not sure why. Well, she pulled off adding a fourth book to a classic trilogy after a couple of decades, with the characters still the same people, and yet developing interestingly. That's pretty impressive. And she did this massive Merovingen Nights multi-author series, in which a dozen books apparently gave her enough space to work up to a sudden violent ending that actually made sense. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| ohmigod, Ohmigod, OHMIGOD!!! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, November 27 2005 11:57
Profile
The actual current logo is "AVERNUM IV" carved from time-expired cheese. Riibu's logo is the excellent idea of a stony, cavey background, with barely legible text of uninspired form superimposed. Some combination of the two would be better. No doubt someone could invent the ultimate A4 logo. Let's cure cancer first. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Number words in English in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 25 2005 10:21
Profile
I believe that when the ancient Romans ran into similar problems with their abacus networks, they would shake their heads and repeat, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Perhaps you can try this on your boss. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Sci-Fi and fantasy authors... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 24 2005 10:43
Profile
Hey, "Lord Foul's Bane" was a great title. Kind of in-your-face, but got the book off the shelves. But in general Donaldson always had a sort of risky way with names; he goes either for childlike simplicity or vaguely Hebraic gobbledegook, and so he's always close to silliness. Somehow, though, I never really got past the first Covenant trilogy. I finished the second one, but it lost me. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Tell Me in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 24 2005 00:16
Profile
Thanks for the unindabbled. The boldface is fine. Could the sentence end with a period, though? Sorry to be so fussy, but in an order like ours one may at any time have to perform intricate arcane rituals from which the slightest deviation would engender cosmic catastrophe. This tends to inculcate a punctiliousness that can extend to such trivia as FAQ punctuation. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Number words in English in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, November 23 2005 01:17
Profile
quote:Bah. It depends how big the car is, and whether you really need to be able to pass on a steep hill while going 200 km/h. For driving at normally attainable speeds, even on the Autobahn, it's surprising how little power is really needed. You can pay thousands more for extra oomph that you hardly ever use and never need. This is not worth it unless you are either (a) leaving a trail of oozed testosterone wherever you go, or (b) in denial about the fact that you are no longer (a). -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Tell Me in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 22 2005 14:28
Profile
We never spelled out what FAQ stood for, did we? It could be Fennel and Ambergris Quesadillas. Mmmm. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Number words in English in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 22 2005 10:58
Profile
I've never heard or read "milliard" in English, but the British convention is that a billion is a million million. The American billion is just a thousand million in British parlance. Hence there are no British billionaires. The difference in the meaning of billion is so great that actually it is generally easy to figure out which one is meant, once you realize that there are two possible conventions. Except in astronomy, where factors of 1000 are not so hard to miss. And the "and" thing -- this is silly. Especially on such a meaningless convention, common usage is the only genuine authority. Both are used. One definitely does not use the "and" with numbers below 100, except for the rhetorical effect of archaism. ("Four score and seven years ago"; abandoning the "ninety and nine" sheep to search for the one lost one; "when I was one and twenty"; "four and twenty blackbirds"-- and the latter two have the Germanic ordering as well.) So it might seem logical to continue the pattern with hundreds and thousands. But no English speaker refers to the "thousand one nights of Scheherezade"; they number a thousand and one. The seventy-six trombones were to be followed by a hundred and ten cornets, in the American musical. Disney animated the hundred and one Dalmatians. And so on. Omitting the "and" is possible, but sounds odd unless the word thus spoken is used in a technical context. A car might have one hundred seventy-five horsepower; but it might also have a hundred and seventy-five. Curiously, I think one could definitely say "one thousand and sixty", but not "one thousand and two hundred". The and seems to be included after hundreds and higher, but only if followed by something under a hundred. [ Tuesday, November 22, 2005 11:15: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Tell Me in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 22 2005 00:59
Profile
Should point out that that list is a compilation of old postings by many people, and not something VCH cooked up on the spur of the moment. For my part, I would like to amend the last word of response #2, so that the last line reads "dabbles in things better left unindabbled". That's right, I want "unINdabbled", because otherwise the "in" from "dabbles in" is missing, and ending a sentence with a preposition is, as Churchill emphasized, something up with which I will not put. I now find the German-style solution to this prepositional conundrum much more appealing. And balking at coining strange words, on this forum, would really be straining at gnats. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |