Randox

Hmm, I feel like I managed to seriously misread that post >.>

I agree with this. I could also go for an embedded interface that allows me to set my body clock. Had another of those people who forget where their car is while trying to make a turn, this time going left. She wasn't really paying attention to our side of the road, or she might have really noticed that everyone was moving halfway into the left lane to get around the nose of her car that was occupying a nice 2 feet of the right lane we were trying to use. Insect life in general. I could go for the blue rinse bombs from Artemis fowl, or at least materials that houses could be built out of that would kill rodents and insects but not harm humans. The building version of the special paints used on boats that are toxic to prevent things like muscles from growing on them, or for the hippies (and law abiding citizens), ablative paint that flakes off when stuff grows on it.

I thought Airsoft was always full face protection. Actually, I thought it was also body armour, since they don't break on impact like paint. That's actually not a lot faster than a lot of my outdoor play, I think because bare skin hits at really close range are a problem if you go any faster. It's common here that if you get behind someone at really close range, you give them the option to surrender and opt out of being shot. Trying to shoot someone who has given you this option is really bad form, and no one will let you on their team if you do that. Gear has always been an iffy one for me, mostly because I'm always skeptical the paint will actually come out. My 'gear' is pretty much camo pants and shirt that I picked up for not too much for paintball. The pistol has a holser of it's own, and the pants have pockets for ammo and stuff. Not the most ideal setup, but it's functional enough for casual play.

I've not been in NIS for a while, but I remember one of the major issues in early Alpha for many, myself included, was that you couldn't make it transparent. I think they did at some point add tranparancy sliders to pretty much everything, but as I said, I'm not actively in it right now (because I don't have the time to keep redoing JAG and removing the old ones).

I do so hate to ruin peoples fun, but it would be appreciated if the thread got back on track, and everyone continued to vent their silly in forum games.

This morning I stubbed my toe hard enough that it started bleeding, which is new. Hope this doesn't cause the same injury I got to my other toe last summer (which I suspect was from something being dropped on it), but since the last time I stubbed a toe this hard was a few years ago, I'm going to assume it will be fine. Not the best timing though, sicnce I am spending the next couple days on deck maintenance, and this is not making walking any easier for me. Also, whatever it is that makes parts of my skin itch is back. I once again have had to put a tensor bandage over my right ankle in the evening to put up a barrier to scratching through my skin, and protect the places where I have already done this. Might try the aloe gel with antiseptic in it tonight, if all the skin is back. Its not super potent, but it does remove enough feeling in the skin to give you relief from sun burns for a while, so maybe it will work on itching too, without resorting to anything more potent.

There is a very particular type of driver that annoys me. See, it's illegal to pull into an intersection if you aren't able to leave, as in, you can't pull into an intersection until there is space for your car in the target lane. During rush hour, you get green lights in certain places where about half the time, cars still can't move because they would be blocking the intersection until space was made by the next green light down. Some people making right turns take this as an invitation to make their turn on a red, even if the lights are set up so that their lane is actually getting a little over half the available spaces from the green light alone. I think a suitable ideal punishment. if it were possible, would be for their cars to park themselves out of the way, and then become disabled for half an hour or so, until rush hour has cleared a bit and their childlike entitlement is no longer an obstacle to other people getting home, or a motivator for everyone else to drive really aggressively to avoid being cut off. Same goes to people who, faced with a line of cars blocking their right turn onto a main road, continually inch out into traffic until vehicles actually have to start veering to one side of their lane to avoid a collision. Contrary to the belief of some people, causing a traffic accident does not make traffic better, or cause you to arrive at your destination any sooner (unless you consider the scene of the accident the new destination, in which case it's fantastic). And just for good measure, people who risk being rear ended to pull out in front of you, and then drive 10 below the speed limit. Why was it so important that you be in front of, and not behind, me again?

Wow, this really does look like facebook some days :lol: Dreary day here, not much going on. No more 'God's Camera Flash' lightning so far. Might get some reading done. Might not. Never know how this will go.

This is one I want to try. I've seen Zemalf play it on youtube, and it looks like it has a lovely combat system, as well as a nice economic simulator side to it. I just...need the time.

The problem I have always had with the co-habitation theory is that, even if you end up not liking them, it doesn't matter. Live with someone for a couple years, and your finances are almost certainly going to be entangled. Perhaps you share rent, or have even bought a car or a house together. Who owns what possessions, have you been using each others money. Are there things in your life with both names attached to them. At this point, a separation is a divorce in everything but name anyway, because the situation is pretty much the same. It's a logistical nightmare, and depending on the couples and how entangled things have gotten, your still going to end up with fighting and lawyers and judges sorting this stuff out. Faced with this reality, I imagine a lot of people will do their best to ignore the situation, to just get married and try to stick this out, make it work. You'll find a lot of people moving to getting married, when deep down one or both know that this isn't going to work, but they are afraid of acknowledging it because they don't want to go through the separation. They are stuck. Down the line, things come to the point where you cant ignore it anymore, and you get a divorce. Probably a more ideal situation, though more expensive, is two co-habbitate while still maintaining full financial independence. Essentially, someone would be living in the others residence (or both moving back and fourth), while each pays for their share of things like food, but each person maintains the burden of their own residence, and things like cars as well (this also means a new TV say, would be paid entirely by whoever owns the house the TV is in). The idea here would be that, if things aren't working out, there is no issue with each person making that transition back to their own separate lives. The places to live are still there and maintained, and no ones finances relied or counted on money from the other party. The problem is, that if you are doing this for a couple years, it's going to stop making sense about 18 months before you hit that point, and if things are going well at first, you'll want to stop wasting money and combined your lives for cost savings. That's why this doesn't happen very much. The downsides I can immediately see is that, as opposed to say never co-habbitating prior to marriage, that option to separate is still there and very easy. I would expect some number of fights that might otherwise be worked through without issue to end in separation, as well as people who separate and then get back together, who once married and can't do this, end up in divorce because that option to move out for a month stopped existing, and they can't work through it without that separation period.

So first up, I think driving home today was the closest I have ever been to a lightning strike. Hard to say, since I can't say I even really saw it. It was more like a gigantic camera flash, and it took the better part of a second to have my entire field of vision back. The station I was listening too was the apparent target (or really close to it), allowing me to hear the delay on a live broadcast (given that they were closer, and would have heard it first, delay is maybe 3-4 seconds), and it also took down a major intersection and a couple others (fortunately getting to that major intersection seconds later, I got through before traffic became super bad. Kind of cool, but I'm also very glad that no one hit the brakes during that brief time when I couldn't see the road. On another note, I am starting to wonder just where the person who thought up daylight savings actually lived. It doesn't make any sense near the equator, since the days are pretty much the same 12 hour span all year. No adjustments would be needed. It also makes absolutely no sense as far north as I live (which is roughly level with the southern edge of Canada, not like I'm in the arctic circle) where our days go from about 8 to 16 hours long during the year. On the shortest day, the sun comes up at maybe 9:30am. It will set between 4 and 4:30 pm. In the summer, when we have daylight savings, the sun rises at 5:30am (adjusted time, ADT) and sets at about 9:30pm ADT (it's a bit later, but you would have a lot of trouble seeing by about 10).If we didn't adjust, much of the summer would end up being around 6:30am to 10:30pm, which I would think is much better. I guess my biggest qualm is that if the idea is to reduce power consumption from people turning on the lights, your attacking the wrong part of the day. It doesn't light up enough here in the morning (before about 7) even with DST to prevent that, since many people like a bright cheery house when they are waking up (also, all the people who shower in the morning who don't have a skylight in the bathroom). On the other hand, if you just left it alone, people would need the lights for less time before they went to sleep I would think. Not that DST isn't already stupid, it's just that extra layer of 'wait, why do we do this again?'. Other than that, the weekend was so nice (before the states sent us their terrible weather just in time for Monday, so uh, thanks for that) that people were out on the lake and whatnot. Some people swimming, a number of boats out. Got sunburnt, though I seem to be healing at a nice pace. Apparently I can tan pretty much to maximum in under a day, and the second day gave me a chance to even some things out (like the one hand from wearing a glove to protect it from the propane torch I was using). This is nice, I think I usually start with worse burns that take longer to fade. Oh, and a new law we have or are getting (not clear on this). On the up side, you can only be charged up to a point for exceeding data plan caps (on phones) so now the providers are motivated to actually cut you off rather than do a Mr. Burns while you rack up hundreds of dollars on your monthly bill. This is awesome. Then we go and ruin it by allowing people to get out of any phone contract after 2 years without penalty. Essentially, they've probably made it impossible to get a proper 3 year contract, since you would still now be required to pay for the phone in 2 years in case you leave. Since like most of Canada, I pay for at least most of my phone through a 3 year contract, I'm not pleased. This makes me wonder if they really grasp the concept of a contract, and why that law essentially now invalidates them at the 2 year mark, turning you into a monthly customer (and that extra phone money they don't need will instead become the risky customer charge you get if you go monthly).

Oh, aren't all our lives insignificant in the big picture? Seriously, watch this video. I find it to be oddly optimistic in a way. If nothing else, it's incredibly cool to think about.

The knee sounds fun. I do hope this doesn't mean you have to swear off showers though :wink: @RPG, I know a bit of how you feel. Went to an open casket for a co-worker who died...was not really prepared for that. It has been a mercifully long time since I attended a funeral, and I hope that streak continues for a few more years at least. @Maddy, certainly unfortunate timing. Can definitely sympathise with the target-less anger sort of deal. Hope your Mom is better soon and you make it through the exams alright, you put up with enough shit I think, don't need any more. In more local news, this is why I wanted a thermometer. It was a reasonably warm day today I suppose, maybe low 20's. My room, more than four hours after the sun has set, is 29.9C, and I still have a freaking puff on my bed for reasons that I'm pretty sure don't exist (quite frankly, at 29C all I really need is the bottom sheet, and my bed has been made this way on occasion in the past). At least I'll finally be able to put a number to this once the days start hitting the high 20's (when this happens, I pray for a nice breeze because that's the only thing that prevents my room from turning into an oven).

At the risk of appearing to be on a bandwagon, I only like the first of Nolans Batmans. I have seen that one a few times. I have seen the second one once, and while enjoyable, the destruction of the bat mobile is unforgiveable, and I am selective about my over the top action (literally every part of that movie). As a point to both inception and the batman films, Nolan actually seems to really dislike CGI. Things like all the fruit being launched or the rotating gravity in inception aren't CGI, that's all real (walking around with the fruit hanging in midair is two separate takes combined). Off the top of my head, the semi trailer going over itself in the second batman was done for real as well, among other things. There is quite a bit that gets done that people credit to CGI (from many directors) that actually isn't. The point about charecters is interesting. Frankly, I don't like batman because I hate the self doubt story arc (I skip scenes when I rewatch Iron Man 2 to cut a lot of that out).\ For the newest Star Trek, the consensus seems to be pretty clear, which is that the trailer was pretty much spot on. Generic (and good) action film that takes place in the star trek universe for some reason. I...don't think I want to see that. I've pretty much managed to forget the last one (it was alright, no need to see it again), and I'm pretty much happy to leave it at that. Also, I like all four of Generations, Insurrection, Nemesis, and First Contact Kaida :P While not really a movie, started watching the fourth season of Community (and by start, I mean the first 8 episodes because I have the self control of a five year old). Still liking it.

I've never looked at mods for the fallout series. I think with Skyrim, the workshop just made it too easy for me (highlighted by the fact that I ignore the nexus entirely because spending hours on my mods doesn't mean I can't be lazy). I usually have to play a game for a while before the idea that there might even be mods really comes to me, so I never reach that point for many games. For Skyrim I have kept it entirely graphical, and sadly unofficially patched, because Bethesda decided that they didn't need to do their job, and never bothered to finish patching any version of their game. The only other game I have really extensivly modified is I think Star Trek Armada, with the incredible Star Trek vs Star Wars Mod where you can play as the Federation, Klingons, Rebels, or Galactic Empire (you can't build the death star as I recall, but the GE can build Super Star Destroyers). The mod comes with like 20x the number of ships for each team, and each one had 1000% weapons attached. It was pretty spectacular. GTA IV as well I suppose. I have an extra game mode (play as police) attached at the moment. Usually though, I just leave games alone.

Yeah. It's nine years of clean driving to get the premiums to drop. Any sort of problems on your record will reset that countdown, and likely raise your premiums so that it becomes years until you go back to paying what you used to. Car insurance is not cheap. I just never realized it was that much, so just as well the deal to get the car fell through.

I am trying to get back into Skyrim, but I seem to have some sort of procrastination block. When I last played, I had just gotten Dragonborn. I think my issue is that I probably need to once again go through my mods, and weed out the stuff I don't really want and get better versions of stuff I have, though I think I already did this (was why I waited to get Dragonborn, needed the mods to all update before I went through the task of rebuilding my list) so I should be able to just jump in. Depending on what state I left it in, I also need to modify some of the ini files again because I was tinkering with the graphical options the game doesn't show you. For anyone interested, visit this site, it allows you to select the options and just copy the generated text rather than editing the files by hand. It allows for massively fine control over the game, and even setting it to be far more awesome than the game allows you to do though it's manu, as well as some options that just don't exist like the number of HAVOK threads the game uses (up to 12, if you have a dodeca core processor for some reason. I believe it's generaly advised to not go above your number of cores less one, so 3 for a quad, 5 for a hex and so on), and allowing it to use more memory and so on. Just remember you can't use the in game option screen if you do this, you have to change everything by editing the ini files. Opening the option screen will immediatly overwrite them to be normal, eliminating any special additions you made, like multiple HAVOK threads or setting the graphics all the way up to [bLEEP] YEAH!. You can spend many many hours getting your mods, and tuning the game. It's kind of ridiculous, but also kind of cool.

Nah. When I went to start it, I tried to hit the clutch like 3 times before I remembered I didn't have one. I then tried to clutch when I came to my first stop sign to avoid stalling. I also tried to shift at some point, I think into fourth from what my brain figured was first, since I tried to quickly pull it back (towards what would be second), right, then back again. there was some confusion about it not moving (and also being located in the wrong spot). Still, better than thinking I was in second, since like most cars pushing is enough to move into neutral (safety feature on ice and snow). I'm also not getting a car afterall, which is just as well because it would have been valuable enough to want to insure the car itself, which combined with liability insurance was going to cost me nearly the full value of the car by the end of the year. The insurance company suggested that I might want to stick to driving things so cheap that I only carry liability insurance until my 9 years are up, and they stop robbing me. This is why you get your licanse ASAP. I was a few months late getting mine (because I put my birth certificate through the wash) which is bad enough. I feel very sorry for the people I know who are my age and still don't have a proper license.

I often do this when government departments and public officials do something boneheaded. Given how often that seems to happen, I wonder if we should consider making it our national anthem. :lol: I like this. If we are going to keep embarrassing ourselves, we might as well have a good laugh about it and embrace it. Have a different vehicle this week, the SUV. Been a while since I drove auto, takes some getting used to. On the up side, it eats speed bumps for breakfast. Also, it seems that some random person decided my drive way was a parking lot, but they are gone now, and it seems they managed to not hit me on the way out, which was nice of them. Nice of me to decide I wouldn't pursue having them towed unless they were still here when I got up. Mostly, I just didn't want to have a debate with strangers about the merits of parking on my land, or going through the exhaustive process of finding out if it could belong to anyone I know who just decided they didn't need to tell me. I have a car so rarely I wonder if they haven't seen my car there recently and thought it was also a random person, and that I was just allowing people to park there.

Phone numbers, facebook account details, fears, and allergies are all pretty common stuff for people to share with their significant other I think, along with things like political and religious affiliation, since this is generally important information to have when trying to talk to each other, deciding where to go on a date, how to approach certain subjects, and implications on any future life together. Just seems like good information to have to me. I don't run through it like a checklist, though I'll volunteer some of the relevant information because the sooner the better, it's just stuff I normally want to know about before going to certain places or bringing up certain topics. Also, sharing personal information is a time honored method of trust building.

In lieu of no response, I suppose I'll keep my follow up as short as I can (I'm going to write a book). Being in any staff position on this site is a serious time commitment. Also, keeping our work honest is the only way to honor all the time, effort, and passion that has gone into making this site what it is. If we wanted to bully people, there are easier ways to do that then taking on what is essentially a part time job (minus the part where you get paid), and without destroying the legacy of everyone that came before us. Being more transparent, as we see it, means that we would open ourselves up to privacy issues, and having our rulings governed by the court of public opinion, rather than the actual rules and guidelines we operate under. By giving the warnings in a one on one situation, we create the best possible environment to reasonably discuss any questions or concerns. Sometimes people don't understand how they broke the rules. Sometimes we misinterpret what was said and give a warning or ban in error. We need an environment where people can be calm and civil to work all this out, which means not having random by standers chip in with their opinions. Equally as important, the court of public opinion is extremely unfair. Either we would be at the mercy of the whims of whoever could shout the loudest, or we lose any ability to be flexible, to deal with circumstances (such as trolls) or unforeseen situations. We certainly do limit our own flexibility, to ensure that we are being fair, and can't push things too far, but at the same time we keep a little bit of wiggle room. There is already enough paper work that goes into giving someone a warning without needing to add pages long justifications for any deviation from the Standard Operating Procedure. The SOP exists to keep us in line, and prevent power abuse and limit any unfairness, but at the same time it is not a ridged set of rules. The ideal here really is that for the people who follow the rules, our efforts are entirely invisible. They know we exist because we have public ranks identifying us, but it's not something we want our users to need to be concerned with if they don't have to be (so unless they break the rules). Anyway, that's about as sweet as I can make it. As promised, here is the questionnaire as well that was done a while back if anyone here is interested. Send it to myself or Tripsis. While I wouldn't take this as a blank check to break the rules in your response (so, it would be helpful if you didn't include lude pictures or a string of racial epithets), we have no interest in taking retribution against people who don't agree with us. This is how we learn and improve. [hide] Copied from this thread: [/hide]

So, that's three Metro games now? I have the first one, and I know about Rangers. Didn't know about Last Light. I assume there are others I also don't know about then, and I now understand why they gave the first one away for free. That's got to be pretty weird having that many people from your graduating class die. Not to happy about the news about CSIS being spectacularly, comically, incompetent at their job when it comes to telling people about what they knokw. What they did is pretty embarrassing. It's bad enough that the FBI had to tell us we had a leak, we didn't need to compound it by promptly conducing a full investigation and then sitting on it, until the FBI got so frustrated that they just went to the RCMP instead. It seems we also managed to nix the idea of just finding an excuse to get our mole across the American border so the FBI could just do it themselves (thus saving the RCMP months of their own investigation). I have to imagine the entire situation occurring to a loop of the Benny Hill theme song.

I'm really sorry that I am leading with this, but I think it's important if you want a an open discussion about our policy that there have to be some ground rules. The first one is that this kind of line, stating that your post is not breaking the rules and hiding it just means we don't like criticism, is hostile and totally not conducive to having any kind of discussion on the matter. I am perfectly happy to discuss the issue; I believe it's important that people do know where we are coming from, how we operate, and see if there are changes we need to make. I can't do this if you are going to attempt to tie my hands, because you will force me onto the defensive all the time, and I'd rather not waste both our time on that particular back and fourth. For my part, I will also do my best to not put anyone on the spot, on the defensive, and I will do my best to take everything that I reasonably can as constructive criticism (provided that it is in fact constructive) and not take things personally, going on the defensive when I don't need to. I hope this is agreeable and fair. My second point to lead off with is also something that I know people just love to hear. The reason we do not allow public discussion of moderator actions is because the matter is not open for public debate. Now, I am happy to discuss that policy if people are willing to engage in reasonable conversation over the matter. The current reasoning is that it serves no purpose, since ultimately the decision is the sole responsibility of the moderation team, and getting people riled up about the warnings only does harm. Opening it up to public debate hinders our ability to maintain consistency (moderators are selected in part for their ability to at the very least recognize when they can't make a fair judgement, and can hand it off to someone who can. The court of public opinion is one of emotions, not logic or policy), and allowing open discussion means having all our rulings second guessed all the time, which means we might as well not make rulings ourselves at all. On the flip side, I actually wrote a while ago about how I don't like operating as a closed box. It opens the door for us to be able to enforce the rules at a whim, and I've spent many hours since I started moderating for this site in particular wondering if there was a way we could be more open about what we do without compromising peoples privacy or inviting attacks from trolls and anti-rules users who would twist our words in an attempt to get people riled up over nothing but imaginary injustices. A while ago I actually created a poll for exactly this reason (which I believe perhaps one person who posts in OT responded to, and none from Tavern). I was specifically looking for suggestions to increase our transparency, which I did not get, though I got interesting feedback in other areas, since it was suggested I ask more than one question. I'll post it here if anyone is interested, though given the time, I am not doing it tonight, and I will not be back probably until late Tuesday. I am also, for those interested, working on the concept for one or two more articles as late follow up to the one I wrote a while back. I had intended to write more, but my time and public subject matter are both limited, and my urge to write only comes when it wants to. I am not around tomorrow at all so far as I know, and I am unsure when I will be around on Tuesday, so I'll have to resume this then. In an effort to better convey my position while actually getting sleep (and also considering that I am more pleasant to deal with, and I write better, during the day), I am going to post that article here, because I suspect that people who don't venture into General probably also do not read the times. This was very much written from the heart, and I still feel this way. The original can be found here, and quoted for your convenience: So yeah, I'll be back sometime late Tuesday or early Wednesday, and I'll try to at least read some of whatever gets posted after this, before then. I'm also expecting that this will get split off, not garuntees though, but I know the green guys know how I feel about my using mod tools after midnight. Cheers.

The nice thing I suppose is that many of us on the thread who will chip in with advice are speaking from our own experiences. We all have our moments when we are petty or what have you, none of us are really in a position to judge. If you should stop talking to her is really a decision best made by you, if you are capable of being honest with yourself. My question you would be, why are you over her? The key here would be to make sure you are not just creating apathy our of anger or frustration, because that's not something you can or want to sustain long term. To me, it sounds like perhaps the last week or two has put you through some perspectives (drug fueled or not) that have forced you to look at things in a different light, and now that you are back to normal, some of that has carried over. Just take some minutes to do some soul searching, make sure that's really what it is. Though this obviously varies by person, I would take being attracted to another person (as a potential lover, not just acknowledging that she is attractive to you) as a good sign. In my experience, many people who become obsessed with someone do so at the expense of their attraction to pretty much anyone else, so being able to do that generally bodes well.

Being perfectly honest, when you described the party as 'going to an island to paint on canvas', the immediate assumption is that everyone will be high, and someone probably has Shrooms. Not sure how you didn't catch that, especially if your already in circles where you smoke pot :P Sounds like you had fun, though I imagine the host was in a hole the next morning (hopefully only figuratively). Tonight I was putting garbage outside, and as I moved to go back in, what I assumed was a neighbors cat got startled and skittered backwards a bit. My first thought was that it was hunting rats, which would potentially put me a little closer to it's potential prey than I am entirely comfortable with. Then it moved into the porch light and I noticed it was in fact a raccoon, my first sighting of one on our property ever. We just kind of starred at each other for a few seconds while I tried to decide what to do. I settled on continuing with the original plan of heading to my backdoor, and the raccoon decided to go hide behind the back deck, peering up at me over the edge from around a corner (I didn't think to take a picture, though I'm not sure firing a camera flash at it would rank among my best decisions anyway). I do have to admit, they are really adorable. That said, I think I prefer to have rabbits as my adorable wild creature of choice in my backyard. I'll still take the raccoon over deer though.