Randox

My turn to dig this up before it gets to old... I don't think I've talked about this kind of dream much before, since I have only had a small handful of them. These are the dreams where when you wake up, you have trouble sorting out reality and fiction. I had a dream a couple nights ago that has been bugging me, even though I now know that it was a total work of fiction. When I first woke up, I knew that the events had been a dream, but I was not able to tell if the dream had been a re-enactment of an old memory, if it was something totally made up, and I wasn't able to figure it out for a little while until I finished waking up and had a properly functioning conscious mind to work with again. I wonder if I rarely have this problem because my dreams are so rarely even plausible. It's not hard to figure out that the dream where I was flying, or on the mountain that doesn't exist, or defied the laws of physics in some other way probably doesn't have much basis in reality. The other defining characteristic is duration. Memories from the 'real' dreams seem to be very very short. Perhaps a second, maybe two at most, where a real memory for me would be several seconds long.

Pretty much what Tyler said. While my sampling is admittedly limited to only a handful of denominations, that would be a very atypical experience as far as I know. I can't think of any major denominations that would have demon vanquishing or healing as part of the service. I've had a super sleepy day, and spent most of it watching TV, or trying to sleep while listening to it. Good thing I organized my movie and TV shows (so that they are in separate lists now) :lol:

My understanding has always been that Zaros was a cut above the other gods, in a tier of his own between saradomin, armadyl, bados, and zamorak, but bellow the elder gods. This is evidenced by the combined forces/power of saradomin, armadyl and I think bandos as well only being able to force Zaros into a stale mate. Zamorak is still scared silly of Zaros, so its safe to assume that without the staff zaros can probably beat him up without a lot of trouble. Guthix probably shares the tier with Zaros, and might be even more powerful (hard to say because the two have never been in conflict with each other), since Guthix was able to bring an end to the god wars without even raising an army (granted, he did it by threatening to just destroy the world, and might not have the actual power to take the other gods on directly).

Shouldn't you be hunting your quarry?

I have the creation kit. I even have a tomb that I will never finish that I partially built toying around with it. It's all a matter of time and effort though, and to do a good job of it is a lot of both. I am planning on going through the tutorials again on the weekend though.

So this morning I discovered that my phones alarm is still in vibrate mode, which was fine when I was waking up at 9:30 in the morning, but today that's when my classes start, when means I wanted to wake up about 90 minutes earlier. On the plus side, my alarm is pretty persistent, and buzzed at me for the 20 minutes it took to get me up, and I promptly set it to make sound in the future. So that still worked out pretty well, but I am just not used to being this awake this early (you know, a normal human schedule), and now I feel like the walking dead (but I got just enough sleep to not look the part). There might be a nap in my future, but I try to resist or I'll stay up too late.

That might be just as well, otherwise I might actually grow a nirnroot garden, and it might actually be loud and annoying. There will probably be a mod for that though. But I want a mod that will let me build a 3 story castle with a tower, because at least one of my characters is going to become a neighbor from hell. Another mod I want to look into if I don't think it will cause to many problems is one that eliminates the need to load cities when you enter them (so you can just walk through the gate, rather than beaming through it). Apparently one of the previous games was like that, and I think that would really help immersion. Unfortunately, because I know how the map was built, and I am pretty sure I grasp how all the mods that make cities prettier work, such a mod would almost certainly ruin most of them (towns like river wood would be fine because they are part of the world area anyway).

Of course we're not at your every whim, but your domestic and foreign policies both impact us, mostly through trade. As it relates to war, if you guys go to war, domestic spending and funding shifts, which causes shifts in the cross border trade. If someone goes to war with you, that impacts us more. The reverse is also true. A different consideration I have also skipped over through is the exchange rate, which is also very important for us. With our economy hit more softly, and recovering faster, we are once again stuck with a dollar at or above par with the USD, which is bad for our trade as a net exporter, and for our tourism industry (great time to go visit you guys though). Unfortunately, I am not familiar enough with the numbers (or able enough with that scale of math right now) to determine which factor (trade restrictions or exchange rate) will trump the other, or even which of your presidents will do the most to get you guys back on your feet, since I am not clairvoyant. If I had to guess, based on fiscal policy in regards to the tax structure, Obama seems more likely to get the masses spending more sooner, which is sort of key. Or maybe you guys have hit the point where giving the masses more money will only cause people to horde the extra out of fear, and giving more money to the wealthy is the better deal because at least they will spend. And free trade isn't just us robbing you blind, since we do a fair bit of import from you as well, which gets more money into certain areas of the economy, so maybe a looser fiscal policy will help. Your at the advantage right now on the exchange rate, since our prices get more competitive in your country the less our dollar as worth. If I lived there, I would probably be more concerned with some of the environmental and human rights issues. But I don't, so I care a lot more about your fiscal policy. Your not a totalitarian state, you can elect whoever you want. I'm just saying that historically, the republicans are better for Canada in terms of our own economic gains.

And I shall have the largest Nirnroot Garden in all the land, an lo, it will piss off all my neighbors with its great sound. I acutally have found a reason why it will be worth buying this on PC, even though there are free mods that duplicate it. People don't make mods for mods, but they do make mods for DLC, so I am expecting the modding community to take everything Bethesda didn't bother with, and fix it, becuase they will have a functional house building system to work on top of, which frees you up overhaul the choices and what not, so I can't wait to see what people do with this. I am hoping I will be able to make a castle some day. It's also possible that the scripts the DLC adds might find other uses that help with other kinds of mods. I don't know, I'm still trying to put my dungeon together (and if no one can let me build my own house, I'll plop one down on the map someday and call it mine because thbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt).

So I've had a bit of a switch of sides. While according to my political stance I still feel that Obama is the best bet for Americans given the two choices, I don't live in the USA. I live in Canada, and the Republicans have historically been better for us, because of their free trade policies (as opposed to the protectionist policies of the Democrats). Romney and whoever his potential VP is don't hit me as likely to start a nuclear war, or drag us into anything else (of course, if the Canadian government signed up for another war right now that party could expect to not be elected to power again for at least 40 years when all the angry people are dead), which is a refreshing change from the last election. So yeah, go Romney. Let us flourish.

There is a mod that does much the same thing (does some things better, like more choice in the internal decoration style, but can only be built in one location), though I think I might hold out for this on the PC because apparently I am a sucked for $5 dollar content (even an economics students brain has a tenuous grasp of the concept of money at the best of times). Dawnstar is really bugging me right now. On the one hand I want it. On the other hand, every single thing I have read about it indicates that it is not worth its price tag, not even close (from reviews, I would peg it as comparable to one of those $7 expansions they did for Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3). Also, I prefer a good character when possible, though I am hearing that being a vampire lord is actually a pretty huge pain in the but since it disables most of the game while your in that form (including picking things up), and I don't want to overpay for content that seems to have been done the lazy way. Also, I went back to my original charecter whom I have pretty much been duplicating, minus a different quest order and some quests my original (well second char, my first was a mage). I stopped using my main melee fighter after getting that annoying bug at the end of completing the civil war quest line. Something about an NPC following me everyplace. Anyway, all the patches since then and now seem to have fixed that, which means I might go back to my original fighter for now, and not use my second fighter again until hearthfire because why not. I think I might also need to start working on my mage again, or start over with magic, and this time awknowledge that there are other spells than the ones in destruction, and they really would help me out (like extra allies and magical armour so that I'm not relying on my uber protective cloth robe), and I need to do up a ranger as well. Though a ranger will probably end up as a light armour ranger/theif/warrior hybrid, because enemies can run at me. Still, it would be nice to use a different set of armour, glass sort of looks neat.

I think its just ingrained in me to never store passwords on my hard drive. If I keep a second copy, it will be on a flash drive, not my hard disk (flash drives having the advantage of being disconected, capable to surviving the washing machine, and lasting longer). Still, if these are going to be permanent, I would like to be able to regenerate my answers form scratch if I have to. A cipher where neither the plain text or key are known presents an almost infinite number of possible answers I might have typed in (actually, knowing one or the other doesn't really help you, though the plain text would give you length).

Hanna. It actually sort of reminded me of the bourne identity (except replace an amnesic bourne with a 16 year old raised by an ex CIA operative in the wilderness of norther Finland, raised to kill a specific person person).

I'd like to take a minute to hope really hard they just because they are now using the beta charecter models in the live game, does not mean they are done modifying them, because this: Is creepy as all get out. It's prortioned very poorly in multiple places, and that expression clearly says "I am devouring your soul!" If they keep that model, I'm either going to have to use a male avatar (assuming its less creepy), or forever wear a helmet that hides my face. I can handle the small head and gorilla body, but that face is going to give me nightmares. I would also like to express my displeasure with screenshot right now, which seems to be determined to make that face blurry. It's a lot more disconcerting when you see it in game.

It will do the job of protecting your account if your keylogged, or phished well enough (or at lest it will 10 times, until all the possible combinations of questions are used). Not needing a new IP as a bug is good, that reduces how often you need to use it ('never' being ideal). And I think I know how to generate questions that I will be able to remember, yet wont be painfully obvious to anyone who knows me. I'll use a cipher.

Should have posted yesterday, knew it would be an overhaul to their existing system, not what the rest of the world is doing (you can tell because they gave it a cute name). I am a bit leery of this system though. On the face it's pretty good, especially if your IP is slow to change. Since you are only asked for the questions when using a new device or IP, a keylogger would have to wait until this happens, or be waiting on that new device for you. This should give your AV ample time to figure out things aren't on the up and up, and tell you what's going on (and hopefully deal with it). Needless to say, you should ideallly be running full scans with an up to date (and appropriate) program every time you are going to need to enter those questions. My issue is the security gained by never being able to change the answers. The best way to use these questions is as 5 additional (very high quality) passwords, that should be total gibberish. Since you will hopefully almost never be using any of them, you will have to record them someplace, or use something painfully obvious so that you will actually be able to remember them (if you can remember a password that you never use, it means that password is a piece of garbage and the gods of computer security should strike you down where you stand). For me, this would be my blackberry which can store passwords as encrypted files, that in turn need their own password to decrypt so that they can be viewed. But then I would be relying on my phone to be a perfect device that will never break (and because I don't want all of my eggs in one basket, I keep my RS pass only in my head). But that puts me one hardware fault, or one wet phone, from having a very limited period of time left to use my account. I'll have to think about this.

Out of curiosity, what sort of variables affect your long term relationship that you have no control over? I'd like to see what you are talking about here specifically.

One more day before classes start. And my schedule looked a lot more awesome before I cleared up all the schedule conflicts for my tutorials. Tuesday isn't quite as free as it used to be, and Wedensday just sucks. But Tuesday and Thursday are still pretty light, which is nice.

You people have such interesting discussions. Just some random mussings, since Noxx seems to be doing okay right now... I am thinking that even though our life is far more complex than our brains really seem to be built to handle (there are a whole list of logical fallacies that would be a lot less common if we had the right hardware), we didn't get here by being clueless. There are certain things we can figure out all on our own, and this includes pretty much everything about procreation, because anyone who got it wrong didn't pass on their material. So while our crazy social system can complicate and confuse us, there is still something to be said for doing what feels right. Your genetic code has been doing this for thousands of years, and you have a thinking brain that can take your base urges and act on them within the social constraints of your culture. Monogamy is too prevalent to be a fluke. While our life spans might have been a lot shorter when the social convention began, if it were not a natural course, it would not dominate the world like it does. My point being, your body probably has the same goal that you do (there are of course exceptions, which is why we have concepts for multiple sexual orientations and relationship arrangements). Part of this is that we have the neediest and most useless offspring on the planet by a long shot, which means we were never able to get away with one parent (and its still a pretty tricky prospect today). And a different line of thought. I talked about it before as it related to being happy. We are programmed to seek more. If our life is perfect, and there is nothing else we need, rather than sink into happy contentment we become stressed and frustrated. We got to where we we're by constantly seeking out new and better things, and this will of course apply to relationships for at least some people as well. The ones that endure are probably the ones that never stagnate, and where the people in them are constantly seeking out new goals. Their lives don't stagnate either, and thus their bodies have less time to get bored and content and want to move on to better things. The death of the monogamous relationship is the rut, or the pattern of hum drum life. The death of the relationship is boredom, but only because the entire life is boring. If you can keep your own life exciting, as well as your partnered life, there is no reason for your body to become unhappy with the arrangement.

As a little thought, if you are trying to spend less on education, one of the easiest ways to save money is put as much vacation into whatever part of the year would have you using the AC, so that you run it as little as possible. Your not in Nunavut or northern Russia, so if you have a school with an AC system, that AC is costing more than the heating is (also, you can't not heat the school because the plumbing will freeze). Or you could do what they apparently do in Salt Lake City, and just not have AC and send your students back to school in mid August, because why not.

The order I have them in seems to be working fine, though I suspect one of them is responisble for my bed in Breezehome being owned, and my not being able to sleep in it. I can live with that though. Oddly enough, the more blood and dripping armour are the ones that I am really noticing. Not getting wet in the rain or after swimming actually did bother me, and the extra blood from fighting seems to be a tad bit more realistic, so that fights are more like this now:

As part of my getting back into Skyrim, I have gone looking for even more graphical mods. I already have times in the game where I am looking around, and the game world is so beutiful that I just stop and gaze around in wonder. My goal is to have even more of those moments. Staying away from realistic lighting mods though. I have a couple (one for outside and one for inside), and beautiful as they may be, I don't wish to be wishing for a floodlight for the rest of the game, so I keep them turned off in the interest of being able to see where I am going. Of course, now I have packs that are duplicating each other, so I'll have to sort out the load order, or pick which ones I want to keep. I got a whole new set of detailed cities, and I think I'll run all of those, but have the new ones load last, since they were developed later and seem to be more comprehensive. It still amazes me the effort people (especially Jay, who seems to be the author of like 70% of the mods I am using) put into this kind of thing. The vanilla world is pretty stunning in its own right, Bethesda did a pretty good job I think. But these people see something they don't like and just BAM! Gorgeous world. I am not enjoying the process of getting my new addons though, since steam has no progress bar for this. So I just sort of have to let my computer sit and not use steam and hope its downloading stuff (though I guess I could look at my network usage to see if I am downloading or idle, and look at that, download usage at nearly a Mb/s, so I guess I am still downloading).

Opps, I think I misinterpreted the post where you quoted me. We seem to be on the same page :D

Just for the record, my last post was not actually an endorsement to go out and be a prick. Just realize that if you are going to respect other people, you will be repaid in bullshit in the short term. Also, this is a good learning experience. While I think being a nice person is fantastic, and I only wish more people were nicer, people will take advantage of your disposition whether they know they are doing it or not. As it applies to you Nox, a lot of people would be a lot less patient and understanding, and even without thinking about it would put pressure on her to make up her mind, and would push her to piss or get off pot. You are enabling her indecision, so if you can, you might want to turn up the impatience a couple notches to see if you can get a decision.

Maybe I am old school, but I would not consider online play to be social in the same way that sitting in front of the TV with a group of friends is social. Voice chat is great and all, but there is still no substitution for physical interaction in my eye. This however becomes an ever more moot point though as more and more games lack this feature, because to them it is lost revenue (they want all your friends to buy the games too). To quote rule 7 of the 7 commandments all video games should obey (Thou shalt let us play your game with real life friends): "The advantage that consoles have over, say, PCs, is that you can play from your comfy sofa. The reason the sofa is considered the pinnacle of furniture technology is because there's room for other people on it. Yet, here's Grand Theft Auto IV, boasting about its robust multiplayer, and if you think "multiplayer" means inviting the gang over to play, get drunk, laugh and high-five each other until the break of dawn, too bad. You can't do that. Want to play with friends, they must be kept at arm's length, faceless at the other end of a broadband connection. Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer is a world without hugs." This trend is a large portion of why I have no desire to buy another console ever. If I am not going to be able to have the gang over anyway, then the PC runs games better, especially if I put the money from the would be console into the Cadillac of graphics cards.