Randox

A couple thoughts. First I agree with Obfuscator. Do that. When she figures out what she wants, she can call you, and if you haven't moved on then you can resume. Second, nice guys finish last in the sex game. (by not taking every potential opportunity that presents itself, you will miss out)

I like the sound of the new quests. While the story line isn't a particularly exotic one, not evey quest can be a While Guthix Sleeps, Ritual of the Mahjaarat, or even A Void Stares Back. This particular story line is ripe for someone to have an irresponsible amount of fun with, so my hope would be for a couple more quests in the vein of A Clockwork Syringe and its sister quests (and if you didn't find that quest fun, get back under your bridge :P). I do hope that neither of them are too short. I am a bit worried that since the quest being replaced is not very long, and the added expense of voice acting will make them something I can blow through in an hour, and it's always a shame when that happens. The botting isle is interesting. While I'm not sure how it is supposed to avoid dying as a piece of content, it sounds like a little publicity stunt I could have fun with for a few minutes once the crowds have died down. I am expecting that only the highest level botters will get that treatment though. Personally, I don't really care about the dungeon beyond the new equipment. If they instance the boss fights, I might get back into boss hunting if I can find myself a team (I like Sara, and I can't do that fight on my own). The highlight of the month for me will be getting rid of the bots, at least for a time. I've been itching to get back into the sorceress garden for a spell (which is what I did after last years bot nuke as well), but the bots run interference and just suck the joy out of everything on a principled level. At 11 months since I last ran the summer garden, I am eager to hone my skills once again.

Cats are hit or miss. Many cats couldn't be less interested in catching mice, and there is no way to know what yours will be like unless you actually have rodents. I've seen them used in places that do have rodent issues, and while they seem to be able to keep populations down a bit, they are wholly unable to actually get rid of the problem. Fewer mice there are, the harder they are to catch. Eventually you end up with a big house little mouse situation, unless you can trap it and throw the cat in with it. Apparently hvaing a house to myself is a bit lonely, especially since I am not really doing anything right now. Life is in neutral for the next few days, and I don't know what to do with myself, except play a lot of Skyrim (getting back into it) and watch all the SG1.

So we did have a rat apparently, just a non destructive one that didn't poop in obvious places. It got caught by the toothed trap too, which serves it right for existing (in this house). With any luck, that was the only one we had and it just came in through an open door.

It's not easy keeping it that way for sure, not with a decades old brick foundation that is slowly loosing a battle with nature. If we were going to keep it, we would likely raise it up off its foundation and pour a nice new concrete one. Our pest control guys filled the breeches with some sort of foam which I guess the rodents object to chewing through, so on the whole, the foundations should be quite rodent repellent. It seems to be much more likely what we have is a mouse, and not a rat, and it is possible that one might have started nesting here and is eating elsewhere since there is very little food in the house for it right now. It is also possible that a door got left open and a solitary mouse found its way in. In general, the key to not getting them in the first place is making sure there is nothing for them to eat, which means never leaving any food out where they can get to it. Don't even leave a garbage bag laying around or they'll go for that. This whole problem is something I miss about living in the country though. Not that mice don't exist outside the city, but the concentrations are a lot lower. If you leave the basement door open your more likely to get a squirrel than a mouse (though admittedly, having squirrels probably makes mouse problems look like a puppy infestation by comparison as squirrels are quite destructive). Also bats. But at the end of the day, I only really have to deal with it when doing laundry, and cooking. We almost never get rodents on the second floor where the main bathrooms are (unless someone leaves garbage lying around up there), and my floor has been rodent proof ever since I woke up with a mouse in the room, and promptly decided that I could either fix that problem, or never sleep again in my life (steel wool and duct tape to seal off the only entry point). I can't secure the whole house this way, but knowing there is one room I can always go to is really nice. And as a point of interest, back when I was looking for a way to fortify my room, I found out that mice are afraid of black lights and stobe lights, as well as certain scents (I think lavender was one of them). I guess back before technology, the nobels used to burn certain incenses or scented candles in their bedrooms to keep the furry little buggers out. Playing really loud hawk sounds might also work, though you'll have to change it up a lot or else they get wise. Also, this might make sleeping difficult.

'The cake goes to...' is a figure of speech, at least here, meaning roughly 'the award goes to...' in this case, I'm using it as a play on words :P The shower I use needs to be replaced. Starting to see some evidence that all together would indicate its not water tight (which I already knew because whoever spaced the tiles was high as a kite, and some are so close to each other there is no grout in them). More to the point, there is some evidence that at least parts of it are now quite rotten, and it probably explains all the mold I just cleaned off the ceiling. I am also being told that we have a rat, though there is no evidence that we have one. More likely, its a mouse, though even a solitary one is not welcome after many months of being rodent free. Every house on our block is under siege from rodents pretty much all year. And yes, my mini fridge has a 'freezer'. It's just an enclosed section where the fridge cooling vent is located, so that the little box ends up colder than everything else. The entire fridge is capable of being a freezer though once its defrosted.

Moved back into my place today, which is not as awesome as it should be, because I was exceptionaly lazy when I left and now my room is a war zone. The cake goes to my fridge though, which is currently defrosting, and then is going to be cleaned up. Thing is a huge power hog when it gets like this. With all the ice, it needs to run full bore just to stay moderately cool, but by tomorrow morning it will be able to turn itself into a freezer if it wants to. But even though I need to clean up still, its nice to be back here, because this is home for me. And I have a nice long year of being poor as dirt to look forward to because I spent the summer working for my parents. Not that it wasn't actually a lot more awesome than having a job, but I normally make enough to live comfortably for the entire year. On the other hand, a bit better spending control will be good for me, and I'll have money for food. And my room spent the entire day reminding me that its still summer, and the room can still get stupid warm. I have not missed needing my tower fan to go to bed, and I forgot to run the AC for a couple hours (I won't let it run all night. Thing just evaporates electricity). Good times! P.S. For bonus points, the defrosting means the fridge is dropping huge chunks of ice as it melts, and its not a quiet process when that happens. Already jumped once, and I expect that will hapen a couple more times. I don't think it's ever been this full of ice before, at least not in year or so.

I am right there with you, with my abysmal sleeping habbits which will put me in perpetual jet lag if I am not careful (right now being a fantastic example). Unfortunately, I have trained myself to use certain audio stimulus to help calm my mind to go to sleep. Long story short, I require background noise, which I normally provide in the form of my computer or tv running some sort of movie I am familiar with (family guy gets used a lot for this) and that has a fairly steady volume level (whispering will make me try to listen, loud noises will be heard by other people and keep me awake as well). On the other hand, I also sleep with a mask on to block out all light. Audio is the only stimulus I like. Every once in a while I'll make sure I can still sleep without it, but its not as comfortable for me anymore. When I know I need to go to sleep, or whenever I want to move back into my time zone, I take melatonin. I'll normally keep doing that for about a month, and then I should be good for about another month after I stop before I revert to jet lag mode and repeat the cycle. Melatonin pills also make me a very light sleeper, so I use them whenever I am worried my alarm will not wake me up.

Yeah, my 'joy' at seeing this (for lack of a better word) is contingent on Jagex playing house. If not it's sort of a 'why bother' situation. And the personal curve thing sounds right for gambling (since it sort of looks like I was trying to imply the same mechanisim is at work for other addictions, when I meant I believe it is a nature thing, as opposed to nurture). I still think it would be interesting to study it using players as guinea pigs, since we might find out there is a nurture component after all, which could potentially be used to help people avoid gambling addiction in the first place. In any case, I sincerely hope that this will ruin, or at least diminish, the current forms of gambling we have right now, and if we are lucky, it might drive up the price of rsgp by lowering what I suspect is a fairly substantial supply.

About time. Gambling is here, its not going anyplace. That ship sailed a very long time ago and its never coming back. While I can't say I have much in the way of sympathy for those foolish enough to throw away all their money, possibly getting scammed in the process, it bugs me that other people get to profit off of it. I would much rather see that money funneled right out of the game, or at least away from those who would sell it for real money. The other thing I have come to decide upon, is better to realize you have a gambling problem in a virtual world where the consequences of an addiction are quite minor compared to figuring out you have a problem when you've spent your retirement savings and the months mortgage payment at the casino downtown. The hope being that some people will figure out they have a problem and do something about it, or at least try to contain it to the game and out of the casino where you can blow a lot more money much faster. I also think it would be interesting to study something here, to see if gambling at an early age has any impact on whether you develop a gambling issue or not. I'm assuming it works more like being an alcoholic (which is a genetic predisposition), since both types of addictions would rely on a particular brain structure that has a higher reward for certain activities than the average 'normal' person. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there probably aren't any studies on the impacts of gambling in your youth done yet (and if there are I would love to see some). Maybe we'll find out that we we're absolutely insane to allow this sort of thing, maybe we'll find out it makes no difference.

What I was hoping for, that wasn't here, was an awknowledgement that IVP are the ones that pushed them into this. I want it not so that everyone can rage at them, but because I want more reassurance that Jagex has a stick big enough to beat them off the selling xp and money directly tree (I'd much rather be stuck with the SoF roundabout method). I want something to guage how long we have, and how much control they still have. When this sort of thing isn't touched on I get nervous, because there is no reason to hide good news. That said, I still think MMG is probably teh best person we could have running the game after Andrew and Paul, because he does seem to actually care. If he didn't care, the game would be in ruins already, so in this regard I do think his actions are speaking for him. Seems to me if they put this on consoles they are going to have to implement their in game talking program after all, or else the consoles wont be able to talk (even quickchat would be a nightmare for them). And I agree that you know things are bad when the CEO has to keep making these kinds of posts. Maybe we can get down to twice a year :lol:

When I said reverting 3 versions, I was looking at my version number. Java doesn't upgrade until I tell it to. And if java cant run without javascript telling it to run, then perfect. No change.

So its like a drive-by attack, but no script wont block it. *shrugs* Fortunately I don't make a habbit of visiting even new sites, let alone dodge ones. I could also just revert by 3 versions until they decide to fix it.

First a correction. I expect I meant dopamine, not endorphins. Biology is more of a hobby, so I try to keep grounded in the concepts, but memorizing words has never been my thing. Something to understand about this thread is we really get two kinds of people coming here for advice. First, we have the people who don't have a lot of dating experience and for whatever reason aren't obtaining, or are unable to obtain, dating wisdom through more conventional channels (friends and older siblings). These are the people we shouldn't be letting muggy and his corrupting ways talk to :P The second, and I would say more common, group, are the people who are in a bad spot and they know they need to get out of it, but they need permission to do so. Furah being a great recent example. His story is overflowing with the knowledge that he needs to change something, but he's overwhelmed and just needs someone to tell him what to do. More often than not, people who come here essentially seeking permission for something are in a spot where they need to walk away. By the time the doubts are getting big enough that you come to us, shit hit the fan a long time ago and you've been eating turd sandwiches since, and your tired of it. We also get the occasional people popping in to tell us how things are going.

More on this later, but Omar sort of hit gold here. Humans are incredibly bad at certain things. One of those things is sunk resources (resources you have already spent pursing some objective). You've already put effort into the relationship, and the human inclination is to keep throwing good money after bad, because we are unable to grasp that the money/time is gone, we aren't getting it back, and we should just move on. If we move on, we feel like everything already invested has been wasted, and we don't want to waste our resources, so we plod on. There is also something to the fear of being single. As another point, you can't be happy all the time. As it applies to the actual endorphins which make you feel good, your brain is specifically designed to not allow you to feel good all the time, or even most of the time (not that you can't enjoy life, you just can't be happy as a clam 24/7). The brain gives you your feel good drug essentially for completing objectives as your reward. Then once you have enjoyed your reward it takes your drug away so that you will pursue the next goal. My point being you can't sustain enjoyment of your life without change, without achieving things. If you stagnate, you don't get your feel good drug anymore. Essentially, your brain was specifically crafted to force you to continually experience new things and better yourself, and will punish you for stagnating by making you miserable. If you think about it for a bit, this explains the whole honey moon phase phenomenon.

By the time they finish, the stuff they can do is better so they restart early. Also, they tend to focus more on places that lots of people go, rather than on places that are outdated. So they've redone falador, varrock,alkharid (soon) and other F2P places a lot more than the obscure P2P places. And I can sympathise with that, but it still feels weird moving from one place to the next and there is obviously a fairly substantial difference in how things are designed. If they did the entire world start to finish, it wouldn't all be at the same level because of how long it takes, but you wouldn't have kits that were made in '04 (or earlier since it would have been done pre release) in the same world as kits from '12. And they don't have to do as spectacular a job on the less busy parts. In particular, not all the areas need their own new npc's. If they could even do just the cities, which would probably take about 40% of the time as a full rework like al-kharid.

Alright, that's fair, they did say soon not next week. So in my quest to be sour about this for as long as I can be (maybe I'm in a bad mood, maybe I just don't give a flying fart about Al-Kharid), I thought the area already had a makeover back when they redid the rest of the free world in an attempt to make a good impression. While I don't object to them making over the entire free world first to make a good first impression, they never finished the job, and huge swaths of Kandarin have yet to be updated. I would like to see the job actually be completed before they go back and start doing this all over again. It just makes the game a bit disjointed having what is now 3 different generations of graphical updates in the game at the same time (I think the third generation started with Burthrope, which would suggest they have no intention of completing the original job in the near future).

So I actually went back to look at this months BTS, and I guess the sizzling summer thing was always intended to be a legitimate update. It was just supposed to be the last one of the month (because releasing your summer update at the end of summer makes lots of sense). So now I am wondering what is going on, because we got a BTS video for an update that presumably got delayed, and now we are getting a BTS for an update that wasn't supposed to be released this month at all. So now I am waiting for next weekend when we will get the Sizzling summer video, which we should have gotten today, and the big chinchompa will be released. OR Jagex will ignore the discrepancy and maybe all the BTS videos will be for updates that are two weeks away, until we hit another delay (assuming chinchompa gets released next week). I guess I'll have to wait to really see what is going on, but I am sort of confused now as to what I should be expecting.

I use hyper cam 3, because hypercam was suggested to me a while ago. The problem is the little banner it sticks in your vid unless you pay for it, which looks unprofessional, though I expect there is a way to just crop the video down a bit to eliminate it. Something that would be good to know is how powerful your CPU is. What I would consider a major boon of hypercam is that it compresses video as it records, so that you don't end up with a totally enormous video file (though depending on the encoder, you can lose considerable image quality as well. Hypercam 2 had a lot of terrible encoders). However, this is extremly CPU intensive, and ideally you probably have at least a tri core to handle it (one for the game, one for the recorder, and one for everything else), though quad and six cores should do it without a hiccup. If space isn;t an issue, get one like fraps which does raw video footage without any compression. Huge files, but low cpu load. And neither fraps nor hypercam will do anything afterward. They both record and write in real time.

Jagex has said that they 'have ways of ensuring the number of rares in the game remains constant'. I assume that means that they dump the rares from banned accounts, but it could mean a number of things. forgot about that. I expect they just stick new ones on the GE.

I wouldn't say no to a barbecue... However, my objection with some of this stuff is quickly moving from microtransactions to 'this doesn't even make sense in the context of the game'. BBQ being a perfect example, along with several outfits. It's sort of like how many emotes aren't emotes in spirit anymore (spirit being actually displaying an emotion). I won't deny they look cool, or that the ones for the stage in particular are useful, but the transformation ones in particular are out of place to me. Movement ones are cool, but the transformations ones seem to defy the game world itself. This is probably why most games (I have seen) will have only one or two 'fun' items that are totally wacky and make no sense, and everything else will still be grounded in the game world. Jagex kind of ran out of ideas, but their wallet isn't full enough yet, so maybe we really will see some 'fun' guns in the game one day or something.

I guess England has a fairly different system from North America then, nomenclature aside (grades 1-12 for us, fancy names if your american like sophomore). Here, school becomes optional at 16 as well, which should mean you finish grade 10. However, unlike you guys, people are allowed to fail as much as they want in grade 11 and 12 and keep trying, and there is no colledge option unless you actually complete grade 12 and get a diploma, or get a GED. When I was in grade 9, our science teacher was fresh out of school. I think we had him in his second year or so (he would have been like 23). |His first year of teaching was at the highschool he graduated from, and there were people there who had been in grade 10 when he graduated, still trying to get through High School. Have to admire their determination. The 'cut' I had on my leg is healing. In the last couple days it managed to generate at least one new layer of skin, and the skin surrounding the edges has managed to grow in and cover about 50% of the original area. Unfortunately, the apparent bug bite which started this somehow seems to have survived, and the area in general is still itchy. Even once this heals, I think I'll have to keep the tensor bandage on since it seems to reduce some of the itch, and it keeps me from being able to do any more damage to the skin. If it doesn't clear up soon, I'll have to get it looked at. Should have taken a picture of the original cut I think >.>

Speaking from personal experience, once you get the "I need you/I don't know what I would do without you" line, its time to bail. I would consider those types of statements to be emotional blackmail, which just isn't going to work. As you said, it makes you feel like you have certain obligations that you really shouldn't have, especially not right now. Be forewarned that a breakup is likely not going to be pretty, and you might want to consider some sort of exit strategy before you break the news. And just to be clear, I am not really mentioning talking to her about it first because you seem to have an issue with the dependancy and road rage, and neither of these things are likely to change. A realtionship founded on the 'I can change them' mentality is a great way to be really miserable, becuase you can't make other people change. Now, people do make major lifestyle changes for other people, children in particular, but this is something people need to decide to do on their own with as little prompting as possible, because it needs to be something they want to do. If they don't do it because they want to, they will either be miserable or it wont stick. As long as she is in a relationship with you, it is pretty unlikely that either of these things will change. They will probably never change regardless (though dependency might change through necessity, which is the other way to get people to make major changes).

This has got to hurt the economy. I wonder just how much cash is in the game. It has to be in the 10s of trillions. Probably middle range 10's of trillions in cash, and many many times that in value of everything else. Removing huge ammounts of money from the game would cause deflation, which has it's upsides and downsides same as inflation. On the whole, I would say a bit of deflation (or reduced inflation) would probably be good for the game every now and then. Realistically, there should be no impact on the cash side of things (and the rares market only benefits when rares are removed). There is still enough supply to the gold traders that the supply of gold for those willing to pay is still effectively unlimited (because keep in mind, very little of this cash was headed directly to general circulation), so the buyers will be the only ones hit (assuming this even affects the supply enough to make gold more valuable). If they buy a little less from price hikes, some of the effect will carry through to the general market, but really any changes will be from speculation, not actual supply changes I expect.

The other type of bank you could have, and one I used to want, is one that can give you a loan. My idea was that you could put up items, or maybe your poh as collateral on a loan, and just like in real life, you get mney now and have to pay it back with interest, or the bank takes your collateral (assume that the collateral is like 150% the value of the loan, so that it is very much in your interest to pay it back). Then I realized that all this would do is cause rampant inflation. But it is a possibility that they could add something like that as well. As a side note, I was playing around with some math not long ago trying to figure out how much money is sold into this game every year by the RWT companies (my result was the volume would be in the low trillions). This making money more available to people has already caused inflation. We didn't noticed because it didn't happen all at once, but we are very much suffering from some level of inflation in at least some markets because of the rampant buying and selling of gold for real world money. Now, the good thing with this is that its just a redistribution of wealth, not a creation of new money from thin air, however it is still making cash more availaable artificially. My point is, that a microtransaction gold shop would probably not do as much damage to the economy as people think it will (though more on this 'think' in a second), because much of the business will be the people who are already buying gold, plus the people who only don't because of a fear of prosecution (a number steadily getting smaller). Now, more gold in the game will have an effect, since more of it will enter general circulation rather than being vaccummed up by the gold sellers and resold right back to the buyers, which means the inflation will spread to more markets in time. The real danger though are the people panicking because they think prices will go through the roof, because they will cause exactly that to happen (and make Jagex extra money by forcing people to buy even more gold). My point being, as cheep a tactic as it is, and while it wont be good for the game, it might not be as bad as we think. It will come down to how many extra people get on board (they must be expecting a lot of extra people to start buying gold, since at the current rates you'd be lucky to bring in an extra million a year vs the nearly 100 million they make on membership fees), and how much people panic and drive the market up artifically (people like to panic, so expect some good old panic inflation). However, all is not lost for those who don't get on board. Becuase the extra money would be in general circulation, rather than being recirculated before it gets to the average joe, the people selling things like raw materials will also get more money for their goods, which should help compensate for everything else being more expensive too. So it shouldn't drive everyone into poverty, just those that don't produce sellable goods.