Ginger_Warrior

How long has she felt down for; has she felt happy at all recently? Is she sleeping/eating normally?

If making innuendoes for the sake of it becomes too flaccid, you might need to aim this conversation down another hole in order to keep it up long enough for the full month.

I know plenty of people who have taken drugs, although I've never done it myself. I've seen them do it in front of me. I've learnt the ACTUAL TECHNIQUE, but am I taking them? No, and having studied the effects of recreational drugs on the body and mind, I personally never want to. It's a ridiculous assumption to suggest that knowledge = addiction. In fact if anything, keeping gambling 'on the top shelf where kids can't see it' will only make it more covert, therefore making it harder to intervene against any subsequent addition in later life.

You're talking to her like she's not British herself, lol Where exactly do you think Bolton is? :rolleyes:

England has its own Army now? Wow, that'll [bleep] off the Scots. Eat that Alex Salmond. Like being in 1707 all over again.

If Jagex clearly state that whatever you 'own' on your profile isn't really yours anyway, it's theirs, how can you be gambling? At the very least, how can you be gambling with your own money? It's not your money, it's Jagex's. In fact, forget that - it's not even money, if we're being honest. I'm not usually one for the "Video games are completely different to real life" brigade, but in this case, it's concrete. The issue with online Poker games that use real-life cash for stakes is that gambling itself is incredibly addictive, and just as we put age restrictions on cigarettes and alcohol for their potential misuse and their detrimental effects on people's health, so we do for gambling. There are many people who get into serious money trouble through gambling, and this has a consequence on their loved ones. If someone loses a game of 'Pick a colour' on RuneScape, it really doesn't compare. The only thing that Jagex should be concerned about is the effects of scamming on the RuneScape community and the concept of 'fair play' in RuneScape.

Oh, lemme guess. "He's a really nice guy when he's not being like that"? Cutting loose completely might not be pragmatic given she's in an abusive relationship, she needs support after all. But sure, the golden principle is Take it or Leave it. If they don't listen now, and it gets them in trouble, don't come crying for help.

If you're coming here, you wanna buy some golden syrup. Apparently it's only in the UK where the stuff is widely available, the US only has substitutes. Makes crackin' flapjack (British flapjack, with porridge oats, I think 'flapjack' means another snack in American English). Can also be used for other stuff.

End of the day, they are her parents. You can choose friends but you can't choose family. Unless you want to fight the£, which will only make more suspicious and protective about how the relationship is making her behave, you're going to have to play this game by their rules. People aren't usually power-mad for no good reason. They probably have what they think are her best interests at heart, but are going the wrong way about it. Has your girlfriend tried reasoning with them up front; explained to them that you're not forcing her to do anything, and that the relationship is safe for her to be in? She is 15 though. If her parents say 'No', then 'No' is the answer, unless you want to go behind their backs and make things very awkward indeed.

Unless you're willing to spend one heck of a long time looking after long hair, or money getting someone else to style it, don't bother. Short hair might take about 5 minutes maintenance a day but long hair needs much more to stop it looking messy and silly. Short back and sides, then let it grow a bit if you want it short-medium length.

The year I spent in Hull (which contrary to most people who've been there, I really enjoyed the place!) I never even heard of Snapple let alone saw it to buy.

I'll do it later. I'm not sure what the rules are over there, but I've seen people use The Student Room before for questionnaires.

Feeling better? It always helps to vent off some steam. Erm... when I was 17, most of my friends who were in relationships were pretty absorbed in them. Those who weren't simple were not able to be so absorbed because of geography, time (etc). I think it's just a phase people in their late teens go through, the whole, "I love this guy/girl like no one else before; they're the One" kind of thing. If it makes you feel better, the friends that mattered were still there when they split up with their respective partners. The real friendships are the ones where you can spend an extended time apart and know that you're still friends afterwards. I'm sure that'll come through with your friend and her BF.

I never claimed you did think the USSR was proof of God...

To be fair, delusion is defined by the Oxford Medical Dictionary (7th ed, 2007) as: "a belief that is held with unshakable conviction, cannot be altered by rational argument, and is outside the person's normal cultural or subcultural belief system [...] The abnormal pathology lies in the irration way in which the person comes to the belief." For instance, it would be thinking I'm gonna get murdered because a blue car passed my house today. There's a difference between rational belief (the universe is so complex, someone of higher intelligence must have made it) and irrational conviction (the USSR was evil and godless, so God must exist). There's also a difference between rational and truthful.

But how many of these lessons are also compatible with a simple, yet unreligious belief in humanity? What lessons are there in the Bible that humanity couldn't already have figured out on its own? It's almost like those old logic charts we used to do at primary school, with lots of variously coloured vehicles which we were told to sort into 'Blue', 'Cars' and 'Both'. I realise the majority of religious people don't make this assertion, but sometimes when you talk to people, they don't accept that there's a 'Both' option between 'Religious morals' and 'Unreligious morals'; everything in the 'Both' section HAS to have been dictated by what is written in the Bible. The classic one I hear is "Thou shalt not kill". Notwithstanding that murders continued to happen after the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, surely this known already? I'm not going to assert where such morality would come from, if not God, but to me there doesn't seem to be any correlation between the Church saying, "Oh yeah, that's a bad thing," and people suddenly developing a conscience that stopped them from doing it. They already regulated themselves, perhaps via a belief in a different religion, but also because they themselves had developed a personal conscience that believed it was the wrong thing to do. Personally, I believe that people, no matter who they are or what they believe, like to think their morals are somehow better than someone else's, and if being religious is a good excuse for saying that, then some people will use it. Even so, as far as I'm concerned, being agnostically atheist doesn't mean I'm about to run into the street and kill people, nor does it stop me from appreciating the societal role that religious leaders have in our modern day lives. As I implied in my first post on this topic, my morals are based on a belief in humanity, others are based on a belief in God. So long as we use those morals for good and not evil, I don't see how one is better than the other.

I like how you countered what he actually said, and didn't go for the, "Well you're a WoW fanboy so stfu" line. I mean at least we understand why you disagree with him now and, yeah, your logic is infallible. Can't argue against the [cabbage] you just posted there.

That's not really the same issue. The vast majority of MMORPG gamers are male, under 24, childless and on low-income. The same is exactly true for your average Xbox 360 gamer (though I concede the Wii appeals to a different market). The issue with a console game is that you pay the £40/$50, you take it home, and the beyond a monthly charge for XBL or a charge for DLC, you no longer have to pay anything in order to continue playing the game. Therefore, the company responsible for designing the game has no need to put a Skinner's Box mechanism into the game, as dragon described before, because there's no need for the consumer to be conditioned into playing the game for hour after hour; they've already paid all that they're going to pay. Once they've done that, the games company doesn't care if they play for a hundred hours or thirty minutes, they get the same amount either way. The difference between MMORPGs and console based games is the lack of subscriptions. You pay the lump sum, you get the game. RuneScape can't depend on that model.

Am I the only one that sees something wrong with that? If you're the kind of person that believes hard work eventually reaps its rewards, then I can see how that would be offensive.

Obvious question gets an obvious answer. Where you have people performing the same action hundreds of thousands of times over, for days on end, it's obvious the level up system is being used to artificially lengthen the gameplay, thus keeping the need for subscriptions.

People used to tout Moyes as the replacement to SAF but he's far too inconsistent. Everton'll have one great season, then an awful one. He wants to do that with a top four team? He'd be out after six months, like Hodgson and Scolari were.

Excuse me for going OT, but one of the most baffling terms I've ever come across in RS is 'afk skills'. To me it's seems daft; you (generally, not you personally) turn on a game to play it, then you find ways of occupying your time elsewhere in between each mouse click. Watch a film, watch TV, read a book, play another game... all activities you could gain more from if you weren't checking your RS character every 30 seconds, and you paid them your full attention. Like when you're reading a book, you might normally put yourself in a quiet room so you can concentrate, and pause after every sentence/paragraph to fully comprehend what you've just gone through, but if you're afk'ing RS, instead you check your character's status, and that whole process of reflection is lost. I once got 99 Cooking - which is hardly a long goal - and I listened to music non-stop to get me through it. With hindsight, I wish I'd have just listened to the music and done something else more personally satisfying than cooking 120,000 lobsters. I'd have gained much more from it. The way I hear some people train, it's like RuneScape is a contest to see who can find the most creative way of paying the game minimal attention whilst doing something else at the same time in order to stave off the boredom/make themselves feel as though they're actually doing something. They'll then turn round and say, "I love playing RS". Just seems... bizarre to me. How people get around grinding in RS, I mean. Thinking about things from that perspective makes you realise why botting for personal use is such a big problem in this game. Sure, it's laziness too, but when the journey itself is that stale, who can honestly blame their logic? Anyways, that's all about grinding, not the original topic of high-level rewards.

So if someone wearing full green dragon wielding an oak shortbow stakes against someone in Torva wielding a BGS, and loses, it's a scam? The odds of me winning the National Lottery tonight are slim to none. Is that also a scam? I call it stupid. But it's not a scam. Scamming involves a false pretense.

Unless someone gives you 20/3 times the cash for win, it'll never be a good idea to even play the game. With duel arena boxing you atleast know you have a 50/50 chance to win, but playing this game at anything less than even odds is just stupid. And not to mention, the whole sceam reacks of scamming. At 4 times profit margain, it's a 38/62 game. In that case, let's ban all lotteries, bookmakers and online casinos. Hell, let's just bulldoze Las Vegas. No one here is denying that gambling is a form of regressive taxation.

As time goes on, lasting impressions will establish themselves. A few dealers (or groups of dealers) will gain an honorable reputation, and will be more trusted. At least, that's what I hope happens. I don't really want to see another case of creative thinking in RuneScape get abused by scammers and cheats.