Zonorhc

If you have no other option but to go, stand up during a preacy Bible reading and just say, calmly yet loudly, "Prove it." Before he can answer, continue with, "Oh, wait, I remember now. It's true because the Bible is the word of God, and we know that God exists because the Bible says so." Once he's sufficiently indignant, calmly walk out. Freedom of speech and religion is one thing, but when you try to force it upon others, that's a whole new ball game. If nothing else, you could make a complaint on charges of verbal assault. Now that I think about it, I would love to attend those services. Once he gets all preachy about morality, point him to Genesis 19:30-38.

I don't think that should be at the top of our list of worries. It would be supremely idiotic for Kim Jong Il to sell nuclear weapons to terrorists, because that would cause an international incident. Of all things, he shouldn't put North Korea into the spotlight for selling nukes to fundies. They're in enough trouble as it is. The biggest concern we should have is that in the event of a war, it's South Korea that gets pounded with artillery and tactical nukes, because the North isn't likely to have any missiles with longer range. It'll be hell in SK before anyone even gets around to turning North Korea into one big, glowing crater.

On tonight's episode, Zonorhc becomes the US ambassador to North Korea... "Hey, Kim Jong? How many people could you kill in the US, assuming you had missiles with enough range and the capability to carry a nuclear payload which you may or may not even have?" "Oh, maybe about a million with my 1kT bomb." "That's not too bad. Say, you see those crates labelled 'food aid'?" "Yeah?" "How many people in your country will die when that's withdrawn?" "..." "Bear in mind that dead people cannot harvest your cocaine crops." "..." "Yeah, thought so. Idiot."

You need more detail regarding why and how things happen. It's simply too much of a stretch of imagination to say "After wulfy takes off one of Grendel's hands and killÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢s him, Grendel's mother comes and starts bothering the castle nobles and the king." That implies that as soon as X happened, Y happened as a result. Things take time to happen. Find some reason why Grendel's mother found out that the poor little monster had been killed. Describe what she does better than "bothering". Also, don't use an apostrophe prior to an S if you're not describing possession. "Kill's" would be written as "kills". Don't use emoticons in literature. It looks tacky and unprofessional. Your pacing needs a lot of work. Things jump from one thing to another. Through the course of one paragraph, the main character finds the king and queen dead, becomes a god, rules for fifty years, is then seventy-five years of age, goes on an adventure to steal gold off a dragon, kills the dragon with an heirloom spear that he suddenly had but hadn't been mentioned before. Then he dies. While a god. It violates suspension of disbelief on so many levels. Right, so he was good at stealing things? Nobody cares what his thieving level is. Just tell them he was good at stealing things. Also, don't use numerals in prose unless for dates. All in all, you need better control of language. Go out and read a lot of books and develop your understanding of English before trying to write anything in it. It's very easy to pick out your own mistakes after reading samples of other people's work. Read novels and see what conventions are being used. A decent set of authors to examine for differences and similarities would be H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond E. Feist, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Mark Twain.

Myself and three friends had a little too much sugar one lunchtime and decided to joust. I kid you not. Two of us hopped on to a couple of other friends piggyback style with lengths of timber in our hands, and charged from twenty metres. It was conducted rather well, with no injuries to ourselves or our impromptu mounts. You should've seen the reactions from passersby. For the most part, we got away with it because it was our last week of school, ever.

You paid only lip-service to the original epic and made it sound ridiculous by overloading it with anachronisms and references to Runescape. Overall, this is one of the most half-hearted pieces I've ever had the misfortune of seeing on this board, even granted that most things are about Runescape. You simply overdid it by trying to shoehorn Beowulf into Runescape in a very clumsy fashion. I don't know what you intended to do with that "fight scene", but I can guarantee you that no decent literary work in this Library - or anywhere else for that matter - uses game mechanics or anything even loosely refering to them in a written scene like that. Nobody cares that he did 20 damage. What a reader wants to read about is what happened when he stuck his sharp object of choice into the fleshy bits. Reducing combat to numbers makes it dull and destroys suspension of disbelief. You also need to brush up rather heavily on paragraphing. You try to cram too many different topics into one block of text, and that makes it not only confusing, but very unprofessional in appearance. It also wouldn't kill you to capitalise the first word of every sentence, as well as the personal pronoun "I". Also, try to learn the distinctions between the words "there", "their" and "they're". A spellchecker is your best friend if you can't proofread adequately on your own.

They've had that ever since music was introduced. It's called the volume slider.

A nuclear explosion emits an electro-magnetic pulse. This is why all military electronics are EMP-shielded, just in case. A detonation of high enough altitude (see Starfish Prime) can have a very large EMP burst. However, the fact of the matter is that North Korea does not have any missiles of sufficient range, nor nuclear devices of sufficient yield, to be able to fry all the electronics in the US. Also, most non-civilian electronics, and some that are, have a degree of EMP shielding.

It would also be very naÃÆÃâÃâïve to say that North Korea is going to do anything but use its nuclear capability to show off. The vast majority of what Kim Jong Il's misguided regime does is pathetic sabre-rattling in order to intimidate other nations into giving more food aid. If they actually decided to fire off a nuke and blow up some city, no matter whose it is, you can bet the whole region is going to pay them a very angry visit. China and Russia don't want an upstart nuclear power in their region, because they're still busy trying to get their own affairs in order, and the last thing they want is Pyongyang yelling out, "OH YEAH COME ON INVADE MY REGION, AMERICA!" Iran... well, Iran is a different story. The people can actually look out and see what the West can offer, as opposed to North Korea's blissfully ignorant peasantry. That, and the country is run by fundamentalists, rather than just some grandiose drug lord.

That was the League of Nations, which was by far and away the single most idiotic concept of a diplomatic body the world has ever seen. To do anything, it required a unanimous vote from all its constituent members, and one veto meant that it couldn't go ahead with anything. When Japan invaded Manchuria, all the League did was reprimand them, but they couldn't do anything because Japan vetoed the decision to take action. Yeah, try keeping the peace that way. I'm glad the UN exists, if only for the sole fact that the League of Nations doesn't. A nuclear war is in nobody's interests, although the US will definitely win one. As sick as it may sound, the US can afford to lose a few million people far more than North Korea can. Even going by World War I-era strategy (if your losses - enemy's losses = a positive number, you win) America wins. My guess is that Kim Jong Il is just going to use this as another bargaining chip for food aid so his pathetic little country doesn't starve while it's busy growing his drug crops and funding his decadent personal life. Like I said, the moment he decides to launch a nuke-capable missile in anyone's direction, China is going to look up there and discipline his sorry backside. They really wouldn't want instability in East Asia. As for Japan mobilising, they won't. From what I've heard, the Japanese people are as anti-war as they come. Sure, they still make a big deal of the old "glory days" when they were lording it over their region, but they won't forget the fact that the last time they were in a war, they got nuked. My predictions for a conflict in the region? Japan: disapproval Taiwan: disapproval/hostile PRC: hostile SK: hostile Russia: hostile EU: disapproval US: hostile Australia: hostile

That's what I was saying. China gets annoyed every time North Korea decides to rattle its sabres, because its rapid industrialisation relies on regional stability, since it imports a lot of its fuel and raw materials. They didn't like it when Pyongyang fired missiles over in Japan's direction, and you can bet they won't like it when Kim Jong Il brings the wrath of the US down on the region again. China's economy relies on trade far too much to want the region destabilised by North Korea being stupider than usual.

There's a US tanker on another board I frequent who is keeping up a blog of his deployment to Iraq. I would provide the link, but it has a lot more profanity than these boards would allow. Reading all these reports from soldiers in the field makes me very disillusioned with mass media. While mainstream news is all too quick to jump on reports of military personel dying or controversial treatment of prisoners, they seem to forget about the other things that Coalition forces are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan: setting up hospitals, schools, weeding out insurgents who hit civilians about as often as anyone else... That said, I'm not exactly supporting the war as a whole, but to say I'm against it would be very far from the truth.

China isn't going to be happy about this. Put it this way: in the international playground, Pyongyang is like Beijing's [developmentally delayed]ed little brother who shows off like a prat and picks fights with Beijing's friends while it's having lunch with them.

I mainly used a previous piece of mine for a reference, and modified things and added detail to my liking. Photoshop. One brush set to 25% opacity and overlaid. I could really use a tablet.

Well, since most other things have already been picked on... The computer screen shouldn't be a perfect square. They have a tendency to be rectangular. And yeah, everything is too smooth and textureless. Make the wood rougher, put stains on the floor, cracks in the wall, what-have-you.

Well, it's been a while since I've actually done anything artsy, much less put up anything here. Without further ado, here goes: DeviantART linky For the paranoid, deviantART won't eat your babies or Runescape account.

I'm a full-blooded Asian. I care about the spelling. Oh, look! You're wrong! BAHAHAHAHA. Stop breathing my oxygen.

There's no point trying to get into the industry without something to make your game stand out. Before you even look at how to code something as big as a game, you'll need loads upon loads of ideas, concepts, what-have-you. Find out what you want in your program and then figure out what the best language to use is. It'll probably end up being C++, because it's a powerful son of a mother.

Another one of my favourites, from Brave New World:

The Call of Cthulhu is about forbidden knowledge and man's meddling in affairs that are beyond the limits of his imagination. It's heavy on the whole "things that exist that shouldn't" thing. For any takers, you can find all of H.P. Lovecraft's work here.

I think I could do it.. But I'd have to know I was going to die fast and with no pain.. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to.. :ohnoes: I would consider suicide as deicide. Then again, I love myself too much to do it, anyway. Of course, if I did try, obviously I'd do it right the first time. Commence hip-thrusting!

Holy crap! Someone should force both of them to read Brave New World. Their brains might overload and cook themselves!

The first paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu:

If it was guaranteed that there would be no later repercussions (retaliation, prosecution, etc)? Yes, easily. I would rob the corpse, too. If not? I'd give it a lot of consideration, and try to find another way around the situation. There are a lot of things I would do, but as a law-abiding citizen with a fair sense of self-control, I wouldn't do them. As with most people, though, my willingness to harm someone is inversely proportional to how much I like them.

You don't? Psht. Freak.