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Don't stay inside, the raindrops know where you live!

Hey guys, Sore Throat. Not so bad in itself, but I have been in bed the last 16 hours and of that I got about 3 hours sleep. Sorry.

Grim saying he had to go. Anywho, hurry up and get steam installed again.

Np. 140 XP

#Joy

Well, no. Your brother shouldn't be an authority figure, he's your brother and not your parents. Who on earth is it acceptable for the older brother to be an authority figure over the younger brother, that's just strange in my eyes. It's even stranger that you accept that your brother can freely take items off you as he sees fit. His brother was acting under orders from his mum... Though older brothers tend to be authority figures in any household (except where they are wastrals), given that they are larger and stronger than the younger, and thus embody an advanced state of 'man'...ergo something to emulate.

I would prefer you attend the one session we have a week, but yes, if you can't make it then you can't make it, I am not gonna hold that against you.

I tend to assume exaggeration. Almost black = Slightly Dark. My initial thought was 'Has he spilt honey on himself?'

For reference: We are going to be starting in the deep end so I expect people to turn up on time and stay online for the duration, and I mean online as 'this is the only thing you are doing'. While I was fairly lax in Crossroads/Space/Dungeoneering, this is a proper game, which has taken three hours to plan so far (and I am using a pre-built adventure) so if people take ten minutes to click over to this tab to respond, or constantly ask what is happening because they aren't paying attention I am just gonna fold this game after one session. If this is going to be a problem for people then just drop out. I am going to be online form 19:00 GMT until 21:30 GMT specifically to answer questions and receive your character sheets. The session will start at 21:30. If people are not here by 21:30 then you have missed the session, don't bother turning up (If you feel compelled to apologize then PM me) because I will kick you. You will be welcome to come to the next session, but you will need to talk to me before then to explain where your character was. If you need to go AFK then I expect you to type 'I am going AFK' or just 'AFK', preferably with a guess as to how long you will be away. If you don't and don't respond for 10 minutes I will kick you (out of combat time). If we are in combat time each person has 5 minutes per round. The first time you just lose your turn. On consecutive turns you will spend 1 fate per round, until you are kicked. If you are typing a longer response then type 'Typing' to let other people know you are. Alternatively type 'Called' if you want to respond first. For this you will be limited to one sentence/action. If more than one person calls then it will go in order (by my log). Called trumps Typing because the action is shorter. Type 'Cancel' if you don't want to respond but said you would. Type 'Silent' if you aren't responding and its been a few minutes since anyone did anything (Or if you have no intention of doing anything.) You can use variants on these words, and obviously use commonsense. I strongly recommend that people use an IRClient, rather than Tip It's one. Link to a good one is here: http://www.kvirc.net/ Another is here: http://www.mirc.com/ I would like to strongly recommend this: http://roll20.net/ But I know that Retech can't use it cause he needs to pretend to study and headphones/speaking gives it away. However if people can try it, and tell me if they can use it regularly then that would be super (I don't like the pain in the neck list of things above any more than you probably do, but in lieu of voice chat I need a way to simulate a better gaming experience). Please print off your sheets, keep them safe, and such. So yes, this is going to be a proper game. PS. Earth, I would recommend building a character using the rules, it doesn't have to be the best character ever, but it is good experience. Assuming people are staying on here is some ritual humiliation/IMPORTANT INFORMATION [hide] Part 1: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12603519/001.mp3 Part 2: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12603519/002.mp3 (Not the best quality but I can't find the microphone and I am using a different computer to normal) Text: [hide] Chapter 1: Clipped Wings "Darkness has taken you, leaving you endlessly falling into an empty oblivion without sight or sound. Moments flash briefly into being and fade again: a cold iron table and bright light above you, the mocking voice of a child, the reeking stench of beasts and raw meat, weightlessness, the hammering of great machinery, and finally, fetid black water oozing beneath you and chill winds stirring foul air. You wake slowly to find yourself paralysed in cold darkness, your voice silent and your body as limp and useless as a rag doll. You are helpless to act or speak, or even hold your thoughts together, but you can hear the ragged breathing of others in the dark telling you that you are not alone in your fate and feel the bone-deep ache in your limbs confirming that you yet live. Sickly-green lamps flicker on in the walls, and a dozen figures appear, wading shin-deep through rank waters towards the cold platform on which you and the other tangled forms hang. They wear ragged cloaks over dark body armour, and their faces are covered by grotesque animal masks fashioned from glittering metal and stitched skin. Each mask is different, one a hound, one a serpent, another a swine, and so on, while the leader wears the gilded visage of a Jackal with crimson teeth. Chains are released and you are dumped into the ice-cold filth of the water with the others, all equally helpless, heaped up like in a mass grave for the living. Each of you is swiftly and perfunctorily examined by the masked men like livestock in a market. The Jackal Mask barks a curt order, and he and the others back away swiftly into the darkness. Frost creeps across the walls, and the waters beneath you grow cold as the grave, as from the darkness a human-shaped, spike-studded metal cabinet comes into view, pushed along by two stunted and misshapen figures. Another shadowed form, tall and lean, hangs back on the edge of sight behind them. Horror is heaped upon horror as the iron cabinet opens to reveal the severed head and mutilated torso of a young woman floating within in a column of unearthly light. The woman’s eyes snap open and cruel white light floods out. You feel the stabbing claws of a vile force invade your mind with its polluting touch as you and your fellow captives finally find voice enough to scream. The force withdraws suddenly as the iron cabinet snaps shut. A silver-clawed hand rises from the darkness and indicates three captives in turn. The misshapen figures lunge forth and drag them screaming into the darkness where they are abruptly silenced. Mercifully you are not among them. The light fades and oblivion takes you again." [/hide] [/hide]

So let me get this straight. To punish someone you need to create a system whereby they can do something, but if they do they feel bad? Yes... I would suggest you look at the many many studies on Homosexuality (Specifically the ones where they would fit electrodes, provide erotica and then apply pain as a responce. There are also multiple studies in mice) to discover how effective that kind of treatment actually is. For the most part the person being punished actually needs to come to the conclusion that what they have done is wrong before any degree of correction can occur. Ergo its either about making the punishment so hedious that the person develops a psychological adversion to it, or you are just wasting time. Unless Earth's mum has no problem in electrocuting (The more human tortures) him into not playing games, you are advocating a system which would work in theory, but its practical application is impossible. Oh, also: I would agree that denial of access is less efficent (Then again I would agree that genocide was more efficent than integration...more desirable too), but it is actually doable. A parent can deny access to something with considerably more ease than they can beat the child into submission. As to doing chores...All your are really doing is asking the child (There has to be a negative consequence for failure, and since denial of access and beating the child (Earth) are both out of the picture you are essentially advocating that his mum goes 'Earth, as punishment, can you tidy your room.') to do something that you yourself find mildly undesirable. This is not to say that this is not effective in some circumstances...but given that Earth was already failing to do MANY of things he was asked to do it is exceedingly unlikely he would, for no reason, do this extra thing he didn't want to do. As to proving you are wrong by attempting to punish the child...You are opening a rather large can of philosphical worms, and one that servers no real purpose other than to degrade and destroy the fabric of society (Like it has done in France). If you try to justify why something should be so then, unless you agree with the fundermental tenants already, or they are not far from what you already believe, then you just end up going in circles. For example: You should tidy your room Why, it will just get messy again Because I said so I don't accept that as an adequate reason for doing anything If you don't you will get hurt I don't accept that as an adequate reason for doing anything If you don't then you will suffer from the degredation in hygine Well I haven't so far But you will in the future I think I would have seen some signs before now if that was the case The signs could be anything, from that cough you have, for instance No, because I saw someone else coughing at school Maybe they caught it from you No And so on. You can also do it with something like 'You should marry this person' or 'Why don't you want to go to Scouts' for things where most of us would say the child was right, or where our own preferences would play a larger role. As such there is a rather convoluted issue because neither parent or child can subjectively prove to the other that they are right (Where they can there isn't a serious problem). Now how do you resolve that? Well, the tried and tested method is to assume the adult is correct, though this has increasingly disintergrated, leaving the situation as one where the child avoids taking on advice and therefore suffers the falls that could have been avoided. On top of that you have the issue that advertising and the ease and avaliability of entertainment becomes a burden in itself. We can see this stretching back to the Industrial Revolution by the drunken working class male, as well as further back by the indolent noble, as compared to the industrious peasantry who worked or died. At any rate that brings us full circle, as nature originally metered out the punishment for idleness, but now we have 'tamed' nature we do not feel her lash at our backs, and finding ourselves free have strove to prevent anyone taking over...Thus we find corporal punishment distasteful, and this leaves few recourses for effective punishment/motivation. "My ideas have changed, but not my belief that I am right." Liberalism, specifically French Liberalism, has a lot to answer for. We do agree with each other on occassion. Typically excess Iron. I would recommend not eating meat or other Iron containing things for a few days...Or visiting a doctor.

That's a sin. Food is the universal good. No, computers are much more reasonable. Note delicious. Perhaps replace those pastries with some spinach. And a sin to what religion? There is no universal concept of sin. Doesn't the concept of sin (meaning against religion) sort of run down your argument. Different things are classed as sins, but then different things are classed as laws. As you are a Liberal I would assume you would consider many things Crimes against Humanity(as you are a genocidal fruitloop genocide isn't one of them), despite not all of humanity agreeing with you. And then whatever my point was. At anyrate, denying access to something is reasonably corrective, and therefore a decent enough punishment. For example, children are denied access to wander around naked (most of the time) and therefore they learn that wandering around naked is bad. Of course if you altered the parameters and said 'Children never want to wander around naked' or 'ITS A CRIME AGAINST NATURE' or other gibberings, then the argument is weakened....Though that would occur with any argument. In terms of the specific case denying access to the computer is not corrective but it can be benifical, for instance Earth might have got a job, read a book, done some homework...all the stuff that the computer holds him back from. On a much much more basic level: Heroin and prostitution. You hook someone on Heroin, deny access when you want them to do something and eventually force them into doing things they don't want to do less. This is one of the options, but most of the time people fold under pressure. Prolonged denial is far less effective, but in the short term very few individuals will embark on a convoluted path to achieve something that they can get by simply following the rules...as shown with the Heroin example above.

Indeed we are. Sorry I didn't get you on Skype, CK2 was too loud.

I agree with Nef, Nex and Lei. Its not funny, please leave and younger siblings are annoying.

Can't give you much advice...HP Laptops seem designed to overheat...On the other hand I have gamed on a hot summer's day with the fan covered by a sock (By accident) and it didn't shut down for 5 hours(at which point I noticed the sock). However it seems to suffer year-and-a-bit-ly hard drive flipout so...(specifically it died once, around New Years it deleted something in the registry so needed to reinstall Windows (Now that was fun), and just recently it went for a 'I AM GONNA BE REALLY NOISY WHILE DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING', quietened down now. Getting one of these: http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2243862011 And either screwing it to the base (as my sister has) or simply being slightly careful with it (as I do) is probably the most cost effective solution...It drains a fairly small amount of battery (I think mine went from two and half hours to two hours and twenty minutes) though mine is probably the worst you can get ('Hey that looks cool in the box, oh, wait...It doesn't have anything I thought it did'). They are also suprisingly cheap. Battery Packs are obviously an option as well (Though a bad one given their size, cost and stuff). Unless you are always using games of yor I recommend 64 bit. I would warn you that laptops seem to work terribly with more than 4 gigabytes of RAM...My first one wiped itself after 2 weeks, second one did the same in 3 weeks, later found out that if you move it after you have been using it (Can move it while using it, and move it after it has cooled down, but not for an hour after you sleep it or shut it down) then it goes to hell. That was two years ago but still. Anyway. I am on a two year old HP (4 GB) with AMD Turion x2 (2.2 GHz) and ATI Radeon graphics card, under Vista. It plays Skyrim for well over 24 hours without a problem, as with Mass Effect. Sometimes it will run the Extreme Graphics packs fine, other times it will struggle to run Medium. It runs minecraft fine, up to 3 players, though nosedives after that. I have spent literally no time optimising it, so is frequently running Steam, Orgin, Dropbox, Media Player, Skype, AIM and Yahoo Messanger (VERY occassionally), USB Wireless software, MSN, Open Office, KVirc, AVG and MS Security Essentials, while running games and such. For some reason everytime I have had to reinstall the BIOS its heat output has dropped dramatically for several weeks, before suddenly restoring to its old levels. (Discovered that after the first meltdown where a full size desk fan was required to keep it from overheating during the installation.) It doesn't have any noticable effect on performance though so IDK. I think it cost somewhere in the region of £250, which is like $400? So either I am wasting your time because you want an all singing-all dancing laptop (At which point I ask why? Paying five times the price to see individual chains in chainmail on mooks seems like a waste), or American prices are insane. Oh, if you like this advice please send money =P (jk, I am happy with my computer, and short of buying a £700 Desktop/this exploding I am not gonna be changing in the near future)

Why would I want to start?

Nope.

You say that...But if the option to pirate wasn't there then you wouldn't have any games, ergo you would be compelled to buy them...Or get a job, get money and spend it on games. Alternatively watch TV or read a book...

Wow...took you more time to type 'Google it' than if you just gave the link... http://dresdencodak.com/

I agree on some levels. For instance if you have brought a product then I would have no problem with pirating it...Ideally you would have tried customer support/searched for a fix before you engaged in piracy (Since you are providing your upload to people with potentially less honest motives) I do wonder what Adam Smith would make of all this though...Infinate resource being charged for at one 'market' and being given away at another 'market'. He would probably suggest that the gaming industry was forming a 'guild' to protect itself, and then note that if it didn't then there would only be a few sources of the infinate resource(games), rather than the huge number there are at the moment. In terms of Call of Duty/WoW...If people didn't want the product they wouldn't buy it/pirate it. Something like Tony Hawks, how much can you really do? Its a guy on a skateboard, who goes and makes an idiot (Guess if I like skating) out of himself. 'Quests' are often entirely unreal, so they can only really make the pathetic incremental updates. Ideally they would do the Star Wars(First Trilogy) solution of releasing a game ever couple of years...But if people are idiots enough to buy substandard games then very little stops companies doing it...and cheaper technology has lead to the Jevonus Paradox of the same, or diminished, amount of 'work' being done per year, despite there being more games. So yeah, its a mess of a situation.

They are kinda like superheros :rolleyes: Software, hardware and experience...that is what you need to do it, not a 'Gremlin in the Machine' - 'Mather-Magicism'...All of which would cost (or require you to pirate, and thus defeat the object of not pirating) a tonne of money and time. More accurately...Game Industries have to invest huge resources into building a game, even Gamefly/Steam and other 'Middlemen' services, to a lesser extent. Though they do have to host the servers, employ the staff (In theory) to make everything work. Pirates have to invest a few hours, maybe a few weeks for Assassin's Creed II type DRMs, they have to pay virtually no overheads...They need only as much bandwidth as to download the few kilobyte links, and upload the file a couple of times, with everything else being stored on the wider internet. Ergo Gaming Industry works hard to provide the games. Yeah, sometimes they fail, but they are doing something majorly complex for what will be a few hours/days/weeks enjoyment on our end, with a diverse, contradictory and shifting audience...Not to mention the idiotic management systems above them. Pirates do very little and so can afford to be magnanimous, with illusions of honour amongst thieves. The reality is Pirates 'like' showing off their ability to break games, and some don't see that just because they can do something doesn't mean they should... Others take an amount of responsibility for their actions and remind the thieves, such as you, that you should support games you like by buying them...Piracy as a means of trying a game before you buy it is vaguely more justified than actively stealing a game. My opinion would be that games should really have 2-5 years 'in print' and then be declared free game (no pun intended), rather than the games from the 80s still being 'owned'. But that is something that needs to be resolved, rather than bypassed by piracy because that only generates reaction against the wider internet...Cause what people like you don't realise is that the internet is not free, all it would take is a concerted effort and it would fall (That the world couldn't co-operate its way out of a paperbag is a diminishing issue) @Nex: Have you tried turning it off and back on? Also, have you tried running the game in Compatibility Mode? For clarity, are you reinstalling the game or the client...cause both are fairly important. Beyond that I would probably say that there was nothing you can do. Oh, and giving us the name of the game would be productive...

Youtube adverts are increasingly convincing me that Net Neutrality has been entirely corrupted by Google and co. If Telecom companies could charge the hell out of those companies then they wouldn't be so willing to show incessantly tedious adverts, which, in turn, would crash a lot of services that have developed on the back of advertising. This is obviously a bad thing for a lot of people who use the internet and a lot of good services exist because of those adverts...However I think the concept needs to be rethought because currently there is this thick band of congeled fat, which just gets thicker with each passing day. Also interesting that advertising was proved to be horribly inefficent since the early 80s, yet persists. Its good for telling people about singular events, or entirely new things, but for the most part it doesn't change minds in any way.

The new ending/s are reasonable good...Its fairly obvious that for all there 'We couldn't possibly change the endings' they changed them a lot to reconcile all the plot holes.

I liked the new Fuschia ending, not sure about the Beige ending though, and the Sepia one was just silly. Meanwhile, in Minecraft, villagers suffer the wrath of Archi for building over his house: [hide][/hide]

I think it is more playful digs between myself and Retech as the adventure had everyone executed for Heresy, after they waited 3/5 days for the Inquistion to arrive while paper saying 'These people are heretics' was sitting in an office, which they were supposed to investigate.

If Grim had joined Crossroads, and provided his cheat sheets then.... :rolleyes: