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Hugh_Mannity

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  • Location
    Taxachusetts, USA
  • Interests
    Runescape (duh!), Fiber arts, computers
  1. The Emote clue "Laugh at the crossroads south of Sinclair Mansion. Equip a cowl, strength amulet and iron scimitar" requires an ordinary amulet of strength (cost about 1,000 GP) however you link to the strength amulet (t) in the items database which (a) costs about 900K GP and (b) doesn't work for the clue. An expensive mistake. I hope I can sell it :(
  2. Iron knives. Knives are faster than bows and iron knives are pretty cheap to make. If you use Ava's accumulator, you won't lose all that many of them either.
  3. Qeltar, You have not responded to any of my points with a single fact. Without facts this story is just that, a story. You can believe it all you want. Absent facts, I shall continue to remain skeptical. Until you can produce some reasonable evidence that this is anything other than a story concocted by the parents -- police report, MySpace transcripts, screenshots, or official statement, psychiatrists report, school report -- in other words something with facts, I'm going to retire from this thread.
  4. Are you a medical doctor? Did you examine Megan Meier and talk with her and her parents to determine what medication would be best for her? Nope. I'm a researcher. It doesn't take much work to discover the link between suicide and SSRIs. From Google: This article is from 2004, so there have been concerns about it for a while. Nowhere did I claim to be a medical doctor, nor to have examined Megan. I merely stated the fact that the drugs most commonly used to treat the conditions she was reported to have, appear to have an increased suicide risk. I see, by not believing uncritically everything I read on the internet, by thinking about whether or not something might have been mis-reported, exaggerated, or otherwise not the whole truth, makes me a conspiracy theorist. You talk endlessly about the dangers of the internet, perhaps you should take your own advice and stop believing everything you read. Every story about Megan Meier appears to be a varient on the same theme. Most of the reports listed by lord_british are simply reprints of the AP story. The local story is simply the mother's story written up by a local journalist. There's no coroner's report and no police comment. There's nothing from her school, the family doctor, her friends. No word from MySpace. Nothing except a reporter writing up what the mother said. It is all hearsay, and until there is publicly available proof that would stand up to the rules of evidence in a court of law: MySpace account details, transcripts of emails, etc. then there is nothing in this story that but hearsay. And nowhere in any of the stories does the word "Runescape" appear. I stand by my original statement that this has nothing to do with Runescape.
  5. At last! Someone with the ability to see through the storm of righteous indignation and question the story. We have one fact in this story: a girl is dead. What we get is the parents' story. Fox News carried this report, but Fox News is not the most scrupulous news organisation in the world. They also appear to have done nothing but repeat the parents' story without doing any research. Let's take a look at a few things and see if it holds up. In the introduction to the story, Megan is described as "a 13-year-old who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder". a couple of paragraphs later the report says: She was described as a "bubbly, goofy" girl who loved hanging out with her friends, watching movies and fishing with her dad. Now there's your first disconnect. Was she "bubbly and goofy" or "suffering from depression" -- very few people suffering from depression are bubbly and goofy and very few bubbly and goofy people hang themselves in their bedroom closet. The story says she was also on medication (but not what for). This is again a problem. Most of the medication used for adults for depression is not recommended for use on children. SSRIs (the class of drug Prozac is in) have been known to increase the occurrence of suicide in depressed patients, as have some of the drugs used for ADD/ADHD. Then we have the rest, all of which takes place on the internet, mostly on the infamous MySpace which has a reputation for being a place where teens can get in trouble. Funnily enough, there's no investigation by law enforcement: I find this surprising, given the high profile of cases where kids have done other stupid things through MySpace and the massive police interest in online pedophiles and stalkers. Then there's this little gem: Her father found the message, and didn't save it for the police? The police can't retrieve it? MySpace has archives, most email systems have archives. Even deleted, it would leave some sort of a trail. I'm sorry, but either the police didn't look, or the message didn't exist in the first place. To sum up: What we have here is a classic case of someone creating a story to hide their guilt. We have some sort of dysfunctional family dynamic going on here and the girl commits suicide as a result of that. The parents, in an effort to conceal their part in it, and to assuage their guilt, create this fictional internet romance/stalking/bullying story. And people, having heard similar things before, swallow it hook, line and sinker. It's been done many times before. In 1989, Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife and claimed that "a black man" had robbed him and his wife at gunpoint, and shot them both. He actually went as far as to shoot himself in the belly to make this fiction real. The black communities in Boston were turned upside down, and one guy was arrested and almost charged with the crime. Stuart committed suicide after evidence was uncovered that pointed to the truth. Then there's the case of Susan Smith. She claimed she'd been carjacked by a black man who drove away with her sons still in the car. After a week of intense publicity and massive manhunts, she confessed to rolling her car into a nearby lake and drowning her children. I could go on, there are plenty more similar stories out there. You see, what happens is that when an infamous stereotype (a "black man", MySpace, "muslim-looking" men, etc.) are invoked, the public stop thinking. The stereotype takes over and people stop looking at critical details. I'm not doubting that Megan Meier is dead, nor even that she committed suicide. What I am doubting is that it was all the fault of MySpace and the internet, and that her parents had nothing whatsoever to do with her depression or suicide. I think it's a case of the dysfunctional family shifting responsibility and blame to an external stereotype, so that they can both garner sympathy and avoid culpability. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Runescape in any shape or form.
  6. I'm very much in agreement with Lux Tenebrae and Vlad the Old. Any parent who lets a pre-teen surf the web without supervision is asking for trouble. Come to that, most teens need a lot more internet supervision than they get, and as a parent of a teen I've had to take some drastic steps from time to time. Vlad's metaphor of leaving a kid alone with a loaded gun is very appropriate -- there's a lot of stuff out there on the internet that's not suitable for adults, let alone kids. Jagex's policy is in compliance with COPPA -- which they need if they want to do business in the US, even though they're a UK company. (Failure to comply could cost them their US servers, as well as huge legal bills and fines.) It's not their job to make their game "safe" for players outside their publicly stated age range. Andrew has said that the game is written for "people like us" -- i.e. Jagex employees, most of whom are in their early 20s. So it is a game for teens and older. (Much older in some cases! :oops: ) Jagex did make a huge error of judgement over the luring issue, and was soundly taken to task over it by many of the fansites as well as the PMods -- although I wasn't privy to the discussion, I've heard that there was some serious talk in the PMod forum. I don't think qeltar should be claiming the glory for getting Jagex to change their mind on this one -- he was just one of a very large number of voices in that particular outcry. Jagex's job is to provide a game for their customers to play. They do that and do a pretty good job of it. It's not their job to do anything more than provide a game and kick out rule breakers when they catch them. Caveat Emptor applies -- perhaps even more on the internet than in real life. As for the infamous flier. I doubt if that was anything to do with Jagex -- Scholastic puts them out all the time. I used to get them send home from school with my son when he was that age. I've seen several things advertised in them that I found questionable, though he stopped getting them before the book was released so I never saw that one. If you want to do anything about that, then complain to Scholastic -- they're the one's pushing the book. And Caveat Emptor applies here too. If you're a parent, then it's your job to make sure that everything your kid does, all the toys and clothes he/she has, the food he/she eats, etc. is suitable and safe. (It's not a job for wimps, let me tell you!) It's no one else's job to tell you how to bring your kid up, what books he/she should read, what TV shows to watch, music to listen to, what time to go to bed, what to eat and drink. You have to take time to get involved in what your kid is doing, and make sure that they haven't strayed into dangerous or dubious territory. It's not Jagex's job, nor is it qeltar's, nor any other "concerned citizen" to bring up your kids. Most of you are probably too old to remember Mary Whitehouse and her campaigns against "obscenity" or Tipper Gore's campaigns against bad language in music. But these sorts of crusades are totally bogus. They're much more about making a name for the crusaders than they are about really making a difference. If you want to make a difference in Runescape, then don't scam, don't lure, don't cheat, don't attempt to avoid the censor, don't buy and sell items or accounts for real money. In short, play by the rules. And of course report anyone you see breaking them. You don't need a huge crusade and an ad-supported website to make a difference, you just need to play right. As it is, the vast majority of players are decent law abiding people -- like the vast majority of people anywhere. It would be a terrible waste to break the game because of a few cheats.
  7. Commas used to be used in the UK while periods used to be the mainland European style. I've not lived in England for a while now so I can't comment as to whether that's changed or not. If it has, then I suspect they used commas for the convenience of the US market. FWIW, the German worlds use commas as well. So I suspect the UK is still using commas and Jagex either isn't aware of the European use of periods, or doesn't give a rat's posterior.
  8. Can it Flammacor. This thread's just had all the guts ripped out of it by a mod. Don't go on flogging a dead horse and attempting to get people to argue with you.
  9. You're obviously not a parent! Kids can, and will, get into anything and everything faster than it takes to type that. Also, they need to learn the world can be dangerous -- keeping them in a padded crib all their childhood doesn't teach them that. The trick with parenting is not to eliminate all risk, but reduce it so that the lesson is learned with the minimum pain. If you'd read the article, you'd see that while the editor did do exactly what Jagex said not to do -- as did I and a boatload of other people I'm sure. The editor said he made sure there was no one around to hear his password. I did the same too, except I was out in the Jungle south of Shilo. It's not stupidity to test something like that -- unless you test it in the middle of a crowd of players and it doesn't work. Testing it in a secluded spot is the sort of research that people like Crewbies and the editor do all the time.
  10. And unless I'm mistaken, Tip.It uses English spelling as its default. Nice article. It's certainly whipped up a storm of responses. Not being a PKer myself, I've not really got a horse in this race. However, I strongly believe that Abyss PKers are the lowest form of life. I was going to say "sentient life", but I think that over-estimates them.
  11. Aha! A clue! Or could it be more misdirection?
  12. Aha! A clue! Maybe the Editor is the Easter Bunny and was too busy delivering eggs to write a column this week.
  13. No, you're wrong. The editor is obviously Cousin Itt
  14. But did you catch the Editor's Pink Floyd references: I'm surprised (s)he didn't find a way to include Meddle in there as well.
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