LadyCrimson

I found it quite boring. But I never finished it, so maybe it got better? I found it lightly entertaining in small doses, except for a couple of "forced perspective/must do" quests. The environments were drab, but some of the monsters were pretty cool. And one mid (or later?) main quest was pretty hard for my character. I think it did start to become a little less boring as the monster difficulty increased, but I never finished it either...we moved, and I haven't picked it up since.

Actually, I didn't notice it at first either, since I was personally more concerned with watching Mr. Fehr... It was hubby who mentioned it, so I noticed. On close-ups her face would look fuzzy and brushed. Several articles I read later mentioned it as well. It's surprising mostly because she doesn't need any airbrushing, far as I know.

All good points, but for me the issue is more that if you did multiple crimes that can be charged/sentenced individually, you can't escape 'ridiculous' length terms without a judge going "well, 100 years is unreasonable, lets shave off/ignore several of his crimes/convictions to reduce that number." And I think the reason long sentence terms are often considered "light" is simply because so often, even with such sentence, the criminal gets out of jail for one reason or another before half of the sentence is over, sometimes even with 'mandatory' and 'no chance of parole' wordings - maybe especially for non-lethal crimes.

I agree w/the idea that abusing his position of social trust/authority/power makes the crime more deserving of longer punishment. Add to that the multiple occurrences (which would make me, personally, want to convict him for each known charge) and the sentence terms can pile on - it's not like he committed only one offense to be judged/sentence on, but many multiples, each of which may carry it's own sentence term. I don't know what a 'firearm charge' entails, but that appears to be the main reason for his massive sentence term, according to that article.

So we got around to watching Resident Evil:Extinction. It was watchable, but not great even for a zombie movie. The previous Resident Evil's were better/more entertaining. Oded Fehr is not nearly as hot when he's mostly clean-shaven. Plus, what was up with all the CGi airbrushing of Milla Jovovich's face? Also, the season finale of CSI:Las Vegas really threw me for a shocked "WTF" loop, since prior to watching it I had no idea what was going on w/Gary Dourdan. Now that I do, it makes more sense, but it's still shocking. And I hear Grissom won't be in too many episodes next season. Maybe time for CSI:LV to hang up it's hat...

Another pet-story: Baby-kitty's left cheek swelled up and he was having trouble eating because of it. I thought "oh no, tumor!" and readied myself to say Goodbye to Baby, since I had another cat this happened with. Trip to vet. He said "back upper tooth broken down to the pulp/root." And I thought "jeez, wonder how long it was broken before infection caused facial swelling...stupid cats and the way they hide injuries." So on the one hand, it's nice because this is likely the problem and removing tooth+antibiotics will likely make him all better. On the other hand, it means spending $500+ on a 17/18 year old cat...but I haven't the heart to put him down just for having broken teeth, especially when otherwise he's been doing really well for his advanced age.

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We just watched that today, too. I thought the beginning was really slow...after that it picked up. Not quite as fun as I expected it to be, but not bad, either. Camera shake didn't bother me either, altho I could see why it might bug some people. But I think I might've liked it more if the guy holding the camera hadn't been such a dufus. We were going to watch Resident Evil:Extinction, too - monster/horror double-bill! - but hubby went to take a 20min nap and he's still snoring away. heh

Yes, there's lot of them. A lot of MP3/wav editor software, for example. Sometimes fancier sound cards come w/packages that will let you do it. I've used the free edition of WavePad for ages for my simplistic needs...I don't know if it'd work w/Vista, if you have that, but there's always other freebies I'm sure.

I do see your point of view (I think...)...but if you think a lack of info puts you in potential danger and you want more info to prevent/stop/prove it, you generally have to have one of two things: an already-in-place knowledge base of info to get that mistake-preventing info from, or the willingness to experiment to gather/learn that info. To learn we must try, and to try means sometimes we discover something we originally thought was going to be a boon is a mistake - or the other way around. So far, I guess China is the current experiment that we will learn from. I'm not sure what your source is on having a serious lack of "clever people" may be, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that either. It may not be a lack of "clever" people...perhaps the "clever" people just don't care to be clever for everyone else, or their interests lie in areas that don't include advancing mankind/public attention/awards. Or a lot of other potential reasons. As to slow ... I said people would have time to adapt to it. Whether they wish to/decide to is always another matter. Typically, humans/governments don't like to adapt/give up anything unless there is an easily noticeable benefit to themselves...(their paycheck is immediately bigger, more food on the table right now, not in 10 years, etc)...that is very true. Hmm...I believe population growth tends to shrink, eventually, when enough people become wealthy enough...I think there's some seeming general correlation between wealth and childbirth rates? So if you could eliminate poverty and bring everyone onto the same economic/tech level as US or Europe or whatever, it's quite possible the population would decline dramatically after a few centuries anyway, and all the "what ifs" you're considering might come to pass regardless...unless we keep billions poor on purpose...which some say we do already. Conspiracies everywhere... Problem is, (human) environmentally speaking, I'm not sure we can wait that long - for time needed for the poor nations to become wealthy/more even distribution of wealth, and the time for the possible decline. Well, anyway, I digress, and we'll probably just keep disagreeing on that original "point" till doomsday, so I suppose that's enough of that for me. We could always just wait for a deadly incurable plague/asteroid impact to kill 3/4 of humanity, and that way we don't have to be responsible for it.

If a path we're on doesn't seem to be a good one, not being willing to try something else for a while to see if that might produce better results, out of fear alone, is...ah...well, I disagree with that way of thinking. imo, a lot of our inventions and advances would never have come about if we all thought that way. Such "arguments" resound with people on an emotional level, since they're emotional arguments, but beyond exercises in theoretical "what ifs", there's no validity to using them as a "never do" argument, before there's proof (from trying and failing) that something actually is harmful. Nuking, to our dismay, was proven to be harmful, not only to immediate human life (which was hopefully obvious from the beginning) but to environment/people for many years after, thus that 'comeback' wasn't valid, imo. Reducing population over time has not been proven to be harmful. I can understand your fear of messing with the unknown and all its variables, but that's life, and I don't see it as an argument in of itself. Beyond that, slowly introducing birthing restrictions would not cause the population to drop overnight. There would be time for people to adapt to having less people in the world, both economically (workforce, product demand) and whatever else. I believe restriction programs were at least partially tried in certain countries (Japan I think? I don't remember), without any horrendous (visible) disaster as a result. I don't know if it was truly "successful" either (it might have been voluntary monetary incentives), but it didn't result in calamity either. I hope I'm making sense...I'm cooking dinner and my brain is divided...although that's mostly an excuse, since my brain is usually divided anyway.

Yes, well my original point was that your point for not even trying something wasn't a good argument, either. Which basically means trying to argue points for/against theoretical actions, at least in this case, is pointless.

May I ask what your plans are for that land? Build a dream house?

Oh good grief. That is hardly a comparable theoretical scenario to, say, trying governmental programs that restrict number of children per family/couple/person/reward those who have less children, or something.

But we wouldn't know if the reduced population theory was true or not, unless we try it, no? Typically the richer nations have less children - so if we spread the wealth out more evenly, it's fairly possible that eventually most people would just have less children by lifestyle choice. Unfortunately I don't see that happening any time soon.

That's something I really don't like either and wish they'd stop going in that direction.

If your sound card is decent, I'm not sure why recording it as it plays would = terrible sound quality? That is, if it's recorded from the computer via a program, not with an external mike pointed at your speakers. Maybe it wouldn't as great as the original, but it shouldn't sound completely awful.

While I think being environmentally conscious is important, it doesn't keep me up at night, simply because I'll be dead by the time we completely run out of anything.

Fossil fuels would still run out. What we need is to move away from dependence on such as energy resources.

I keep thinking that whole website/group has got to be a long-running joke/hoax for chuckles/fame by some really bored people, but a quick Google makes me think they're actually serious. I mean, I agree overpopulation is a problem for many reasons, and that education about it being a problem is good, and that a very drastic reduction over the next 200 years would be pretty cool...but this "movement" is just silly.

As you guessed, such symptoms usually mean the actual video card or video drivers are fubar'd (or soon will be fubar'd) - my own vid card went this path this week, complete w/those graphical glitches - but since you tried on different systems/cards, it sounds mysterious. Did you try changing all the cables, in case any of them have become faulty? Hope you figure it out.

Interesting chart, that, thanks for those links. When I complain about amount of direct wage/income tax, I guess what I'm complaining about is the social security part. If you're self-employed, personal-finance-wise it's more "painful" since with no official employer to pay half of your SS tax, you have to pay it all. While you are allowed to deduct the "other half" from your total gross-income, that won't typically lower your adjusted-gross enough to make a huge difference in the non-SS areas of taxation, so you still end up paying close to double more "out of pocket" than a non-self-employed worker, for the same end result.

Dye his hair blonde or give him a wig etc. and I think the guy who voiced Disciple (Greg Ellis) would do fine as a live-action Disciple. I base this on seeing the hammy way he acts in bit roles in stuff such as '24', 'Pirates of the Caribbean'.

"book1?" There's only one Gone w/the Wind book. That Scarlet 'sequel' should never have been written. I've been re-reading the Northern Frights anthologies (edited by Don Hutchison), a decent dark fantasy short story collection series. Some of the tales give me pretty creepy mental images that stick for a long time.

Excellent film.