Tigranes

I WOULD IF MY COMPUTER COULD RUN TF2 AT A DECENT FRAMERATE I'll just go in a corner and cry now.

So, uh, schools shouldn't offer discipline, sports, debating, social activity, music, etc? Schools are an institution who have always been designed to prepare a child to be a good social subject in later life - read any educational documents in 18th/19th century England/Europe and you can see them going on and on about this. If influencing a child was entirely a parent's job then parents shouldn't be working, they should be taking care of children 24/7, and children shouldn't need to go to school. The fact is children, now more than ever, spend more time and pay more attention to external things like school, media and their friends more than their parents, and as the child is mainly operating outside their spheres of influence, the parent cannot be expected to do it all alone. edit: more generally directed than just at astrocreep.

I love how we have this great convergence between OE news and Colbert news.

Apparently, it's possible to discuss hockey players without calling people losers, ignorant, etc. I respectfully request that the pot and the kettle stop with the handbags.

I think the basic logic has been, "al those environmentalists are yapping about how we are running out of oil. So people think we're running out of oil RIGHT NOW. So, if we increase prices, the greenies will talk even more and everybody will accept it." Which we do. I mean, what can we do? I don't drive, but it can be a damn pain sometimes, and prevents me getting things done.

I don't agree that it's just the parents' responsibility, because it's not a simple parent-government scale - kids aren't influenced by just parents, and more than in any other period in history, they are out of the parents' grasp and not for the fault of the parents; it's just a consequences of our times. The old, and certainly once true, adage has not gone compeltely obsolete, but certainly outdated. Anyway, totally called the Sand post. And I do definitely agree that whatever the solution, it isn't to not teach them about contraceptives and pretend they don't exist, goo-goo ga-ga. I don't know how they came up with that one.

Why, you sound suspiciously like Sand there.

Of course, samm. I am not championing abstinence over casual sex. I am saying they both have their own logics, and their logics are constructed things; neither of those are 'natural'. I was trying to debunk a particular strand of argument that some like to use, saying sex is a natural thing and if it feel's good, it's not wrong, etc. These things are all built up through social and cultural influences - this remains true for boths ides of the spectrum. The real challenge for proper sex education (which does not necessarily promote abstinence), is that it has to overcome this discourse and social climate of sex which has a much bigger and earlier influence on people than sex education. You get sex-ed from, what, 13/14? By then you are already exposed to the hypersexuality of the media and of the way other people talk about, elude to, joke about sex, how sexuality or rather eroticism is worn as a cloth and sign of a certain social status. You are already unconsciously aware of how this society thinks of sex, so by then, sexual education has to do the harder work - it has to scrape that away as well as teach the stuff. Just teaching kids the knowledge isn't going to make them practice abstinence, or really change their sexual behaviour at all (except for, uh, wearing condoms more often). Now, if the goal of sex education is to avoid diseases and unwanted pregnancies and nothing else, I suppose this is fine. But that's why if anybody is unhappy or worried about how our society treats sex at all, sex education is... well, it's a very difficult way to go about it.

I know one couple. Very dedicated Christians. Not exactly weird people, or fanatics or stuckups. Yeah, it can happen, apparently. I'm not going to comment on whether abstinence is 'good' or 'bad'. But the point is - sex is really only as important as you make it. If you and your partner don't depend on sex to confirm your committment, and if you're not used to satisfying your hard-ons immediately, abstinence is not actually some sort of constant vigil, or a difficult, unnatural choice that forces your body to do what it doesn't like (hell, that's dieting. That doesn't stop people, right? There goes the 'natural' argument). The biggest thing that makes abstinence so difficult, rather like vegeterianism, is not your 'natural wants' or your relationships itself, but the social climate. I'm not saying abstinence > sex or whatever, just wanted to point that out. If you like sex and want to have pre-marital sex, fine. I haven't made my mind up on the issue yet and so I'm not even in a position to judge that either way. But let's not pretend it's some sort of 'natural' 'as-it-should-be' 'inevitable' thing. If you pursue ars erotica, you pursue ars erotica.

Exactly like Hollywood. "OH WOW, EXPLOSION". To be fair, I don't even know the GTA stories, though I would be surprised if it wasn't like that.

*shrug* IE portraits were never really that good, with the exception of Torment. I didn't think many of the IWD series portraits were that special, but then I'm never a fan of the fantasy style. Item icons were fine, weren't they? They weren't great, but they didn't really stand out or jar or anything. A year or two ago, Weimer with a couple of others founded http://www.planewalkergames.com/ - I have no idea why I called it PSG, sorry. Anyway, they are developing a whole new RPG with a very IE feel to it, with the explicit aim of bringing back that kind of older RPG that is no longer produced very much. It looks quite promising, though it's a long time away. Given this, I find it very hard to believe he would come back to dabbling in BG2 mods.

Yeah, I wouldn't usually recommend beta mods for everyone. Icewind Gate would have been a very nice mod had it been finished by Weimer himself, but he's at PSG now and won't ever come back to it. As for NPC mods, I never play them. I find most of them poor or not fit in very well (making a new character is a lot harder than it looks) - also I am very happy with the standard NPCs. I do hear good things about Kelsey, though.

Yeah, I forgot about that one - I don't install it either. There is indeed a line between challenge and sadism. I recall a couple of other battles where I liked the level of challenge being presented, but some of it was obscene, and I would use Ctrl+Y to kill off a particularly cheesy enemy before I began - no problem, still a fun challenging battle, but without, say, a superhasted Vampire that hits every hit and level drains 3 levels (not an exact example).

I remember the first Mordino family (?) mission in New Reno, where the wheezing boss wanted you to find someone who won/stole money off him in poker/chess/whatever. You found him in a basement, scared out of his wits; you could make him guide you to the spot in the graveyard where he buried the stash. "Here it is.. uh.. I'll just go, now.." "No, no. Here. Shovel. Dig." He digs, and eventually gingerly unearthes a land-mine. "Tricky, aren't we? Carry on." Eventually, it opens up into some sort of well, where you can see a bag of money in the bottom. "So, uh.. there it is.. you want to, uh, go down and get it?" "No, I think you'll go down, and get it, and bring it here. Now git." He goes down. You pick up the landmine. "Here, catch!"

True enough, if it didn't have multiplayer or toolset, it would have been like buying Beyond Divinity or Lionheart: a piece of crap. But then, I think their success is easy to overlook - it wasn't an easy and guaranteed task to make such a relatively easy, competent, polished toolset and mod-installation systems available, spawning all those mods; multiplayer wasn't much of a hassle either, compared to some of the other games around.

Maybe Calax has that certain mindset...? I'm getting NZ citizenship to avoid the compulsory Korean military service (2 years), because I'm definitely not the army type physically or mentally, and I don't want to pursue it as a career anyway. But I can definitely see the good it can do for some.

Woooow, I'm not touching Vologic, no way. I think eventually, most people got their money's worth out of it, little by little from the variety of functions offered.

It does suck when the mod doesn't fit well with the game. Spell/item icons that are clearly out of place; abilities that are clearly overpowered; so on and so forth. However, over the years, I feel that the BG2 modders have become so good at what they do there are quite a few mods out there which really fit in quite seamlessly; for example, the one which lets you have Irenicus in your party in TOB, and even have him contemplate redemption, as Sarevok does. He is a little too powerful, but they did a good job by not going overboard with the redemption thing (he has doubts, he doesn't just go OMG ILL BE GOOD NOW), the dialogue fits quite wonderfully, etc. Tactics is very good if you leave out some fights you personally fiind silly. You don't need to cheese through most of tactics battles to win it, and I'm not a particularly good D&D player or a careful character builder (i mean, Jan+Edwin+Mage PC+Jaheira? Not effecitve, at all), but I don't need to cheese on most of the battles. Even soloing Very Hard vanilla isn't very hard after a while, because the challenges are very 'stock' - it just gets annoying because of the ridiculous difference in pure damage and HP. It's not fun to fight, say, 50,000 soldiers with 2,000; it's fun to fight 3,000 vs. 2,000 where those 3,000 have special bonuses like immunities or unnerfed abilities, and that's what tactics does. MC - Yeah, I assume with a more sensible party like yours Torgal is eminently defeatable. A trilogy replay is due sometime in the next month or two, I think.

Intriguing - Improved Torgal is usually one of the few Tactics improvements that I leave out. I can deal with Improved Shadow Dragon / Shadow Lord, and most other improvements, because I like a challenge and there's nothing I enjoy like a battle where I have to reload 20 times and try all sorts of tactics and eventually win, thanks to a last-ditch critical hit, Korgan whining about the low health while the rest of the party lies dead at various points on the map. The thing iwith Torgal was though, no matter how beefed up I was, his entourage would fall quickly but he was mathematically impossible to kill. Very high AC + very high regeneration and the troll immunity to lower class weapons and magic resistance really hur tme, because I usually have a partyh of 4, and 2 of those could well be mages. Without enough 'blunt' power he would always heal faster than he was hit; and to add insult to injury he would attack very fast and land them. I'm sure it was just me having trouble due to that (frankly silly) party makeup and so forth, though. I'm not a particularly savvy D&D player.

I hate undead, you can't backstab them. There are so many cheese tactics available in BG2 that you can even solo a thief or a mage and get by on Core difficulty... though I suppose it's a challenge if you get Tactics on top of that. I remember having a maxxed out SoA assassin take out Irenicus in the Tree of Life with, uh, traps. You lay traps, rest, lay traps, talk to him, then fire an arrow as soon as battle begins = instant death. The resting bit makes it cheesy so I didn't do it again, but it was quite interesting (and funny) that one time.

I just hate Cernd, you see. Bluhhhhh I am Cernd and I have been lobotomiiiised. A fine line between enigma and bleached brain if there ever was.

Uh... you don't play torrent files. Just to cover all bases, I'll explain: 1. You search for a torrent file of whatever you want to download. (e.g. an mp3 of Mary had a little lamb.) 2. You download the .torrent file, which is tiny and isn't actually the mp3. 3. You run a torrent program such as Utorrent (linked above) to use the .torrent file to download the acutal mp3. 4. You play the .mp3 in winamp or whatever. I suspect you are actually talking about step 3. There is no such thing as a torrent player. Yes?

I think Josh has a point, speaking as a total ignoramus on anything about guns. I wouldn't know which model or design was 'real' or not, but I wouldn't mind - so I can't speak on that - but I think the important thing isn't that guns are realistic and matches reality; it's that they, like other items, have a sense of history and context and fit into the world. Even if all the names and stuff are fake, and it's a totally fake gun, does it really matter if it's designed well and it feels 'real' in that world?

Clarify what exactly you are wanting, yes, walkerguy. If it's playing partially downloaded torrent A/V, then an FLV player or winamp is the best way to go. If downloading, I have to agree with the utorrent recommendation.