Tigranes

got to love the random kotor(2) screenie in the middle..

It may be realistic, but it's one of those things you don't want anyway. Like eating, or sleeping. Runescape was the *devil* just because when you start the game you're sitting there whack, whack, whack, cook, cook, cook, chop, chop, chop... oh, another example of this was Dungeon Siege. So unless you want half the game to be "Practice being a Swordmaster"... I personally like the idea, too, but have yet to see any suggestion for a proper implementation.

Heh.. can't do Chinese, sorry. I was mostly talking about the others here though. I can understand you just fine, so if you understand me.. that works.

Go to "My Controls" then you can pick an avatar, which is the picture you're talking about. What language do you prefer? Most people here can speak multiple languages if you want...

uh.... sure.

It's a twisted miracle Kerry's still not winning.

A portrait from Icewind Dale.. 1 or 2, I don't recall.

by a "legal" p2p site, as in irrefutably legal and not borderline sued, the seeder or p2p organisation would have to legally buy every single copy of everything that is traded, then pay a massive amount more, tracking how many people acquire the same item. Insanely impossible. there is and won't be for a while a "legal" p2p network in that sense. Go buy music at iTunes or something.

Well, I'm in a weird spot myself; attending church for a while - Anglican Protestant, in name, but it's really just your average hodge-podge vaguely Protestant church. And I can't disagree with most of the Bible's teachings (moral teachings, not discussions over its historical or scientific value that I consider pointless), but personally can't get that faith jump to believe in God. But then, I am young, so I'm giving it time to see how I go. Usually my take is that the Bible was never written as a historical account, or even a factual handbook; it was a collection of believers in a religion full of the said religion's teachings, and often not literal. I know many may disagree, but I believe that the Bible does not argue Jesus actually performed most of his miracles, except perhaps the resurrection, and there was no worldwide flood, etc. I'm not saying that I don't believe it, I'm saying that I believe the Bible is not trying to say that at all. This is all my opinion, of course - feel free to demolish it and I'd be happy to read it - that the Bible has moral and spiritual guidance to give, and it gives so in any way possible by the eloquency it is lent by the writing skills of the twentysomething Christians. To ground back my points to somewhere concrete, I have little association with the modern network of churches for spiritual and religious guidance; everyone finds their own way to religion, and while they may be helped the churches have become an unorganised morass of publicised institutions that are pressured by monetary needs, public appearance, the changing values of the society (and, of course, most churches' inability to stand firm with any value but bend to the perceived rightness of the changing world), and their relationships with other churches and for some the Papacy. Urban II is a Pope I believe was an excellent one, the Church having waded, and now wading further, into a time of great religious debate and pressure. Yet when I read his latest statement about the role of women in the Christian religion, this is shown clearly. I am in no way opposed to feminism, gender equality or anything of the sort; yet this is, just like homosexuality (which I support), another example where the Church changes its values simply for the sake of surviving, and avoiding the scorn of the world. If society changed in future centuries to, say, recognise the clear differences between genders to a degree that discrimination against gender was seen as a sensible and logical thing, I have little doubt that the Church of that time would "get with the times" and reverse their edict once again. It does little to bolster its reliability. Proof for the existence of God does not exist; there doesn't need to be one. To take the argument further, we don't have any clear proof of *anything*. You can't prove your own thoughts since for all you know you are manipulated, drugged, hallucinating, whatever; you can't prove the existence or presenc of any material thing in the world; there can be no irrefutable proof or anything. There is always unconditional, illogical belief involved, and it is simply that our conscious logic defies the existence of an omniscient deity more readily than the shape of reality and whatnot. I have heard said that the age of the earth and so forth does not apply to the debate on Christianity because God exists and presides outside the realms and confines of time, and of course this means he operates in a way quite very alien and unimaginable to us. The last part is an integral part of accepting the existence of God, but I wonder what the rest of you think about the Time thing. Most religions have many, if not most (Christianity and Islam), tenets that are the same, or parallel, with each other. Why? Because we are talking about religions that were born, or majorly developped, after the formation of basic human societies. In this basic human society, we recognised that if everybody killed each other wantonly we would all die; so, most/all religions declared reasonless murder as wrong. That's it. Religion is, in its core, a social law seperate of a secular government whose most fundamental values rest upon the perceived important values of the society that gave birth to the said religion. If a new religion began in 50 years time, it will surely have, as one of its most important commands, that you shall not discriminate on the colour of someone's skin, their gender, etc. Then doesn't this contradict my baulking at the church's changing values? Yes, it does, but this is my reasoning; I argue this as a man who cannot bring himself, for now or for ever, to believe in a deity, only appreciate the values of the religion. Thus this is my viewpoint of religion; but if one believes in the Christian God, say, then one believes in his eternal wisdom; so why the wishy-washyness that picks up whatever is good to oppose or love? Oppose communism, go ahead. In this vein, I respect Islam much more, because for all its severity it has maintained much more of a spine, and what I see as a true religious belief. We may cry horrible at women not being able to go out on their own, and whatever; but *however* heinous anything they do may seem to us, we must realise that our values of right and wrong are firstly formed with contribution from our environment and our acquaintances, and secondly that no matter what we have to respect any person that strives for what he believes to be right. They cross the line when they kill other people to enforce their own vision; but if they don't harm or infringe upon other people, then they have just as much right to follow Islam in the admirably true way, as we do to have pathetically low church turnouts in some parts of the western world.

I'm a native Korean speaker, learnt English, learning French, sorta-picking up Japanese and can read/write a tiiiiny bit of ancient Greek. I'm interested in Latin/Arabic since I do Classical Studies, but they will have to wait until I'm in uni Personally, Japanese is much harder to learn than English or French (which weren't that difficult); of course, I learnt a lot of English living in an English-speaking country, but I picked up French from studying, and in my opinion Japanese manages to be more complex than either. An American friend of mine wants to learn Korean from me, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes.

If you regularly worship Drizzt and Elminster, then you're stupid and addicted. If you regularly slag off Drizzt adn Elminster, then you're very addicted.

Yeah, the only downside of Azureus is its javaness. There are lots of situations where p2p doesn't necessarily mean illegal. For example, my CD drive can't read crap and my computer case is sealed, and I never got round to cracking it open () so I buy games, then download it off the net.

To make fun of everything in a crude way. a la South Park.

Change your settings; for example, Modem/56k setting will restrict your upload speed to 5kbps, and download to I think 30kbps. Now that's not really great, but there are different levels. Also experiment with number of peer connections. Azureus is good, I use it, but it's java and murders your processing power.

Awww, be nice to him, now. Sometimes I wish we had a bash.org of threads.

Hahahahaha!

It's not a good scam if it attracts intellgence. *looks at above post* well.. maybe i was wrong.

Someone gave me a song by the smiths recently. I listened.... he's okay. Nothing brilliant.

five to ten.. though at first i thought you meant an illusion of face created by the beans.

Agreed. his newest book is a spinoff-prequel about Lan and Moiraine, too. His last 4 books in the series have been "They will all do this... NEXT BOOK!"

Guess FO3 can go on the list now, huh.

I don't know about their guitar/bassists... In one of their songs the guitarist actually needs to take out three of the strings so he can play the riff (only 3 strings are used). And the riff is about as hard as... start to fade to black?

I'll add to the voice of sympathy, Ender; and it's great that you could pull through. We can all say that it's not the situation, but the person itself; you're right, someone who did not have a strong sense of self would crumble in any situation, sooner or later. But it's worth thinking about, that perhaps a good childhood can give a person a chance to ready himself. It's sometimes not the problem that you don't try to change yourself, either. I know that I am one, because everyone is; and when I notice others doing it it's frustrating and depressing; that you don't know what you're doing wrong, or what is happening to you, and despite fervent efforts by yourself and/or others to make you realise it, you can't seem to figure it out. It's like not knowing about something hanging over your head, sometimes even unaware that it is even there at all. You can't fix a problem till you see it, and if you can't even see it or know about it... what do you do?

Ender's Game was a great book; his themes weren't nearly as tightly knit and the philosophic speculations were less convincing in his sequels. Of course, then he came up with the idea of writing a parallel series with Bean as the lead, and the first one was pretty much a carbon copy; the two characters are too similar to do a POV thing.