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Look out for birthday racists. I've used that one before, but now it's gotten ****in' teeth, I'll tell you.

You ever get one of those Ghostbusters toaster things as a kid that they trapped ghosts in? They resemble that. Still, when you hold one, you generally feel the sort of power that one feels when holding a gun. It's mostly the fact that it resembles a gun. Telling factoid: When asked what stunt he most regretted doing (or that he would never consider doing again) Johnny Knoxville said getting tased was the most painful thing he'd ever experienced. And that guy snorted wasabi.

The difference between Micheal Richards and Chris Rock (or perhaps more appropriately, Richard Pryor) using racial slurs is self-identification. Slurs are demeaning precisely because they place whatever distinction they make (black skin for "****", homosexuality for "queer" or "****", etc.) above the recipients' personhood. A white man calling someone a **** generally implies that they are black before anything else, and being black is bad. When Pryor or Rock self-identify with that slur, they remove the negative connotation from being black, and the power that those who use the word "****" disparagingly wield over them. Thus the word becomes innuendo, only offensive to those who accept it as such. Some would say that the very condemnation of the word is racist, because addressing it would be implicitly lending it credibility, and the whole purpose of the "taking it back" approach of the black comedians was to rob "****" of its credibility and power. So when we say that black comedians can use the word "****" and white people can't, that's why. Asians can be **** and charlies, irishmen can be micks, italians can be guineas, hispanics spics, etc. etc. only if they choose to identify themselves as such. No one else has the right to refer to them as such and still be accepted.

Meh, I find the BG2 engine to be look better than the Electron engine. High-end 2D is more aesthetically pleasing than middling 3D. Some of the level design (particularly the mountain environs) are certainly better looking, but there were no aspects of the BG2 engine that obviously came up short in the way NWN2's do. For example, it's obvious from the design of the areas that the engine can't handle more than 3-5 sub-areas per location, which is a problem in, say, marketplaces, and it makes the gameworld feel way too tight. The entire city of Neverwinter is about the size of a single BG2 district. The weight of some of the BG areas would be too much for the Electron engine to handle, which makes me skeptical about the chances of the planned BG version coming out whole. I'm currently putting my recently neglected 360 to use, replaying some Hitman: Blood Money missions and starting on the new Splinter Cell game. No running and gunning for me.

When was this? I only really noticed Bond fighting hand-to-hand starting with Goldeneye. In Casino Royale most of the fights were up close and personal, in the stairwell, in the truck (a pretty overt reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was kind of funny), in the embassy and in the museum. He only uses his gun towards the end, he loses it in most other scenes. He pulled his Walther much more frequently in the older films. Harry Knowles disproportionately favors those films that he gets to preview early. But you're right, I probably will see it. While Sly wrote the rightly hated Rocky V (probably the worst sequel ever put on film), he also wrote the original, and Rocky is still the quisessential underdog sports movie. It's not the best movie ever, but it has undeniable charm. The new 'un has potential, but come on, Rocky V.

I'm playing a Warlock too. They're "boring" in the same way fighters are boring, in that they more or less repeat the same actions over and over. Certainly nice once you get some of the blast shapes and some of the nicer variations on the blast. Nevertheless, I'm having a few problems with mine. For one, the AI won't play the character as a spellcaster, a problem I don't have with Ammon Jerro. Second, eldritch forms don't stack at all, meaning, if you hit an enemy with a draining blast, which slows and curses them, and then you hit with a brimstone blast, the curse and slow effects are removed and replaced by the immolation effect. I'm also at level 9 and encountering more and more enemies capable of resisting the blasts, which is frustrating, if to be expected.

There's certainly no video evidence of that and the UCLA Daily Bruin reported that student witnesses denied Tabatabainejad was inciting anyone. http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38960 <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Indeed, and even if that was the case, cops aren't supposed to use that kind of force on people who only verbally provoke. That's the whole point. I would hope people would have thicker skin than that. Force 101: The situation called for level 2 force, and they used level 3 force. We call that "excessive force" and it's a problem. Even if in this case the situation had escalated to level 3, tasers are to be used once, twice if the subject is resilient or tweaking, which was not the case. This is serious ****.

Unlike noses, **** are awesome. Obsidian's got my back on this one. O YA! Game over. I'm printing out Van Buren design docs. Again. Well, we could throw that back atcha and ask what's erotic about soft, supple mammaries, eh? They stop being really useful after you're about 2 (4 if you're european) It's the brain, man. Things can be entirely removed from sex and still be sexy.

According to the material I have, one day in the FR the clerics of Lolth suddenly stopped being able to cast spells, and they sent some adventurers to the Demonweb Pits to check **** out. The adventurers found Lolth "in a comatose state" on the floor of her Abyssal grotto or whatever. At that point the opposing drow god Vhaerun teleported in to kill Lolth (apparently he had just found out about the situation) and Lolth's slave-son Selvetarm came in to defend her. Big god-battle ensues, and the very substance of the Abyss is torn in so doing, and Lolth's body, Vhaerun, and Selvetarm all fall into a void. The implications of this are also unclear, as there are now 3 potentially dead drow deities. It was suggested in the material that this could constitute another FR cataclysm, with the rift in the Demonweb Pits causing the Abyss to "bleed" onto the other planes and the prime material. High-level campaign, obviously. Exactly what happened to Lolth is a mystery, I believe it was made that way so RPers would be able to make the story up themselves. When I briefly ran a campaign centered around it, I naturally tied it into BG pulling my deity/adventurer into conflict with Lolth, with my deity setting up the rift as a trap. The rift fed into the Far Realm, D&D's version of a Lovecrafian cosmos. It was meant only to trap my deity and Lolth, but when Selvetarm and Vhaerun also got pulled in the trap went haywire and the rift became permanent. The PCs were meant to start off small, fighting monsters and horrors that had appeared on Faerun through the rift, then become wise to the rift itself, go through the rift to the Far Realm, find Selvetarm and Vhaerun, kill them or get them out, deal with Lolth's minions, and then leave before the rift closed itself, and ensure that neither my deity nor Lolth could escape. Pretty epic stuff. I'm glad this is a D&D enamored board, else I would never talk about these outlandish ideas I have at all. Today's homework: compare and contrast the hierarchies of Demons and Devils. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Heh, I'll try. The blood war and the outer planes are more symbolic than anything. Everything in the outer planes is a personification and exaggeration of ideas and concepts. They're kind of like Plato's ideal forms, kind of. As was outlined in PS:T, the blood war is less of a fight between devils and demons than it is a fight between law and chaos. And unlike drow and orcs, devils and demons and angels cannot have any traits that are unbecoming of their alignment, they are their alignment. They are ideal representatives of it. A succubus who acts in a lawful or good manner is no longer a succubus. An archangel who acts in an evil manner just once becomes an archdevil. So really, all you have to do to compare devils and demons is compare LE to CE. Here's a cosmology of the Far Realm I made. It was meant to have a linear, assymetrical configuration in comparison to the conventional D&D wheel-cosmology. I remember having all of it done, but I can't find a complete copy, so it's incomplete here as is:

Open the console (~ key) Type "DebugMode 1" Type "rs kr_influence(12)" You should then get a dialogue box that allows you to check/modify any of your NPC's influence values. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That'll certainly make it easier to crack those tougher dialogues with NPCs who you don't travel with much. Much obliged.

No wai. 5/10. Epilogues 4/10 (no Adalon? No Nasher? wtf?) End VO 3/10

so there is a way to kick people out of your party? Do they come back eventually?

what.

I don't know if I'd go that far. So far as I understand the situation, the kid was using standard non-violent resistance methods (going limp, etc.) often used by protesters. It's certainly better than throwing rocks. The tasering was about as called for and appropriate as using attack dogs and clubs on civil-rights era marchers. The fact that there was only one of him and he was potentially goading them is irrelevant, they showed irresponsibility that should cost them their jobs. They made a mistake, but one that wasn't out of acceptable negligence. This wasn't negligence, this was dangerous stupidity. Hell, I wonder what they'd do to somebody who actually resisted them.

I generally find the Gith races to be rather boring in the oddworld of Planescape (which strangely enough I also found to be rather boring), but MCA certainly knows his ****, and even if he didn't exactly "move forward" with Z as a character concept, she's still rather compelling in execution.

The drow are CE because even though there is a heirarchy in drow society, order itself is not valued. If you can get away with killing your superiors, you should. The same can't be said of, say, the zhentarim, where a lot of caution must be exercised if you're going to break rank. In this way, the drow society is chaotic in a social darwinist sense, the herd is constantly being culled of the weak, and as a result the drow are always formidable opponents. However, unlike the Germanic-style CE warrior culture of the orcs, the paremeters of the drow heirarchy remain more or less static, there's an established high-born class that always leads them, and the race of the drow itself retains a singular sense of malign purpose (in the following of Lolth) that unites them against external pressures and makes their threat to the surface constant. Interestingly, in the FR Lolth no longer exists, for all intents and purposes, and drow society in that setting has more or less collapsed as CE groups tend to do when they have no supreme power-regulating figure with an interest in a status quo, but the full implications of it haven't been explored much last time I checked.

I just hope these games don't constitute a "revolution in gaming" like some claim. I found the J-Horror plot of FEAR (a big selling point of the game) to be atrocious sub-anime tripe, and I've already said my piece on GoW. I'll be happy if I never see another game franchise that's focused primarily on arena combat MP.

Bahahahaha It's long, but worth it.

Bah. The equation of ethics with opinion is fallacious. The statement "I like coffee" is fundamentally different from the statement "rapists should be castrated". The former is descriptive claim that is true so long as it is the case that I like coffee, the latter is normative claim prescribing that it ought to be the case that rapists be castrated, and the truth of my claim is dependent not on how I feel, but the reasons for my conclusion. One's subjective opinions about whether or not coffee is good does not require rational defense. One's claim that rapists should be castrated does require reason, and if that reason is sound its persuasive force requires acknowledgment. If there is no good reason given, then they're just making noise and you're free to ignore them or ridicule them. The very fact that there exist different conceptions of right and wrong does not make them created equal as opinion. It does not follow that there is no objective fact of the matter, and that no one is truly right nor wrong when they make a normative claim. I think in most regards it's reasonable. To do otherwise abrogates the philosophy of rights you're wanting to uphold. Nonsense, I never stated that rights are inalienable or universally applied. One gets around the problem by concieving of a social contract that one must follow in order to recieve his/her recognized rights. The fact that those outside the contract are not considered is a strength and a weakness of the theory. A strength in that those who violate or ignore the contract forfeit their rights and thus crime and punishment becomes a relatively transparent issue, a weakness in that naturally one does wish to include some who are excluded. Social contracts are by nature conservative. But in this case, I'm willing to make rapists non-people. Why should they have moral consideration for what you allege are your rights? Yours are just as phantasmal. Naturally, because it's in their best interests to do so. Their agreement not to violate the contract and my rights as a signee with them is made with the reciprocal understanding that I cannot violate theirs. When they break the contract and harm others, they invite harm upon themselves. When they recognize and protect others' rights, they recieve those rights and enjoy them. Perhaps. If we're being realistic we're talking about people who were convicted of crimes, not necessarily people who have committed them. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Of course, which is the most significant and reasonable argument not to rip anyone's balls off, or kill them for that matter. But that's not to say that retributive justice is wrong, it's to say that it can't be applied fairly. Once guilt is 100% assurable, we can practice such punishments. But because we'll never be 100% sure, we shouldn't practice them, lest we contradict ourselves by torturing / killing the innocent. Ah, it's refreshing to try on Hobbes' shoes for a night.

That's only if we consider that everyone everywhere all the time no matter what have the same basic rights. Is it really reasonable to consider a rapist and Ghandi, or a murderer and a common citizen, as equal in all regards? I'd say that the rapists and murderers are less deserving of moral consideration. They themselves never regarded what was right, why should we include them? We're not talking about ripping the balls off of your average man or your petty thief, we're talking about ripping the balls off of people who have committed the worst violations of right & wrong imaginable.

Here I was actually expecting reason, and all I get is an appeal to relativism. Tsk. Moral questions are not opinion-based. The desire to punish criminals is an incredibly reasonable one. The concept of a convict being a victim of crimes perpetrated by the state is invalid if we consider that by violating the law, he has removed himself from the law's protections. If he is guilty of the crime, it is not unreasonable to demand that he not be protected from that crime. He has asserted that he cannot regard others' rights, and thus he himself has no rights.

Dead Rising. I'm trying to decide what to do with my free week.

There's a dichotomy between the ethical legitimacy of retributive justice and the feasability of its implementation. Of course a rapist deserves to have his balls ripped off. If you're arguing against that then you're fighting a losing battle. Surely someone who commits such a heinous crime is removed from the consideration we would put on the rest of humanity. The only reason we don't rape rapists is because there's always the possibility of innocence.

excerrent

they're all okay. . As it stands, Sand is probably my favourite character.