Epaminondas

I frequent online places irregularly over the past several years. I guess mostly because I'm a coward. However, I promised myself a long time ago that, should I be in an online community on Christmas, I would always wish everyone a Happy Christmas. This isn't a challenge. This isn't some flaunting of my beliefs in your face. I don't care if you're Christian and I have lived where Christianity is not the dominant religion. I've also had my own brand of Christianity called "the Whore of Babylon." Sadly, while this is a standard boiler plate, it's easier to get this out so I don't have to respond to snarkiness later. I won't. Free reign and I almost certainly won't even resent anyone, although I will probably hold outright trawling as contemptible. I likely won't even respond in this thread. That said, Happy Christmas! From the bottom of my heart, I hope the day finds you all in good health, in great spirits, and happy. The world is and has always been imperfect, but it's also a beautiful place and, in my experience, is filled with beautiful people. I lived for quite some time in a place where it has been Christmas already for several hours and I'm not sure what my schedule will be until it is Christmas here in less than twenty-four hours, but I think the world and its inhabitants deserve a lot less grief and a little more happiness. So, for all of you out there, whatever your religion or lack thereof, Happy Christmas. May the God I know in my heart to exist look down upon you with kindness. May He forgive your shortcomings and give you peace. May the Lord who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life grant you joy and contentment all the days of your life. May you feel some stirring in your soul to find the good inside yourself and act upon it in accordance with your conscience. ...And may He forgive me for sounding like such a pompous and arrogant putz as I make this post.

I don't think the dice are rigged, but I still curse them sometimes. If people are like me, I can point out a couple of things. If you've tuned your deck well, almost all of your mid to late game rolls are highly favorable to you. So, you're testing the edge on those rolls and, being a computer game/app, you're testing them a *lot.* Conversely, you aren't testing unfavorable rolls because you've engineered your deck not to be forced into them. That said, I've actually been caught with my pants down and one time I had a three percent change to get a roll. I shrugged and threw my dice. I laughed because it brought to mind the times I'd rolled in extremely favorable conditions and lost. To your point, though, MrScott, I would have railed with nerd rage against the first loss. Good chance I would have laughed at the second one. It's cool to see others feeling the same pain, though. lol Gotta bolster each other's spirits when the RNG grinds us down to a fine paste.

Happy Festivus, Shadysands, you glorious bastard!

I think a debate over the process will be fun, but this is your idea, your work, and your decision. Your baby, your call. So, I'm happy to discuss the methodology you used, but I also think it's good to have one person be the final arbiter because you can't find perfect and a committee would nit pic the hell out of the whole thing. On the other hand, if you provide the raw data to others who might tweak it, you could see different results. Kind of takes the fun out of it for me, but there might be someone else who's interested. There are great programs out there that brute force the math so you don't have to number crunch it all yourself unless you enjoy it.

What he should do is compile the damned list already! :D

I guffawed! lol It's like when you meet that beautiful young lady and ask her out for coffee and a Danish and she responds with a deeper voice than your own.

Portal is a tough one. I really think that should be on my list, but I'll stand by what I posted. Portal is one of only a few games I actually arsed myself to get all the achievements. Great fun. MotB deserved to be on my list, but it was an xpac for an existing game and that ruled it out of my paradigm. The rubric had specific requirements. Still, nothing is immutable.

You should look into Pathfinder Adventures. The whole package isn't particularly costly and the game is engaging and quite fun. I've played hours upon hours on my Samsung Tab S2. You can also get it on steam and connect the accounts. At one point I had it on my phone, my tablet, and my computer. I'll probably put it on my laptop for those moments I need to take a quick break but can't take the time to play an RPG or something. I imagine I'll get Witcher III. If I can avoid combat and enjoy the story, that's enough for me. I just finished Dishonored 2 and didn't fight anything other than rats and blood flies the entire game. Well... I did occasionally fight folks for the hell of it, but then I reloaded. If I can get at least some respite from the fighting and get a little exploration and an unfolding story, I'll be a happy gamer.

Finished dishonored 2 with precisely 1 kill. I did, however, kill the final boss the first time, but I reloaded and let that big boss live. *shrug* Deserved an unceremonious end, if you ask me, but according to Tolkien, some who deserve to die live. I will say this, they did a good job with Corvo. He is sympathetic and I enjoy his story, but I still think that Daud's story is better. Part of that is that I'm a sucker for redemption. Corvo's story is personal, which is excellent, but he's responding to what people have done to him and his family. Daud struggles with himself and so it's not about a series of antagonists. Whatever external foe Daud faces at any given time, he's at war with his inner demons at the same time.

heh, my neighbors told me to go outside to see an extremely weird light in the sky. Turned out to be the iridium 4 launch, but it was really weird looking, I tell you! I took a video. I've seen several test launches over the years, but this was really weird looking. My neighbor didn't recognize it and he worked on earlier versions of iridium.

Symbolism is important for people who buy into the symbols. The people voting at the UN might not buy into the symbols since they're behind the curtain, but they're playing a part for an audience. The problem with the UN is that the symbolic gestures that it makes are manifestly impotent. If people cease to believe the UN wields moral authority, then it becomes completely irrelevant. I don't have much use for it as an institution, but it *has* served to provide legitimacy to many American endeavors globally and we should at least recognize that we're part of the problem when it comes to the UN. I'm more interested in outcomes rather than history, but there's no way to know what will happen if we see an actual dismantling of the UN. Anyone who says he can say for certain how that all shakes down is more than welcome to propose his prognostication here. However, my prognostication is that UN pretty much continues in status quo fashion until it whimpers itself to death in a corner some considerable time from now. The alternative, that it completely crashes, makes my prognostication irrelevant because I'll be more concerned about keeping my family alive than making global predictions. That's not because the UN fell apart so quickly, but nothing has inertia like a big bureaucracy. If the UN came to a crashing halt immediately, some other horrible event will have caused it, and *that* is scary.

Just saw this post. I'm not one of those people who panics after a few years of drought. After all, I've been a Dolphins fan since the 70s. However, it's good to see some new blood. At least Ohtani is young. Cozart is getting on in age, but he's got some skills. I just hope last season didn't end up being his swan song. lol

I don't mind people saying that we shouldn't lower taxes because we need the revenue. I don't even mind people saying we shouldn't lower taxes because the government can spend it better than the citizens. One is pretty standard liberal fare while the other is bat**** crazy, but at least both are principled arguments. What I do mind are lies about the tax bill. ...And the lies are counter-productive in that, when the goods start coming home to the tax-payers, they will realize that the detractors were lying. If I recall it right, both the Regan and Kennedy tax cuts were unpopular when passed and greatly popular over time. This tax bill has an advantage over Regan's in that everything can go into place straight away. It would have been nice if the Republicans hadn't been so idiotic as to take until the end of the year to get it through because it could have been retroactive for 2017. This might still hurt the Republicans in 2018 because the full effects won't really come into focus until the 2019 tax season, but it will be popular with people. I really could have used not having to run numbers to see whether I should itemize or take the standard deduction for this years taxes, but oh well. Middle class mooks just need to muddle through.

Hmmm, I did "bounce off" an earlier Witcher game. I finished it, but it wasn't my cuppa and, moreover, I hated the way combat worked. So much so, in fact, that I tended to avoid it as best I could. I'll have to take a look at Witcher III with this new info in mind. Plus, I didn't think Geralt was so much douchie, Hurlshot, as really just trying to figure out why he gave a crap about what he was doing. Take the money and run, you white haired freak! Maybe Witcher III will redeem him.

Ah, that changes things. I thought it was serious, in which case I had no interest. A comedy? Might give it a shot.

Naw, bud. You did a good job. Heavily accented? I think not. I did get a kick out of how well you managed to get suspect as a noun and as a verb. It's good to see someone else enjoying a game that I've always loved. If it were a book, the binding on my copy would be held together with duct tape by now. Anyhow, on the last chapter of Dishonored 2. Using the Humanoid variant, I've only had exactly one kill and that was a hive keeper whom I'd sleep darted but was apparently too close to the hive when I burned it. I'm going to play again as the girl next. I always thought she was a good kid.

Hopefully soon.

You are clearly the coolest person in this joint, ya rat bastard. That was quite an interesting read. Looks like the event starts around 1030 local time for me. If I'm able, I'll definitely take a gander.

Wow. There's an even better article embedded in the one you cited. I would say that's a standup guy. I've always kind of thought Jeter was a class act, but staying cool in the face of an angry crowd commends him.

"Nothing is immutable."

The dynamics of individual races always come down to the candidate and what threshold he has to pass in order to overcome his or her opponent. In some cases, it's presenting a better option. In some cases it's simply being electable in some half-assed way because the opponent is so bad/disliked that people are looking for an excuse to vote against him. If the Republicans can't rehabilitate Trump at least a little before the next election, it won't matter if the country is doing better or not. The dude is a royal pain in my ass.

lol rotflol Edit: Oh, I see. Hey, I'm a sweet partisan. I'd buy you all a beer. Maybe have to do it in shifts depending on how many showed up, but I'd buy you one. Either that or give you one I have handy!

I know you're a bitter partisan, but this is what happens when you can't get people from the other party to vote on any major piece of legislation. Everything must be passed solely by the party in power, which is harder for the Republicans. After all, unlike the Democrats, at least some of the Republicans vote on principle. However, I think that, in fact, the continuing resolution will go through and hopefully we'll get something even better eventually, which is an actual budget complete with an appropriations process and a look towards funding. They might end up shutting down the government for a few days, but I also think that the public is getting to be inured to this sort of thing. Now, however, if the Dems shut down the government, that'll be a ballsy and iffy move on their part. Won't matter if the GOP can't get their act together in the House, though. In the House, the Democrats can put all the blame on the GOP. In the Senate, that's not the case. I think the current strategy of hate has been successful, and it's driven by a president who gives plenty of fodder to the opposition (aw hell, just about everyone), but at some point the opposition party will have to offer up something other than hating on the pres. By that, I don't just mean CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Don't forget the Democrats are also part of the opposition party. ...And the Democrats are the elected representative faction of the opposition party, so they have it in their power to do things other than foment this 'resistance' movement. Right now, I'm not in a betting mood, but I'm looking to see whether I think this resistance movement/hate Trump crap will be a winner in the midterms. It might just work, especially in a first administration mid-term election, but it might not and, worse for the opposition party, it might actually backfire. I'll keep thinking and then maybe bet. After all, I'd like to see if the magic mirrors around this joint beat my prognosticating abilities. EDIT: I'm not in a betting mood. I'm not in a better mood either, but I'm also not in a worse one.

I need to do another New Vegas run. I watched a little of Algoroth's PS:T run, and now I'm thinking about doing another one of those. He had a hammer I didn't recognize and he said it was in the base game. Glowing red two handed hammer. I don't remember it, but I've seen it if it's in the base game. I not only did multiple runs, hacked all my stats to get the most dialogue options (because mods weren't ubiquitous for PS:T as they were for Doom), and then got a text editor so I could read through and find dialogue I missed. There's a reason PS:T is at the pinnacle of my favorites list. Anyhow, New Vegas could well be in order and PS:T, but I'm determined to finish Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider simply because it's good to play a game you haven't already finished every now and then.

I've heard of people like you, Sonic, but I never thought I'd actually meet one. On a serious note, I don't begrudge Celine Dione fans. God bless 'em, they may be greater in number, but as long as they don't resent me enjoying better music, I won't hold their lack of tastes against them.