Tale

I ended up buying Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops over Amazon a few days ago. And now I find out we're about to get an expanded version. terrific

So now we learn of Sand's snuff film fetish. That's terrific.

Ein mehr. Then they're going to go over whether to continue releasing games as episodes or go back to the tradition model.

I thought the Orc caves were also pretty easy. They're spread out enough and your characters have levelled enough where they deal with them. I'm of agreement with Cant, it was just slow.

I thought Episode 2 was... I don't know. I'm not sure if I liked it or not. It does repeat somethings that it doesn't really need to. That whole using physics props with the gravity gun to cross dangerous "water" thing? Yeah, I FCKING HATE THAT! But, episode 2 includes it. I was glad to leave that behind in the original Half-Life 2. Otherwise, it's mostly good. Doesn't have as much new stuff as Episode 1 seemed to. Or maybe it did, it just had more repeated stuff + new stuff.

There's one point in NWN2 where I've almost had to use traps every time to get through without smashing my keyboard. The quest in the watch/thief lines where you must get the snitch from inside the house. That place is filled to the brim with enemies and if you try fighting them, there's a few places where two or three rooms worth of guys come at you all at once. I have to floor the place with every trap I've encountered up to that point in the game and just train as many guys as I can across them to the entrance. Takes ridiculous amounts of time to set up, but it gets me through it.

Neverwinter Nights 2 It would appear that the Grobnar did not recognize when I gave him the rune-inscribed whatever. It was in a bag in Khelgar's inventory and he wouldn't take it, but he'd talk like he was taking it. Then I move it into my characters inventory and he takes it! But, nothing updates. And I can't for the life of me get the ga_start_convo script to work using grobnar and 21_cs_construct as the first two values. I used to be able to do this kind of thing when it first came out! But digging around in here brings back memories.

It's something like the Warlock "gets a 25% discount since he never meets the spell component increased CL by 3" what?

The description for imbue item is absolutely terrible. Not because it's not descriptive, but because it seems hardly english.

Well, it can't be too complicated if I was able to have an even superficial grasp of it when I was in middle school back when I first read about it. However, some aspects of it when explored as thought experiments are immensely counterintuitive. Further, the implications it has for order of events and how faster than light communication can ultimately result in breaks in causality (as some people have supposedly put forth) are what are most interesting and most complicated to grasp. And that's what I plan on going over next assuming my fickle nature does not take hold of me tomorrow. I'm trying to put it in words that are relatively easy to follow, as well, as the intention is to teach for those who may not have any particular education in even so much as physics. Or at least as simply as I reasonbly can without doing any serious planning. But, my ADHD makes my train of thought drift, so I'm probably getting off track. If anyone wants to add something, feel more than free to jump right in. Add, clarify, discuss, elaborate, take over, whatevah!

No.

Captain America is back.

They taste like candy.

I hated those gates with a passion. I hated fighting Clanfears with a passion. I could not fight a Clanfear without having to rest afterwards. It didn't matter if the Clanfear never saw me, he still took most of my health away. And they only got stronger?! JIMMINY CRACKHOUSE! But, my first time playing it I did play it all the way through. I beat the main quest, I beat the thieves, I beat the brotherhood. After that, I wanted a set of glass armor. When it came to the point that every light armor wearing humanoid non-civilian in the entire game had glass armor, I just didn't know what to do anymore. And all I wanted was a helmet that nobody wore. And even trying to replay it, I just can't shake that experience of the "end game." I can't play a game where I fight through annoying gates and clanfears just to be met with no real personal goals or achievements to strive for.

I agree. Personally, I'm wanting to draw some diagram, so if you could hook up some touchscreen functionality that I can use with my DS when I get home that'd be terrific.

If I were to become a spy for Britain would this qualify as treason even though they're an ally?

And as an aside, and part of why I love this subject, I'm almost certain that I've already messed up somewhere and gotten something wrong.

So, what have we established? We've established now that the speed of light is invarient for all observers/reference points. This is included in the second postulate of the Special Relativity Theory (SRT). The first postulate, as we went over, is that for all frames of reference, the physical laws of the universe are the same. Let us say that two objects moving through space are A and B. A is travelling at 1/2 the speed of light towards object B. A emits light. We might therefore expect the light emited by A to have a total velocity of 1 1/2 the speed of light. The second postulate of SRT says "NEIN!" The light emited by A is still only going the speed of light, c. However, according to an observer at A, the light emitted by A is also going the speed of light! This is weird behavior. If A was instead going 5 miles an hour and threw a softball 1 mile an hour, the softball would be going 1 mile an hour from the perspective of A, but 6 miles an hour from the perspective of B. It really wouldn't matter if A was going 5 miles an hour, 1/2 c, or 9/10 c, the difference in these two situations is that one is dealing with a 1 mile an hour softball and the other is dealing with the speed of light. But again, according to the first posulate of SRT, are they really that different? And now hopefully we see the complication. The true difference in the 1 mile an hour softball and the speed of light in my examples is only a matter of scale. The same laws and effects are in play, the only difference is that the effect is unappreciable at the slower speed of the softball scenario. I mentioned consequences of this earlier. There's more consequences to this and I'll be going over them in a bit.

Know what I'm fascinated by today? Special Relativity When I was younger, I owned a set of scientific encyclopedias. It was a short set of encyclopedias that covered topics ranging from lasers and holograms, to relativity. Of course, those are just the three sections I was most fascinated with and read through several times at the time. So, I have some background knowledge on special relativity. I've been reading up more on it in wikipedia, when I should be working, and I feel like sharing it with you all. Some of you know of it, some of you probably don't, but it's doubtful too many here truly know what or why. Some of it's counterintuitive and that makes it difficult to wrap your head around at times. In fact, despite my interest in it, I won't be surprised if a few of the concepts I think I know, or at least think I'm familiar with, are wrong. And even if what I know isn't mistaken, there's no surety that I'll be presenting it accurately. But, here goes. First off, I'd like to go over why special relativity is so difficult and counterintuitive. Einstein's Special Relativity takes the notion that observed motion is relative to the observers, Galilean relativity, and applies it to all laws of physics. As an example of Galilean relativity, if you are sitting still on the sidewalk and I were to move past you (ignoring friction), then from your position on the sidewalk I was moving and from my position, both you and the sidewalk are moving. According to Galileo and Einstein, both these points of view are equally valid. This is only slightly counterintuitive. In ways it may seem philosophical, because we're tempted to use the Earth to give us the frame of reference. Acknowledging that even it is moving through space, rotating along its axis, revolving around the sun, moving out from the center of the expanding universe, we have to discard this notion of the Earth as the definitive frame of reference for motion. Einstein takes this a step further and says that it doesn't matter if you're sitting on the sidewalk, driving by in a car, or hurtling through space in a rocketship going at 9/10 the speed of light, the physical laws of the universe are all the same. So what? Big deal. It makes sense. Nothing difficult about that. Well, the problem is that it complicates what has been observed in regards to electromagnetic waves. Several experiments attempted to measure earth's speed relative to a hypothesized medium through which electromagnetic waves travelled. This hypothesized medium, aether, was thought to be an absolute frame of reference. Unlike relativity, it was the only truly valid point of reference, always still, and everything else moved in relation to it. What's wacky is that these experiments ultimately showed a consensus that the speed of light does not change regardless of the motion of the observers. What's so weird? Well, this has consequences. More on this when I post again.

Don't forget the traps. Those were actually kind of fun. Not sure if I ever killed anyone with the logs, but it was fun to try!

Maybe if you were nicer to them!

Why don't you kill some Cylons about it?

I hate that I know it's going to be Davros so early. I was surprised every other season.

None of those models are ripped from games. The DOA models are too low quality to have been anything DOA2 or later and too high quality to be DOA1. Aside from that, Machinima is not defined on a per model basis, but the use of a game itself as the platform. It looks like it was either done frame by frame or using some sort of complicated scripting. Either way, it would qualify simply as low quality CG animation.