Bartimaeus

(e): apparently I don't like reggae. sorry shady, apparently? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kf4p738j80

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Veto power over new federal laws is quite significant power, although Germany's presidents usually use it only to prevent laws that they think are in violation of constitution and it has been only used eight times total by all the presidents I think. Good to know. Is the president usually of the same party/extremely cooperative with the Prime Minister, or is not too infrequent that they're from a different party? What would it take to override said veto? (e): Article with more information on it. Apparently, the president is not really supposed to have the right to veto a bill, per se, but nevertheless does technically have it, and according to the wording, the only circumstances where it's maybe supposed to happen is where they feel it goes against the Constitution, as you said. Interesting and odd. That power would probably be used and abused to its limit here in the U.S. if we had a presidency-PM system like that, and if they were from different parties.

Yeah. I was talking more the scope of importance and responsibilities. The position is just not very important in of itself, and it usually doesn't matter who's currently sitting there - if it's a Republican presidency, then the fact that it's any other Republican is usually good enough, and the same for Democrats*. The three most important things about the VP is the effect it has upon your election chances, providing a clear successor in the case of tragedy, and their influence/power in the Senate. Nobody really thinks much of the VP until they actually do something - for example, tiebreaking a vote. Biden didn't tiebreak a single vote during his entire time as VP...but apparently, Pence has already done 3? *We should really go back to the old days of having a VP (and some cabinet members) from the opposite party instead of the "kick out everyone regardless of how competent they were and stick in your own cronies" system that we've been stuck with for a while now. Mueller, the former FBI director currently investigating Trump, is one of the few exceptions I can think of where the new president didn't immediately oust a prior administration guy when the the first opportunity came: Obama asked him to stay on after his term expired, which he did for two years. I guess the FBI position is a little different than others, though, and there's probably more examples of that sort of thing out there.

She does. The presidency there is more or less ceremonial. I think they have some miscellaneous responsibilities and powers, but really... (e): The easiest analogue would probably be VP of the U.S.

Yeah, I wanted to be mad at WoD's "I know you are but what I am", but Gorgon was pretty much asking for it.

I actually think it's more likely he has an early form of dementia. If you go back 20 years and see how he talked then, he's much more of a lucid, clear-spoken, and intelligent speaker. I wouldn't say he's quite a totally different person, but it's at least possible to follow and understand him. Nowadays, the majority of what he says is just endless nonsense or platitudes that you can only get the very basic gist of - anything more than that you're going to have to really construct yourself for him. IIRC, he's the oldest president ever elected and he's lead a pretty horrendously unhealthy life-style*, so I guess it wouldn't be that much of a surprise if that were the case. But to answer your question, I would say it's "not good". *This is the guy that believes that everyone has a "finite amount of energy", after all, and that your body breaks down once you start to run out of it so exercising is obviously terrible for you.

"Top Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election" https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Sbo500AyldgJ:https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Apparently, the lady who leaked this was arrested about an hour after it was leaked. (e): Also, in other news, CSPAN, FOX, CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC will all be airing the Comey testimony live this Thursday.

Trying to get an understanding of how areas of effect work in Baldur's Gate. What I'm learning from the vanilla spells is that every time the spell description says it's a 30 foot radius, it's a 30 foot radius. Every time it says a 20 foot radius, it's actually a 30 foot radius. If it says it's a 10 foot radius, it's also a 30 foot radius. If it's a 3 foot radius, it's actually, yes, you guessed it, a 30 foot radius. If, on other hand, it's a 5 foot radius, it might just be...a 7.5 foot radius. I don't know much about how areas of effect work from what I've seen so far, and from the looks of it, neither did BioWare when they made this game, regardless of what they were writing in the spell descriptions. All I was trying to do was to fix a spell whose area of effect I noticed was wrong...and all I figured out was that literally almost every spell that is supposed to be anything besides a 30 foot radius or just a single target is also wrong. Thanks, BioWare.

I've always wondered what exactly causes a program to freeze up in Windows. Like, you look at what it's doing, and it's still using CPU and RAM, so why isn't Windows receiving any updates from it? How can Windows not know what's going on so badly that it thinks the process should straight up be killed when it's actually working just fine? Clearly, a little better prioritization should be implemented so that the user doesn't prematurely kill the process...

Well, I apologize if you're not a bot...but...what the heck is this, then? This stuff would be hard to follow even if it were on topic...and the line-breaks appear to be totally random (one paragraph, you're using them very liberally and cutting every sentence in half for no apparent reason, while in another paragraph, you don't use them at all?), and the way you're pasting links everywhere makes it look like you're advertising. What's going on, man? The sentence structure isn't even very bad. If you read the sentences in isolation, it's pretty readable. When taking everything as a whole is where things seem to go wrong, because it's like an endless list of segues. I've moderated other forums before, and it really reminds me of some of the slightly more subtle spam I've seen over the years...but uh, I guess it's not.

I'm actually not one hundred percent sure if they are a bot, but jeeze Louise, they sure mostly write like one. Their posts are mostly total nonsense randomly stringed together that looks super bot-ish, but then there are a few things in it that make you think maybe it's not. This post is probably their worst so far, as it doesn't make any clear callbacks to previous posts, which their other posts actually did (which made me originally think they weren't a bot). Maybe they're a bot that has a little manual input or something - I'm not sure. Either way, the link spamming/advertising sure is annoying. (e): I don't know how to spell "Louise", apparently.

the bots appear to be evolving

...is it deliberate that there are an even number of options here, and therefore no "middle" option?

Why is Johnathan Frakes killing librarians for a TV show?

I remember the book and the movie both having a funny name for cars...I remember them pronouncing it in the movie like "roo-doo-doo", but I looked back at my copy of the book just now, and apparently, it was "hrududil". ...Well, that's not that far off of roodoodoo,

The worst example of a child "taking over" for one of their parents, though, I'd think would have to be Todd McCaffrey and the Pern series. His mother, Anne McCaffrey, wrote this fun little coming-of-age sci-fi book series, and he writes this weird...like metrosexual fan-fiction-esque subseries about a young teenage girl, taking place somewhere else in the timeline. It was really strange and, I have to say, kind of gross. I've read some of Christopher Tolkien's work, and I've read some of Brian Herbert's work, and I don't think either can be said to be as bad as Todd McCaffrey's.

I sadly have actually watched the entirety of this movie. I would prefer to keep repressing the memories, thanks.

Not at all. Someone will retain the rights, however, and no doubt someone will want to bring it back somewhere down the line, whether in writing or in film.

Will anyone take over after Christopher, I wonder? The bloke is in his 90s now, after all...

Yes, from my own guess, and based on what I'm reading in the foreword of the book, this is basically a reframing of the story as to separate it from the Simillarion, and to make it easier to follow. On a side-note, I just remembered that I don't like Christopher Tolkien's writing:

"New" J.R.R. Tolkien book: https://www.amazon.com/Beren-Lúthien-J-R-R-Tolkien-ebook/dp/B01MG2HOWD/ Article on it: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-40109396

I tried to find more info on the issue by searching for recent news about it, but failed pretty miserably.

When I last played BG2 about a year ago (or something like that), I discovered that a random Shadow Thief in Trademeet held the Gloves of Missile Snaring. I knew that they existed from mucking around in the files, but figured (without checking) that weren't actually present anywhere in the game. It's an odd location for a unique magical item, too, because the character is only there for one encounter under very specific (and limited/fleeting) circumstances and immediately disappears after the first time you talk to them (and they automatically talk to you the moment they see you), you can't pickpocket them for it, you can't obtain them from them via dialogue/quest, and there's no reason to fight or kill them. So...a pair of unique and useful gloves that the vast majority of players probably didn't even know ever existed and had no realistic possibility of obtaining without already knowing they were there. Strange.

In other news, Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris climate deal, making them one of three countries (Nicaragua and Syria being the others) to not be party to it.