Bartimaeus

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that, in the case of self-defense, I would necessarily actually be more safe on average in most situations - I don't think I actually did, to be fair to myself, but the connotation is unfortunately there (as it's a popular argument by pro-firearms folks). That is not the argument I'm trying to make (and based on your statistics you listed, it isn't likely to be a great one anyways in most cases). That's sort of...besides the point, in my mind, particularly seeing as statistics are based on the general population, rather than, you know, particular situations and individuals - some of whom do (based on your statistics) use firearms correctly, and do not cause accidental firearm killings. Rather, for me personally, it's more about simply the right to retain it as a sort of last resort option in cases where it *is* a requirement - the only case I would ever use it. Why do I feel this way? Well...I'll use an example: when my aunt was a young adult (around 19-20), she was still living with her parents (my grandparents). They were a victim of a home invasion in the middle of the night by a man who was, if I recall correctly, drunk and/or high, and who attempted to rape my aunt. She did not have a weapon, firearm or not, and it would've been...difficult for her to resolve the situation in a ideal manner by herself with what means she currently had at her disposal. My grandpa, however, woke up and quickly became aware of the situation, and quickly got his gun and confronted the man. Without the gun, my grandpa may not have been able to stop/overpower him. Even if he could've without it, what if he wasn't there? I believe my aunt should've had the ability to at least try to resolve the situation herself in regards to her own well-being (being the victim of a home invasion, after all), and to me, that's what firearms represent: they can be a sort of "great equalizer" between those more physically capable, and those not. If my aunt had had a gun, she would've at least had the capability (perhaps not the will, but the capability) to shoot that man and physically disable him - whether in severe injury or death: his well-being comes second as the one who's breaking the law and doing harm - in the event of there being no other way to handle the situation in an ideal manner. So combine this (the fact that I consider the ability to not be able to defend yourself with guns to be non-ideal) with the problem of gun control just...not going to be effective or make hardly any difference at all for likely the rest of my life, and I just...I just can't get behind it. It's something that I just don't feel like I could ever persuaded differently in regards to - I'll certainly listen to other people's reasons for being pro-gun control, and I may agree that some of them are good...but I don't think I'll agree that they outweigh my own reasons and change my own opinion on the matter. (e): Also, for what it's worth, I do not actually own any guns myself (and do not currently plan on obtaining any any time soon), and I did not grow up in a family that had any guns. Guns actually quite terrify me...but that doesn't mean I want to demonize them and for there to be no possibility of being able to obtain one in the event I feel like I need one, y'know?

I personally like the self-defense and the "people who don't care about the law in general won't care about another law" angles better, rather than the anti-government stuff. Personally, I do believe it's almost entirely about public safety. I just think it's really, really, entirely, the 100% wrong way to go about trying to fix the problem (in terms of what is right and ideal), and it wouldn't even fix the problem at this point (at least, not without disregarding the current rule of law and searching the entire populace for weapons and seizing them - there are just way, way too many guns already that it would be nearly useless; this also doesn't even take into account that, what, roughly half of the population is against further gun control? We've already tried the Noble Experiment: it didn't work, and it actually made things much, so much worse. Maybe it would start to become more effective after a significant amount of time...probably 50-100 years at the very least - but even so, I don't regard it as the correct course of action), and they should really stop trying.

Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking. There are a lot of things that I would personally evaluate to be "bad", but something I still like. Video games, books, movies, TV shows...even stuff like card games and the such. Above all else, boring is not something I generally ever want something I'm trying to enjoy to be.

But that isn't what Guard Dog asked, or really even hinted at, at all. If it's not for public safety/crime control, what reason does the government have for disarming its citizenry? Guard Dog might have his reasons for not wanting the government to disarm him and the rest of the U.S., sure, but that has no relevancy to why certain members of the government do want to disarm him and the rest of the U.S. - unless those reasons are why the government want to disarm him and the rest of the U.S. in the first place, which you're saying they're not, anyways. So why do it?

Or...in other words, bad.

Yeah, I hate crappy futuristic aesthetics on computer stuff...

Those look bad enough that I wouldn't want them to begin with. Writing a review for them? Hah, yeah, nah.

I care about everyone and everything, including the aliens. Death to the universe!

rip

Hey, I'm literally barely in my 20s here, and I played it upon release. Sure, I was literally like 5 (and terrible at it), but that's irrelevant. Yeah, Tales of the Sword Coast was the lowest point (in terms of writing) of the BG series. Werewolf Island was literally laughably bad. I don't want more of that spread throughout the rest of the game, thank you very much, Beamdog devs.

I'll assume I can answer the question, too: I don't know. I dislike and distrust Hillary and the democratic party in general so, so much...but Trump seems like a literal whackjob, even though I don't personally dislike him quite as much as Hillary (I do dislike the republican party in general just as much as the democratic, though). It's a tough call.

I like this chart better (a little down the page after it references the chart you just linked), since it actually has clear methodology and isn't just a bunch of numbers seemingly arbitrarily chosen by whoever made it. However, the value both charts give for the 1st and 2nd picks are actually pretty close to each other (when adjusted for the different systems of "value", anyways - the #1 pick has 14% greater value than the #2 pick in mine, 15% in yours), so your point remains.

Apparently, the NY primary is already a gigantic mess, with many precincts having their polling places' locations switched literally yesterday for no apparent reason, tens of thousands of registered voters being purged for no reason, closed polling places, broken voting machines, gigantic delays... Every time this sort of thing has happened, Clinton has won big. Is it corruption or incompetency, I wonder? Probably a bit of both.

No, sadly, I cannot: I've never played the Victoria series. I hate the industrial age (or anything later) as a time period for these sorts of games, so I haven't touched it.

I don't consider mail in rebates as part of the price: I've been screwed out of too many for literally no given reason for me to do so. It's also just such a crappy process in general.

I always wanted to try out a tiny random country in EU4, but I'm such a Roman/Byzantine homer that I never got around to it, and now EU4's completely broken...very sad.

Better, as in higher quality? Nope. Seasonic is essentially the gold standard in consumer-grade PSUs (or, at the very least, one of the gold standards). However, I find Seasonics to be mildly to moderately overpriced, so I tend to avoid them personally...but you certainly can't go wrong with them if you don't mind paying just a little extra for more or less the highest quality. I say "more or less", because there are other brands that are pretty darn close to the same quality, but a little cheaper: some of those brands even just use rebrands of Seasonic PSUs, haha.

Heh, that took a second.

Is it any surprise that the game has technical issues and terrible writing? I mean, it's Beamdog: didn't any of you play BG:EE? Just the little bits of additional content they added in that were atrocious, and the game was broken on release... I mean, it's not like the BG series had brilliant writing or anything (BG1 generally ranged from poor to O.K. at best, with some parts that were truly atrocious - like, anything in TotSC - and only a very few parts that were maybe verging on good; BG2 was a bit better, but still had a lot of bland and boring bits all over the game, but only a few exceptionally bad parts - most of that being in ToB*)...but that's not the point: don't stick bad on bad for no dang reason, and don't buy crappy content from a terrible second rate (third or fourth rate would probably be more accurate) company that's just standing on the shoulders of giants - even if it's true those giants maybe weren't really that great to begin with, giants they were nonetheless. I have no interest in Siege of Dragonspear, personally...but it ain't because of the alleged politics mentioned in this thread: Beamdog is not a good dev for much better reasons besides that. *I say all of this as a gigantic mega-fan of Baldur's Gate, by the way: just because I'm a fan of something doesn't mean I'm bloody stupid and blind to its flaws, though.

Boo. That was my favorite armor from Dark Souls 1.

I'd probably be inclined to kill the other 6. The dog is one of my own, they're not This sort of statement causes me to reflect on what has gone awry with our species. A dog will never write a symphony, let alone appreciate one. They will never provide insight into the nature of reality. Its capacity to produce, appreciate, and relate are so comparatively inferior, yet somehow humans will frequently elevate them beyond their own kind. I don't understand this. Dogs have been selectively bred for social compatibility with humans for hundreds of years. Their affection has been cultivated the same way grapes have been selectively evolved by humans for enjoyment. Pinot Nior vs. Sauvengion Blanc. Doberman vs. Chihuahua. When people start valuing another species more than their own--let alone something as simplistic and inferior as a dog, I begin to suspect projection of a cognitively dissonant self-loathing. Somehow tossing human survivors overboard to their deaths is a sane statement, yet making an equivalent statement like, "I would murder half a dozen innocent sapient beings and feed them to my demonstrably inferior emotional toy should I deem it necessary" would be considered psychopathic. Bizarre. To sort of co-opt an argument Hurlshot made in a different thread: in the modern, Western world, we are given the opportunity to not need to kill or hurt anyone else to survive, and to survive at least well enough...generally speaking. When that changes, when our civil society falls apart, when we're no longer afforded that luxury...it's foolish to we'd be the same people: we won't be. We will look to our own. If by "[something] gone awry with our species", you mean "something that all other tribalistic species BESIDES humans do", then okay, sure, I guess you can say that.

Singleplayer-wise, no, there's not that much difference. But there was a huge difference for PVP (where who you can match up with is determined by level), which is probably why they got rid of it. ...on the other hand, pyromancies weren't really any good for PVP anyways in DS1, so I guess it didn't really matter.

fite me irl Drangleic was the best armor in DS2. Made me feel like I was playing a Roman soldier. From what I played of DS3, the movement feels much closer to DS1 than DS2, so I'm pretty happy about that. Controller's broke, though, so I currently can't play it.

That, and a x16 2.0 slot is still enough for current gen top end GPUs (or close to), and a 3.0 slot is...uh...I think double the bandwidth, so yeah, I wouldn't expect it to make much difference.