J.E. Sawyer

Our inability to rank candidates in order of preference is one of the primary (lol) reasons why we have an unbreakable bipartisan lock on our government. "Well, the Green candidate is never going to win, so I'll vote for the Democrat even though I hate him!"

Our current system is a plurality voting system. I favor IRV or Condorcet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_voting_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_voting

The illustration of Loviatar in Faiths & Pantheons is particularly... interesting.

WotC is very particular about the following things: * Amount of skin shown on human-like races (humans, elves, halflings, etc.) * Head appearances (and creature appearances in general). * Weapon appearances. * Clothing and armor appearances. They started to become stricter on these subjects starting with BG: Dark Alliance 2 and ToEE. I'm actually fairly surprised the warlock outfits were approved, because almost every other outfit needed to cover from neck to ankles and wrists. I think Aribeth had a neat design, but the word "realistic" doesn't exactly leap into my head when I look at it. I think more flexibility in the types of outfits available to characters would be nice, but I don't think NWN1's characters were inherently better because they could show more skin. Some of the NWN weapons did look like traditional "Medieval" weapons, but some didn't. My brain didn't explode when I saw them in NWN1 and it doesn't explode when I see them in NWN2, either. I think our hair does look bad and I don't think (m)any Obsidian artists would disagree. I think there are two main culprits for this: 1) 1-bit alpha looks terrible 2) using a de-saturated base texture with multiplicative color tints is never going to look as nice as individual hair textures (or potentially a different tinting system). I think NWN2's hair looks a lot worse than Oblivion's hair, but I think NWN1 had pretty crummy hair too. Better for its time, but still crummy.

Sure, but I don't think it's necessary for me to either confirm or condemn them on an individual basis. I definitely think there's a lot of stuff we could have done better on NWN2, but I also think it's a pretty good game and platform for building. With 20/20 hindsight I could list off a lot of things that I would have chosen to do differently, but that's not particularly helpful or insightful.

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Number of spells effects on screen are among the things we have the least amount of control over. We can budget placeable polygons and set limitations on how our artists flesh out areas, but nothing really prevents players from dumping dozens of spells on the screen at once. I honestly don't know how much of a difference it made, performance-wise, but I believe we were erring on the side of frugality.

My comment's purpose was solely to kill the claim that either game has effects that "really" look like a person buffed by spells. I do think the NWN2 spheres would look nicer as "true" spheres, though Justin attempted to avoid that for performance reasons IIRC.

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Box contents are determined by the publisher, not the developer. EDIT: Also, not that many games in the 80s had cloth maps. The Bard's Tale map was on the inside cover. Pool of Radiance's map was on the Adventurer's Journal. I think the only game I remember having a cloth map was Ultima V.

I went to a private liberal arts university in Wisconsin. On paper, it's the most expensive in the state (tuition + room and board are around $34,500 now), but the university's endowments from wealthy trustees are enormous. My family was pretty poor, but I received ~$10,000 in grants each year and a little less than that in loans. I've been out of school for about seven years now. I think I have about $11,000 left to pay on one set of Federal Loans and $2,000 on another. Not too bad, all things considered, but I never went to grad school.

The U.S. government ostensibly exists to support the majority, but not at the cost of the minority. Too much of that and you get the proverb about three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. Plurality voting is another matter entirely, and I think it's stupid.

It's kind of a peculiar PrC, but I think it works well with rogues, monks, and rangers. Pure fighter or barbarian builds might not find the benefits of the PrC that great. It's oriented around running all over the battlefield and preventing your pals from getting whacked.

There are multiple female gnome merchants in the docks. Reylene is not the one that gives BoW items.

The only achievement I had on NWN2 was getting it (more or less) done. I didn't really lead the design of the game and much of my time was spent revising and cutting, tying up loose ends.

The best romance I've ever seen in a game (even though it isn't an RPG) was in Full Throttle. A very bittersweet ending, too.

GUNS

A number of students have said that he was very disruptive prior to the video starting, but the multiple tazing response was still incredibly asinine. Three+ officers can't take a limp, tazed, handcuffed skinny dude out of the building? After the first tazing, it's obvious that the student witnesses are becoming incredibly agitated from the tazing, the officers' shouting, and Tabatabainejad's screams. He also shouted at one point in the video after the first tazing, "I have a medical condition!" This is vague and probably B.S., but why would you risk tazing him again considering all of the potential for disaster from him and from alarmed, hostile witnesses? Personally, I think Tabatabainejad was being a shouty dum-dum. That doesn't excuse the officers for escalating the situation. That's really all the tazing did, and it seemed clear that's all it was going to do after the first or second jolt.

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

One of the officers in the video also threatened to taser another student who repeatedly demanded the badge numbers of the officers involved. That is absurd. At least some of the officers also tried claiming that Tabatabainejad was inciting the other students to resist the officers. There's certainly no evidence of that in the video at any point, and a bunch of students have also come forward to dispute the officers' claims that Tabatabainejad incited resistance at any point. You gotta be pretty bright to try B.S.ing your way out of something with a video camera and about a hundred hostile witnesses present to create a record of the event.

That's not really what I was suggesting. I was saying that Chris made a choice that githzerai spoke in a certain way. The affectation is supposed to be a distinctive part of that group, rare as its members are. In parts of America that were heavily settled by Germans, it is not uncommon to hear people say things like "Come here, once." or "Are you coming with?" Though most of these speakers are now third or fourth generation Americans, they continue to use grammatical constructions that are part of the German language. Specifically, using the English word "once" in place of "mal" to make a polite imperative or placing the preposition "with" at the end of the sentence as one would when asking, "Kommst Du mit?" Another good example is a question like, "Is he here or no?" English speakers should say, "or not?" but in German would say, "oder nein?" -- becoming "or no?" from some German-Americans. Dak'kon and Zhjaeve have similar types of affectations because they're both githzerai. I don't think it's really fair to say that they're the same character or to suggest that he "fell back" on Dak'kon's style. The easy way to portray characters from other cultures is to act like they speak similarly to everyone else -- which is pretty weak, I think. EDIT: Characters that have been separated from gith culture for longer periods of time may obviously vary, but Dak'kon and Zhjaeve are both pretty hardcore githzerai, being Zerthimon superfans and all.

Character from a bizarre foreign culture has speech patterns and philosophical ideals similar to a similar character from the same bizarre foreign culture. You're correct that there's nothing in source material that outlines how various gith folk talk. Chris invented that pattern because it helps make githyanki more than just weird looking dudes who happen to be from another plane.

Could it be? Sure, it could. Should it be? Probably not. There are a lot of beefs people have with the fundamental design of the OC, so I think expansion effort would be best spent on fresh content. If we make an expansion, I won't be working on it anyway, so take my opinion for what it's worth (not much).