Tagaziel

Well, the wheel is the basis of the theology (if you can call it that) and soul dynamics on Eora, so yeah.

One thing to remember is that we're talking about a god, not your average Admeth from Whogivesa****ford, Nowherewood. The Godhammer, a purpose-built god-killing bomb failed to kill him, so I doubt a straight-up fight is in the cards.

I'm confused, what's the context? Because adding a date to establish the time frame of signing is hardly forgery, especially since it's a crime that can only be committed deliberately, you can't accidentally forge documents (otherwise, we would have to prosecute prop departments).

How do I get this.

Skimming through the plot summary, I assume you refer to the ashes, which isn't a deus ex machina, but actually a rifle hanging on the wall that fires off in the final act - and the rules of magic seem to be consistent in the movie. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChekhovsGun That's it, the name briefly escaped me. Thank you.

Skimming through the plot summary, I assume you refer to the ashes, which isn't a deus ex machina, but actually a rifle hanging on the wall that fires off in the final act - and the rules of magic seem to be consistent in the movie. I'm not sure why you equate verisimilitude and internal consistency with "scientific" magic, though. Having consistent rules isn't the same as having a detailed physical explanation for how magic works and is, in fact, a prerequisite for any kind of magic use; if magic is utterly random chaos, you can't possibly learn to use it since you can't repeat its use with any certainty. I mean... I'm not even sure what your argument here is.

I kind of like having a general idea of what's going on and why things happen the way they do. It helps ground the story and keep the disbelief dangling from the gallows. LotR relied heavily on deus ex machinas - Tolkien had a fancy name for them, but really, they were deus ex machinas.

My bet is on Eder. Aloth's from Aedyr and he traveled by sea a good deal from what I remember, so he'd likely be the one watching Eder and making sure he doesn't follow his dinner overboard.

I don't think using Fallout 2 as an example of well-written evil options is a good idea. Most of them are "the dumb brute" variety and not even particularly evil, just dumb violence.

I've been trying to follow the discussion for the past couple of pages and kind of failed. I do feel an inexplicable urge to point out that the character system in Pillars (any game, really) is an abstraction of reality, rather than a literal portrayal of it. Changing attribute names etc. affects mechanics, but not the underlying principles of the world. There's going to be a disconnect, sure, but gameplay will always be disconnected, kind of like how in Fallout: New Vegas you get shot in the head and survive it, making you exceptional... Except then you have every NPC and their mom surviving getting shot in the face and coming for seconds.

I'm replaying the game, so we'll see how it goes. However, from what I remember, I didn't feel Lady Webb was artificial or forced into the story. Having someone who is an incredibly powerful and influential figure who achieves things independently of my character helped reinforce my suspension of disbelief. She had her own agenda and goals and didn't rely on the Watcher to achieve them. It made the characters feel more alive, as opposed to games like Skyrim and the like, where they are usually just waiting around for the protagonist to do everything and become everything. Not to mention, how competent would Thaos seem if a random nobody could unravel his millenia-old plot in a couple of weeks? How stupid would Dyrwoodans have to be?

Upon re-reading the companion (Collector's Book) and the mention of the territories in the East that are purported to be the gods' own, I think it's going to be a little more nuanced than that and explore the idea of gods in a setting where souls are fact and gods artificial creations. We barely scratched the surface of Engwithan lore and civilization, after all, so what if we venture far to the east and find... Say, a way to become a god? Merge with Eothas? Replace him?

Pillars of Eternity (it's better than I remembered it), as part of an obsessive wiki drive. Archimedean Dynasty with a gamepad; the story, graphics, and even voice acting stand strong in this day and age. The Elder Scrolls Online, for obvious reasons. Steel Division to indulge my passion for history (even if the units are not as accurate as I'd like). Anything else I'm assigned at work

A random link for the historical nerds among us: http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/TWI/ I'm currently mining it for sweet illustrations.

Inspired by Pangea's example, I decided to focus on the wiki and bring it up to spec. I'm currently making my way through the game, filling in lore, locations, maps, everything, really. My ambitious goal is to get the PoE1 section in shape by the time Deadfire drops, which might take a bit of effort, but is quite doable. Hell, I managed to do a lot of heavy lifting on the Tyranny wiki: https://tyranny.gamepedia.com/Tyranny_Wiki (which, admittedly, was a game I went a little weird about for a while; a long, long while) On a side-note, reviewing the source material makes me appreciate the forethought put into the setting and the fact that Deadfire fights right in. <3 Obsidian

Thief Gold and Men of War. The latter is particularly interesting, since I've taken to stealing tanks from whomever is on the other side of the barricade. Fun to drive around a bunch of Crusaders while you're playing as the Afrika Korps.

In a conflict caused by separatist insurgents. Every nation in the world would fight separatist insurgents, I'm not sure why you think preserving the unity of a country is bad. If you still believe it's a grassroots movement at this point, I have nothing more to say. Because wiretaps, eyewitness and photographic reports of Buk M2 systems (one with an incomplete load of missiles) being shipped back to Russia over the border by separatists, and the fact it was brought down in rebel controlled territory, are no evidence at all. Because MH370 and Malaysian 17 disappeared in nearly identical circumstances, right. Wikipedia has a nice summary of sources. But of course, I forgot, it's biased and a tool of the evil, evil West. You certainly sound like a person who gets his news from RT.com and nowhere else. The line of argumentation is certainly similar. Yeah, Russian websites are totally reliable on that count. Problem is, can't find any evidence that this is in use or indeed true. Well, except for sites like globalresearch.ca and the voicesevas.ru you use as source of the image. Neither is particularly reputable. I'm not sure how you can classify shooting down a civilian airliner cruising at 10km as accidental.

Not this **** again. If you don't see the fundamental difference between popular protests aiming to preserve Ukraine and a foreign-funded separatist insurgency that recently murdered three hundred people, there's nothing to discuss here. No, because we live in 2014. A civilian airliner suddenly disappearing from radars at a 10 km altitude followed by a crash and plane being strewn over 15 kilometers are obvious events that are easily connected. Planes don't randomly plummet out of 10 km and there were no reports of any problems on board the plane before contact was lost. If it was a conspiracy, no one would make such an elemental mistake. NYC wasn't an active war zone. The incident from 13 years ago has no relevancy to the incident discussed here. Reality is, Ukraine doesn't have any kind of motive for it, especially since unlike the insurgents, the Ukrainian military has access to equipment that allows them to tell apart a civilian airliner and a Russian military aircraft. The insurgents, on the other hand, have a history of shooting down aircraft and have access to hardware that can be used to shoot down such an airliner. The fact that the insurgents are looting the crash site and destroying evidence that could implicate them is also pretty damning. Really, read something else than RT.

That category entails a lot of airline companies which had flights going over eastern Ukraine. As the article points out, it was a simple business decision: It saved fuel and the risk of someone screwing up so hard was considered negligible. It's the black swan problem. Please provide me an example of people surviving a ten kilometer freefall after their plane was destroyed in mid-air by an anti-aircraft missile carrying a seventy kilogram fragmentation high explosive warhead designed for use against military planes. I find only one person who survived such a fall (incidentally, holder of the World Record for freefall survival): Vesna Vulovic. Sure, volunteers can be looking for survivors. But they will only find bodies or rather, pieces thereof, because the chances of surviving the missile hitting the plane and the ten kilometer fall afterwards are astronomically low. It's not rocket science: A soft body impacting the ground at terminal velocity is not going to survive. I mean, seriously. Do you even read what you write? Or what happened? EDIT: I'm reading about the Buk system and it's pretty terrifying. The system mounted on an armored personnel carrier (and that's apparently the case, as linked by a gentleman earlier in the thread) is ready to fire within five minutes after reaching a position and can lock on to targets in 22 seconds. Maximum range, as far as I can see, is 32 km, with a maximum ceiling of 22 km. The clincher is that the Buk system mounted on an APC is fitted with an independent radar allowing it to operate without a separate radar station, though it's much less sophisticated and returns blips. The truly horrifying thing is the warhead. The 70kg fragmentation high explosive warhead is apparently design to behave like a giant shotgun slug, destroying the target with a hail of shrapnel. Given that civilian airliners are not armored... Christ. Oh, the rebels had plenty of reasons to fire on aircraft. They have, after all, shot down several Ukrainian military aircraft, including an Il-76 strategic airlifter.

You are correct, Wals, though you don't point out one thing: Shooting down a plane carrying the Russian head of state would give the Russian Federation a casus belli so perfect that Stalin would've rose from his grave and kissed Poroshenko for being such a perfect moron and enabler of imperialism. No planes should've been there, but airline companies have been plotting courses over separatist territories because it saves fuel. Funny thing that. It was actually closed airspace to a certain flight level, because nobody expected that separatists would be retarded enough to fire on a civilian airliner at 10,000m.

Yeah, a plane destroyed in mid-air by military-grade anti-aircraft weaponry and crashing down to earth from ten kilometers usually leaves most, if not the entire crew and all passengers alive. After all, it's just ten kilometers. Everybody and their mother survive ten kilometer falls. The tin foil hat is strong with you.

Oh, it gets better. Yeah, heard about it. It's ridiculous beyond compare.

Dude, you're more educated than the vast majority of EU citizens. You actually know what you're talking about. My hat off to you.

Did I say that? No, I did not. The EU is a manifestation of the seminal changes brought upon by the continental trauma that was World War II and a further guarantee that we won't repeat the mistakes of the past. For reference, people also thought that the Great War was the war to end all wars and that ordinary Germans would not think about invading other countries again. People will be stupid if they think they can get away with it.

I think that's the greatest achievement of the European Union, one that we unfortunately take for granted. We forget that just last century, Europe was being torn apart by nationalist sentiment. And yet now I, a Pole, can safely settle in Germany and be treated as one of Germans, thanks to the EU. The abolition of internal borders is also a step towards commonality. A lot of that is caused by ignorance. The European Union doesn't micromanage the legal process of individual countries, what it does is adopt framework acts, leaving the implementation of their goals to member states. If a politician passes a ****ty law and blames it on the EU, they count on the population being morons who don't know how the process works. Sadly, it's a fertile ground. On the subject of common identity, I feel that the problem is that many people think that the European identity is supposed to supplant national identities, which is not the case. It is supposed to (or, at least, that's how I feel) to complement our national identities, much like federal German identity complements states' identities, or how U.S.' national identity complements that of individual states. (Lots of repetition there, my inner writer is cringing) Personally, I consider myself both an European and a Pole. My country always existed in Europe and was never a separate part thereof. We have common values, common cultural roots stemming from religion and history, and we can cooperate together. The nationalist sentiment in EuroPa can be a threat, but only if they form an united front (somehow, English and French nationalists don't strike me as the most cooperative sort). Even then, the EPP (<3) will still control the majority of the Parliament, so we can safely say that the EU isn't going away anytime soon. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/schedule I agree that the EU needs to communicate more effectively. Mandatory civic education like in Finland can be a good step towards that. I tend to notice that the higher the education level, the more are people disinclined towards hammering the EU, though maybe it's just muh circles.