Monte Carlo

As usual, Vol, you bring clarity where there was obfuscation. Bravo.

No, it really isn't.

The Arma 2 demo. There's a brilliant game in there somewhere, I just can't be getting on with the controls. It's a multi-tasking nightmare for me.

Bioboards: a very disturbing corner of the internet.

The best plans are usually simple ones.

If the USA manages to make a length of rope, or a bullet or a syringe more expensive than the admin then that's their business but not particularly efficient. Incidentally, my post wasn't aimed at all of you. Mainly Krezzie, bless him, whose adolescent liberalism always seems to grip my turd.

Darth, you are one of my favourite Obsidianites but this post needled Fisking so badly it hurt. Sorry. This is a hysterical SWP tagline, not political or economic analysis. As an ardent Thatcherite myself these cuts are chicken-feed. The people in the chair are Tory wets who clearly want perpertual coalition with the Liberals to continue their dinner-party politics. Having said that, the cuts are a start. I'm not asking for stats, I'm not that sort of pedant but this is wrong. Building confidence in the UK economy needs a demonstration of intent (oh, and an independent currency) which the cuts are part of. The Left always want to soak the rich but unless you are some sort of hairy 70's Marxist you need to acknowledge that wealth creation is important. Am I a fan of the perpetually greedy? No (as Jean Cretien famously said, "The biggest enemies of capitalism are capitalists, they're never rich enough). Do I accept them as a necessary evil? Hell yeah. We aren't going to get out of this mess unless we reduce the deificit which is predicated substantially on the reduction of public spending, especially on third generation, unemployed, benefit dependants. Let's storm the Winter Palace, comrade! The likes of Green et. al. are more productive and important to our economy than the legions of public sector non-jobbers, parasitical students studying golf course management and other assorted indulgences of 13 years of ZanuNuLabour. Green came from nothing. He earnt his money legitimately. He is entitled to use every legal tax loophole to retain it. When will the left and their fellow travellers get their allegedly fully developed brains around the fact that there is nothing wrong with being successful? Give me one Philip Green over a dozen Gordon Browns or Polly Toynbees or Will Huttons. The post-apocalyptic state of MIT, Harvard, Stanford etc must explain the exodus of British students and academics to the USA. 'Monetized' education is fair. Don't ask me to pay for Guy and Jocasta's art history degree FFS. The argument that their four hourly weekly attendance at 'Uni' (which is in fact a crumbling provincial Poly with Botox) is in some way essential for the preservation and extension of all human knowledge is risible. Otherwise, I hope we are still friends. Cheers MC

I like the bit in The Silence of the Lambs where Lecter, in return for information, is offered a new cell on a chemically-contaminated island facility, and an hour's outdoor exercise a day. "In a truly civilized country," says Lecter to Starling, staring around his underground dungeon, "you'd execute me." Krezack and other navel-gazing, priviledged liberals always fail to grasp the uncomfortable nettle that monsters roam amongst us and that the most appropriate way of dealing with some of them is to take them out of the gene pool. Krezack and his ilk also think that their bleeding hearts trump the wishes of the victim's of violent crimes and their families. My view is that the US has checks and balances and a death row appeal system. If they wish to have the death penalty that's there business and wailing from foreign countries is unlikely to change their minds. China, OTOH and Iran and all the usual suspects do not have checks and balances. Execution is part of the tool-box for maintaining the regime. You can't say that about the USA.

Ah, 'Son of Bhaal' syndrome. Obviously, I don't want to play for a hundred hours and end up as a goat-herd, alternatively it's no biggie for me if I don't end up as the scion of a god either. I'd settle for middle-ranking, castle owning type person.

Try liberal amounts of bourbon in your coffee/tea. It always works for me. No, bourbon is awful in tea you have to use vodka. I have field-tested this extensively, if you are going to drink bourbon at work become a lawyer or a doctor.

It looks great, I might well pick it up. But ain't that cover art awful?

Why pick locks in DA:O? They never contain anything of worth. And, of course, your STR-spammed uber-warrior is unable to bash open the smallest container either.

Stop arguing about who has the lamest hobby, FFS compared to LARPers you are all perfectly normal.

I think it makes more sense to say they've become too PC-centric, actually. Could you expand on that please?

I'm just finishing off my first novel. Guard Dog is a writer. So is Wals. Why don't we create a virtual writer's critical evaluation / support thingie (technical term)? Mind you, my opus is weighing in at 125000 words so I probably need an editor more than you do.

Blimey, this takes me back to Sociology 'A' Level. I failed. by the way, by virtue of not actually turning up to the exam. Sociology has been successfully and succinctly described as 'The study of people who don't need studying by people who do.' Anyhoo, Chicago school in a nutshell, despite being written in the 30's turns a lot on anomie theory. That is the poor and dispossessed, scorned by the mainstream, will invariably adopt their own value system that nonetheless mirrors that of the mainstream. Rap culture, with it's bling and hyper-materialistic values, is a classic example. The other stuff worth looking at is the Human Biogrammar by right-wing sociologists (a contradiction in terms normally) Tiger & Fox. These guys were presaging the stuff we increasingly know via advances in genetics by using anthropolical techniques thirty years ago. As for London, Wals just send me a freaking PM and I'll sort it out.

I suspect this is the crux of it, although being fabulously wealthy I don't have to concern myself with such trifles.

AND THEY ARE WRONG!

Genuinely witty, bravo.

I'm not bashing EmoWare in this post, it's a serious question. Which is: Have CRPGs become too NPC-centric? Of course NPCs are an important part of the game, but FFS the amount of effort that goes into them, for me, has outweighed their overall significance. I know a few folks here look down on old-skool values like exploration, fighting in tunnels, fun, humour and all the rest of the things that make games worth playing in the first place, but isn't the current NPC paradigm akin to the tail wagging the dog? Frankly (done really well), a bit of dialogue, a side quest here and there and maybe a special item or two is more than enough NPC input for me.

I was calling it McBio but I was wrong and I'm sorry. From now on it's EmoWare.

^ Poor taste. You should know better. Reagan is the most consistently underrated American President, mainly by Libtards.

Ah, happy families. It's like The Sound of Music. With very big swords. Dave Gaider is at least being completely up-front about the customer's essentially passive role in his interactive novel.

I think it's more of a "Monte wants to draw conclusions that make him go postal based on WMGing and incomplete second hand information"? No.

Move to France, it's the cornerstone of European agriculture.