Zoraptor

Retroism owns the publishing rights to Darklands. Since Night Dive mentioned it as one of the titles that could potentially get a remake similar to the System Shock remake currently in progress it's likely that they own the IP outright. Retroism = Tommo + Night Dive, for publishing purposes.

I'd be very surprised if you weren't, otoh, I'd be surprised if Longknife knew about it as it's not exactly the most widely known amendment and in most countries such a situation would be solved by a run off vote between the two highest candidates or highest voted option winning directly. Parliamentary systems were by and large fought for, not granted. Not always with violent revolution, but at least in the same way women got the vote, and violent revolution is hardly a plus in getting to a workable system. Having said that, the 'mother of all parliaments' had its two most significant moments on the field of battle at Runnymede (Magna Carta) and the extended Civil War to Glorious Revolution period, ie in actual bloody revolt and revolution. Plus, most parliamentary systems nowadays are republics with not even a figurehead monarchy. (Please, don't start in on the Gough Whitlam again either, that was unique to Ockeronia and it has been impossible to repeat for forty years. The following election also voted the dismissed government out, emphatically.) While I mostly agree there are some pretty major intrinsic weaknesses, First Past the Post leads to 2 party rule and that makes it extremely difficult to change anything unless it benefits both parties- and changing rules to allow viable 3rd parties obviously doesn't benefit them. And as much as the more complicated US system adds safeguards and protects the status quo, once the safeguards are thwarted the benefits of those safeguards become a weakness as the system itself tends to protect the new, worse, status quo as there's no incentive for those in power to undo them and so little chance of anything genuinely shaking up the system.

4 way election -> congress picks President from top 3 candidates assuming only a plurality is reached which seems likely in a 4 way race. Which would be interesting if the top 3 candidates were Trump, Sanders, Clinton; not so much if Cruz were in the mix. I don't think that Sanders would run anyway though, he'd be far more effective inverse Tea Partying the Democrats by targeting the electable establishment figures in states he's done well in (practically, all except the south, given he wasn't even a Democrat until recently). Nothing wrong with a parliamentary system, it's no more susceptible to corruption than any other system or the current US one. Party blocs and the Whips are usually stronger than in the US though, if there's one big advantage the US has it's that the two parties are not absolute monoliths but have to tolerate some fraying around the edges. If you want viable 3rd parties- or to remove the possibility that congress directly elects the President- keep the same general system as now but allow preferential voting (Single Transferable Vote; single member variant). Having said that, there's a reason why basically no one else uses the US system, and it isn't that they're just not awesome enough to. As for Cruz, I don't think I've ever seen someone manage to look quite as much like a meat suit wearing lizardman who has only read about human interactions in a book and is trying to mimic them. Everything about him from body language to how he talks to how he looks is like something out of Oblivion rather than reality, I half expect him to start raking the carpet or go on about meeting a liberal the other day, horrible creature he avoids them whenever possible.

If the Sarlacc were an option I'd go for that, on the basis that Boba Fett survived it. Really though, you'd have to see them go head to head for at least a short time to make that choice. I rather suspect an open poll here would end up with something like Bernie Sanders vs Ron Paul which would at least be a bit more inspiring as a contest.

To be fair, GOG very seldom has genuinely new releases, 90% or so have been previously released elsewhere when GOG gets them. Allowing reviews for unowned games that have been out for months to years prior makes sense in context as the person may well have played them a great deal prior to their GOG release. They should probably be disallowed for genuinely new release games though. 'Brigading' reviews is a minor concern for 99% of GOG's games- SoD, Gone Home and Fez have been hit but that's all I can immediately recall.

At this point, is anyone surprised? Election fraud in the US- must be a Tuesday. The Colorado Republican débacle was probably worse but having closed primaries with an early registration deadline then finding there have been 'mysterious' changes in voter registration is at very best incompetence at the level where it's indistinguishable from actual corruption and might as well be deliberate. Clinton has taken some hefty blows from a septuagenarian self declared socialist who is, basically, a nice guy running because nobody else wanted to and hasn't even been a Democrat for very long, had little support (and some active opposition from) the party hierarchy and had only scratch resources from a standing start a year ago. Whatever else, she's going to get utterly pummelled by whoever the Republican candidate is as they won't 'watch their tone or 'cut it out' for absolute certain- they will have tons of resources and the will to go for the jugular far more so than Bernie had. I agree that she'll still most likely win- barring an actual FBI indictment or similar- but it isn't only a question of Trump/ Cruz getting enough support, it's also a question of Hillary getting enough support. Relying on people voting against the other candidate is intrinsically risky because they may decide you're as bad an alternative and just not vote. I'd say the exact opposite- Trump is the logical end point of the Republican trajectory over the past decades. He's just applied a lot of the anger and rejectionism back at the Republican establishment instead of where it was meant to be aimed, at every other establishment. He's Tea Party with a more broadly and overtly populist base.

Not much chance of that, rebels just broke the ceasefire. So long as you keep paying Erdogan he'll keep the tap off, while it's convenient for him at least. Plus Syrians aren't even a majority of the refugees anyway, they're roughly 1/4 of them. Albanians make up a greater proportion, indeed well known success story Kosovo has only slightly fewer migrants as there are Syrians, by itself. And Turkey can't stop them.

If there's even a 1% chance that Bruce is trolling, you must take it as an absolute certainty. Really though, why throw the pet overboard. In a few days you'll be wishing you did the sensible thing and, uh,

In the end the only thing I actually disliked about The Magicians was the naughty word filter- the important things worked well, I liked the Harry Potter noir tone and after some initial doubts the casting was almost entirely convincing. Why put so many f-s in there if you're just going to mute them anyway? Last episode got reclassified after the first showing here as rape scene is automatically R18 while swearing wouldn't even get a blink at its timeslot. I guess the actual ending was a bit... silly too, since it reeks of some sort of inevitable time shenanigan or retcon. Have to say it, all the SyFy stuff I suspected would be vaguely entertaining at best (Magicians, Expanse, Dark Matter, Killjoys, etc) have actually turned out to be at worst OK and some of them I'd say were outright good.

If there's incompetence or lack of reasonable care involved then there should definitely be more than a 'replacement cost' award, if only to make sure that there's proper motivation to actually take the required care. Having said that, 67k is far too much to have spent and I suspect not done in the (3rd party perspective) best interests of the dog either- understandable, but I don't think I'd consider trying to keep a dog with renal failure or similar alive for nine months to be in the dog's best interests, but done to make the owner feel better.

It happens pretty regularly and not just in games. Essentially, you have 1) What they as developers want to do 2) Dedicated, enthusiastic fanbases for certain aspects of the game (romance, especially) 3) Their own created characters 4) An existing framework which they are supposed (or perhaps 'supposed') to follow. (1) is the most critical because they aren't doing the game for a publisher so there's minimal oversight on the game, as a game, on anything except broad lore and mechanics from WotC. There's no one to tell them when their ideas are crap. OTOH, there's no one to tell them their good ideas are crap either, but that relies on them having good ideas. The critical voice should have been someone like MCA's job, but I suspect he's too 'nice' even if he saw any problem. And it's hard to get people to change their minds if they don't have to. (2) is critical because it's very easy to think that the dozen or so people who have game romance as their lives' purpose represent what people, in general, want. That's natural because these people are highly committed and enthusiastic whereas someone who hates/ is neutral to/ only mildly likes the romances are unlikely to go on about them near 20 years later because they've moved on. (3) is less critical here (though in other examples like the TV show 'Arrow'* it's of absolute importance) but explains why you get their creations primarily as NPCs. To be fair, it may well be about voice over artist availability as well, and with some of the prosetylising and recharacterisation there's a large dollop of (1) at work too. This and (2) also explains why you have Irenicus Everywhere despite it not making that much sense in context. If you've got David asterisking Warner you want to use him. (4) Everyone has different ideas of what makes a BG game a BG game, including the devs. Some of those won't be compatible, and some of the devs decisions will rub the fans (practically, a certain subset of the fans) up entirely the wrong way. By its nature an expansion to a 20 year old game is unlikely to attract many new fans, after all you must at least have played the first game, first, and decided how things progress from there yourself. *To again be fair, all four of those categories apply more to Arrow than to SoD.

The dude with the sword has to be Cruz. He's got Trump supporters captured and his shock troopers are Faux News et MSM, plus he's the only major candidate missing. Dude(s) with the cheese I would have suspected were Romney (and Rubio?), but I'm not aware of them doing anything cheese relevant beyond some recollection that Romney didn't like cheese. From context, I'd guess the woman was intended to be Fiorina.

As above, it isn't simply gross - production costs = profit. The estimate of 60 million per film is based on ~60% of the gross going to distribution and advertising. That would normally be quite conservative in terms of advertising costs but I cannot remember any of the Narnia movies having huge amounts of advertising, and it's possible some of those costs are included in the overall budget- I find it hard to believe the Narnia films cost 2x the LotR ones even though the LotR ones were shot concurrently in a low cost location and a few years earlier. The LotR films are far longer, even without all the EE extras etc.

Actually, they did quite well. The three movies made a combined ~$1.58 billion on a combined ~$560 million budget. The least profitable was the second movie and it still made over $180 million in profit. The series hasn't been finished yet due to some unfortunate hang ups with copyrights and production rights, but there is supposed to be more Narnia movies. Not with the same production company though (due to those rights issues), and at this point very likely not with the same stars. Both also likely unfortunate things. Odd as it may seem that's not considered profitable enough. It's 'only' 60 million profit per movie, on a blockbuster scale that's barely worth getting out of bed for when they wanted LotR numbers; ~2 times the box office on barely over half the budget. Rights issues have a tendency to disappear when movies are profitable in a big scale, as happened with LotR -> The Hobbit. And in that case The Hobbit(s) were made despite Jackson suing New Line Cinema, who he made LotR with. Though some might wish they had been tied up in legal problems...

... which is idiotic and completely and utterly unneccessary. And which opens up for arbitrary changes in the end result. This is about comparing "vote on X" versus "vote on X through a proxy, which might or might not invalidate your vote depending on a particular randomized property of your proxy". One of these systems is retarded, the other is OK. It's not arbitrary- arbitrary implies changes for no reason, or at least no reason related to the democratic vote per this example. People not being bothered to turn up is an implicit part of democracy- even when voting is compulsory like Australia it still happens. There were alternates in Nevada (and again, most of Hill's didn't turn up) and it's no more complicated than multiple other systems that get an end result after multiple rounds of voting. Nobody votes for anyone because they are in a particular party. Well, that's certainly an opinion. I don't think it reflects reality, and I'd suspect I'm not alone in that.

Nah. It's the same as selecting a pool of candidates, then selecting further. The delegates are actually determined at the end of the process, you want them determined at the beginning instead. Think of it as run off elections, if it helps, and it's no more complicated than what happens on Survivor. It's not the way I'd do it, but it's fair which is by far the most important thing. I realize that you probably know nothing at all about cryptography, but to give a pedagogical example everyday folks can relate to: have you ever wondered why nobody is (practically) able to make counterfeit bitcoin? You should think about that for a while and then maybe you realize that you shouldn't so eagerly blurt out opinions about things you know nothing about. Yeah, nah. Who writes the code? Is the code public? Who collates the results? Who tabulates the results? Who audits them? Can they audit them effectively? Who edits the required databases, who audits them, are they secure? How do you check any of these steps effectively? There's far more in play than haxxoring teh AES256 with my 1337 scripting and five computer botnet to change a few individual votes. After all, it wasn't the votes themselves that got altered in Arizona, it was the party affiliation as that was all that was required for disenfranchisement. He is only obliged to vote for his own positions, as usual. Also, lol at "arranging for them to be absent" when this is also possible to exploit - tinfoil hat on! - when absence would mean you cast no vote. By this logic, you could exploit any modern parliament by just arranging for your political opponents to be absent. Right, so he votes for his own positions, as determined at the time of the election. And the people who voted because he was in a party with positions that end up contradicting his own positions are then disenfranchised. Plus there's no flexibility for changing circumstances. Asterisks knows what happens if he decides that another party better represents his views after the election, logically since he's obliged to vote for his own positions I suppose it'd be OK, even if it ends up with an identical situation practically to the multi tier voting in Nevada you were complaining about... Sure, arranging absence is a way to manipulate votes as well, but it's half as effective. Going from No to abstaining is a 1 vote change, going from No to Yes is from -1 to +1, effectively a 2 vote change. And, most parliaments have quorum rules where a minimum number of votes must be cast for precisely that reason, and that's why pairing and proxies are usually granted only in specific circumstances, historical precedents where votes have been manipulated ensure it. At its heart though you seem to be very concerned about 1st round Nevada peeps being disenfranchised because second round voters they selected failed to turn up, but you're very keen to have other people then cast their representatives' vote for them once they have been elected. That's a fundamentally inconsistent position.

I read the Narnia books when you're meant to read the Narnia books and despite going to a theoretically religious school at the time the preachy went straight over my head except in the way that something like Harry Potter could be said to be preachy*. The recent movies were certainly backed strongly by christian groups, but didn't do well enough to even finish the series. As an adult there's plenty 'problematic' about the Narnia books, of course, and if you want to look for it. Apart from the religion there's the two things people frequently complain about in LotR as well (though Narnia has women/ girls) with the rose tinted glasses for Ye Olde England and the human baddies being swarthy foreigners. *Though I'm pretty sure I thought that Susan/ Peter and Edmund/ Lucy were all married as Kings and Queens. Which is kind of the opposite of the good christian values it was supposed to instil and probably a bit too progressive even for most progressives.

Yeah, nah. All your examples are the height of speciousness- the equivalent of responding to a statement that a game isn't that complicated and just has set rules you have to live by by saying "well then, why don't people play it standing on their head while playing a trombone and juggling nitroglycerine if it's so simple?" You've added processes utterly unrelated to voting, presumably because you don't actually have any other argument. Come back with something relevant, please, not something I'd expect from RostereVC. The process was known to everyone, some people chose to commit to it and then didn't fulfil their obligations. It's their fault for being lazy and making commitments they cannot follow. The actual delegate count is decided at the end of the process, thems the rules and always have been. It's fair, everyone has the same rules and process to follow and they don't involve unrelated guff like having to skydive off a Las Vegas skyscraper naked while yodelling or anything similar. No, MPs are elected as political representatives of the people and letting democracy be subverted by arbitrary minutiae like whether or not MPs can move their lard asses to a particular building should not be allowed. An MP can suffer from a debilitating disease of be hindered by accidents or traffic jams. Letting this have any bearing on important decisions is a farce, not democracy. 200 years ago, democracy would have required people to meet in person for votes. Technology allows for remote voting today. The only reason we still insist on the old ways is inertia. Yes, it would be such an improvement to route voting through... Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, whoever; and that after the Arizona clusterasterisk happened. That's... yeah. Most parliamentary systems have an alternate system for sickness, official duties such as overseas meetings and other legitimate reasons. In our case they need to be and are routinely cleared through the speaker and either a proxy is cast or one of the opposition pairs with them and don't vote. However, simply don't turn up and... diddums, no vote. You may be amazed, but there was an alternate system for Nevada caucuses as well. Most of those that turned up as alternates were Berniebods as well, while there were not enough Hillaryites. There's also the question of the logical conclusion of your ideas which you really haven't thought through at all, compulsory voting for citizens, and compulsory voting for MPs. The first is utterly undemocratic as democracy should be a free vote, a compelled vote is not democracy in any real sense- and that counts for representatives too. If someone is absent from a vote, who votes for them? The Party/ Whips? Congrats, you've just handed even more power to the entrenched political parties. The old joke about ministers 'wanting to spend more time with their families' becomes rather more sinister when their absence means that the party leader or his direct appointment gets to cast their vote for them. If there's a dichotomy between party and electorate is the MP compelled to vote for the party position, or his electorates, or does the leader/ whip just arrange for them to be absent and vote for them? If they do vote against the party does that mean they've impugned the democratic process- after all, people voted for their party- or does voting with the party impugn democracy- after all, the electorate voted for the member. And who decides which is the case, because if it's the party leader then you know which one they'll pick, every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

I think an honourable mention has to go to Greg Norman losing to Nick Faldo in 1996 when talking about choking. That was an eleven stroke turnaround and while Norman did end up 2nd he wasn't even close to first by the end.

Is this some new bad meme? Attributing quotes to Abe that he obviously never said? It's certainly not a new meme. (Original was something like "You should not believe every quote found on the internet - Abraham Lincoln" and it's from years ago.)

I'm being triggered by your cultural appropriation, guys. Chinggis Han is the one true transliteration, G*****s K**n is deeply offensive. (Subotai4eva) In off topic news Bernie won Wyoming but got the same number of delegates as Hillary.

He's thinking of George Ziets' BG3 'pitch' from a while back. That had you at big e Epic levels and potentially fighting Cyric. (BG3 as in actual sequel to BG2/ToB, not Baldur's Gate: The Black Hound unconnected to and non sequel to BG2, because we can use the name in other words.)

They get to choose who the delegates* are in caucuses though**. eg, for Nevada direct from their faq: "Any caucus participant may stand for election as a delegate to the county convention. Anyone who wants to be elected a national delegate must participate in the precinct caucuses (1), and each subsequent event –county convention on April 2, 2016 (2), and the state convention on May 14 and 15, 2016 (3). " What has happened is that a bunch of Hillary delegates from step 1 didn't bother turning up for step 2 so the ongoing delegates for step 3 reflect that they didn't. *somewhat confusing in context, as there are delegates for the national convention and county/ state conventions, but ultimately it's no different from voting on something like, I dunno, ambassadorial appointments? You don't directly elect the ambassadors but the people you voted for do, and if a bunch of them don't turn up for a vote you might end up with Sean Penn being ambassador to South Korea instead of Paul Wolfowicz, or whatever. **buggered if I'm going to check all the caucuses' rules to see if they're the same. I'm not insane and don't want to be.

"Nope Zor. It is about spitting on the face of people who voted. Should go by votes period or why bother with the pretense. Oh yeah, for pretend." Don't vote for someone who can't be bothered turning up, easy solution/ prevention. No one should expect Bernie supporters who actually turned up to recuse themselves in order to preserve a margin because some Hillary types had better things to do than what they were selected for.

Don't really see what's wrong with it. Yeah it's a confusing, clunky and odd system for anyone used to a Westminster type system, but that's not really the problem here since the rules are known and equal for both sides. 'Solution' to the problem is for Hillary's delegates to actually turn up, if they do then you get the original result, if you don't then it's their fault for not turning up or organising alternates. If half the government MPs didn't turn up in a Westminster system and they lost some votes it wouldn't be the fault of the system, it would be their fault because they didn't turn up.