taks

yeah, but you're talking about in a city, i'm talking about in a college town. big difference, particularly anywhere removed from either coast. taks

that last bit is key. many, if not most, major schools are in relatively cheap areas. the apartment i lived in while working on the MS was $225/month, and there were three of us in there. the beer index was low because a) i ran a night club and b) we were in a college town in the middle of the ozarks. getting drunk was free for all intents. my "salary" was $225/week and i got some cash from the school (i was a graduate research assistant) plus some tips, but i wasn't pulling in much more than $10/hour before taxes, maybe $11. cheap rent, roommates, no car loan (had a beater) and probably walked nearly everywhere anyway... but yes, it is difficult on that much money and i was doing it over 13 years ago. taks

nasty world the bar business is. at the st. louis night club i worked (two, actually, but the first one was only for 6 months) we had a pretty large security staff... lots of 'em and they were physically big as well. we also had mob connections, which came in handy one night when a gang fight broke out and the gang came back after hours to "finish us off." once they heard the source of their <insert black market dealings here> was a bit miffed, they suddenly turned around and left (it was a motorcycle gang, btw). anyway, people got tossed out all the time, and on more than one occasion i had to hop the bar to help out. oddly, when i moved to the bar in rolla, in spite of being a town of only 14,000, the problems were MUCH worse. my bar was constantly being investigated because we had more than one call to the police per night (on average) for the 15 months i ran things. lots of drugs down there in rural missouri, particularly crystal meth. i still have a scar from the guy i banned one night. my staff was dragging him out (6 big guys), and it was a stalemate. i reached over the top and put my arm around his neck and pulled the back of his hair up. he stopped fighting, but bit my arm in the process. taks

i should add, the way to do it is to get jobs that don't require much work, such as the night attendant at a gas station. that way you can actually do homework in-between customers (which i did for a while before getting my first bar job). of course, back in the day, you could still buy ephedrine (aka, mini-thins) in stores since meth wasn't that big of a deal. taks

not completely, particularly during a thesis and a dissertation. i actually drove back and forth between rolla and st. louis in 1992 and 1993 (110 miles) to work three times a week as a bartender in st. louis (near westport plaza, actually), finally moving back down to rolla during the summer of 1993 to actually find a thesis (i switched specialties mid-stream of my MS and ended up with 42 credits instead of the usual 30). it would have been harder to do as an undergrad, certainly, because you usually have more than 2 classes at a time. i won't comment on your imbecile statement. taks

no, the sum of the diablo mindlessness gives it much more meaning than lionheart could ever achieve. have you not played it? oof. lionheart went negative after barcelona, drawing life out of me like a vampire. that is time spent i can never get back, never... hehe, right or wrong, they got hammered publicly on that decision. taks

i dunno, i worked about 70-80 hours a week for most of my master's degree. granted, i didn't have much of a life, but i think it paid off in the end. fortunately i only had to work part-time during my undergrad years (full-time in the summer, of course). taks

uh, yeah... that brings up another cardinal sin: character choice determines whether or not you can actually win the game. or a lesser sin would be that characters are unbalanced in such a fashion that it does not make sense to choose certain character types. i believe lionheart was impossible for pure casters, correct? weren't there also some bad choices in arcanum. ooh, speaking of arcanum: females had strength caps. oh boy did they piss off a segment of the gaming population with that one. taks

oh please don't sully diablo (which was by no means my favorite game) by making that comparison... it was far, far worse and vastly more meaningless (huh?). yes, me too. one of my unfinished games. man was it awful after barcelona. taks

i realize this, but that does not make UU superior in any way. what carmack did was genius, and set the stage for the future. taks

"Doom didn't do anything that wasn't done in Wolf3D before, apart from multiplayer." uh huh. doom was miles ahead of ultima underworld, which is why it had such great success. in spite of being released on shareware, it still managed to garner over a million copies sold (10 million shareware versions). you can apply subjective assessments all you want, but technologically, id won the day. taks

"as far as i can recall" == "i don't know but i'll talk like i do anyway." a quick check at the wiki dispels 99% of these statements. i'm not sure what "feature rich" means, but it certainly was not used nearly as much as the doom engine, nor was it given any credit other than being rather advanced for 1992. taks

college football is certainly hypocritical. academic standards are meaningless for athletes. they should simply do away with all the moronic requirements and offer non-degreed positions on teams for those that want them. it is hardly fair that someone should be screwed over if his/her only talent in life is not of an academic nature. you end up with all these kids cheated into college sports programs under the pretense of being smart enough to get the degree, when everyone in the freaking world knows better. sigh. taks

yeah. according to wiki, it was "... widely recognized for pioneering immersive 3D graphics, networked multiplayer gaming on the PC platform, and support for custom expansions (WADs)." groundbreaking is an understatement, if anything. taks

no, i don't think they do. the system is horribly broken, but in a 128-team field, and only 12 or so games each season, i don't think there's a good answer. one thing they do need to do is remove the rose bowl from the BCS system. it is contractually obligated to include big-10/PAC-10 teams, which is why a 3-loss team got in last year (illinois, and USC trounced them). the other bowls are all required to take a top-10 team. i'm a mizzou fan, btw. i attended the university of missouri-rolla (now known as the missouri school of science and technology) for my undergrad work, which is 90 miles south of mizzou. the top 3 teams right now are USC, OK and mizzou (in that order). neither FL or GA should be in there. taks

GA barely squeaks by an unranked team and they get to keep in the top 3... pitiful. FL didn't even play. grrrr. taks

me too... i need to just face facts and admit to myself that BG2 needs a permanent home and stop uninstalling it. sigh. oh, BG1, BG2, NWN2 and i'm sure something else, maybe IWD1. i'm not at home so i don't know for sure what else. taks

i got home from denver today. we went to the broncos game yesterday and most of the time spent after the game (which was awesome) is a blur. i'd prefer to be napping right now. taks

http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showt...mp;#entry884952 well, i now have HLA abilities, particularly use magic. with the amulet of power, my rogue is not having any problems with undead. add in an occasional protection from undead and it is almost a joke how easy they are to kill (need the level drain thing since i don't always use the protection scroll). i still die often, and have to retool fights accordingly. still fun, however. taks

i don't think that was his point, walsh. the government can't "give" anything to you that it did not originally "take" from you. in other words, what the government has to provide is derived from the resources the people provide. taks

i've got a cat right now, and about 2 months ago i had 2 of them evil buggers. the one needed to go away (she was way ill), and now i only have one. i don't want him to go away. he's evil, quite evil, but he's my buddy (11 years, maybe 12). sorry dude, way sorry. taks

really... hmmm. i guess it works differently for large ticket items, however. both the cost of my tv and shipping (free) for the same were cheaper at amazon than anywhere else. taks

depends. the majority of electricity used in an active circuit is not simply resistive with constant current sources, so probably not. taks

my specific reference is probably obvious to many that post here, but i'll point it out for those that don't know: oblivion. i never played wiz 8, btw, at least not for very long (i think i tinkered with the demo once). don't recall that leveling feature in it, however. here's another that really irks me: stat based games with a broken random number generator. all of the IE games have a seriously broken PRN generator (that would be Pseudo-Random Number generator). i've never done any statistical tests but the numbers clearly cycle in strings, rather, successive rolls are correlated. hard fights are merely a reload away hoping on a string of high numbers. the converse is true as well, in which an easy fight requires a reload or two so you don't get 30 rolls in a row all under 5. there are several generators out there that have known correlations from iteration to iteration, but are considered useful for most purposes. the most common that i know of is the quick'n dirty one from numerical recipes in C, and i'm pretty sure it has this issue (can't recall specifics). i don't understand why these suckers keep showing up in games. taks

oh, i don't know... it's not really a horror flick, more of a suspense flick with a horror subject. the movie is quite well done overall, not just the ending, but the ending is one of those that just gets to you and makes you think on it for a while... a long while. taks