Enoch

Yeah, no kidding. My save was probably within a stone's throw of two of them when I posted that comment. Although I wish that I had recruited these two before I sold all that extra loot I brought back from Oz. I was up against the backpack cap coming into town, so the first thing I wanted to do was find a merchant and unload. The new folks could use some of those bits of armor I didn't think I had a use for.

Wandering around Lothering for the first time. The 'conventional fantasy RPG-ness' is putting me off a little (lots of people with predictable little problems for me to resolve), but that's probably just my mood. I'm playing as a Mage, and I seem to have inadvertently taken my early spells as a near-copy of Morrigan's (the Ice line, the Horror line, the one with Paralyze in it). So she's probably not going to be contributing much to my campaign. But that's OK-- most of the supposedly-witty banter so far has left me groaning, so I'll probably ditch these two wannabe comedians I'm lugging about as soon as I have some feasible alternatives. (The dog, Thelonious, can stay.) Not sure where I'll go next. From a role-playing point of view, the Circle of Magi seems to be the logical starting point, because my character knows the First Enchanter, and knows that he's a reasonable and responsible guy to deal with, who isn't likely to . Although it's probably a good idea to wait until I have a companion alternative to Morrigan before I show up there. I haven't talked to everyone in this town yet, though, so no need for a decision just yet. @entrerix: You had the dog with you for the tower fight? I didn't seem to have an option to recruit him until after the battle. The game gave me a nameless "Soldier" (S&S) and "Tower Guard" (mostly a crossbowman) for that area. The "Soldier" actually finished off the for me-- I lost Alistair pretty early in the fight, but the rest of us made it out OK (with a few less mana potions in my pocket).

Yeah, that's what I did. Although I'm not sure if it was any different from registering a new account except in that it had my e-mail address filled in already (which needed to be updated anyway).

Yay. I has teh game. Installed, redeemed the code for the Shale DLC, downloaded and installed that, and made me a wizardy-type character (human male). I took the first level of the Cold spells and whatever-you-call the one that has the sleep spell in it. I had futzed about with the character creator a few days ago, but I didn't bother uploading anything. Bonus items are for the weak. I hear there's a patch, but I didn't see any in-game updater. Is one forced to apply it the old-fashioned way? The opening cinematic was very ho-hum, as was the intro to the Mage Origin, but it is nice to see the DA logo come up when starting the game, accompanied by something other than the silly Manson music.

Breyer's Black Raspberry Chocolate = the best supermarket-available ice cream evar.

This has probably been answered much earlier in the thread, but is the l00t random? The USPS failed to get me my copy on its Saturday round (despite receiving it at the local post office at about 4:00 that morning, according to my online tracking), but it should be waiting for me when I come home today. And Wednesday is a federal holiday!

I'm not going to comment on Murdoch, but I will say that this is going to fail. The Wall Street Journal (which Murdoch acquired a year or two ago) gets away with charging for online content because the paper is so highly esteemed in business circles, so lots of companies will pay the fee to get its employees access to its content, and anyone who is looking to make their career in banking/finance/etc., pretty much needs to read it over every day. His other ventures, though, are much less distinguishable from their rivals that still offering free online content. People will just delete the sites from their bookmarks and go elsewhere.

Nice call on the Bucs GD. Creamsicle Magic!

Washington at Atlanta: ATL Arizona at Chicago: ARI Baltimore at Cincinnati: BAL Houston at Indianapolis: IND Miami at New England: NE Green Bay at Tampa Bay: GB KC Chiefs at Jacksonville: JX Carolina at New Orleans: NO Detroit at Seattle: SEA Tennessee at SF 49ers: SF San Diego at NY Giants: SD Dallas at Philadelphia: PHI Pittsburgh at Denver: DEN @ Kelv & Volo, you didn't pick the Monday Night'er.

Question: If the Day-one DLC were included in the game for everyone, with the retail cost of the game increased by its price for all buyers, would that be better? It would certainly be a less jarring in-game experience, but it would come at the cost of putting the game's price out-of-reach for some consumers. For whatever reasons, major-release video games all tend to sell at right around the same price point, despite what I assume are wildly varying production costs. DLC adds more price flexibility (a way to sell a bigger game at a higher price), which leads to a more efficient market. (Although that's not really why developers are doing this-- the main motivation is almost certainly to give players incentives to buy rather than rent (or pirate).)

Is it confirmed that the combat calculations are actually doing this, or is this just in the feedback you get on your character sheet?

"Out of contact"? You might want to check your calendar-- it's not 1865 anymore, and North America and Ol' Blighty now have means of near-instantaneous communication. And it gives you an excuse to visit London! (And a place to crash when you do so.)

Hehe. You guys are trying to get Gorth back in here right quick, aren't you? And everybody knows that the optimal number of simultaneous sexual partners is 2 & 1/3. (At least everyone who has tried it does...) On topic addendum: Ordered my copy from Amazon this morning, with the 5-9 day free shipping. They estimated the ship date to be Nov. 9. Got an email saying it had shipped at around 4PM... from their facility in Sterling VA, < 25 miles from my house. It's USPS, so it'll still probably take until Saturday, but I really think that a lot of Amazon's positive credibility is based on their giving unrealistically long ship-time estimates, and then beating them easily.

Yeah, he seriously needs a script and some editing to be funny.

I'm the same way. Inveterate control freak and pause whore in RTWP CRPGs. Although I tend to play everything on the default difficulty. Currently downloading the character creator. There's a better than even chance that I'll put an order in on Amazon later this evening. (And then wait patiently for the free shipping option, which usually doesn't take as long as they advertise around here.) The early reviews have mostly confirmed my suspicions about the game-- i.e., it's a competent party-based fantasy CRPG, and whether one considers it "OK" or "Great" depends heavily on one's tolerance for (or, I suppose, enjoyment of) genre cliches, clumsy sex n' gore fan service, and Bioware character writing. Other than a Civ4 game or two I'd like to wrap up, I don't have much else I'd rather be playing right now.

Heh. I found this line entertaining: Isn't even wanting to "escape ... the game's design" a better indicator of poor design than is the degree to which said escape is possible? I'm sure I'll play this game at some point, but I haven't ordered it yet. I am looking forward to reading the impressions around here.

Gorgon and TN make good points. 1K participants isn't much, especially when they start making conclusions based on sub-categories (mostly age ranges) within their sample. And partly, this survey is picking up the portion of the population who simply likes music more than most people, and is more willing to make special efforts to get new music. Second, this is a survey. The type of people who will admit to piracy are probably also the type of people who ideologically view it as a valid distribution channel (you know, the ones who bring up wholly irrelevant points about record company overhead in all these arguments) and are trying to convince others that there's nothing wrong with it because they support the artists they like in other ways. Other people who have downloaded stuff will simply lie.

Thanks.

You underestimate the popularity of front-runners. The Yanks are almost certainly one of the most popular teams in the league, nationwide. Lots of fans like the idea of rooting for a team that, based on historical averages, wins it all once every 4 seasons. Of course, front-running fans are mostly jackasses. (Standard sports jackass test: You qualify if you root for any two of the following: NY Yankees, LA Lakers, Dallas Cowboys, Duke NCAA Basketball.) Edit: On-topic addendum: My foot hurts. Last weekend, I empted the dead leaves out of the gutters of the house. This involved a lot of balancing on the top steps of a 6-foot folding ladder, leaning as far as I could to cover lots of ground without having to move the ladder. Later that afternoon, I went grocery shopping. As I was jogging across the parking lot, pushing my cart full of purchases out to the car, I felt a bit of a tweak in the instep of my right foot. I walked it off and felt fine, but pain came back as I was lying in bed that night. Some ibuprofen fixed that and helped me sleep, but in the week since then, it has gotten progressively worse instead of better. It's intermittent (only consistently noticeable when lying in bed), not associated with any particular type of movement (when present, I can't consistently make it hurt more or less by moving in any particular way, although standing still is generally worse than sitting or walking), and the locus of the pain seems to have moved a bit, edging closer to my heel and towards the outside of the foot. Based on these observations, I suspect it's a nerve issue (inexpert diagnosis: Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome) rather than a muscle/bone/joint issue. But I tend to irrationally avoid medical professionals, and every time the pain gets bad enough for me to want to call my HMO, I delay, it gets better, and I don't make the call.

I can't get it to work with Vista personally - and I don't think Gizka is getting it done any time soon.. I don't think that a mod would change the interaction of the program with the OS-- if you can get basic KotOR2 working on Vista/Win7 (it starts and runs fine on my Vista machine, but I can't get the sound to work, so I play on min settings on my ancient XP laptop), it should run with the mod. Also, I think the talk is about TSLRCM, which is in public beta and is getting pretty regular updates, not Team Gizka's (ever-) ongoing effort.

Yeah, it's getting nasty. Losing to Philly is particularly painful. Still 5-3 is not terrible; they'll have their chances to get back in it. With Kenny Phillips on IR, the pass defense is just awful. Run any kind of fake at C.C. Brown (not sure if it stands for "Can't Cover" or "Complete Crap") and the receiver is going to be open. Combine that with the slowest LB corps in the league, and you've got a recipe for any decent offense plowing up the field at will. We can hope that the return of Michael Boley, Aaron Ross, and Chris Canty to the active roster will help, but I have my doubts.

Hmmm... I'm just beginning to consider some upgrades to the system I build back in the spring of '07 (I posted the specs here at the time). As I'm starting to look around at what's out there, I noticed that all the fancy new video cards out there now list their interface as "PCI-E 2.0." Judging by the lack of any kind of version number in the description of the PCI-E slots in my mobo's manual, I'm guessing that I'm stuck with whatever I can find that still runs on 1.0. Is this guess accurate?

HOU at BUF: HOU CLE at CHI: CHI SEA at DAL: DAL DEN at BAL: BAL SF at IND: IND MIA at NYJ: MIA NYG at PHI: NYG STL at DET: DET JAX at TEN: JAX OAK at SD: SD CAR at ARI: ARI MIN at GB: MIN AT at NO: NO @Volo, I'm sure it's a typo, but you somehow picked the Forty-Niners to win the OAK-SD game.

Well, besides the possibility of running less-than-full, another way that very-large ships may be less efficient: Sometimes, they have to take the long way around. By the dimensions announced in the video (56M wide, 397M long), that ship is by far post-Panamax, although it appears to be sub-Malaccamax. International shipping in general has been hit quite hard by the recession. I recall some coverage a number of months ago about the backlog of empty container ships just sitting at anchor in Singapore, waiting for the West's appetite for Chinese exports to perk back up. By sitting still in a warm-weather port, the hulls of the ships were growing beards of kelp that really hurt the efficiency of their operations, but the owners preferred to keep close to China so that they were ready when the export rates jumped back up again. Based on the Baltic Dry Index, there has been some bounce-back in international shipping, but nowhere near its '07 to early '08 levels. A lot of the ships coming onto the market now-- having been ordered back when things were booming-- aren't finding much cargo to keep them running. I know it's way off topic, but I have always found international shipping interesting. Edit: a 9/28/09 update: The fleet is still there. Picture:

I don't find this particular focus to be all that objectionable-- making one big new efficient ship is probably a gain over running several smaller older ships, so long as there is sufficient demand to keep it running full. The kite is pretty silly, yes-- far more symbolic than it is effective. But that doesn't change the fact that people are interested in increasing the efficiency (the big gain to the operators) and the enviro-friendliness (a useful thing to highlight for political reasons) of container ships. I also wouldn't say that greenies are delighted by bureaucracy. (Hippies generally don't mix with regulators all that well.) More that they are surrounded by the glowing conviction that they are of the enlighted few who see the correct way of things, and that the world outside of them is mostly ignorant and a little bit corrupt. Government is seen as a tool to punish the corrupt and educate the ignorant, the latter of which will inevitably result in the world acclaiming the clear correctness of their cause. (Which is not to say that there are not large elements of their cause that are quite likely correct.) But, yes, people do take things too far. There are lots of examples of poor design, over emphasis on minor symbolic changes, poor decisions from a cost-benefit point of view, etc. The ones that bug me most are the changes driven primarily by people marketing toward the environmental sensibilities of consumers ("Buy our product if you care about the environment-- look, it's got leaves on the labels and everything!"), particularly when the actual impact of the products is no different from their competitors, and when their marketing efforts yeild policy changes based on poor data.