Enoch

I think there might be some undetected sarcasm going on here. "it were obvious that folks (almost w/o exception) liked Durlag's Tower better than they liked any single location in bg." Not to threadjack, but I didn't particularly enjoy Durlag's Tower. It was indubitably more artfully designed than the rest of BG. But I never actually had the patience to finish it for a few reasons. First, creeping along 6 feet at a time and waiting to see if I detect a trap is not particularly enjoyable gameplay. Second, IIRC, the story didn't give much motivation besides "there's treasure there" and "you just payed $30 for this expansion so you might as well go play it." Third, my party hit the XP cap before I got far in there (I played BG1 after TotSC was released, and reached the TotSC XP cap either before or early on during Durlags), which makes it seem more pointless. And, finally, if you haven't set your party up to abuse the BG1-optimal "chokepoint, summoned meatshields, ranged weapons/spells" mechanic, a couple of the fights in the dungeon are difficult enough to make you quit in frustration. Otherwise, I agree with Grom. SoZ feels like BG in that there is too little entertaining content spread out over too great an area, with mostly boring filler combat in the gaps.

Fallout 3. Installed it on Saturday evening, and played for about 6 hours over the weekend. Already had 2 tech problems-- the game locked up when messing with the pipboy just after exiting the vault, and the lag upon entering VATS seems to increase as playtime does (memory leak?), eventually culminating in the program going all "Not Responging" on me. Walking to work this morning, I realized that I hadn't updated my video drivers in rather a long time, so I'll try that tonight and see if it helps. Anyhow, the game is enjoyable so far. I've been wandering around on the Virginia side of the Potomac, doing some Megaton-based quests and generally getting the lay of the land. I keep marching off with the intention of finding Bethesda to see if there is anything interesting at or around the location of my house, but obstacles and interesting distractions keep popping up. (I quit last night shortly after entering .) I eventually also want to see if there's anything cool near my office, but that's in downtown DC, which I gather would be a bit too tough for my Level 4 character.

Got home from visiting with family. Installed Fallout 3. Played until I left the vault, and the game hard-locked on me.

TV on the Radio -- Lover's Day. Haven't spent much time with it yet, but tentatively it seems to me that the critical hype about the new album is mostly deserved.

In the spirit of the holiday, I've got a lot of problems with you people, and you're going to hear about them!

good point. do you think they see it that way, however? taks I think a lot of them do. But it only takes 1 very angry, well funded gay couple to bring the court case...

This is hardly the thread to rehash the silly debate between the "any job giving less than 6 weeks of paid vacation is a civil rights violation" nutjobs and the "Teh Mahket is Infallabal! Ayn Rand 4EVA!!" nutjobs.

As GD alluded, the only legal argument now open to gay-marriage-rights activists in CA is to sue based on the federal constitution. The argument would be based on one or both of the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the 14th amendment. There is already precedent (Loving v. Virginia) under the Due Process clause for the right to marry being a so-called "fundamental" right which triggers "strict scrutiny" (i.e., the state needs a damn good reason for denying it to a group of people without giving them due process). Of course, using the federal constitutional argument means that any decision by the CA Supreme Court is reviewable by the Federal Supreme Court, and the SCOTUS as currently composed has been very reluctant to expand 14th Amendment rights. Lawrence v. Texas was an exception to this trend a few years back, wherein Anthony Kennedy joined the more progressive justices. But that decision only affected a dozen or so laws that were almost never enforced. Kennedy is a pragmatist, and would be concerned about the institutional standing of the Court if they issued a wide-ranging emphatic pro-gay-rights decision on marriage. I think the legal argument is quite sound. Read together, Loving's precedent on the primacy of marriage rights and Lawrence's holding that "gay sex is gross" isn't an acceptable reason to legislate against it spell out a pretty clear path to overturning Prop 8. But the general societal sh!tstorm that would follow would be furious. As a matter of strategy for the gay rights movement, I think it would be a big mistake. Looking at the demographics, there's going to be a majority favoring gay marriage in a generation. Forcing change now via a counter-majoritarian court decision would be making the same mistake that abortion rights groups did in the '70s.

Did most of the gift shopping this weekend. (Protip: in the holiday season, stores usually open earlier than normal on weekends. This means that Sunday morning is the perfect time to go shopping, while a significant percentage of the rest of the population is either worshipping the benevolent god of their choice or serving penance to the vengeful god of hangovers.) I was amused to discover that the Best Buy in Rockville, MD, has a life-sized model of a dude in FO3 power armor, a gift from the people at Bethedsa Softworks (which, despite the name, is HQ'ed in Rockville, which you shouldn't go back to). There was a signature on the front (as well as a sign indicating that it was not for sale), but I couldn't make out who signed it. Other than that, I, like GD, spent a large part of the weekend watching football. None of that minor league stuff, though-- just the pro games.

Nice tree. A Ginkgo, no? My neighbors have a huge one about 6 feet from the property line. Unfortunately, it's a female, which means that every fall it drops a crapton of foul-smelling fruit all over our yard. My shoes still stink from the last time we gathered them up. Pretty leaves, though.

Yeah, the 'eschew religions' strategy is actually more important on higher difficulties. The AI production bonuses make them so effective as missionary pumps that a competing human player has a tough time keeping up. Plus, the more religions out there for different AIs to found, the more likely that you'll get some nice wars between them (since Civs almost always adopt native-grown faiths as the state religion), slowing their expansion and research. Few things suck more than discovering the other continent for the first time, to realize that they're universally one religion, that they have been at consistent peace for 5000 years, and that even the least advanced among them is 3 techs ahead of you in the liberalism race.

Ahh, well, you forgot to mention they were filthy heretics. Burn them, I say! I just lost a stack of 6 macemen that were attempting to head off a stack that was headed for my capital. The enemy stack was mostly horse archers with one city raider maceman thrown in for good measure. I dunno how I lost 6 fights in a row. My troops supposedly had a 90% chance of success in each fight yet somehow they all died and then he took my capital. Also, the apostolic palace voted on whether he should end his war against me. He voted that he wanted to end the war, but he still won't talk to me to offer a peace treaty? A) Ouch. The random number generator is a harsh mistress. What difficulty is this on? B) This illustrates why founding your own religion is for chumps. You spend piles of hammers on missionaries, but still end up hated by half the world. Better to let the AI have all the religions, thank them kindly when they send their missionaries to your cities, and convert to whichever faith is most diplomatically advantageous (or none at all, if none of them would help). If you can't do without the income from a shrined holy city, just remember that Mr. or Mrs. Holier-than-Thou is using most of his/her production on missionaries and temples, rather than catapults and macemen...

This thread is comedy gold. But, then again, I'm a government operative, and not to be trusted.

Some classes and builds are way easier than others - If you're not a cleric/favoured sould/druid Gann is essentially your only healer and he burns spells likes he's addicted to them.. That makes things a little tougher.. and if you're a class that doesn't deal much damage, well then it's alot tougher. 20 minutes spent with Safiya and the enchanting satchel can make the game miles easier. And if you're not interested in that, once you get a perma-hasted Okku, dealing damage really isn't much of a concern anymore. I played as a Wiz/Eldritch Knight/ASoC, and there weren't a whole lot of challenging fights. The shadow temple of Myrkul was probably the toughest spot to me-- most of the fights that others seemed to have trouble with (groups of high-level spellcasters) were usually taken care of with one Wail of the Banshee. Edit: Yeah, there's no reason you have to do the lower level of the Death God's Vault early on. Venture out of Mulsantir and take care of some other areas first.

Had a memorably strange dream last night. I was in high school, and had to put on some sort of act or performance for a talent show or something like that. I came up with an idea that I thought was pure genius-- my performance would be a simultaneous tribute to Jim Henson and . I would do a standup routine guaranteed to bomb: composed entirely of old hackneyed jokes (I'm thinking Henny Youngman-type stuff) all while speaking in . The dream never got to the actual performance. Upon waking, I can't decide whether such a performance would be incredibly brilliant or incredibly stupid. I have always been strangely fascinated with performances that are humorously contemptuous of the audience. When I was in college, my roommate and I always talked about doing stuff like showing up at one of them pretentious poetry readings and monopolizing the mic for 40 minutes while we recited the entirety of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But we didn't have the balls to actually pull it off. (Plus, I never memorized more than the first third of the poem.)

Well, there's nothing wrong with crock pots, per se. It's just a method of providing the heat. If you use good, fresh ingredients, you can get good food out of a crock pot. I used one for the stuffing when I was cooking Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks ago-- it's a good way to provide gentle heat over a long period of time, or to keep stuff you've made ahead of time warm until everything else is ready. @ I Want, I try to fight my food hangups, and I admire those who have overcome such to become essentially omnivorous. (Food critics have to make a point of this.) But the dish you mention cuts to the core of the one category of food I simply dislike-- semi-solid dairy products. Specifically, anything that resembles the taste, smell, or texture of milk that has been sitting out on the counter for a week. Sour cream, yogurt, ricotta, cottage cheese, cream cheese...

A lovely summary of all that is hideous about most cooking in America. I.e., opening 6 cans of prepared stuff, mixing, and warming it over counts as "cooking," and, despite it having enough sodium in it to make the Mississippi taste like the Dead Sea, people still call it the "vegetable" course.

I made some coconut cookies a week or so ago. I don't have a recipe handy, but essentially I whipped 4 egg whites and some sugar (1/2 cup? 2/3rds? not sure) into medium peaks (a.k.a., a meringue), then folded that into a mixture of shredded coconut (two 7-oz. bags), a little condensed milk, and some vanilla extract. Scoop 'em onto a cookie sheet, and bake until the tips start turning brown. (Then let cool and dip in melted chocolate!) I liked how the meringue made them light and airy, which is the opposite of what you get with a traditional coconut macaroon.

Can we at least agree that bickering over whose ancestors were more virtuous and helpful to the rest of civilization is pointless and irrelevant to pretty much everything?

It may be good for democracy, but it's often not good for efficiency/effectiveness or for prevention of corruption. Differing regulations from jurisdiction to jurisdiction destroy economies of scale for government services and place a heavy informational/compliance burden on entities (companies) doing business over a large area. Also, it's a lot harder for dirty officials to escape scrutiny in a town with 20,000 people and 1 tiny newspaper than it is at the national level. IMO, you've got to weigh the pros and cons on an issue-by-issue basis.

Fixed that for you. Very little. taks and GD are part of a small but very vocal minority whose views haven't been in accordance with mainstream public opinion or legal precedent for a century or so. In the overseas area, I do agree that the courts have been too deferential to the executive over the past 30 or so years, generally at the expense of Congress. But often Congress has only itself to blame for that one-- most legislators would rather run against the institution rather than stand up for what should be the legislative branch's domain.

sorry, but it was written as a timeless document, rightfully so. you sir, are a disgrace if you think something "more with the times" is a good idea. shame on you. If there was one common spirit that motivated the entirety of the 1787 Constitutional Convention it was that the people should be actively engaged in questioning the nature of their government, and, when appropriate, assertive in taking action to change it. They included Article V for a reason, you know.

Well, the Constitution does specifically direct that any treaties signed by the executive and ratified by the Senate are the supreme law of the land, absent a direct conflict with a latter-enacted federal law or with the Constitution itself. Thus, for example, the decisions of WTO boards regarding trade practices are binding on American policymakers and companies. So international law is not wholly toothless in America. But, ultimately, for criminal matters, taks is correct. The 6th Amendment (guaranteeing all criminal defendants trial by "an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed") almost certainly provides some protection for U.S. citizens from criminal proceedings conducted by non-U.S. bodies (e.g., any international court certainly couldn't prosecute a U.S. citizen for supposed crimes committed solely within the U.S.). And that's all academic at this point, anyway, since there has been no Senate ratification of any treaty that would subject U.S. citizens to an international court. Yeah, it would be nice if the world were free of hypocrisies like the U.S.'s rhetoric in favor of justice for international criminals and its refusal to subject itself to any binding authority in that matter. But that ain't the world we live in. If it were, well, there wouldn't be much point in America maintaining it's enormous lead in the "capacity to kick ass" department, which woud ultimately create a much less stable international environment. There is understandably a lot of frustration outside the U.S. (and within) over the actions of the Bush Administration. Those who attribute these actions to malice rather than mistake are looking for some way to make these leaders accountable beyond simple electoral defeat, but I do not share that view-- there have undeniably been plenty of poor policy decisions, lack of foresight, and devotion to misguided ideological principles even in the face of contrary facts, but I don't see anything that convinces me that they did what they did for any reason other than the belief that they were working toward what they thought was a greater good.

Al Green -- Belle Fan-freakin-tastic.

The pull of Civilization is strong. I read this post this morning and all day I've had this urge to play Civ4. Ha! I didn't read that post this morning, but I did decide to jump into a game of CivIV (BTS, with the latest BUG Mod, which doesn't change gameplay at all, adds a lot of more informative feedback). It's been a few months, so I stepped my usual difficulty down to Prince.