Enoch

Silly me. I tried to start a dance party without any music. If only there were someone who could get this jukebox working...

Woah. Getting way too serious in here. You all need to loosen up. Dance Party!!

Oh, wait. That's not it. What were we talking about? Ah yes:

The perils of hotlinking. I edited in a replacement. Speaking of hot:

Trapper to Hunnicut was a step down. Blake to Potter was a step down. Burns to Winchester was a huge step down. Radar was funny. Hotlips and Mulcahy had their moments. Klingar was one joke that got old fast. Speaking of steps down, anybody remember the laugh this guy got when he first stepped down out of the dispatcher cage?

Now all we need is Bethesda to release a toolset for Fallout 3, and MCA & Co. to use it to make the FO3 they envisioned...

A great character in my second favorite show, but I can't seem to separate the actors politics from his performance. I always felt that the supporting characters carried M*A*S*H. Col. Blake and Maj. Burns were the funniest ones to me. Yes, the series sufferred when Alda's more maudlin tendencies got in the way of the comedy, but mostly it suffered as most of the better characters left, leaving uninteresting, derivative replacements. Also, M*A*S*H the film > M*A*S*H the series. Oh, and just one more thing...

Did I miss something? Is Volo a 15-year-old girl? Kelv's list is reasonable. But it needs more Mary Ann. And every sitcom lead in history is pretty much a rip-off of one of these people: Also: Batman! (C'mon, people-- it's Batman!)

Dishonesty, born out of paranoia, born out of every man who talks to them being motivated only by desire for their treasure.

I doubt you have much to worry about. Her last name is "Tang"-- if that's not a sign, I don't know what is.

False. There are different styles, and from memory putting the full stop inside the quotation is the American style. Sawyer used the British style. More power to him! If we're going to be pedantic, you should have used the word 'quotation', since in this context 'to quote' is a verb, not a noun. Forgive me for citing the correct form in American writing when addressing an American writer on an American website. Any copy editor for a US publication would have moved the period inside of the quotation; it's not a choice that every writer gets to make for him/herself. (Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., sec. 6.8 ) And, according to Merriam-Webster, "quote" has been used as a noun to mean "quotation" as far back as 1888.

Dual-wielding isn't causing me any trouble, but that may be because I leave the AI off and obsessively pause and micromanage everything my characters are doing. It is annoying, though, that clicking a different weapon configuration in a hotbar usually causes the character to put down her current weapon and wade into combat bare-fisted. It usually takes another click to get the proper weapon in her hands. I recall this happening in prior NWN2 incarnations occasionally, but now it seems to happen every single time.

I don't think anyone went out and bought FO3 specifically to hear Mr. Neeson's performance, but his inclusion probably helped in other ways. I'm thinking specifically of media coverage outside the gaming media. Since Bethesda is a local company around here, their stuff usually gets some coverage in the Washington Post and other local outlets. The fact that Neeson was involved in the game usually figured pretty prominently in this kind of non-gaming-media coverage-- non-gamers (and non-gamer reporters) tend to take a project more seriously if they see a serious celebrity involved in it. That shift in attitudes probably does help sales in subtle ways.

Nice work on getting Firefox to change. I was always puzzled to see "dialogue" with a squiggly red underline beneath it when I typed it into a text box, but I never bothered to do anything about it. Edit: Since I'm in grammar/spelling/usage pedant mode, I should point out that the period at the end of your title should go inside of the quote.

I knew you were an engineer in the telecom industry generally. If you ever mentioned the particular firm, I must have missed it or forgotten. I have an Aunt who used to work for AT&T in their NJ offices, but she moved to a major insurance company a few years back. It's getting rough out there-- even us fancy DC lawyers are feeling the pinch. My brother-in-law, a mid-level associate at a big law firm's DC office, was let go a couple weeks ago. Still, you've got practical technical expertise and experience, and no crappy economy can take that away. That makes you much better equipped to weather this kind of storm than most people.

Ouch. Best of luck. (Hmmm... 12,000 layoffs announced today? I think I have a good guess as to your employer.)

Brothers Johnson -- Get the Funk Outta My Face

I haven't seen any yet, and it would really really surprise me if they did. With the ridiculous number of FR deities, it just doesn't make much sense to include custom content that such a small % of players are going to see. Maybe something for Kelemvor, since the Doomguide is the new PrC.

For the moment, the solution is to re-route shipping away from the Gulf of Aden and instead around the Cape of Good Hope. The higher transport costs will be at least partially passed on to consumers and should help create the political will to get some international cooperation on pirate smackdowns.

The problem is that, for ships that can't outrun or outmaneuver the pirates' speedboats, there really isn't much that armed guards can do. The pirates are generally armed with RPGs-- all they have to do is get close enough, and they can threaten to put a round in the target ship's hull. A sharpshooter might be able to take out the guy with the RPG before he gets a shot off, but what ship owner is going to want to take that risk?

The method that the Anglo-American legal system has to deal with stuff like this is simple: prosecutorial discretion. Cops and district attorneys (or whatever they call the prosecuting officials in your particular jurisdiction) are under no requirement to seek the maximum possible punishment for every little violation of the law. When they do go too far and enforce a stupid law, it often raises the public ire enough to get the law changed. As to weird legal stories, my favorites are all cases that I read in the first year of law school. Lots of legal textbooks rely on the founding cases that established a particular legal principle, and most of these cases are from the 18th century or earlier (in some cases, way earlier). Thus, they tend to be full of lovely antiquated terms (mobs throwing "brickbats" and "lighted squibs," "a rick of hay" that catches fire), people doing hilariously stupid things (home-defense deathtraps, criminal law cases beginning with the phrase "[Defendant's name] stumbled out of a bar"), interesting bits of latin (e.g., Moliter manus imposuit), and humorously unlikely factual situations (a founding case for a major principle of contract law revolves around two ships transporting goods from Bombay to Liverpool, both named "Peerless"). There is a lot that sucks about law school-- particularly the first year-- but the centuries-old caselaw you end up reading can be entertaining.

It's available on Steam for something in the area of 10 US dollars. (At least it was a month ago when I bought it.)

A neat detail I stumbled upon in SoZ: Trigger the lightning trap, and it shoots out of the snake statue's mouth!

As someone who scrutinizes federal agencies for a living, I don't entirely agree. Yeah, a lot of the bureaucracies do essentially run themselves, with the political appointees as window-dressing on the civil servants making the real decisions. But direction from the top can do a lot of good, particularly on internal management issues, where the career civil servants have little incentive to make waves. One of the most frustrating things about the Bush administration has been the inflated hack-to-manager ratio in political appointees. Every administration has some dead weight-- party hacks with no skill or drive worth mentioning picking up a Deputy Assistant Secretary position or the like. In the Bush years, though, it has been extreme. Agencies that weren't considered important for the administration's ideological goals were often treated as afterthought and staffed with second-rate talent. (The most troubling example being the way in which the Bushies encouraged the Inspectors General they appointed to work collaboratively with their agencies and avoid publicly embarrassing them.) Some competent, aggressive managers running the federal agencies, focused on fixing big issues like contract management, federal human capital, IT stuff, and budgets could really help to improve the overall operation of the government.

OK, that was funny. (Even though I got tired of Deus Ex around the the beginning of the Paris level.)