Enoch

How did this thread turn into a ****-waving contest between Aussies and Scandinavians (Scandies?) on which nanny state is the most nurturing?

Yeah, religion in America is odd. The theory is that the long tradition of a religious "free market" in America encourages people to "shop around" for the faith that fits them, as opposed to other countries with a state religion where it takes a greater non-conformist step to join a different faith. With an established faith, people who are just a little bit unhappy with their religion will be less likely to change it, and instead simply follow it with less devotion. After a couple of generations of that devotional diminution, the society generally becomes less religious overall and more accepting of the overtly irreligious. On the other hand, in America, where people have fewer barriers to switching to a different religion, people are more apt to switch to a different faith if unhappy, and retain their overall their level of devotion/piety/whatever. This leads to religious adherence that is more constant across generational divides, and, sadly, a higher incidence of intolerance toward the overtly irreligious.

I successfully ran KotOR 2 on my laptop with a Radeon Mobility 9000 back when the game was new. Got some stuttering in the movies and the occasional crash, but it worked. Edit: Mine was the AGP interface version, so your mileage may vary.

Whenever I sit down to write one of these, Torment, Fallout, and a smattering of Civ games are the only real constants. I'm also struck by the population of games out there that other people think are the BEST EVAR that I have never played. Some of this is genre-based (my current experience trying BioShock out has reminded me once again why I don't enjoy shooters not named "Portal"), and some of it is based on certain gaps in my awareness of the overall gaming community (Lucasarts made adventure games?!* Deus Ex isn't a pure shooter?! Who knew!) I also get to thinking about some of the old games I used to play and how I would totally not enjoy them anymore. My tolerance for the grind has gone way down (I'm looking at you, Might & Magics 3-5, Icewind Dale, BG1, et al.); whenever a game starts getting the slightest bit repetitive these days, I start thinking that the game is wasting my time and the Devs should've cut more stuff. (One of the things I love about Portal is its brevity.) I really admire the heck out of what Obsidian has done with Mask of the Betrayer, but once the essential mystery was revealed at the beginning of Act III, I lost my motivation to keep grinding through boring epic-cheese D20 combat and stopped playing. Anyhow, here's a list. It's in a rough order of preference, but I reserve the right to monkey with it. PS:T Fallout Civ IV Alpha Centauri Fallout 2 Railroad Tycoon The Fool's Errand Portal Quest for Glory I BG 2 * (Lucasarts story not entirely true. I tried to play at least 1 of the Monkey Island games as well as IJ: Fate of Atlantis on a relative's PC, but got stuck on something ridiculously early in both games and gave up. Since I hadn't shelled out the cash for them, and this was before solutions were readily available on the internet, I never bothered trying them again.)

Well, there's one thing you'll have in common with the developers. (As for your problem... I got nuttin. Good luck.)

You make a good point about the difficulty in dealing with a bad SCOTUS decision, but I still feel that it's far too distant and speculative an issue to give much attention to in selecting which candidate to support. For my part, I'm more interested in balance on the Court than I am in one ideology or another. So long as the 'swing' votes are pragmatists like O'Connor was and Kennedy is-- Judges who value greatly the Court's institutional legitimacy and are willing to compromise the doctrine of the ideological hard-liners to avoid decisions that are too far out of tune with the people's views generally-- there isn't too great a threat of earth-shaking decisions that are tough to undo. Based on that, I should probably be supporting moderate-to-liberal candidates (which I am, but mostly for other reasons) because the current balance on the Court is threatening to slip too far towards the conservative camp. ("Activism" is hardly the sole province of the liberals-- the agendas of the Scalias and Thomases of the world is merely a different kind of activism.) Anyhow, you're right in that we're getting frighteningly off-topic. Feel free to resurrect the thread I linked on Kelo, though, if you'd like to discuss it further.

Kelo v. New London was properly decided. (And it was completely consistent with precedent-- the dissent's approach in that case was the "activist" one.) Yes there are differences in outcomes based on who is sitting on the Court. But the amount and effect of policy change that one can influence through court decisions pales in comparison to the amount and effect of policy changes that one can influence through legislative advocacy, foreign policy initiatives, and executive orders. This is mostly because influencing policy via the courts is all guesswork-- you never really know which cases are going to come up or whether the people you put there will make the decision the way you want them to. Most of the ideological screening for potential nominees usually comes down to their stance on "substantive due process" cases (which includes the decisions on abortion, gay rights, and the like). A judge's position on that type of case isn't particularly informative on how they're likely to vote in cases on statutory interpretation, free speech, anti-trust, or any of the other myriad of subjects that pop up in the federal court system.

After looking at it on the corner of my desk for a week, I got around to installing BioShock this evening. Played for about an hour, then went to watch something on TV. By the time the show was over, I had had too much wine to boot the game back up. I'm not very good at shooters, and it was just getting to the point where the game sends more than one enemy at you at a time. So far, it's a very pretty game, and the setting and backstory certainly has my interest.

Beatles -- Blue Jay Way

Certainly not. I don't yearn for the total federal grinding to a halt that I suspect GD would endorse, but I certainly see the advantages of divided government. Better oversight of the executive agencies, more checks on the back-scratching of political supporters, etc. (Heck, my job is essentially based on the continuation of the intra-branch power struggle, which is always at its most intense when at least one house of Congress is controlled by the party that lost the last Presidential election.) But, of course, there is always a balance between the goal of checking the exertion of power and the goal of representing the electorate, which does occasionally decide that it wants one party to have all of the power. Sure, it usually leads to a cyclical "house cleaning" in a few years, but sometimes the swift enactment of popular policy goals is worth going periods of weaker overall governance.

Edited for accuracy. you know, i haven't even seen a sheep since moving down to wellington like 3 years ago today i went and hung out with an ex after i finished work she's a strange one really, but we still get on pretty well Strange? You mean she doesn't say "Baa" when you pull on her wool a bit too hard? Today I got home from work, made myself a lovely dry Plymouth Gin martini , and drank it far too quickly before eating any dinner. (This may account for the above joke not being particularly funny.)

As I said, it's been a while. I don't doubt that you're correct on MR and Insect Plague. But I was talking about one-high-level-enemy-mage battles (who seldom had significant MR), not dragon or golem battles. I never really had the patience to go through the combat log and remember which anti-magic spells countered which defenses-- I just Plagued 'em and hammered 'em into the dirt. One of my attacks (like, say, the various elemental bonuses from the Flail of Ages) usually got through. I had a militia beat my battleship in the original!!! Haha! The perils of defensive bonuses and win-or-die single-calculation combat! It's fun to laugh at (and frustrating to see happen), but there is a serious scaling issue on how to balance each incremental step in the technological development in the game. Sure, Tanks should always beat stone age militias, but should Medieval knights? Should those knights, in turn, always lose to 19th Century rifle infantry? If you make the advantages of getting that next tech around the bend too high, you skew the balance between boosting research and boosting military, and the winner is always the player who stays "clean" enough to pursue his/her peaceful research until he/she can be the first to build a modern military. (In which case you might as well start the game in 1900AD instead of 4000 BC.)

I haven't played BG2 in forever, but as I recall, my mage battles were always won by 1 overpowered spell-- the 5th level druid spell Insect Plague (or something like that). It was area-effect (so it could hit the invisible), and it affected enemies only, but it was targetable on your own characters. Its effects (1 dam/round, 100% spell failure, chance of "Fear" effect) were also considered physical, so magic resistance did the enemy no good, and the duration was long enough that your fighters could bash through their stoneskins, mirror images, mantles, etc., before it wore off. Simply target the spell on one of your charging fighters, tell them to wail on the enemy, and wait until he goes down. That and an occasional "True Sight" from Keldorn were really all you needed.

Tom Waits -- Jockey Full of Bourbon

Ideal, if you want gridlock and inaction. Really? The "single most important thing"? Sure, judicial appointments are among a presidency's most enduring legacies, but I don't see how that compares with major legislative proposals championed or big foreign policy decisions. Activists on the right have used "liberal judges" as a strawman in stump speeches for decades, but that doesn't mean that a candidate's taste in judges is a particularly useful criteria to use in deciding where to cast one's vote. As Gromnir mentioned, the judges have an annoying tendency to think for themselves once on the bench (you didn't note it in your post, but Justice Stevens was also appointed by a Republican-- Gerald Ford). Also, the political views of the judges are really quite irrelevant in vast majority of cases that these judges and justices hear and decide (particularly at the District Court level). A natural consequence of the American system of "catch-all" generalist parties. Instead of voting for members of lots of different smaller parties, and forcing those elected to compromise with each other to form a working government, we make the voters do the compromising in picking which of the major generalist parties best represents their views. Hillary Deathwatch: Now at 9%. The trend among the superdelegates-- even the ones who had previously supported Mrs. C-- is against her, not for her.

Still more Civ4. Also, while wandering through the Target this weekend, I noticed that the price on Bioshock had dropped to $30, so I picked up a copy. Haven't installed it yet, though.

Hillary Deathwatch!

Yeah, I'm limited to an apartment kitchen, so no grills here. Grilling is a great way to cook sausages, but the sauce suffers because you lose all those lovely deglaze-the-browned-bits-in-the-pan flavors. We've been looking for a house to buy. A nice propane grill will be high on the to-buy list after we move (propane for weeknight for convenience; I'll probably also pick up a charcoal grill for weekend grilling and smoky flavor).

Some types of sushi contain no fish at all. Other types contain fish that is cooked (such as the excellent unagi roll). The defining characteristic of sushi is the preparation of the rice.

Per FOX, one arrest has been made, but the police suspect that there were multiple gunmen. Apparently, Steve's comment on surveillance video was prescient-- this idiot parked his very-conspicuous car (a Gremlin!) in a bank parking lot.

Is it just me, or was that report nothing but pure conjecture? Okay, U.S. Passports are made by a european firm, using chips and assembly in the far East. Some Members of Congress have taken GPO to task for the supposed security risks in this, but is there any evidence that domestic production would produce a roughly equivalent product at a reasonable cost with a lower level of security risk? GPO is the only party I see that has thoroughly examined this question (they are required to do so under the Federal Acquisition Regulation and the Buy American Act), and they concluded that the answer is no. The rest is all jingoistic whinging.

Play Noble+ difficulty and you'll never get a Settler (or Worker) again.

Virtually none. The highway runs mostly through woodlands and farm fields.

I think we need a new food thread around here. Consider it an amalgamation of the old "currently eating" and "recipes" threads. Discussions of diets, restaurants, and general food and cooking topics would also be appropriate. So, I'm currently eating a rather typical lunch-- a soup & salad from my building's cafeteria. The soup is a chicken-with-rice (and seems to be well-seasoned with black pepper), and the salad contains various lettuces, carrot, peas, cucumber, broccoli, boiled egg, kidney beans, a bit of canned tuna, and basalmic dressing. I'm also planning on doing some light cooking when I get home. I've got some boneless chicken breasts thawing in the fridge, and I'm going to tenderize them (meat mallets R fun!) dredge them through some seasoned cornmeal, cook them in a skillet with a bit of olive oil, and squeeze a lemon over the top when they're about done. Probably pair that with some steamed broccoli. A relatively simple but tasty weeknight dinner.