Enoch

I seem to remember them being about $30.

This is interesting. I wonder how liberally they've been handed out. Personally, I didn't have a problem with, say, Blights being susceptible to very high levels of damage from their "home" element. They're clearly inspired by D&D elementals, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily need to replicate every feature thereof. And who's to say that a super-high level of heat wouldn't damage the soul fragment that is animating that flame? That said, "knockdown" effects working against non-corporeal enemies was just silly.

Every once in a while, The Onion still hits: Humanity Still Producing New Art As Though Megadeth's 'Rust In Peace' Doesn't Already Exist

Had no cable/internet in the house all afternoon and evening yesterday thanks to a summer storm. It was horrifying.

Funny picture But Orog is obviously using hyperbole to make his point that you need to use Mods to make Skyrim enjoyable and or playable Eh, I don't know. 1) SkyUI 2) Unofficial patch 3) The one that puts roads on the map 4) - 255) Nothin' but Hentai I am playing The Banner Saga.

Chanters are best used one of two ways: Melee tank, or ranged DPS. The latter is simple-- get Ila Knocked, use it all the time, take ranged-combat feats, and pick invocations that are useful from range (this means summons). The usefulness of this depends largely on how many other characters you've got using ranged weapons. That said, I think the tank option is a little better. Stack deflection and DR, take tanky feats, and put him out front. Chanters' unique power is that the "main thing" their class does is virtually unaffected by penalties to action speed. They keep accumulating Chants at the same pace in plate mail as they do naked. Given that you probably need 1 or 2 characters out front in heavy armor, you might as well make one of them out of the character whose class ability is not held back by said heavy armor. Plus, there are a number of chants and invocations that have useful short-range effects (the frightening chant and the paralyzing invocation are both really nice), and Chanters' Lore bonus can be put to good use reading cone/ray-type scrolls when you need extra offensive punch.

If I hadn't read about it here, I wouldn't have known that the stronghold can be attacked. I've only completed the game once thus far, but, still, something feels wrong about that.

Oh, man...

Respec option sorta-kinda confirmed: https://instagram.com/p/5Kwd2jJxyq/

The difference is risk. With 2 FT contracts, all the risk is on the player. If he gets trips over a hernia belt walking across the locker room and has an injury that impacts his career effectiveness, the team is out at the end of the season scot-free. If they sign him long-term with huge guarantees and something like that happens, the team has a huge headache to deal with. Career-impacting injuries are not exactly uncommon in the NFL. Yes, Dallas wants Dez happy and tied to the team for a long while, but the 2-year option was still a pretty good fallback plan for them. The relative attractiveness of that option likely meant that Dez's side did more moving off their initial position than the Cowboys did.

He had very little negotiating leverage. Calvin Johnson's deal, in annual-average terms, is far higher ($16M/year) than the #2-#5 WR contracts (M. Wallace was #2 at $12M/year) that, collectively, are used to calculate the Franchise Tender salary. A tag at $12.8M for 2015 and a subsequent tag at $15.4M (the tag is either the average of the top 5, or 120% of that player's prior-year salary) for 2016 makes for a really nice starting point, from the point of view of the team. With 2 years for $28M (with no up-front cash and all the injury risk on the player) in their back pocket, Dallas had little reason to give much ground.

Which, by the way, isn't to say that Iran is in great shape. They are bellicose because it get results in their internal politics, and they want a nuclear weapon because it's the best insurance there is against "regime change" being forced from the outside. The sanctions did hurt-- Iranian domestic infrastructure, governance, and economy are pretty dire. They just didn't hurt the right people enough that they came to the negotiating table as hungry for a deal as the other side was. @Bruce, "positive" might be too strong a term. I'm just trying my best to understand what was reasonable to expect coming out of negotiations like this, and expressing my skepticism that there was much opportunity to do better. Gromnir is not far off in his assessment of this Administration's diplomatic record, particularly with regard to Assad, so some skepticism on that ground is perfectly understandable. Ultimately, nobody will know enough to assess how the whole thing went down until the memoirists and historians start getting access to the good documents in a decade or three.

Well, Iran been an ascendant power since the fall of Saddam. The U.S. didn't have a particularly strong hand in negotiations, and the two nations badly needed an avenue to a new way to dealing with one another. Yes, the agreement acknowledges what the last decade has wrought-- the replacement of Iran's traditional rival with a failed state with no military capability has made it a power to be seriously reckoned with in the region. Plus, the rest of the world is losing its appetite for the maintaining the sanctions regime. They're getting something out of the removal of the sanctions this way. Is it "enough"? Who knows? The best medium-term geopolitical benefit of the agreement probably doesn't come from the Middle-East at all. The fall of the sanctions allows foreign investment to bring modern technology into the Iranian oil industry. (Something, by the way, that only American and Western European companies can do.) Letting that production boost come on-line on top of the recent global price drops (shale oil, sagging Chinese demand) should further cripple the income streams of the mobsters running Russia.

I was about to make myself a Boulevardier, but I mistakenly grabbed the applejack instead of the whiskey, and didn't realize my error until it was already poured. That sent me looking for alternate c0cktails that involve both applejack and sweet vermouth (as I have a bottle of Carpano Antica that I want to get through before it starts to turn). I was intruigued by the Newark, as I also have recently bought a bottle of Fernet Branca that I'd like to get more use out of. But I didn't have any Maraschino liqueur. I subbed simple syrup, knowing that maraschino is a very sweet ingredient and that applejack c0cktails usually benefit from a little extra sugar. I'm calling it the Jersey City-- kinda like Newark, but not quite. Final recipe is 2 oz. Laird's Apple Brandy, 1 oz. Carpano Antica, 0.25 oz. Fernet Branca, 0.25 oz. simple syrup. It's not bad.

Well, keep in mind that a large part of the initial pitch for the Euro was political, rather than economic. That is, it was a further step of the pan-European unity advocates, seeking to mute (or even end) the nationalism that had led to the continent regularly blowing itself the **** up once per generation over the previous few centuries. It may have been misguided to extend this sentiment into a common currency, and to extend it to relatively peripheral nations like Greece, but the overall motive, for many, was benevolent. And for those of that line of thought, it should have been obvious that some level of "help" from the richer nations to the poorer nations would be an essential element of the union. An economically poor idea can still be reasonable policy if it buys you political advantages, say by seriously deterring conflict. The other part of Euro support was on behalf of those who thought it was in their economic best interest. The export-driven economies who wanted some neo-mercantilist markets; the poorer nations who saw cheap borrowing as their path to modernization. An economically poor idea can still look like smart policy if it has short-term benefits for you and you think that you can retire before any of the long-term risks come due. Unfortunately, the reaction to the 2008 financial crisis made it very clear that the Euro was primarily the tool of the economic opportunists. The Eurozone powers-that-be could have cast blame at the feet of the financial institutions who enabled all this borrowing. (Or the Euro-treaty rules that allowed those institutions to hold that debt valued on their balance sheets at unreasonably low risk levels.) They could have poured what relief packages they offered into things like beefing up deposit insurance to keep the citizens reasonably whole while letting the financial institutions holding the bad debt fail. But instead they chose to protect their friends in the financial industry, stringing the Greek government/economy along with restructuring so that the "important" money would have time and opportunity to get out before the other shoe dropped. And the result is that it ends up inflaming exactly the kind of nationalistic anger that European integration was supposed to prevent.

We took the youngin' over to play with his cousin this afternoon, which was fun. He's 16 months old, and she's nearly 2, but she was born perilously prematurely (birth weight of 500g; didn't leave the hospital until she was 4 months old), so she still weighs less than he does and has a pile of other developmental challenges. They don't live far away, but we don't visit very often because of how immuno-compromised she is. For a long time, the fear was that something as simple as a chest cold could put her back in the hospital. And, of course, our little guy picks up a little bit of everything that goes around in his daycare. But we're all symptom-free at present, and she's getting old enough and doing well enough that the importance of getting her more social interaction is beginning to outweigh the risk of illness. It started out a little rough, as he can get a little aggressive sometimes, and she's not at all used to defending herself from a fellow toddler. But, with some mediation (and after a lunch break) they both settled down and happily ran around and played with toys together. He plays with 11 other babies every workday, but she doesn't really interact much with folks beyond her parents, nanny, grandparents, and many many medical professionals, so it was really nice to see her having a good time with a "peer"-- to the point where she was unhappy to see us leave.

There's a scale beyond which a forum run largely by volunteer mods becomes unstable, and the default subs passed that point a good while ago. Something will set them off sooner or later and bork up the system. In this case, it happened to be the unexplained departure of a popular admin.

Here's the thing-- the Euro mainstay powers like Germany were entirely complicit Greece's problems from the beginning. Flexible exchange rates are the release valve for export-oriented economies taking mercantilist advantage of poorer nations. The Euro was fantastic for Germany, et al., because it gave them a market for their exports whose monetary policy they could control and that didn't offer much (besides pretty beaches) on the other side of the trade balance sheet. In a typical relationship, a one-sided trade balance between two nations gets balanced by their currency prices-- Drachmas get weak enough that Greeks can't afford imports from Euroland, Greece's domestic producers grow because imports are so expensive, Euroland's economy suffers from the loss of exports, and the currencies go back into balance. The Euro gave the Northern Europe effective control over currency prices in the PIIGS markets, so that this would stop happening. In exchange for giving up this power, they bribed the poorer nations like Greece with access to basically unlimited credit. And Greece, in particular, has been especially profligate with this credit-- it used it to fund a huge, well-compensated, well-pensioned civil service, and to avoid serious efforts at tax enforcement. And nobody cared until the '08 financial crisis taught us that banks couldn't just hedge away all their default risks anymore. The powers that be in Euroland have been enabling Greece's profligacy from the beginning. The folks in charge were very interested in the short- and medium-term gains, knowing that they'd be out of office by the time the long-term risks came due. They studiously avoided looking too hard at how rigorously countries like Greece were adhering to the treaty's deficit caps. The books were cooked, everybody knew it, and nobody cared. A currency union that encompasses both export-driven manufacturing economies and third-world-level nice-beaches-and-no-businesses economies was doomed from inception.

Somehow, it feels to me that s13ep is either 15 years old, or Associate Justice Samuel Alito.

Well, what were you expecting? I'd hope for any of the new threads on this forum to have more going for them than iterating on one obvious and unfunny joke.

Really?

That amendment was never ratified.