Enoch

I've put a little time into this now, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Didn't play the beta. Picked Highpool instead of the Ag Center (I figure that a threat to the region's water supply was the more pressing of the two), and my group is now shooting roaches in basement. I wanted to turn around and try to help the Ag Center after I'd neutralized the immediate raider threat, but the game wouldn't let me ride the lift back down. Feels like a gamey way of making me deal with the consequences my decision, but I suppose it's also true that the damage to the water system is just as imminent a threat as were the attacking raiders. Melee gal: Blunt and Demolitions, mostly. She took some points in Hardass and Brute Force, but with how slowly she's gaining skillpoints, those skills will probably fall by the wayside. Leader/Doctor: Leadership, Kissass, Medic, Doctor, with a point in ARs. Sniper: SRs and Perception, mostly, but also a little Mech Repair and Alarms. Tech/Access: CompSci, Locks, Safes, Smartass, Toasters, and a point in SMGs. I feel a bit like I'm spreading them a bit too thin, but the fact that skill ranks start costing more at rank 4 is daunting. Combat-wise, the melee gal is disappointing so far. I might have invested a bit too heavily in her strength, at the cost of initiative/speed/AP. I also probably need to upgrade the default melee weapon she started with. Oh, and she's had a concussion since early in the Highpool assault that I can't seem to get rid of. (I seem to need a med-supply item that I don't presently have. Or are there NPC doctors who can heal these things?)

So, what is up with the game asking me if I want to install a Razer sound driver when I first launch it? Actually helpful, or insipid marketing tie-in?

It's pretty worth it, they are super cool to watch grow up. Plus we get to corrupt them with all our odd ideas. Yeah, I totally can't wait until he's able to communicate beyond gestures, cries, and expulsion of fluids. We did end up seeing the doctor, but probably didn't need to. The doc took a look at how cheerful the little guy is and pretty quickly concluded that he's already getting better. Was told to go slow re-introducing his normal food, and to try some electrolyte solution and eat more fruit/veg purees in the interim. (His reaction to the electrolyte solution would've made a good "What the hell is this ****?" image macro if I were quick with a camera.) The "stage 1" solid food experimentation has been kinda fun, by the way. Good: Green beans, butternut squash, apple, carrot. Less Good: Peas, sweet potato, mango. Still uncertain on pears.

Well, I might as well add my medical concerns. Silly baby keeps giving us back all the food we give him. Which, at least, explains why he was fighting so much when we tried to give it to him in the first place. He doesn't seem especially unwell, otherwise. He just seems to think that his food is much better off sprayed all over my chest than in his stomach. Anyhow, I've taken a sick day and am waiting for the pediatrician to call back to talk it over (and to see whether we should bring him in for a look).

Eh, a cloak is just an amulet that has gotten too big for its britches and needs to be worn backwards.

I gotta say that did hit some of the right notes. (Although, yeah, I did cringe a little at the part Volo is alluding to.) I backed this one pretty minimally and I've been staying away from the updates, so it's nice to see something that reminds me why I threw my ante in. I did have some doubts that they would be able pull it off, given how high they set their sights and inXile's dubious release history. But with W2 coming together, I'm much more confident that I've made a good bet. Now I just need to get over my consistent urge to call the setting "nurma-nurma." It's just such an overlong mumbly word. Cutting the number of syllables in half would've dramatically reduced its pretentiousness.

The advantage of democracy in that context is that you can (theoretically) replace your decision-makers if/when they become too incompetent or too corrupt. To the extent that Chinese cultural practices encourage meritocracy and discourage excessive corruption (or that oligarchic party-committee practices effectively mimic the function of democracy), they may go a generation or two before that problem becomes acute. Or they may not.

What a weird thread. But I guess it was a silly premise to begin with. There are many many different and nuanced ways for a society to figure out who should work on what, how much, and how should the proceeds be distributed, such that reducing it an "X v. Y" question makes little sense. You end up with the flood of unrelated anecdotes and partisan talking-points that one sees above. As a default organizing principle, large-scale central planning has been pretty conclusively shown to be less efficient than empowering private enterprize, but even the most laissez-faire of governments do a certain amount of central planning and/or anti-competitive cooperation with business elites. And all the small decisions that, stitched together, make up what one would call a society's economic system have potentially dangerous unintended consequences, both on the economic and non-economic spheres. (To pick obvious examples, unregulated capitalists' tendency towards monopoly, and the problems that centrally planned economies have in civil liberties areas.) Most of the big economies in the world have figured out reasonable answers to these questions, I think. (With the major exception being economies that are large only because of the volume and value of raw resources they extract. Wealth owing to an accident of geography doesn't say much about the rigor of one's systems.) They differ in much the same ways as their underlying cultures differ. The common elements are that capitalist elements are needed to induce change, growth, and ingenuity, while socialist elements are needed to prevent exploitation and labor strife.

I enjoyed the goofiness in D:OS. I sort of wish they had gone further with it-- the overall storyline still seemed to be trying to get me to take it seriously, when it would probably have been better if given the pure camp/farce treatment. The inventory management and NPC interactions, though, were a joyless chore. Once you get to a point where you've mastered the combat system and have enough tools in your bag to handle each of the threat-flavors the game throws at you, the tiresome elements of the game begin to outweigh the entertaining ones.

So, the youngin's got one of them baby helmets. ("Cranial band" technically.) He was getting all lopsided thanks to a stiff neck that always had him looking to his right. And when you sleep on your back every night, with no pillow, always looking a bit to the right, at an age where your skull is growing faster than it ever will in your lifetime, you tend to develop a bit of a flat spot on that side-- which only reinforces the neck issue. The theory on the new hat is that it stay snugs to the parts of his noggin that currently protrude, so that the normal growth can happen in the other parts to even things out. Plagiocephaly (medical-talk for crooked-headedness) is mostly cosmetic (and there is some evidence to suggest that it would straighten out itself over the long term without extra paraphenalia), but the self-reinforcing combination of the assymetric flat spot and the muscular issue in his neck was leading to developmental issues like difficulty rolling over. He got the new headpiece last week and we've been slowly breaking it in. Today will be the first time he goes overnight wearing it. Of course, just to make things extra difficult, he's also got a cough (and so do I) and he's just started at his new daycare facility (in the building where I work). Between the illness, new environment, and new hat, it's been a rough couple days-- it's been very tough to get him to nap, which substantially affects his overall mood and appetite. But he is sleeping now, and his head is actually pointed a little to his left, which feels like a huge win. What I really need to do is come up with an awesome Halloween costume that incorporates a helmet with a swirly blue/white pattern. I'm thinking it would make a passable wizard hat.

I'm going to take the opinion of somebody enjoys "cinnamon whiskey" with just a teensy grain of salt. Rye & soda.

What exactly are you putting in that chocolate milk??

Today I've become a driving commuter. I'm not entirely happy about the change, but I don't want to be the guy who brings his 6-month-old kid on the subway in rush hour. The youngin' starts at the daycare facility in my office building on Monday, which was enough to convince the Powers That Be to grant me a parking pass for the garage under the building. So today was the dry run. Getting into work was roughly 15 minutes faster than the walk/subway I used to do, but it's probably unrealistic to project that I'll consistently be leaving the house this early once I'm toting the little one along. And the return trip will likely be in the thick of the afternoon rush, regardless. (The garage is set up in "departure zones" so that they can fit the maximum number of vehicles in. I got a permit for a 4:30 departure zone, which means that I double park into a big block of cars that all should be leaving at around 4:30.) What I'm going to need to account for is the degree to which this reduces the physical activity I get in the course of my daily life. I had been walking about 2 miles every day as part of my commute. I've never been the sort of person to seek out exercise for the sake of exercise. That might have to change soon if I want to maintain my present only-moderately-doughy physique.

Goodell's job is to do the unpopular things that team owners want done, but don't want to blamed for by the fans. Of course everybody thinks he's a jerk. The initial suspension for Rice was reasonalby congruent with previous League actions under the Personal Conduct policy dealing with domestic violence. What they didn't account for was how much an incriminating video can do for public perception. The normal course of business made them look pretty terrible. (Which is appropriate, as the normal course of business is to give players a mild punishment and quietly consider this part-and-parcel of being in the business of employing violent men to do violent things.) Sure, I'd rather see them be inconsistent and eventually do the right thing than stick to their guns on the initial call, but this does bring into pretty sharp contrast the arbitrary nature of the Personal Conduct policy in the CBA. They may salvage some dignity if there really was a material change in the information they have available now versus what they had when they gave Rice 2 weeks off. (For example, if Rice himself lied to the Ravens/NFL when he met with them and explained how it went down, it makes sense that the video could make them feel like chumps and throw the book at him.) But we folks on the outside don't have the information to make that kind of judgment just yet. On an entirely different note, the NYG@DET game tonight is going to be weird. I have no earthly idea what to expect from either of those teams.

I have to agree. Creeping along slowly and searching for stuff is one of those game elements that feels completely logical, but that just makes the game a drag to play. (Durlag's Tower was awful.)

No. I'm not a big fan of ESP-based AI. The enemy shouldn't know how much stamina a character has. I wouldn't say that it requires ESP for a combatant of animal-or-better intelligence to determine that a particular character has taken a beating and could be put out of the fight with a few more blows.

As an attorney who is employed in-house counsel to non-attorney bureaucrats, I can confirm this. Also: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

It's bizarre that people care this much to see a game do poorly. I mean, how does one get to a point in their lives when they're willing to invest so much mental and emotional energy in yearning for disastrous results from the work product of hundreds of people in the entertainment industry who they've never met? ... Well, apart from hating the Dallas Cowboys, that is. ... Still, at least hating a sports team is tied up in loving a competing team. Vidyagame production isn't a zero-sum game the way professional sports are-- "rival" games developers can have concurrent success and happiness. So EA is making a game that you don't care to play and has customer-relations practices that make you unwilling to buy their products. That's one less sale for them. Why does it have to be more than that?

Probably a bit late to get a question in, but for your entertainment, I present Elisha Nelson Manning, the AMA.

Anybody trying to convince you that The End is Nigh is trying to sell you something. (Nothing pushes sales or votes quite like panicky fear does!) In reality, political economies are slow-moving beasts. There are long-axis trends within the governance of Western democracies (and the oligarchic trend has been rising sharply over the past few decades) but there are still plenty of avenues for countervailing trends to restore some kind of balance. The obvious parallel in U.S. politics is to the late 19th century-- the last time oligarchic power was as strong as at present. That plutocratic dominance eventually inspired the successes of the populist movement, with strong anti-trust enforcement, the establishment of a sharply-progressive income tax, and other reforms. In the U.S., yes, the trends over the last generation favor federal power in place of state or local governance, and the executive over the legislature (at just about all levels). I point out, though, that, historically, the great threats to the liberties of the individual have come from the local and state governments, rather than the Feds. Particularly in the 20th Century, federal intervention to protect the liberties of individuals from state- or local-government oppression has been a pretty major theme in American history. (And, in general, state and local governments are staffed with less-qualified individuals operating with less oversight from the press and official watchdog entities, relative to federal entities.) Stuff like the recent NSA leaks are disturbing, but the average citizen has far more cause to fear morons and racists in their local police department than they do folks in Fort Meade listening in on their phone calls.

This is excellent. For me, historically, the question has been "Would I be having more fun starting a new game of Civilization than I would continuing to play this game?" Lately, CK2 has taken the place of Civilization. (Sidenote: This also applies if the game I'm playing is Civ/CK2. Playing out the string in big strategy games is far less fun than starting over.) Anyhow, my D:OS party is level 12 or so, running around Hiber-someplace, and it's getting pretty close to failing this test.

Perhaps a better way to express this is that there is a relatively common player desire to make a ranged-combat specialist who isn't a Ranger-- i.e., who doesn't come with the nature-boy suite of abilities. In AD&D, that character would be a Fighter, so that's the place people are looking to begin their "I hate trees" Gunner/Bowman character. I submit that the PoE Rogue is probably the better place to start. Given that Obsids are breaking further from the D&D Rogue's "Thiefy" origins and casting them primarily as skirmishers and guerrila fighters, having a valid ranged-weapon path for the Rogue class seems like a natural extention of the class concept. (And would diversify the class more than PJ's observed "hobble+stabstabstab.")

The point is that they're not "mobs." They're AI-driven simulations of how an actual combatant would react in their situation. If there's, say, a wizard in the back ranks raining hot death on their friends, it makes perfect sense for an intelligent combatant to try to slip through the front line and stick a knife that guy. If you want to prevent that, you have to block his advance with abilities, other characters, etc. Giving front-line characters mind-control abilities to make opponents switch targets is a terrible idea.

That's a shame, he always seemed to be on the cusp of being a great QB. Really? He always looked like a mediocre player to me. He can run an offense that consists of piles of 6-yard hooks, but I've never seen him consistently scan the field, read the defense correctly, and make a tough throw downfield. His career yards/attempt is a rather dismal 6.3-- worse than such luminaries as Chad Henne and Mark Sanchez. The last we saw him, Shaun Hill was a reasonably competent backup QB.

"Overrated" is new-media-speak for "I would like to rustle the jimmies of the folks who like this without clearly stating an opinion that I might be asked to back up." I am enjoying this game, although I am playing it quite slowly, and I sometimes stall for a few days when I get to a point where I need to spend some time doing non-combaty stuff. The city exploration, NPC interaction, and inventory management is a drag.