Enoch

IIRC, the Saints are in a tricky salary cap situation, with so much of their allocation committed to Brees, to the Graham franchise tag, and to their two starting Guards. Guard is typically a low-cost position for most teams, so keeping both Evans and Grubbs under high-cost contracts puts more restraints on spending at typically-high-cost positions (WR, DE, CB, etc.) than other teams face. (That said, NO has a good reason for committing to having the best interior OL in the game. Brees' otherworldly pocket presence and quick release make him less vulnerable to outside pressure than most QBs, but his height makes clear throwing lanes an important consideration and makes him more vulnerable to pressure that comes in his face.) And, yeah, Jairus Byrd is a good player, but that's looking like one of those contracts that the team is going to regret in a couple seasons.

Not being a fan of the ridiculous way that big-money minor-league sports are paired with educational institutions in this country (a.k.a., the NCAA and the conferences and collegiate athletic departments that enable it), most of the draft hype is lost on me. (Plus, watching TV for most of every Sunday for a third of the year is plenty-- no need to add Saturday, too.) I suppose I'm rooting for lots of quarterbacks to go in the top-11, so my Giants will have a better selection of WR/OL/TE/DL/DBs to choose from. I do hope that somebody takes Manziel high, just because of how entertaining his trolling of college football traditionalists has been over the past couple years. Free agency was uncharacteristically interesting for the Giants this year. Although it's not surprising that they would want to make some moves coming off a 7-9 campaign that could easily have been 4-12 if not for some well-timed injuries to opposing QBs. I tend to be a pessimist on major FA acquisitions-- the "winner's curse" inherent in the bidding process usually means that the teams will end up regretting those contracts in a few seasons. I did really like the Geoff Schwartz acquisition-- he should really help fix the biggest problem on the team ("Everybody on the OL except Justin Pugh") with a very good player for less money than I would have anticipated. Robert Ayers should provide a serviceable, younger, and cheaper replacement for Justin Tuck. But I can't get on board with the cash they're forking over for Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie. Way too mercurial a player-- there's a reason he's on his 4th team in 7 years. I'm glad Jon Beason is back, but that kind of payday for somebody with his injury history makes me nervous. I have no idea what to think about J.D. Walton, the Center they picked up, because he's spent the last 2 years on the sidelines dealing with a serious injury. Rashad Jennings should be an upgrade over Andre Brown, but paying the retail price for a 28-year-old RB has seldom proven to be a smart move for NFL teams in the past.

Man, I know they're more expensive than most supermarket apples, but I think you may be tking it to an extreme...

Agreed. I couldn't get over the idea that the big lunk in front of the party was essentially exercising a limited type of mind control over every enemy we faced, regardless of their intelligence and training, their leadership and discipline, or their ability to comprehend human speech. I couldn't help but imagine how much more interesting and fun the game would be if tactical positioning were a more realistically effective way to manage which party members faced the brunt of enemy attacks. Of course, such an approach would've forced everybody to play the game the way I played it-- zoomed all the way out in the overhead tactical view and pausing every 4 seconds on average. am suspecting that what ruined squad-based tactical combat, were something ridiculous simple-- nomenclature. d&d 3e, originally, didn't have to contend with mmo vocabulary, so when you looks at a game like toee, there ain't no specific tank abilities or some kinda distinction 'tween a barbarian as dps or a paladin as tank. you scout ahead with your sneaky character and see a giant mob o' bugbears in a room, so what does you do? plant your most heavily armoured guy in the doorway and then lob a fireball into the room? is one way to do it. and perhaps your barbarian would actual be the guy playing as your door. when bugbears try to get past your door to reach your spellcasters, you gots folks with reach weapons or ranged turning the goblinoids into kibble. is other tactics that would work... and if enemy has spell casters too, then you has need o' changing your tactics. all this were possible in a pre-mmo world. the thing is, once tank/dps/heal distinctions became the norm, developers were able to use abilities to substitute for crafting complex tactical scenarios to challenge players. is much more difficult to come up with complex geography or scenarios in a game than it is to tweak ai a bit and add waves of mobs to challenge a party. mmo nomenclature made design easier for developers 'cause it added a layer o' tactical complexity, but it did so in a way that was much more simple to add into games than were considerations that, particularly w/o a meaningful z-axis, were technically demanding. am thinking that if mmo nomenclature hadn't become popular, developers wouldn't have been so quick to use it as a crutch. mighta happened anyway, but am doubting the change woulda been so stark and ugly. HA! Good Fun! Could be that language had an effect, but I suspect that it is largely secondary to the passage of time and the intended audience for thegame. DAO was trying to please the audience that had bought the IE games, sure, but it was also gunning for the larger, mostly younger crowd whose primary experience with fantasy RPGs was in MMOs and Diablo-clones. Even if nobody had ever come up with concise terms for DPS/Tank/etc., Bioware probably still would have wanted to create a gameplay experience that wasn't going to feel too unfamiliar to that crowd. (IMO, by far the most annoying bit of MMO-ish nomenclature is referring to one's character as a "toon.")

Agreed. I couldn't get over the idea that the big lunk in front of the party was essentially exercising a limited type of mind control over every enemy we faced, regardless of their intelligence and training, their leadership and discipline, or their ability to comprehend human speech. I couldn't help but imagine how much more interesting and fun the game would be if tactical positioning were a more realistically effective way to manage which party members faced the brunt of enemy attacks. Of course, such an approach would've forced everybody to play the game the way I played it-- zoomed all the way out in the overhead tactical view and pausing every 4 seconds on average. You play like a Man, and I approve of this post. To continue my rambling, I am now vividly reminded how especially infuriating I found all this, because the game clearly had the potential to be the kind of tactical combat experience I really wanted. The whole "tactics" system could easily be set up to do things like "Form a line of battle" or "Have these 2 characters guard each others' backs." Flank attacks would be made extra dangerous for everybody-- not just Rogues-- in my Dream-DAO. (Rogues would still have advantages in getting into and out of Flanking position.) In place of threat-based mechanics, Fighter types would get abilities limiting opponent battlefield movement, pushing opponents around, and projecting defensive bonuses to other nearby characters.

Agreed. I couldn't get over the idea that the big lunk in front of the party was essentially exercising a limited type of mind control over every enemy we faced, regardless of their intelligence and training, their leadership and discipline, or their ability to comprehend human speech. I couldn't help but imagine how much more interesting and fun the game would be if tactical positioning were a more realistically effective way to manage which party members faced the brunt of enemy attacks. Of course, such an approach would've forced everybody to play the game the way I played it-- zoomed all the way out in the overhead tactical view and pausing every 4 seconds on average.

Thanks for the input. Also: Is there a way to "wait" a turn when enemies are near, but outside my line of fire? I recall doing that in the old school M&Ms, but haven't found the option in this one.

Yeah, not knowing how skillpoint-rich the game is over the long haul, I wasn't too sure about how aggressively to specialize. When I said I was looking for spellcasters who could Master a school, I really meant "had the option to, if I decided it was worthwhile." For now, I'm basing most of my magical-skillpoint allocation on which Expert-tier spells I want to unlock. When I get an idea of which higher-level spells I want, I'll re-assess which schools I want to continue pushing. (I also don't have much of a clue as to whether Trainer availability is going to be a bigger restriction on my ability to Master/GM a school than skillpoint availability is.) I probably don't have a full enough understanding of the block mechanics yet to appreciate the effectiveness of Daggers. (I'm guessing they scale up in no. of attacks moreso than other weapons, and opponents sometimes have abilities that stop the first X no. of incoming blows?) Still, I don't feel bad about sticking with swords on my BD. She started with a free point in it, and it's rarely a bad choice as far as good-weapon-availability goes. I've also been avoiding putting points in the "support skill" stuff (i.e., things not named after a weapon or school of magic). I figure that direct investment in weapon skills and stuff that unlocks better spells probably has the best ROI early on. Will re-assess as I advance.

So I started mucking about with this game this weekend. (Hands-free baby carriers should be marketed specifically at gamer parents as the best way to get their fix while watching Junior.) It is pretty stingy with info on classes & skills going in. I was alt-tabbing to firefox to figure out what the heck each of these classes were. And the spellcaster classes are particularly quirky-- no clear healbot/glasscannon split. I had to look up which schools had the healing spells. Anyhow, after some experimentation, I think I have a lineup I'm happy with. Not having an especially exhaustive knowledge of the spell rosters, I wanted to have at least one character who could Master (or Preferrably GM) each one. My first attempt had a Freemage supplemented by a Crusader to provide Light magic. But I soured on that idea as it seemed that the Crusader would never have enough mana to be a useful caster unless I really neglected her melee skills. (And if I'm neglecting her melee skills, why didn't I just pick a full-on caster class instead?) Also, that run through the first quest taught me that defensive magic is really useful in this game-- at least at low levels, it seems to be a more efficient use of mana than is direct damage. So based on that I decided that 2 full caster-classes was the way to go. (Plus, without the classic Cleric/Wizard split, the flexibility that each caster class has to be both a support and damage caster seems to make them all rather powerful.) As Freemage has a monopoly on Dark (odd design choice there), I wanted one of those, and Rune Priest looked like the best complementary choice. So the RP gets Earth/Fire/Light, while the Freemage goes Primal/Dark/OtherElemental (with enough Earth to be a secondary healer). For warrior-types, given the strength of defensive magic, I wanted to lean towards high-damage-per-turn builds, as I didn't see much point in 'tanking' in what I saw of the combat. And I didn't see much difference between the Pure Basher classes and the "Hybrid" ones-- so long as the hybrids can GM a melee weapon skill, they should be good enough for me. My experience from prior M&M games is that magical abilities in my front-liners are useful when they provide backup healing and utility casting, and pretty pointless in the more offensive-focused schools. So that gave me the Bladedancer (earth), Crusader (light), or Scout (light) to pick from. I didn't want to do both the Bladedancer and Crusader, as both seem tied to Swords as their primary weapon, and diversified weaponry leads to better results in games like this. (On the other hand, my party is probably weak in armor diversity-- I imagine that I'm going to be finding a lot of nice heavy armor that nobody in the group can wear.) So I notched the difficulty up to Warrior, and set up a Bladedancer - Scout - Rune Priest - Freemage group. The other Protip I learned from my first party-building experiments is that giving each character 1 point in bow/crossbow on character creation gets them a free missile weapon. Ranged didn't seem to be very effective given how often enemies pop up in your lap, but if it's worth a 1-point investment for each character (and I think it is), then putting that point in at character creation saves 100 gold or so, which is nice.

The New Guy has apparently come to the conclusion that 4:30 AM is a perfectly lovely time to be wide awake and petitioning the outside world for interaction.

Monte I have come to realize that there is a perspective to Romance I haven't explained and you anti-romancers haven't realised. Basically promancers truly embrace and understand the RPG experience on a greater level than people who don't interact with the Romance options. I can explain it to you if you want? In my mind, a smooth jazz soundtrack begins playing right around the last sentence of this comment.

If what the video Valsuem posted checks out this isn't so much the government as corrupt officials utilizing the government to make their fortunes (although to be honest this isn't something new in the US) It seems that the levels of corruption and their blatant disregard for public opinion are beginning to anger people. Whether their fears jump to the irrational; and fear always does, its undeniable that the US government has been growing corrupt for a long time now and the public seem to be beginning to understand what this means. The fact that it was posted by an account called "StormCloudsGathering" should give you some clue as to their biases. As Wals put it, they're among those running around pretending that we're all just about to get stomped.

So... Dragon Age then... I hope it has at least one mad wizard asking riddles. I do so love punching people who ask me riddles.

This got me thinking. The reason why some risky and delicate stuff such as say, flying an airliner, has a great track record of safety is because part of the extensive training includes learning procedures that pilots must adhere to systematically, to minimize the possibility of judgment errors and improvisation. The way I understand it, the idea is to reduce the room for human error as much as possible, within reason. This is basically to account for the fact that people will be people in a situation where it's unacceptable to make preventable mistakes. You work in government. How closely is regulation observed? How is failure to act according to regulation punished? I live in a country with a huge problem of corruption and mismanagement, from the local up to the highest levels of government. The problem is accumulation: the few (high profile) public officials and servants that try to do the jobs they were appointed to as per the job description simply cannot turn the tide of incompetence, corruption, and sloth caused by a majority that is concerned only with getting their paycheck. What is the ability of government to police itself, and how effective is it at that? Well, it's a big government (and a big country), so things of course vary a lot. If you're talking about preventing corruption and mismanagement, preventative controls are more important than punishment after the fact. Federal entities are required to have a system of internal control over their operations, and are subject to significant external controls. Internal controls are the internal (duh) policies, procedures, etc., that an entity puts in place to ensure that it is doing all the things that it is supposed to in a reasonably efficient and effective manner, and that upper management is kept informed of relevant performance information. They include common-sense items like having written policies and following them, requiring supervisory review of decisions, creating and maintaining appropriate and accurate records, etc. (See here.) Other controls include designated independent auditing entities (Inspectors General for each agency, and the Government Accountability Office for everybody), provisions allowing for public access to records and a free press that can feel safe in reporting on fraud/mismanagement/etc., a procurement system that requires competition and allows for disappointed bidders to have their complaints heard when they don't feel they were treated fairly, provisions protecting "whistleblowers" from retaliation, a legislature and judiciary that are structurally independent of the executive branch, and legal requirements for entity financial reporting (and audits thereof). No one of these things functions perfectly, but that's a large part of why there are so many somewhat-parallel accountability requirements. The end result has its flaws, but in my experience, the level of corruption and mismanagement gets higher as you get to lower levels of the government (i.e., state and municipalities, rather than the Feds) which are subject to generally less oversight, particularly from the press. When the feds screw up, it's all over the press and something is done about it. Public interest and oversight is measurably less when you're talking about state legislatures or county councils. The federal programs that regularly report the highest levels of waste and abuse tend to be the ones whose day-to-day administration is carried out by state officials (e.g., Medicaid). On the other hand, all this planning, review, and auditing is one of the main reasons why stuff happens so slowly in government and tends to cost more than one would expect. As for Valsuelm, suffice it to say that his/her views are well outside the mainstream of thought among those who have spent their lifetimes studying and applying American history and legal/constitutional doctrine. And the fact that he/she appears to dismiss anyone with a different view as either incompetent or corrupt is a huge red flag for thinking that never leaves its particular ideological echo-chamber. I should probably apologize for the "hilariously dumb" bit, though. That was an overstatement-- it gave me a chuckle for its complete impracticability, but I can see how a clever attorney might throw that type of argument in when he/she is clutching at straws. It's an amusing hail-mary that has been shot down when it has been attempted (correctly, IMO).

North Dakota !!! What is out there, won't you be bored? Isn't that cowboy territory ? Petroleum-industry boom towns. ND is the fracking capitol of the world, and a whole lot of support infrastructure is being built to support that. (GD's background being in wireless communications, if I recall correctly.)

I'm sure the well-being of the ranchers is at the top of their priorities. Knee-jerk cynicism is no substitute for facts that are mdst likely freely available. Anybody who writes like that is more interested in scoring ideological pionts than in informing their audience, and not to be trusted as a serious source of information.

Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution To Be The idea that the Constitutional language providing for the establishment of the District of Columbia would limit the federal government's power to take jurisdiction over any other land was such a hilariously dumb one that I had to look up whether it had actually been litigated before. It had! Collins v. Yosemite Park & Curry Co. (1938): "[Art. I Sec. 8 Cl. 17] is not the sole authority for the acquisition of jurisdiction. There is no question about the power of the United States to exercise jurisdiction secured by cession, though this is not provided for by clause 17."

I'm sure there's an answer to that question-- How does BLM decide how to set the volume and price point for the grazing rights it sells? It'd make for a nice topic for an "explainer" type news column or a GAO report. I don't know the answer, but I also don't have much time for columnists who just ask a question like that suggestively instead of doing the research. It'd all be in publicly available sources.

So, basically, the guy lost a court case back in '98, has had all his attempts to appeal laughed out of court, and he's been defying the court order ever since. The feds haven't quite figured out an effective way to enforce the ruling, though, and when they tried recently, a BLM officer did something dumb and it went viral in wacko-militia circles.

Indeed, I don't think anybody is positing bullets as the primary means of communicating with one's government. But the idea that it can make any difference at all is deeply troubling-- "I have a gun, therefore my government should/does treat me differently than it does its unarmed citizens." That's not the kind of society I would want to live in. And I'd argue that the 2nd Amendment has nothing at all to do with small-scale incidents like this kind of thing-- it was a societal-level check on tyrrany, not something that was at all relevant in individual land disputes and the like. For the most part, the Founders had no problem with cracking down violently against folks with small-scale disputes with the government. (Washington himself authorized conscription to build a force to supress a tax revolt, and even suppressed the riots that rose in resistance to that draft.) A government that lacks a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is no government at all. Anyhow, people can often read what they want to into the writings of the Founders, because there were a lot of them and they didn't all agree on things. What often gets lost, I find, is a sense of context. As 18th-Century Englishmen, the primary frame of reference for envisioning the struggles of an emerging (tentative and fragile) representative government were the struggles between Parliament and the 17th-Century Stuart monarchs. England relied on civilian militias armed with small arms for its defense against any invasion that could get past its navy (as did most nations in those days), and these arms were generally kept at local magazines. One of the tactics that the Royalist forces used in their intermittently violent struggles with Parliament was to disarm the magazines in areas of strong Parliamentary support. The 2nd Amendment can be read quite cogenty as a pre-emptive strike against this kind of practice. In a world where loosely-drilled mass of infantrymen with small arms and a few cannon has a legitimate chance of overthrowing an oppressive government (as the 17th-Century English did a few times, and as the new USA had done just a decade earlier), this is a relevant thing for a Constitution-level document to protect. Because standing armies were a 1-way ticket to despotism, in the view of many of the Founders, the 2nd Amendment could ensure that no policy so oppressive that one couldn't conscript a force of citizens sufficient to defend it could stand. The presence of all those magazines and privately-owned weapons in Virginia, say, would be a serious threat that could overthrow a President from Massachusetts who "went too far," and therefore deter him from doing so in the first place. But in a world where the best that a loosely-drilled mass of infantrymen with small arms can do is plunge a society into drawn-out failed-state guerilla warfare, and in a nation with a huge technologically advanced standing army, what does the 2nd Amendment get us? In the event that the social order truly breaks down, we end up in a Syria-style bloody (and likely failed) revolution instead of a North-Korea-style quiet accession to tyrranical rule. That's... something, I guess. I can see having preferences about which of those we'd rather deal with should the worst come to pass. But throw in America's 200+ year record of pretty stable rule-of-law and its very strong legal and social taboos against the use of the military in domestic politics, and the "we have guns, just in case" failsafe in the 2nd Amendment becomes about as relevant a check on tyrrany as the "you can't sleep here, Sergeant!" failsafe in the 3rd Amendment. As to this particular incident, I profess no real knowledge or insight, apart from that ascribing overbearing actions or other screwups by law enforcement folks to "the highest levels of U.S. government" is almost always a mistake. Yes, folks in government do screw things up sometimes-- pointing this out is pretty much my day job. But there is no "The Government" clawing for power in the abstract. It's just people being people. Government people are just as flawed as humans are anywhere else and are sometimes driven by venal or vindictive motivations. (But, at least as often by noble and charitable motivations, too.)

Yes, I've always found that BG1 drags on a bit through the Cloakwood portion, especially if you spend the time to clear some of the optional wilderness areas. The last time I replayed it, I really rushed to the City as quickly as I could, which helped-- I could space out the "compulsively mowing the fog-of-war off this unimportant wilderness map" so that it isn't all concentrated at the start of the game. I've done some mucking about in CK2 lately, but it's fairly half-hearted. Gaming time is tough to come by with an infant in the house, and CK2 really requires some longer-attention-span playtimes to really get those satisfying "3-generation plan that finally comes together" moments. I'm considering grabbing M&M X to scratch the Old-Skool CRPG itch I'm starting to feel in my fingers. (M&M I was the very first CRPG I played.)

This is the best use of the Forum auto-censor I've seen. We can all entertain our own theories as to what particular vulgar word Drowsy can't get enough of!

I don't see that as fundamentally different from having Seth Green play himself, for all intents and purposes. Both are characters aimed primarily at "what we think stereotypical video gamers like" rather than "what makes sense for the setting and story we want to tell." (Indeed, I'd argue that the backstory "explaining" Miranda has a hell of a lot more verisimilitude than the backstory "explaining" Joker.)

So... How friendly is the game to playing in a living room while looking after a newborn? Specifically: Can it be played mostly one-handed with either just a mouse or with hotkeys and occasional trackpad input? As I recall M&M 3-5, melee combats were effectively paused while waiting for player input on a character's turn, but at-range opponents would take their turns if you sat idle. Does M&MX work the same way, and are the quasi-real-timey elements pausable at any time? Can the text be effectively read off a 40" TV from 12 feet away? Will it run well on Haswell i5 integreated graphics? Is it amenable to short-interval playtimes, or do you really need a couple free hours to get anything interesting done?