Enoch

That's... cruel. Would be fun though. Cruel to Tim, maybe. "Seriously, dude, you thought this was a presentable RPG rules system?? I'm beginning to have second thoughts about hiring you."

Well, it's more about Africa than it is from there, but I'll take any excuse I can find to post Ra. Edit: This one was recorded in Africa!

Hey, .

Nah, I only have the time to post from work. ;P What is this work you speak of? Is it fun? Can you smoke it? Something we adults have to usually partake in... ;P When I grow up, I want to be a worker! On-topic, schedules finally worked out such that I was able to join a couple friends for co-op Borderlands last Friday. (As I mentioned awhile back in the Borderlands-specific thread, a friend had bought a 4-pack of the game on Steam and gave me one of them, as he was looking for co-op games that his wife might enjoy.) I'm not generally much of a shooter fan, but I'm enjoying it more than I expected to. I make up for my poor FPS skills by playing as Brick and getting very close to the things I'm trying to hit.

As an old Toto fan for me it was the other way 'round. That song made me like Vice City Vice City was the only GTA I could really get into, which I largely credit to the music. It was the kind of soundtrack I need to inspire the sociopathy that game requires. I'm not normally into running down pedestrians and blowing up speedboats with rocket launchers, but when the pedestrians are wearing legwarmers and Members' Only jackets, and when that speedboat is blaring Mr. Mister or Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the resulting annoyance and rage gets me into the proper GTA frame of mind. Anyhow, this is the only song named "Africa" worth remembering:

That's what they'd be in my neck of the woods. I'm not sure whether such species are present out in California. I got drafted to cook Easter dinner for 8 people yesterday. My wife's family is predominantly California-based, but her sister and brother-in-law live a short ways away from us in MD. Said sister-in-law has been hosting her husband's parents for the past week, visiting from their home in Tucson, AZ. Further, Wife & Sis have a cousin who moved to Norfolk, VA, because that's where the Navy sent him, and who stuck around after his commission expired, as a reservist going back to school full-time. As we're the only family he can get to in a day trip, he and his girlfriend were also invited. My sister-in-law tried to arrange a get-together at a restaurant, but reservations at anywhere decent were hard to come by, so she turned to me late last week as "the guy who cooks for family gatherings." This was complicated a bit because my in-law's in-laws don't eat red meat or pork. So, in a somewhat atypical move for Easter, we had fish. I went to the fancy grocery store and bought a few pounds of a big white fillets (from a beast called "Whiting" or, if you're being fancy, "Hake"), that I could slather with a dijon-thyme sauce and broil for a couple minutes. (I'm usually not especially picky about my ingredients-- all the other stuff was bought at the regular ol' grocery store-- but it doesn't pay to mess around when it comes to fishmongers.) That came out pretty well, but the best part was the scalloped potatoes with mushrooms and goat cheese.

FWIW, the continuing resolution that passed earlier this week did move some money around in DOD such that Tuition Assistance is now exempted from the sequestration cuts. The department is also got some more flexibility to transfer funds around, and they've announced that they'll be using it to reduce number of sequester days for DOD civilians from 22 to 14. (They haven't said where the money is coming from yet.)

In the States, it's a 1-time thing, but only good for 1 state. Some states will honor bar exam passage in other states (or require bar passage, plus a certain term of active practice) to allow admittance to that state's Bar. But sometimes, if you move or want to extend your practice, you've got to take another test. I know a guy who moved around quite a bit shortly after law school and ended up taking 4 separate state bar exams (and passed them all).

Oh, I never said that it was shrewd or sustainable as-implemented over the long term. The Germans, et al., trusted far too much that the southern-Euro-folks wouldn't get in over their heads. If they hadn't, the whole setup may have lasted for a generation or so. (Which isn't bad, as international financial regimes go.) The agreements for Eurozone inclusion had debt caps built into them, but enforcing those caps lapsed because it was politically inconvenient to do so-- far easier to trust that the sorta-free market and the democratic process would prevent governments and banking institutions from getting out of hand. Still, 15 years of some pretty sweet trade imbalances is a nice payout. And the client states got to have outsized government spending and financial institution revenues for awhile, too. A hell of a lot of wealth was generated in the short and medium term. It was just at the cost of some long-term consequences that folks (and the global macroeconomy) now have to face.

One of the lessons here is that Cyprus had set itself up as a financial center to compete with the established international banking hubs in NYC & London. (Its primary "advantage" was a relative absence of legal oversight, but, still, it was competition.) And now the Powers That Be in the West are not especially interested in saving those banks. (The other lesson is that it is not a good idea to keep your money in a domestic bank in an at-risk country. If that bank fails, the immediate sovereign might not be able to bail it out, and the folks in the richer Eurozone countries can't be counted on for help, either. Best to send your nest egg on to London, NYC, or Frankfurt as soon as you can. (Which, of course, makes that domestic bank failure all the more likely.)) Well you can't blame the strong countries of the EU like Germany for countries,like Greece, for fudging there books and mismanaging there financial institutions when they joined the EU. No country was and is forced to become the EU. The poorer Euro entrants were bribed with cheap borrowing, paired with lax oversight. Zor might be overstating the case a little bit, but the Eurozone is essentially a mercantilist play by the big northern European exporters. They make credit available on cheap terms to the primary markets for their exports, and they take away the capacity for exchange rates to adjust when the trade gets too one-sided. That's the core of how 16th-19th Century European powers treated their overseas colonies. (Well, with a little less plunder, rape, and slaughter, I guess.)

That was 2 avatars ago! I was Lancelot Link for a rather long time in between Zoot and Sun Ra.

This has gotten pretty far afield, but I've actually looked into the original subject a little bit for work. Sequestration (primer) was designed to shield military personnel and veterans from its cuts. The law was written so that it didn't apply to the appropriations accounts that fund those activities. However, Tuition Assistance (or, in budgetary talk, "voluntary educational assistance") isn't funded by a personnel ("MilPers") appropriation. Instead, it is funded out of "Operations and Maintenance" (O&M). I don't know the justification for this funding structure (possibly because the military departments have the discretion to limit access to it, as opposed to non-discretionary benefits like salary or retirement?), but it puts TA in the same category as base maintenance, equipment upkeep, and general "overhead" type costs. And O&M (along with civilian personnel) is taking the brunt of the sequestration hits in DOD. Plus, the sequestration order from the Office of Management and Budget that implements the law gives agencies very little discretion to pick and choose which programs get reduced -- the cuts generally have to fall on each program, project, and activity in relatively equal fashion. So, it's something that was probably not expected by the people who drafted the law, as TA being funded out of O&M is one of those small exceptions that is easy to miss. And it does suck for those folks who are affected. But as the victims of sequestration go, they're pretty far down the list. Civilian DOD employees, for example, are facing one-day-per-week furloughs that amount to a 20% cut in their paychecks for six months, and a lot of contractor staff are being outright laid off.

Yeah, it's a weird series to try to resurrect. In a lot of ways, it never matured in the way that other CRPGs have over the last 20 years. The writing, apart from some of the best riddle-based content I've seen in CRPGs (particularly in the 3rd installment), was always rather dire. The gameworld design never paid any attention to verisimilitude. (Much like most of the early Gygax modules, everything clearly existed for you to go find and kill-- nothing naturalistic about it.) The gameplay experience was always very grindy. The RPG systems were bizarre-- they operated on a weird logarithmic scale, staring stats somewhere in "it looks like D&D" range, but quickly accelerating them into the triple digits, to diminshing returns. All that's a long way of saying that there isn't a whole lot of potential to build on, other than that a recognizeable name gets more free publicity than does a new IP. (See: this thread.) And I say that as somebody with a huge nostalgia-based affection for the series. M&M: Secret of the Inner Sanctum was the very first CRPG I've played, and I have fond memories of playing all of the first 7 games. (3-5 were the best.)

Wait a minute... Don't you always sermonize in every economy/personal finance thread about how important it is not to go into debt? I suppose even you can recognize important exceptions to this rule of thumb, like baseball, video games, good whiskey, and getting laid.

OK. They will have a relatively small amount of my moneys. I have some reservations, but I figure that, if this does see the light of day, I'm certainly going to buy it relatively early on and give it a spin. And I've got the disposable income to forget about $25 every now and again, so why not.

HH shines mostly in the exploration element. Especially if you've actaully been to Zion National Park before. (And if you haven't, that's the place to point the RV next time.) There is one interesting narrative thread, but it doesn't have much to do with your character's actions, so my interest flagged after I had poked my nose in every corner of the map.

Ive always wanted to try absinthe just to see if it gets me all blotto. Well, back in its heyday, it got a reputation as having hallucinogenic properties, which led to its prohibition. Nobody ever confirmed that it was at all different from any other strong liquor, though, which is why the prohibitions in Europe and the U.S. have been lifted. (The trace amounts of thujone that one finds in it were blamed, but they would have to be incredibly concentrated to have that kind of effect.) So, it's legal now, but it isn't cheap, and it's incredibly strong. (The bottle I have is somewhere in the area of 120 Proof.) Much the same as cask-strength whiskey, it is understood that one should dilute it a bit before drinking. It's also a rather overpowering flavor. Most ****tail recipies incorporating it-- including the Sazerac-- call for just an "absinthe rinse," wherein one adds enough of the stuff to coat the glass and/or ice, then pours out the excess before adding the other ingredients. More than that, and it'll often be the only thing you'd taste. (Which is nice, in that a bottle goes a long way.)

Fixed that for you. It is the official ****tail of the city of New Orleans, after all. Additionally, I suggest eating at as many roadside BBQ joints as possible. The dirtier and flimsier the building, the better.

One of the more user-friendly tracks from the dude in my new avatar (and His Interstellar Myth Science Arkestra):

The only female characters who can become spymasters are the wives or mothers of the present ruler. A daughter/sister won't be an option, absent an incestuous marriage.

Seconded.

Hey, that's not true! I also want a pony!

I found the writing in the first Witcher to be very much a mixed bag. Like Alan, I pretty much hated it for the first dozen hours or so. But then, right around the end of chapter 2 and early chapter 3, there's a flurry of sidequests that all present variations on the core theme of "how does a monster-hunter decide what is and isn't a monster," and then takes that over the top into "and does he even want to be a monster-hunter in the first place?" (The talking ghoul; the werewolf bit; the vampire bordello; the old cannibal; the creepy deep-ones worshippers; meeting the princess you'd previously cured of her possession problem; all topped off with Shani trying to pull Geralt into a life of domesticity.) I love how the game really forces the player to engage with Geralt's role in the gameworld at that point and make decisions based on their understanding and interpretation of that role. That was far more compelling to me than the game's racism themes or the "Witchers' secrets" macguffin.

Heh. The place I work is full of folks matching this description-- a whole lot of people with Masters degrees in public policy (or similar), and a smaller group with JDs. (I'm of the latter type, with a History/Econ BA.) Consequently, I can offer little other than well wishes, and congratulations on (a) figuring all this out while you're young enough to do something about it, and (b) avoiding the trap that is Law School. You've always struck me as a sharp individual who can write in an engaging fashion, which should serve well across a broad range of potential endeavors.

Sick day means Civ day! Closing in on a Cultural win as the Celts. The "Fractal" map script gave me a small continent all to myself (with one city state), but within Trireme range of the big continent with everybody else. I had a good setup for scientific development (a mountain-adjacent capital; a good amount of Jungle), but science victories take so long, so I leveraged that advantage to get me to the good cultural techs and wonders.