Enoch

Clearly, the first priority needs to be acquiring the Human Skin armor, and modding it so that Tale can wear it. I'm probaby a bit late, but I would not object to being exhumed to once again show these youngsters how it's done.

Got home today for a few days of respite from taking care of the parents (and for some actual showing up at work). As mentioned earlier in the thread, Mom is recovering from a hip replacement, and Dad went and broke his fibula not 2 days after Mom came home from the rehab facility. He had surgery last Friday but is under strict orders to keep his ankle elevated until the New Year. The wife and I just spent a week at their house, before handing "custody" back to my sister (who is more local, but who also has a 20-month-old daughter to watch). We'll be heading back sometime this weekend to help out and to join the more-extended-family holiday gathering.

So... a good way to just get rid of your debt without paying it back. Or is the Court specifcially to prevent that from happening. Sounds kinda like fraud to me honestly. Well, the Court, and the various provisions that give the jilted creditors voting rights on the reorganization plan. What often ends up happening is an equity-for-debt swap-- the company doesn't have money to pay its debts, so instead they give their most important creditors an ownership interest in the company. So, you get rid of your debt, but also suddenly see your ownership interest (and share of any future profits) shrink from 50% of the company to 10%.

Depends on the details. Obsidz would be absolved of any further obligations under the contract, but that doesn't necessarily govern the ownership of the work produced to-date. If it's the property of old-THQ, then it is an asset that the new company can sell, use, or stick in a drawer if it wants to. Again, the devil is in the details, such as the timing of the payments from THQ to Obsidian. If THQ owed Obsidz some cash at the time that the bankruptcy was filed, they'd be on line for that money with all the other people who lent THQ money and may get less than 100% of their claim. That said, Obsidian is probably viewed as an important partner for the successor company, given that the revenue potential of tSoT will likely be very important in the company's getting through the next few months. So it seems likely that the Power That Be in THQ and Clearlake would have reached out to Obsidian's legal and financial folks as they planned the Bankruptcy filing.

There are basically 2 kinds of business bankruptcy in the U.S. The first, "Chapter 7" (named for the chapter of Title 11 of the United States Code that contains the pertinent laws), is a straight-up liquidation: Sell everything the company owns and give the proceeds to its creditors, in a designated (and often hotly contested) order of priority. THQ's filing is not one of those. Rather, this kind of business bankruptcy is "Chapter 11," which allows the business to go on operating, while drastic changes in ownership and debt liabilities go on in the background. Many creditors' claims (i.e., debts the company owes) are greatly reduced, converted to equity (ownership interests), or wiped out, as dictated in the rules and negotiated by all the interested parties, under supervision of the Court. The power struggle in big chapter 11s is complicated-- usually the people running the company are allowed to stay on and keep things running ("debtor-in-possession"), but the people who owned the company before the "reorganization" usually end up owning only part of the post-bankruptcy company. And, sometimes, the whole thing ends up getting sold to an outside party, which is what this "Clearlake" is apparently trying to accomplish. If these things are well-planned, and most of the interested parties have agreed to how everything will work in advance of the filing, it is not unheard of for the whole process to be wrapped up in a few weeks. As for SP:tSoT, the post-bankruptcy company (which is technically a new business entity) will have the opportunity to either assume or repudiate contracts to which the pre-bankruptcy company agreed. This would include the development deal with Obsidian and the South Park folks. In this case, though, a game that is so close to completion is almost certainly a valued asset to new-THQ, so I'd be shocked if everybody involved didn't want the company to keep moving ahead with the project.

Dang. Should've waited a week to finally buy that Quest for Glory pack.

Each 1-way trip eats up about 3.5 hours and $30 in gas and tolls (in a Corolla). Not too bad. Unfortunately, it looks like Dad's surgery is going to be complicated. He broke the bone in 2 spots and tore a ligament or two. The surgery isn't happening until next Friday, and after that he'll still have 2 full weeks of "keep it elevated at all times, excluding bathroom breaks." (And then a month on crutches and some more time in a walking boot.) And he's the kind of guy who absolutely hates lying around not doing anything.

I've finally gotten around to making more progress on my Iorveth run through TWitcher 2. (Which had been abandoned a few months back somewhere in the middle of Act 2-- I had to take a break because of a hardware failure, and by the time the machine was fixed, I was more interested in something else.) I've gotten just to the opening of Act 3 now. I had forgotten just how terrible that whole Draug sequence was. I'm not sure how the developers thought that taking on the roles of random dudes with no appreciable combat skills would be at all fun or necessary for the narrative. Also did some multiplayer Torchlight 2. Certainly a more satisfying experience than playing solo, but not so much that I would seek out people who aren't IRL-friends to play with.

Well, the good news is that there's no reason to expect that they won't have perfectly normal recoveries. (Dad, in particular, is in better physical shape at 57 than I am at 33-- the break was just one of those fluky accidents that happen.) The next month or two is just going to be a struggle.

So, you may recall my little story about my Mom going through hip surgery about 2 weeks ago. (She's recovering normally, but still quite mobility-limited.) This past Saturday, my Dad, who has been taking care of Mom through all this, tripped on the basement stairs and broke his left fibula. Now he's going to need orthopedic surgery too! So she's got a walker and is limiting her activity to what the physical therapists tell her to do, and although he can get around well on crutches, he has been instructed to keep his leg elevated on a near-constant basis so the swelling can go down enough to do the surgery. My sister and brother-in-law live in the next town over from the parents, so they've been doing most of the work helping them out for the last few days. But they've also got a toddler to chase around, so that's going to get old pretty fast, and although their employment situation is pretty flexible, it is not infinitely so. (I joke with my sister that this is payback for all the free babysitting she's been getting from our parents.) So it looks like we'll be taking another trip up to NJ pretty soon to pitch in. Once we see when Dad's surgery is scheduled for, we're going to have to decide when and for how long to make the trip.

So far, Crusader Kings II. I haven't played XCOM, although I've heard enough good things that I'll probably pick it up at some point.

Things went well, overall. A few dishes were less successful than I had hoped. The sweet potato pie was overpowered by vanilla flavor (I suspect a recipe typo here). The brussels sprouts came out kinda dry. I was cooking in somebody else's kitchen and forgot to bring my own butter, which led to the mashed potatoes being a little "off" (they're a margarine household, but I found 2/3rds of a stick of unsalted butter in the fridge; unfortunately, I realized after I added it to the mash that it had gone a bit sour). But the turkey came out great, the gravy was lovely (basting the bird with white wine and roasting some aromatics in the bottom of the pan brings a world of flavor), the fruit pies were delicious, and the lamb was a big hit. (I had decided to add a supplementary protien to go along with the turkey. Ham is most traditional in this role, but I floated a few possibilities in the planning email, and lamb was the one that was best-received. So I splurged and bought a few racks of lamb, made a persillade breading, roasted them hot and fast, and cut them into chops.) Also, got the good news that Mom has been released from the hospital (after a hip replacement on Monday) and moved to a rehab facility much closer to home.

Philly trip went as well as can be hoped. Mom's surgery started a little late, but went smoothly. I'm glad we made the trip, but I'm beat. I've been up since 4AM, and have spent the majority of the day either burning down I-95 (the drive was a little over 2.5 hours each way) or sitting in a waiting room. I think it'll be time to collapse in bed just after I finish this Old Fashioned.

Mom's having surgery tomorrow, so I'll be getting up insanely early and driving up to Philly to be there with Dad and my sister while it goes down. She's getting a hip replaced, which has become necessary after she broke her femur back in January, had arguably botched surgery to fix it, and hasn't healed properly since then. (It's not exactly the right circumstance for a deliberate meetup, but if I happen to see any folks who I suspect of being Tigranes while I'm around UPenn, I'll try to come up with some sort of Obsidz-boardz code words to identify myself.) This is complicated by the fact that my wife's parents are already in town for the Thanksgiving holiday. (And that I'm to be the primary chef for the big meal on Thursday.) Fortunately, they're staying at my sister-in-law's house at present, so it's not too disruptive to duck out of town for a day.

That's exactly my experience... with Might & Magic I. 3-5 was really the high point of the series, in my book. MM6 & 7 had some neat elements, but the balance was awful, and a lot of the rule systems were rather broken. The "Fly" spell was both the best and worst thing about those games-- gamebreakingly powerful, in that it allowed you to essentially dodge attacks while in turn-based mode, but at the same time, sailing about the landscape dropping meteor showers on your enemies was easily the most fun thing to do in the game. As a whole, the series wasn't actually all that good. I've bought them from GOG as alan did, and beyond the nostalgia kick, playing them now is quite tedious. The games featured huge amounts of combat grind, and the combat experience was composed primarily of "press A to attack." The writing was wholly forgettable, and most objectives could be completed by following the general rule of compulsively exploring everywhere. The middle games (primarily the 3rd one) did feature some good riddle content, though.

Well, a lot of them used to. Before religious issues were really pushed all that heavily in national politics, there was a creature in Washington known as the "Southern Democrat." They caucused with the Dems because no true son of Dixie was going to join the party of Lincoln and Grant, but they functioned essentially as a centrist 3rd party, mostly positioned between the Democrats from the rest of the country (like the Kennedys) and the GOP. The Republicans managed to pry these folks away from the party of their granddaddies by emphasizing social issues-- first Civil Rights, then religious issues like school prayer and abortion. But, more likely, they'll just vote less. The mobilization of evangelicals as a political force is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the GOP started working hard to reach that audience, they didn't vote at particularly high rates. If someone has a staunch "I'll never vote for a candidate who allows abortions to happen in this country" position, and if neither of the major parties put forth a candidate that speaks to their particular concerns, that kind of voter might prefer to disengage from national politics.

The basic Might & Magic series was essentially a Wizardry knock-off that started in the mid-'80s. You create a party of characters in pseudo-D&D rules, wander the countryside via grid-based movement in first-person perspective, fight enemies in turn-based combat, etc. (From the 6th game onward, the game changed the grid-based movement to free-movement in a 3D landscape, and added a toggle between real-time and turn-based combat.) The Heroes series started much later and is more of a strategy game, with top-down gameworld exploration, base management, etc.

Not really. I've only just started drinking and I've noticed it has two purposes. Getting buzzed and being more social... but you do NOT go overboard Getting completely stonking drunk to forget about something that's happened or just to escape from life for a night or two. Well, as you're new, and as you're consuming the stuff via dubious media such as vodka-soaked gummi bears, you can be forgiven for missing a few core points: 1) Many drinks taste really good, and offer an appreciable depth of flavor that one does not find in non-alcoholic beverages. (Although I'm sure there are afficianados of obscure coffees and teas out there who would disagree with me on that last point, I'd argue that the preservative qualities of alcohol allow for flavors to be added and developed via ageing processes that you don't see in the non-intoxicating stuff.) 2) Beyond the social lubrication effects, alcohol has a physiological effect that many find pleasant (in moderate doses) as an aide to relaxation. 3) Mixology is fun! You get to tinker with established formulae to find new and interesting flavor combinations! 4) It provides a lovely excuse for bad decisions that you were probably going to make anyway. (I'm thinking particularly about relationship-related decisions, here.) That said, it is also a dangerous habit to start for those with a propensity for chemical dependency, it makes the operation of heavy machinery a Bad Idea, deleterious long-term health consequences, high caloric content, propensity to urinate in public places, low birth weights, etc., etc., etc.

Last time we needed one, we took the lazy way out. In my defense, it's our only car, the nearest auto parts store is at least a few miles away, and it was the middle of winter. The hassle of either imposing on a neighbor for a lift to the store or figuring out how to get there by bus (and then doing so) greatly outweighed the additional cost, in my mind. (And, well, being affluent enough that the added cost isn't going to 'hurt' in any meaningful way also helps.)

The thing with the writing in Morrowind is that it was utterly lacking in pathos-- it never gave the player much reason to care whether the world was saved of not, or what the Real Story was behind all that prophecy nonsense. I'm sure there was a deep storyline of cosmic significance that unfolded as you read the books and progressed through the main plot, but the game didn't give me much reason to want to bother with that, because there simply weren't any characters who presented an interesting mystery or were worthy of much empathy. In the absence of effective narrative motivation, I just did what was fun, which was mostly to wander around and see all the weird stuff. I get that some people like this, in that the game wasn't 'spoon-feeding' its core narrative to the player. But a game can be free to let the player do his/her own thing and still present the character with an emotional hook to pull him/her into the main story. And you can't really do that in a game that essentially lacks any compelling or memorable characters. Bethesda has been trying to get better in this regard. In Oblivion and Fallout3, they went with the "the player will care about these characters if we hire famous people to voice them!" approach. Skyrim was a bit better in that it presented the player right off with the Nord rebels, telling their tale of woe and dying for their cause.

Time & gas, obviously Although I doubt you're spending $50 on gas to the store unless you drive a Canyonero She said "walk" to a store. Car batteries are heavy. (Also, installation requires some low-level familiarity with auto mechanics. Nothing that one couldn't learn pretty easily from youtube, but plenty of people would prefer to part with a little extra cash to have a professional do it.)

This is one of the silliest talking points that gets bandied about right-wing circles, and it irritates the hell out of me. The President is required by law to present a budget proposal to Congress for the next Fiscal Year (Oct 1 through Sept 30) by mid-February every year. The Obama Administration has done so without fail. You can read them all right here. The Congressional budget process is an odd kind of thing. It used to be reasonably simple-- the Appropriations Committees would meet every year, have their subcommittees hold hearings, and produce legislation to fund the different parts of the government on an annual basis. This process was criticized (fairly) for being too atomized and not doing much to incorporate long-term and cross-governmental concerns. (Also, it was part of a good ol' fashioned Congressional power struggle-- other parts of Congress wanted to rein in the Appropriations Committees.) So, in the '70s, they set up the Budget process. The President would pull together input from all the executive departments on what they wanted to do over the next several years and how much money they needed to do it, put it in one (huge) document, and send it up to Congress. Congress, operating through the new Budget Committees, would review this document, make changes as they saw fit, and pass a Budget Resolution. As it's a Resolution, rather than an Act, this document needed no signature from the President had no legal effect outside of Congress. What it did was limit the Appropriators-- any Appropriation that was not within the limits set by the most recent Budget Resolution would be subject to parliamentary procedures that could easily delay or halt it. Thus, the Appropriations Committees had to either operate within the guidelines of the Budget Resolution, or have a damned good reason for doing something different. This process has pretty much broken down. What talk show idiots mean when they say "we don't even have a budget!" is "there has been no Congressional Budget Resolution." If a Budget Resolution doesn't pass, it just goes back to the old system-- Appropriators write the funding legislation without input from the Budget Committees. (They do, of course, have access to all the information provided in the President's budget request.) On the other hand, if the Appropriations bills don't get passed, the government shuts down all non-emergency operations. There are basically 2 reasons this has happened, and neither of them has much of anything to do with the President. Mostly, in a Congress where compromise only happens when a crisis is impending, there is little incentive for folks to use up political capital pushing a Budget Resolution. A somewhat more complicated and controversial secondary reason is based on what kind of legislators go to the Budget Committees. If a legislator is interested in getting into the details of federal programs, he or she generally goes tries to get a seat on the related oversight committee (e.g., Armed Services), or the Appropriations subcommittee that deals with that area. The sort of legislator who tries to get a seat on the Budget committee, on the other hand, is more likely to be a careerist who is mostly interested in making speeches about the deficit without putting a whole lot of work into serious oversight, or doing anything to affect actual legislative change. (In the interest of disclosure, my own Congressman is the minority leader on House Budget.) The much-ballyhooed "plan" that the House Budget Committee produced last year was basically a 5-page outline that didn't even break down spending by Department, much less specific programs. Compared to the level of detail in the executive Budget proposals linked above, it might as well have been scribbled on a bar napkin. As to the sequester, there's a smart way to cut the budget, and there's a dumb way to cut the budget. The smart way involves actually examining all the line-items and making individualized determinations about the relative merits of funding them at particular levels. The dumb way takes the existing levels and says "cut em all by X%." The sequester is the latter kind of cut.

[nothing to see here; accidentally clicked "quote" when I wanted "edit"]

There are a number of current policies that are due to expire early next year (around the time the new Congress takes over). Among those are the tax cuts passed early in the Bush administration and a temporary reduction in federal payroll taxes that was passed as a fiscal stimulus measure a couple years ago. There is also a mandatory "sequester" of funds appropriated to federal agencies for their operation-- essentially a reduction in the money that existing legislation had already provided to the agencies. (Congress passed this last one as a consequence that would automatically kick in if a particular effort at budgetary compromise didn't produce an agreement. It didn't.) There are also a couple of annual rituals (the Medicare "doc fix" that prevents Medicare compensation rates from actually following the standing law limiting their change to the rate of inflation, and an Alternative Minimum Tax "patch" that prevents an oddball tax provision originally designed for plutocrat tax-dodgers from hitting a lot of upper-middle-class-ish households) that generally get passed without much controversy every year that haven't yet been done. (This is done in annual "patches" because an actual change in the underlying legislation would be "scored" as having a huge negative effect on the long-term deficit and debt situation. Doing it one year at a time essentially does the same thing, but makes the long-term projections put together by CBO and OMB look prettier. And, yes, that is an incredibly stupid way to run a government.) The essential point is that, if some new legislation isn't passed by sometime in January, a whole lot of taxes go up, and federal spending drops. Which would generally hurt the economy in an immediate sense and make a lot of people mad. The Republicans in the House are in an interesting fix-- they can either do nothing and allow a rather large tax increase to occur, or vote for a comparatively small tax increase as part of a compromise bill to address these provisions. (This is interesting, because a majority of their caucus has signed on to a "I will vote for no tax increases, ever" pledge pushed by a particular right-wing interest group.) Also, I should note that "cliff" is a poor metaphor. No immediate disaster takes place if they miss the deadline. It would cause some headaches for folks at IRS and other agencies that have to deal with the sequester, but most of the nation wouldn't notice much if the legislation to address this comes a week or two late.

Not sure where GD is getting the whole "driving the coal industry out of business" thing. Sounds like the kind of hyperbole that comes out of mine owners who want to be sure that their workers vote the correct way. A staggering amount of American electricity comes from coal plants-- that's not going to change anytime soon, regardless of who's in the White House. Policies like a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade setup, or additional anti-emissions tech at the point of combustion would push margins a bit, but the U.S. is still going to be burning a hell of a lot of coal. (The bigger threat to the Coal business than regulation is probably competition from cheap natural gas produced by the gas boom in the upper midwest. That's not going to shut down many plants, but it means that any new ones built probably aren't going to be burning the black stuff.) Re: layoffs, it's tough to pull any kind of conclusion from anecdotal data. Aggregate employment numbers will come out in a month or two, but even that would be one data point in a rather long line that isn't as sensitive to what's going on in Washington as most would have you believe. As for the healthcare stuff, that's not really my area of policy expertise. I'll say 2 things: 1) Most of it hasn't actually been implemented yet, so a lot of the effects are TBD; and 2) The pre-PPACA healthcare system in America was already, to my admittedly layman's eyes, really quite broken. Something needed to change. There are some smart people who think that it will help, and some smart people who disagree. Most likely, they're both partly right and partly wrong. (As a complete aside, I did get a kick out of the level of bitching and moaning coming out of some folks I know in the healthcare business regarding the requirement to transition to electronic records. Saying it out loud would've been a bit of a faux pas in this particular context, but really wanted to roll my eyes and say something like "Welcome to what every business that has to deal with actual price competition and accountability went through in 1994!")