Bay 12 Games Forum

This sort of thing is the primary reason I don't buy from Blizzard.  They've had a lot of fairly high-profile cases like this recently, and between the two camps of "you own your software but agree to play by our rules on our servers" and "you own nothing but the right to use your software as we see fit, until and unless we decide to change the rules", it's pretty obvious Blizzard is in the second camp.

To Blizzard, we aren't "fellow gaming enthusiasts", we're "revenue sources", and their only concern about whether we like their products is based on how many people they can keep subscribing to them.  They love us like Doctor Doom loves Latverian citizens.

What game?  CC?  Touhou?

CC, yes.  If their mods would enforce the actual written rules instead of imaginary unwritten ones, and hand out a few summary IP bans when people were elitist about how long they'd been playing the game, that forum would be a tolerable place.  Oh well, I guess Toady gets my dollars instead of Data.

A good standby that I consistently play and have been for years now is Warning Forever.  It's about as far away from DF-type games as you can possibly get.  If only somebody would make a Fraxy Forever mod that made the bosses for that game evolve each round, I'd play that.

A couple weeks ago I played Fallout 3 pretty consistently, and recently one of my buddies got the Painkiller Triple Pack for his birthday, but because he's all the time playing World of Warcraft, he never plays it, so I'm playing it instead.  It really is a better sequel to Doom 1 and 2 then Doom 3 was.

Quantum of Solace introduces us to the most nefarious Bond villain to date:  Whichever Hollywood asshole decided that changing the camera angle every two seconds is in any way entertaining or even acceptable.  Quantum of Solace is without question the most extreme example of this unfortunate cultural phenomenon that I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.  This movie cuts around enough to give a blind man an epileptic seizure.  I am not exaggerating when I say that within the first half hour of Quantum of Solace, there is literally not one ten-second stretch of the movie that does not include an entirely unnecessary change of camera angle.  Nor is this limited to the action scenes.  Even during expositional scenes, the camera inexplicably cuts between angles, often in the middle of sentences.

This movie is also missing much of what we expect to see in a Bond film.  There's no Bond movie villain, no Bond movie villain henchman, and not much of a nefarious plan.  Where's the guy with the metal hat, or the guy with the metal teeth, or the guy with the metal hands? Where's the giant space laser or the nuclear blackmail plot, where's the secret volcano lair?  The villain this time out is a phony environmentalist who's built a dam in the middle of the desert, and his nefarious plan is, get this, he's gonna build more dams.  Despite the world-spanning power of SPECTRE, ahem, I mean QUANTUM (I guess that's what they're calling the ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule to world in this new century), a VW bus full of Greenpeace activists could have handled the villain quite as well as our favorite British Secret Service agent.

I'm also bewildered by the decision to omit both of Bond's signature lines from this movie.  At no point does "Bond, James Bond" introduce himself as such, and instead of ordering his martini in the usual fashion, he allows the bartender to explain to a friend what he's drinking in exhaustive detail, right down to the molecular composition.  To compensate for this, the movie includes a throwback to arguably the most famous Bond movie scene of all time, presumably so that the viewers won't forget that they're supposedly watching a James Bond film.

I want to point out that this is not necessarily a bad film.  It's just badly filmed.  There's at least 25% of a good Bond film here, it's just hidden by crappy camera work.  Quantum of Solace has its good points.  The acting is all that you could ask from a blockbuster action movie.  I particularly love Daniel Craig's take on Bond as a vengeance-obsessed sadistic psychopath who will pull a friend in front of him to take a bullet, then unceremoniously toss the body into a dumpster after said friend forgives him with his dying words.  I also don't expect to see character growth in a Bond movie, but this movie gives it to us.  Without spoiling much, let's just say that in the last outing the climax involved water, and this time it involves fire, and the outcome is different.  There's also plenty of stunts which straddle the line between "totally awesome" and "absolute horseshit", most notably a scene in which a parachute which opens five feet above the ground saves two people at once, but we viewers have to take the movie's word for it that these stunts actually happened, because the hyperactive editing means that we never get to see the stunts in their entirety.

I can only recommend Quantum of Solace if both:

A.  You are truly desperate to see a new Bond film, and
B.  You are utterly unoffended by choppy camera work.

Otherwise, let's hope that the next Bond film is edited by somebody who actually knows how to edit, as this potentially good Bond film is crippled by the worst editing of any film I've seen in this century.

He's apparently some kind of noble and he's upset that his suboordinates have a badass gaming computer while he's trying to run DF on a laptop that still uses Windows 2000.

I'd have to go with Lumberjacks who cancel jobs because they get interrupted by a harmless woodland creature.  "OHMYGOD, a MOUNTAIN GOAT!  RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"  Dumbass, you HAVE AN AXE!  That mountain goat is no threat to you!

My opinion of his works is mixed.  I loved Sphere, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Eaters of the Dead, and The Great Train Robbery.  Travels was also quite interesting.  Apparently once you learn how to bend spoons, you don't care that you can do something that would win you a million dollars from Randi and you just get bored with it.

On the other hand, both of the only two books I've ever gotten so disgusted with that I threw them across the room were also written by Crichton.  I'm speaking of Timeline and Prey, naturally.  It was also the polar opposite of classy when he put a pedophile with a tiny dick into one of his books just so that he could give the guy the same name as one of his critics.

If they haven't locked his Wiki entry yet, there's a constant battle going on between the crowd who's trying to keep it accurate and the guys who are changing it to read "...died yesterday due to being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus while on the toilet".

With regards to the farm, there's the "dodging" issue that Skanky already mentioned, and it's conceivable but terribly unlikely that a flying creature could get in.  Also, unless you ring the holes to the surface with walls, goblin crossbowmen WILL fill your farmers with bolts.

As far as the parties go, it's not that your dwarves are sad, they just like to party.  If excessive partying is causing work to not get done, you can just de-designate the dining room to stop parties.

They're only sad if you see a flashing red arrow on them.

Firstly, yes I have read Hawking's novel, and yes, I disagree with it. The fact that it relies on black holes, charge-neutral interstellar space and wishy washy dark matter concepts is why I discount it.

You know they recently discovered actual evidence in favor of dark matter? 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020135219.htm

It's not conclusive proof, but it's observed evidence that backs up the predictions made by people like Hawking decades earlier.  Naturally if dark matter exists trillions of miles away or more, we're not going to be able to get first-hand evidence until our technology improves.

Also, there's piles of observed evidence for black holes.  The term "gravitational lensing" comes to mind.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/bh_obsv.html

you can talk about the effects of magnetism as much as you like, they're well known, well reproducible, understood and accepted. What I am trying to get through to people is that we know what it does, just not why or how.

What I'm trying to get through to you is that just because YOU don't understand the mechanics by which magnetism works, your ignorance does not invalidate or question the qualification of literally thousands of scientists (like, well, that Osmosis Jones feller) who spend their entire lifetimes researching this stuff.

by the way, before you think about "not attacking" me, try not suggesting I didn't get through high school. I may not have degree level qualifications, but my level of knowledge is far from basic.

Well, when you say things like, "there's no peer-reviewed publications dealing with the mechanics of magnetism", you come across as a high school freshman who rented "What the Bleep Do We Know?" last night and is now going to OMGWTFPWN his physics teacher.  When you confuse (deliberately or otherwise, I honestly can't tell if you're joking) the scientific method with "faith", it makes you look even worse.

You see, this is why I call myself a Heretic. I dare to question the assumptions that underly our theories. You who blindly follow the current faithscientific method are the ones who need to open your eyes.

But, see, I don't "blindly" follow anything.  Magnetic theory has given us things like the electric motor and, well, that computer that you're reading this post on.  If I'm blinded by faith (I'm not), I'd say my faith is justified.  Science has a darn fine track record.

The scientific method isn't about blindly following what came before.  It's about constantly questioning everything.  For a long time, science believed that the "atom" was the smallest possible particle, and atoms could never be split.  Now we have nuclear reactors, and you can even build your own Geiger counter with a kit from Radio Shack.  Science still doesn't know "why" a particular uranium atom undergoes radioactive decay while the one next to it just sits there, but that doesn't invalidate nuclear theory or indicate some "blind faith" on the part of the "establishment".

Again, I must say, I'm NOT attacking YOU PERSONALLY.  You made a ridiculous statement and I'm pointing out the flaws in your reasoning.  Now, I COULD write ten pages on electron spin and quantum interactions, but I'm admittedly not qualified to teach quantum mechanics or calculus, so I can't show you the equations that describe magnetic force and say, "this is how magnetism works" in a way that you OR I would understand.  Here's a couple of links for your further edification.

http://www.coolmagnetman.com/maghow.htm
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=96769

If this isn't enough information, make a new thread about it on the physicsforums.  Just be a little more careful in your phrasing.  If you go all thermonuclear on there with some "there are no peer-reviewed articles on the mechanics of magnetism" crap, they will quite reasonably dismiss you as an Alex Jones type crackpot.  If, on the other hand, you are civil and reasonable, and say something along the lines of, "I'm not aware of the mechanism by which magnetism works, could you point me to some good peer-reviewed articles on the subject", I don't doubt that you will get all the information you need.