Bay 12 Games Forum

ok, so your son is called Elric.

No, although it's apparently derived from Alberich. Maybe Elric was too.

Quote from: Boksi on May 04, 2010, 09:25:58 am

But German sounds far better to my ears than French. Oh, the French. They don't even pronounce half of their letters, the wasteful twits.

I can't stand the way French people speak French.
Their accent is so arrogant and pretentious.
French with, say, a Germanic accent is actually pretty awesome.

And the French should be used to hearing it with a German accent, as many times as they've surrendered to Germany. 

Quote from: Jackrabbit on May 05, 2010, 12:30:01 am

I have this list of clothing I want.

I do too, the top hat was probably second. First, fedora, third, trench coat.


Fedora + trench coat = awesome.

Fedora + trench coat = meh.
Fedora + trench coat + beard + calabash pipe = awesome.

.
The larger problem here is that you see firearms as symbols or totems rather than as tools.  "Metal penis".  "Action movie".  "SWAT team."  "Machismo."  In the real world firearms are tools that, taken together with proper training, improve a person's chances to survive a violent situation.
Fire extinguishers aren't metal penises, either.  They exist to put out fires.  One needn't be a firefighter to use one to put out a fire.  People learn CPR, too, even though they're not doctors.  We can't put out big fires and we can't do open heart surgery, but we can improve our chances of surviving a violent situation.  A bullet is a bullet, whether it comes from a SWAT sniper or a scared civilian who remembered his training at a moment of decision.

And in an ideal world where we're all responsible, intelligent adults, you're correct. However, that's not the world most of us observe. Maybe you're right and guns aren't about proving your manhood *for you*. But I think Aqizzar and I both have plenty of experience with folks for whom there's definitely some fetishism going on.

Quote from: Aqizzar on May 03, 2010, 08:26:26 am

By definition, all statistics on gun violence, or crime prevented by gun violence, is anecdotal.  Mostly anecdotes made up by people who want to sound tough, in studies funded by people like Wayne LaPierre who watched too many old westerns and think the solution to urban crime is to turn America into Yemen.

"By definition" statistics are statistics and anecdotes anecdotes ... unless of course you're defending a belief system steeped in symbolism from the rude intrusion of reality, in which case whatever hand-waving is required to make the cognitive dissonance go away will be done.
I don't know about Yemen, but Detroit has a higher murder rate than Iraq.  Private ownership of firearms won't "solve" the crime problem, but wishing it away only leads to a false sense of security.

I'm not even going to deal with how absurd that comparison is, or how it doesn't even support your point (both cities have high rates of private gun ownership), but I would point out that Ciudad Juarez has a higher death toll per capita than either of those cities, and the easy availability of firearms, particularly American-made automatics and easily converted semi-automatics, is a definite contributing factor. The Mexican border is awash in guns, and it's allowed what is essentially a gang turf war to spiral into the sort of mayhem usually reserved for disintegrating central African nations.

I'd qualify that by saying that computers are far better at predicting things which can be mathematically modeled *and* which have accounted for most, if not all, of the significant variables. A computer will generally be a far more accurate and faster solution to plotting an artillery strike, for instance.

What we do better is "fuzzy" calculation, where we make a rough estimate to account for unknown variables based on past experience without necessarily being able to quantify or even explain why. More experience, better estimates.

In theory, a good enough AI could do the same thing, and faster. But modeling that heuristic loop that allows humans to do fuzzy learning is one of the core problems with AI design.

I got to use word "nom" in a work email today. As in, "I brought in some assorted free noms. Enjoy." 

This ensured that younger co-workers understood and reacted to the message first, leaving the older and weaker members to starve. All part of my Darwinian plan....

On a semi-related note, does anybody know how to get the weird double-s symbol that sort of looks like a capital B?

You mean this?: ß (it's called an Eszett)

There's Alt+key codes for it, but they don't seem to work here. I had to cut and paste.

Yeah, I liked Lords and Ladies. Nice changeup against the pansy froo-froo elves. The elves in my pet project world are a bit like his, though perhaps less innately malicious. They're an advanced hunter-gathererer society that was driven from their mild, fertile homeland by a genocidal war with humans and found refuge in a subarctic taiga. And pretty much kill trespassers on sight and are harboring one serious grudge.