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Messages - Flying Dice

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631
Other Games / Re: Elona
« on: December 19, 2017, 01:19:21 am »
If it's from an etherwind mutation, just get a potion of cure corruption. Easy way is to hit up the casino with single chip bets, all you need is a single 5 win streak, which is dead easy if you know how the dealer works.

632
Other Games / Re: Elona
« on: December 18, 2017, 08:45:23 pm »
Maybe backup your save and do a fresh install? New version's out anyways.

e: LUL

I hammered random rolls a couple times for luck as usual when I genned my current character. Just now noticed something off in the stats.



TIL E+C has implemented midget skeletons as a player race. God damn she's malnourished or some shit. And running around with a sword that weighs nearly four times as much as her. I think I'm gonna turn this into a no-mount no-buff-magic run just for the hell of it, since the random background is the "impoverished family of warriors, left to find work" and fits so well already. 4'6" 33lb emaciated samurai child stabbing everyone's shins and eating their corpses.

633
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: December 18, 2017, 07:48:29 pm »
Add in lentils/peanut butter/whatever. You don't need to splurge on meat to stay healthy.
Peanut butter is a very 'Murrican thing. Hard to find in South America, as far as I am aware. He should go for beans if at all possible.

Fair, I hadn't realized that. Lentils are still a god-food if you're in tight straits, beans are ofc good, &c. They're already cheap canned, but if you buy them dry they don't cost much/any more than rice. Beans/lentils over rice is the go-to staple if you need to stretch food money a long way. If you can get pretty much any type of nut without too much expense, do, they're high-protein, high on good fats, and tend to be packed with other nutrients, basically one of the most nutrient-dense types of food there is. They do tend to be pricey if they're shipped or processed, though, hence the caveat.

634
Other Games / Re: Elona
« on: December 18, 2017, 07:45:10 pm »
To get the obvious out of the way:

Did you allow the files that wanted to overwrite on installing Custom to do so?
Are you running the game with the Custom exe?
Are the scene .hsp files in the same top-level folder as the exe? (They are named scene1.hsp and scene2.hsp)

635
Other Games / Re: Elona
« on: December 18, 2017, 05:43:37 pm »
As an addendum (which I also edited in), the Christmas Cake Set added in 1.74 also gives you a Lucky Day buff, and is a consumable (though apparently they should spawn in shops during December). Forget rushing to the casino when you sleep well, just stockpile these and pop one whenever you have enough casino chips for a long run of blackjack.

636
Other Games / Re: Elona
« on: December 18, 2017, 11:03:42 am »
Elona+ 1.74 release, fix coming soon.
Elona+ Custom updated for 1.74

Notable features include: More Act III content; when characters > lv50 encounter bandits, bandits are scaled as if they were lv50; new museum parameter to gauge unique NPC items with plat coins as an additional reward based on unique rank; Sense Object can now detect traps; new Xmas item that satiates the party and recalls all allies to your side + granting a Lucky Day buff (it's consumable); can look at enemies to check their stamina; experience gain for skills/attributes >lv300 is now equivalent to what they would get if they were lv300.

637
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: December 18, 2017, 10:30:41 am »
Add in lentils/peanut butter/whatever. You don't need to splurge on meat to stay healthy.

638
He wasn't really central though. Could've had a minion do that for him, and have a CG of him toward the end or something.

It was good CG though. I had to really look before concluding that it wasn't a real person.

He really was, though. The movie was about Tarkin's bid for power by seizing control of the Death Star project as much as it was about explaining how the Rebel Alliance got the plans in the first place. Y'know, the reason he's the Imperial big-shot in charge of it back during A New Hope.

639
Other Games / Re: Elona
« on: December 17, 2017, 09:13:38 am »
Oh man, now that I've worked them out, I'm really liking a lot of the more recent changes.

Skill tickets + capped plat costs make it feasible to get every skill you want fairly quickly. Good shit.

The new god, Yacatect of Wealth, is amazing (and also contributes to the last point). She takes rings/amulets as offerings so she's dead easy to level. Her skill bonuses are to Negotiation, Sense Quality, Traveling, Investing, and Alchemy (which in E+ can be used to make near-weightless food & pots of cure mutation and water, and a chunk of the items for artifact fusion atop other stuff). Her pet turns food into plat coins at a rate of 2 per sleep. Her gem gives 10-25 plat coins per month. Her weapon is a near-weightless throwing coin that gives invisible sight, darkness res +200, and bonuses to investing + negotiation. Her hidden item massively reduces negotiation (-3173), which drastically reduces how much gold you have to spend to trigger progress in negotiation.

That's important because of how they changed materials scrolls. Now Inferior/Change/Superior each have a list of materials which they cycle through, same way every time. Listed on the wiki. That gives you a couple options and even further increases the value of investing in magic shops. You can use blessed change material to cycle up to one of the stopping points (Dragon Scale or Adamatium depending on where you want the item to go), then use a maximum of four blessed superior material to take it to crystal/titanium/mithril or emerald/diamond/rubynus/ether. If you want dawn or spirit cloth, you can hit it with inferior material to turn it into paper and then 1-2 superior to get the cloth you favor.

It's hard to overstate how massive it is to be able to remove that particular RNG goldsink. Especially when I play mostly Claymore. Knowing exactly how much I need to spend to get all my armor to Griffon Scale (and later Spirit Cloth), and it being "not too much" is wonderful.


e: Well what the fuck. My little girl had an artifact crystal battleaxe but it up and disappeared at some point.

640
None, of course.

But hey, look at how well privatizing prisons has worked out for Louisiana, another stellar example of the "libertarian" neofeudal paradise.

That's the real gold, how people call themselves libertarians when they spend all their time wanking to social structures that benefit oligarchs and tin-pot dictators. Small government only means more freedom for scumbags to build up personal fiefdoms. From the very inception of the Constitution one of the principle purposes of government has been to protect the extraordinarily small wealth gap that existed at the time of the founding. The rise of neofeudal social dynamics in the pre-war South, and the shift away from the open-frontier agrarian society (which was one of the primary factors in that small wealth gap, as "small business owners" could be anyone willing to hop on a wagon heading west) driven by the Industrial Revolution created an opportunity which the oligarchs seized with both hands.

We got the Gilded Age. The late 1800s through the mid 1940s were full of progressive reformers working to counteract that, culminating in the New Deal. Unfortunately, it was derailed by the shift in focus caused by the stresses of WWII to a primarily political/military conflict rather than economic conflict, and the forces of the post-industrial nobility took the chance to roll back the clock, with the Cold War offering additional political capital. The second half of the 20th century was entirely about propagandizing and increasing the wealth gap. The American middle class wasn't created in the 20th century, it was eroded, and we're reaping the outcomes of 50 years of effort to stratify U.S. economic classes with a second Gilded Age.

Every word you've ever heard about the free market, the good of unrestricted capitalism, the evils of "socialism" (i.e. American democracy as it existed circa any point in our history prior to the '50s and outside a brief period from ~1880-1930), &c. was specifically spread to blind people to what was being done. We began as a society where the average working person could own property, work reasonable hours, and support their family on a single income while also spending time socializing, learning, and resting to one in which multiple jobs per household often still can't bring it above the poverty line and the majority of people either don't own property (in the sense of land/homes/&c.) or owe massive debts on the property they "own" (for so long as they can continue paying for it), and have no spare time or energy for pursuing personal interests, education, or politics.

That has been the concerted and primary interest of corporations and the moneyed class throughout American history: breaking the middle class, making us think it was in our best interests, and crippling government sufficiently that there will not be a second sweep of progressive economic reforms.

This is why Reconstruction was forcibly derailed: it was deconstructing the wealth gap created among citizens of the South by diminishing racial divisions between freed blacks and poor whites, providing better education and public services to both, and diminishing the capital and power of the plantation aristocracy. The Civil War was, fundamentally, about economic power, specifically about preserving an economic system (slavery + the cultivation of cash crops for export) which massively enriched a small portion of the population while providing little to no social benefit and preventing the bulk of freedmen from advancing themselves beyond subsistence farming (which was actually a degradation from the average status of an American eighty years prior).

When you hear someone talk about the benefits of small government, deregulation, &c. remember: those benefits are not for you. They're for the people and institutions which possess sufficient power that the only reliable check on their excesses is a strong central government. Moreover, any attempt to return to such a society (for it is, as I have repeatedly implied, little more than a gussied-up and modernized form of feudalism) will result either in the creation of innumerable local tyrannies or in massive popular violence. The notion of distributed and largely independent individuals and settlements is functionally impossible for any society past a purely agrarian stage of development: modern infrastructure cannot be constructed or maintained without high-level coordination of resources and effort, the bulk of human population worldwide cannot be supported with local agriculture even if all other elements of society were miraculously maintained without the systems they require, &c.

The unfortunate truth is that the frontier is closed. There is no settler's paradise, no land to live by your own hand, and there never again will be save for one of two scenarios: space travel and colonization becoming as simple and inexpensive as hopping aboard that wagon train of the idolized past, or the near-total eradication of human life and technology (both material and social). It has been reduced to a lie peddled to too-credulous people to convince them to dismantle the structures which shield them from abuse while convincing them that those structures are abuse.

641
Who knows? That's pretty bad. How is this an argument though? Thing A being bad isn't a good reason for thing B to be bad, even if they are similar.

Additionally, I'm not saying "tech companies are bad, therefore this additional bad thing is not bad." If anything, I take a bit of delight in the fact that this decision goes against big tech.

Isn't that literally exactly what you're saying though? If not, I think I've misunderstood what you were saying.
You are right; whataboutism is not a (valid logical) argument. That's not my point, though. My argument for the most part has been that this is inconsequential since most of the dystopian wet dreams that people came up with regarding this are antithetical to basic thought from a business standpoint, and that this changes things that have been in place for all of 2 years. People have lamented the death of "net neutrality" several times now, and I've yet to see any change.

This recent bit about big tech was just a one-off response that ended up becoming an actual conversation point. A better response would've been "there were presidents before Obama where this was relevant, so arguing that this would've been shut down under Obama so it's happening now makes no sense given that it would've then instead happened under Bush."

Can you, though? If I start a restaurant, and then not have it listed on Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Bing Maps, people would find it... how? No mention on Bing/Google, no Facebook page, et cetera.

Sounds more of a monopoly of a different type than a forced monopoly, more like the one that develops because everybody else and so many others are using it.

Amazon though, they're being like a blob that is trying to eat everything and BE everything all at once. The definition of monopoly needs a better legal definition in the digital age because they can be a monopoly and at the same time, not a monopoly.
Nah, they're monopolies of the forced type. Buying out competition, et cetera. I'll at least concede that Apple isn't too awful these days, but that's mostly Google's fault (and yes, Google is 100% a monopoly, as is Facebook and Amazon) due to taking a big hunk out of the cell phone market and Microsoft for taking a big hunk out of the PC market. Apple isn't really a strictly digital company, unlike the other ones, so it's harder to argue that they're a monopoly under the same way that Google, Facebook, and Amazon are.

And ISPs are (at least in the 'states) enforced monopolies with legal protections for their status. They get the same treatment as other utilities regarding their operational coverage, but now they want to double-dip and not be treated as utilities regarding service provision. Most Americans have access to the internet through a single monolithic provider. Some places, you get to "choose" which one you get fucked by. I'm relatively lucky, insofar as that I live in a place with both Google Fiber and a smaller local ISP as other options, but most people don't get that, so the "free market" as far as internet service goes is a total lie, and they get the choice between not having internet access (which is unthinkable if you want to function in society, even basic stuff like government services and job applications are often online-only now) or being reamed by whichever telecomms company has your area as one of their fiefdoms.

642
Other Games / Re: Elona
« on: December 14, 2017, 09:06:21 pm »
Beat me to it.

Time to restart, I suppose. Can't even remember what I was doing with my last character beyond being a scumbag fairy wizard.

643
The whole affair is just awful. One more franchise turned into a soulless profit-pumping machine.

I'm having serious trouble parsing this remark because I feel like you probably don't mean Star Wars, as that'd imply you'd somehow completely missed the past 30 years or so of Star Wars media.

Don't get me wrong, Lucas was a moneygrubbing asshole with marginal creative talent, but he didn't have shit on the capacity of Disney for cynically extracting every possible cent from every sucker willing to pay for mold-stamped nostalgia bait.

Like god damn, Mel Brooks' MOICHANDISING scene in Spaceballs was supposed to be a piss-take about the commercialization of Star Wars, not a how-to guide.
"guys, disney has star wars, they can do no wrong with this"
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
can do no wrong
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
THEY CAN DO NO WRONG
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The CGI of Peter Cushing was actually pretty damn good, and there's not really a lot of good options for dealing with an iconic actor-character pairing when the actor has died but the character is central to the plot of a film.

644
My mistake, 2014, not 2012. Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC, dismantled the "net neutrality" FCC Open Internet Order, which was only passed in response to Comcast Corp. v. FCC over a 2008 order that violated the Communications Act of 1934. This is all because in 2005, the FCC as a part of the Supreme Court case National Cable & Telecommunications Ass'n v. Brand X Internet Services had ISPs considered to be "information service" rather than "telecommunications service", which caused in Comcast Corp. v. FCC for the FCC to not be able to impose particular restrictions on Comcast due to the Communications Act of 1934 not allowing such regulation on "information services", resulting in the FCC issuing the Open Internet Order, resulting in Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC determining that the FCC cannot impose the restrictions in that order due to overreach since they can only be applied under Title II to common carriers, not information services.

I believe in all of this the FCC also tried to maintain that ISPs were utility companies, and that this recent ruling simply confirms that ISPs are "information carriers" as covered in that earlier Supreme Court case. It was really rather messy, as much as everyone wants to try and make it clear-cut.

You're still off. This is specifically about the FCC rule from 2015 that classified broadband internet as a Title II service, making ISPs common carriers rather than information providers. It came about because of Obama intervening in internal discussion within the FCC in mid-2014 over whether to explicitly allow non-neutral service or enshrine the classification of ISPs as information services, in part because of the lack of legal protection for net neutrality (which had previously been protected largely because the telecomm corps hadn't yet seriously exploited).

645

In local news, Dan Johnson offed himself after the story re: him sexually assaulting a 17 year old broke.
This is a trend I can support.

EDIT: I see his widow has already said she'll run for his vacant seat, saying "these high-tech lynchings and half-truths cannot be allowed to win the day".

A few reactions:
1. Eww. His body's barely cold and she's literally using it as a campaign platform. That's one stone-cold woman.
2. "Half truths"? That implies that there's something to the allegation.
3. "High-tech lynchings" is the exact phrase coined by Clarence Thomas to describe the Anita Hill hearings decades ago. It's virtually a dogwhistle to the right-wing base.

Yep, was just about to mention this. She's all but said that his seat belongs to her. Half-inclined to think that she talked him into it so that she'd have the opportunity.

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