Bay 12 Games Forum

Seriously though, this keeps up and another couple weeks of it the UK'll be an experiment in direct democracy by virtue of all their politicians having quit.

Which'd be pretty interesting. I don't think the world's seen treaty renegotiation done entirely through public consensus.

... cute. MP being singular wasn't a typo, was it?

Sudden disturbingly strong urge for a cinnamon glazed donut. Like, a cinnamon roll? But a donut. It started as an idle urge for one or the other, either a cinnamon roll or a donut, but roughly two seconds from the thought it morphed into a spontaneous vaguely ravenous desire for a mixture of the two.

Probably won't be getting one (money, distance, effort, etc., etc.), but still. This is odd and oddly insistent.

... actually, in retrospect, it's a little worrying. Been getting odd urges like this occasionally for a bit now, now that I think of it, and the last time I had something similar happen it was after surgery (basically an incredibly strong desire for chocolate, which is apparently fairly normal when you've had chunks taken out of you). Starting to wonder if something new is a bit off in the ol'biochemistry, bleh.

Today in the Spokesman-Review: Dick Meyer: Media, politics exaggerate terrorism threat.

... yeah, to show up a bit late to the conversation, terrorism is generally overstated to farcical degrees outside of a few countries. There are some places where it's a very serious, very deadly problem, but... the US isn't one of them. More likely to die by lightning, iirc, or a whole host of other things. Our non-terrorism related gun deaths were roughly on par with the entire world's terrorism-related deaths a year or two ago, for an example of something that approaches an actual problem.* No clue if it's still around that level, but... yeah. Yeah. And non-death related damages can't really compare -- I wouldn't be surprised if kitchen fires have managed a higher average (or at least median -- the 9/11 stuff and maybe some of the bombings would probably through the average off) of material damage to our country over the last few decades.** Probably not total cost (because the amount spent on this stuff is several orders of magnitude over the direct damages), but just in terms of property damage, it wouldn't surprise me. Maybe even including the major outlier figures, I'unno. Some cursory search for the pure material costs of terrorism in the states turned up mostly that it's a complete pain in the arse to find data on the pure material costs of terrorist attacks in the states. Kitchen fires have fluctuated around half a billion a year, though. Fire damage in total between ~7-~8.

Really though, media and politics don't just exaggerate the threat of terrorism, they build towering edifices out of aether, consecrated in the blood of civilians killed by collateral damage, and made out of lies, exaggeration, and sometimes a small, barely existent dollop of truth. The psychology of it and whatnot make for damn good ratings and/or votes, and the more people are concerned about it the more true that becomes -- and so there's some folks out there that make damn sure people are concerned about it, regardless of whether terrorism's actually much of a legitimate concern for the country. It's scary, it's shocking, it's like a personal affront to a lot of people. But it's not a threat, not existentially, not materially to any meaningful/relative degree. Frankly, every country in the world experiencing significant terrorism campaigns could spontaneously stop their conflicts, join together both their military and paramilitary forces, and then attempt to straight up invade the US and still wouldn't be much of a threat worth note. Most of the threat from terrorism comes not from terrorist attacks, but how our country reacts to them. As evidenced by the amount we spend on the subject, most of it just kinda' uselessly as near as anyone seems to be able to tell

*Note: To try to avoid much of a derail in that direction, it's probably good to note that guns are still less of a killer than alcohol (or any number of other things, obesity among them) by a fairly significant margin, never mind all the other drugs our government spends millions on making sure they do more damage to society that they could be doing. Stateside gun deaths are just an easy figure to use, because they happen to roughly line up with global terrorism related ones.

... hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

Thankfully, bisexuality doesn't exclude reproduction. :v

... neither does homosexuality. Hell, neither does asexuality. Artificial stuff aside, you don't have to be attracted to someone to have sex with them -- and surrogacy is a thing, too.

The only thing that comes close to excluding reproduction is infertility, really... and I'm pretty sure we're fairly decent at working around that these days. If there's will, you probably got ways, regardless of your fornicative inclinations

Mm... those two you find through exploration, iirc. It does tell you what you need to power the mana whatsit, though not where to find it. Goal wise, there's a quest list and that initial blurb The former also updates itself as you gain levels/time passes in game, so you kinda' find out about your goals alongside the character instead of starting off some sort of prescient.

I guess things could be more explicitly, but I'd actually say at the moment the game is handling that sort of thing fairly well. It's pretty obvious when you find something, but not the most obvious where to find whatever, which is generally how a decently tuned exploration facet of a game goes. Add the plot progression that's already there (and apparently to be improved) and it's doin' a'ight.