Bay 12 Games Forum

... I've never even heard of this deltora thing before now. Hrm.

Looks like it came out in '00? The books started to, that is. Worth reading?

And... no contractions? Should one read it assuming clan mechs are about to come barreling out of the woods for any particular scene? Because that sounds like it would be a significant source of amusement.

... now I'm kinda' curious as to what kind of cheese it was, and what you were comparing it to.

M'just going to guess you didn't normally eat that orange american cheese stuff that's only good for changing a meal's texture >_>

They don't dare announce it; as soon as the government remembers that NASA exists the left and right will hold hands to strip

And it would be such an improvement from the status quo...

I do find it interesting on a philosophical level that you think there are irredeemable crimes, though.

... you do realize that that's basically one of the primary tenants of christianity, right? That literally the only way to absolve oneself of sin is by god's forgiveness, which is given only by its will. There is no act you can actually perform, as a christian, that grants you redemption. It's all by god's largess, not your doing. It may be well inclined towards doing so towards people that perform certain acts and hold certain thoughts, but there's nothing behooving it from not just saying, "No."

S'the basic concept behind the many denominations that say good acts are insufficient for obtaining salvation. For them, it's not a matter of there being irredeemable crimes, it's a matter of all crimes being irredeemable, and redemption being entirely out of the hands of the sinner, who can ultimately only pray and have faith. That's something going substantially further than just saying "some" acts are unredeemable.

... but yeah, when it comes right down to it, I do hold there are certain acts for which redemption cannot be obtained. Forgiveness, perhaps, but not redemption. It should be sought, should you commit one of them, if you wish to be anything but a beast that should be put down, but there are things once done that cannot be undone, and for which even eternity is not sufficient to repay. There are scales, once tilted, that cannot be rebalanced. It's a bar considerably lower than what's attributed the OT divinities.

It'd be pretty easy to change my mind regarding the christian god, though. Just throw out the OT and excise the nastier parts of the NT, maybe chunk out or better define the omnimax related stuff, and I'd have a pretty glowing opinion of the critter's formulation. I'm already pretty down with Streaker J, as things go. Relatively few problems with the christ part of christianity, it's just the rest of it that sticks in the proverbial craw. Unsurprisingly, the atrocities would bother me far less if they weren't there :V

There's a whole word for that, actually, though I've forgotten what it is. Rule by random allotment is one of those proposed governance systems you occasionally hear talked about. There's even the rare implementation on smaller-scale stuff -- I've heard it used in factory work and whatnot, iirc, shuffling managers/PR folks/etc. at random, with something like group veto or impeachment options if the critter thrown into the lion's maw buggers up too badly.

Conceptually, if you're dealing with a population that is at least roughly meet the same minimums in regards to qualification and vested interest, and you've got some means of post-ascension quality control, you can just throw some random tosser in charge and it'll turn out decently enough (on the net, if not on any particular term). Don't recall anyone's trying it on a large scale, though.

Probably something fairly old or very specialized. That's actually a word I've seen used before, but it was from something archaic (or trying to sound it, anyway). It does look like it's still a word in use, but you're pretty much never going to see it used practically outside of the medical fields and even then pretty much never in actual conversation.

Yeah, more or less. There actually are still ones of the more modern design that just use wind power alone to grind stuff, though. Most do use turbines in conjunction with modern equipment to do the same thing, better, but you have the occasional holdout/inherited bit or eccentric.

Still, seeing the spinny wind things doing whatever is common enough to not really be notable in state-side farmland, at least from what I've seen. One of those big ol' european monstrosities would be, but folks 'round here generally don't go that far ham, heh.

I'll take the icecream. Ponies are stinky expensive poop machines, and I'd rather not >_>