Bay 12 Games Forum

Enjoyment can come from very simple things, Cthu. Often through ways that don't really take much effort at all.

Beyond that, the only one who gets to measure if a person is enjoying their life is that person, really. If a person is content with putting out little effort, then more power to 'em. Many paths through samsara, etc., so forth, so on.

It's mindsets like that which cause things like this to happen in the first place. FYI before everyone high-horses on the I'm the protector of your privacy and freedom spiel none of that junk protects my little girl when an extremist decides to bring an explosive to a public event.

*scratches head* About the only thing that actually does protect in that situation is to not have public events. Period. Secret to everyone, there's not actually a way to stop that sort of thing if someone genuinely wants to go through with it. There's always gaps. There's always a way to exploit them to do harm. Physical protection is inefficient and generally quite imperfectly effective. It has its place, and a certain degree is reasonable and up to a point worth the cost, but at its core this sort of thing is not a question of security. It's a question of motivations, values... what causes people to do things like that and how to demotivate them from doing it without substantial negative effects. And physical demotivation... deterrents, security, etc., so forth, so on has... thresholds. Points of decreasing efficiency. Points where going beyond a certain degree of implementation backfires and increases motivation. I won't go so far as to say the states are there yet on the domestic front, but... there's a lot more to be pissed off about than there was a decade ago, I'd say. Especially considering how at odds invasive security in general is to a good chunk of the American ethos.

But yeah, it's going to depend on what happens next on the civil liberty front. Given what's happened since 9/11 and how the fear culture has been propagated and exploited, though... it's understandable that folks are kinda' preemptively worried. Hopefully the reaction will be sane and effective.

More of a crossover thread thing, really. But seriously, Tau don't push too hard on the "when possible" front and are perfectly happy to come in and murder everything until they stop fighting back. Federation would not be happy with them at all in terribly short order. Tau's motto is more "Tau or else." Which, being fair, does make them comparatively peaceful in relation to most of the other WH40k factions.

That, uh. That's actually another one there's a Xover fanfic written for. Tau and Feds didn't get along. I mean, they sorta' tried and initially the feds were like, "Hey, cool!" But then exactly what the Tau do and how they work (They're pretty damn close to biological Borg in terms of methodology.) came out and suddenly the federation was no longer quite so enthusiastic.

E: Pretty sure it was this one, actually. Shorter than I normally read, but a alright piece. If I'm remembering the right one.

In hell, initiative pays in prongs. Hope you didn't need that part for sitting.

Yeesss... some. Only two hundred million or so. Seventh most spoken language in the world, or thereabouts.

Somewhat of an upgrade, yes.

Are we assuming that they're both familiar with the game?

I'm relatively sure with Creed involve the rules would quickly be come irrelevant.

And yeah, WH40k has something vaguely related to chess. Called something different, though.

Haha, site nothing. I wrote a pretty terrible poem that actually got its crappy self published in a fairly major (at the time, for a while) poetry anthology. You may now bask in the glory of the rising 1-up'd.

To the extent it counts (I don't remember how canon they are) one of the KotR games has a character that did some jedi hunting as a bit of background fluff and talks about it a wee titch, though I forget how much at this point (Having never played the KotR game in question and only reading it via LP). Only thing I remember is him talking about playing sabacc in his head and generally keeping his head on static mode, so to speak. A pretty standard sort of passive/active defense against psionics throughout fiction, actually. Apparently it screwed with jedi senses to some degree or another, particularly the mental stuff.

As for the clone thing, iirc (and this is pretty murky, so I may be misremembering), cloned stormtroopers were mentioned in one of the books involving the Sun Crusher, during the bit before a major recruiting world was nova'd. So yeah, cloning tech both lasted and was used pretty long after the original trilogy timeline. Gods know there were enough Palpatine clones to get sick of it.