Bay 12 Games Forum

For f*ck's sake, why does everything need to be so loud and obnoxious now-a-days?

Because apparently the trick to pushing drugs useless trinkets is to be really loud about it, and if people aren't buying obviously the way to connect to them is to be even more fucking annoying so they'll spend money shut you up!* Or at least something along those lines is what goes through the head of the bastard whoresons people (who pay the people) in marketing. I guess.

*In reality it's more like assault charges are about the only thing stopping us from  hunting these buggers down and feeding the frakkers their tongues. Or maybe it's just me, I'unno. I've reached the point where I hate TV (and mainstream ad-supported media in general) with an absolute frothing passion.

PMs are pretty neat, yeah. They run off Paradox instead of mana, which is... hrm.

Base rundown of paradox: Casting spells generates paradox. There's no (hard) limit to how much paradox you can have. However, the more paradox you have over certain thresholds, the more likely things will go tits up and you'll blow yourself to kingdom come, or achieve something functionally equivalent to that.

Moreover, most of your spells power (and occasionally other things, like duration, etc.) scale with paradox -- the higher your paradox, the more damage you do... and the more likely your spell's going to explode in your face instead of the enemy's. Paradox magi (and their more physically inclined kin, the temporal wardens) are therefor all about risk management, right down to their primary resource. Do you keep paradox low to avoid potential mishaps or let it scale on up and blow everything away (including, occasionally, yourself) with paradox boosted doomspells? A happy medium, perhaps? It's up to you, and how lucky you're feeling that day

PM talents also get pretty interesting (they're in the chronomancer metaclass for a reason ) but I'll leave details as to that for if Dr.F decides to run one.

Unusual cognitive processes can often benefit many lines of study. Fresh mind, subtly different set of physiological cognitive underpinnings, etc., so forth, so on. All things being equal, having another sentient that genuinely thinks (in a neurophysical sense, i.e. the wiring is actually different) differently brings with it the potential to benefit many endeavors. No guarantee, of course, but the possibility's there.

Annd somewhat ninja'd.

Only thing man was not meant to do is what man can't.  Or possibly what man decides not to do. Only thing dictating mankind's actions is the laws of physics and our own bloody selves.

As for the cloning... be neat if it works. Doubtful it'll go anywhere or if there's any general benefit from having the lesser sophant around again (for either group, because if there's anything our innate xenophobia wants to have around it's an actual other species ), but hey, one way to find out! The eternal experimental endeavor: Poke it with a stick and see what happens.

No one here's ever watched Farscape?

A little bit! Like. A decade ago.

... I don't remember any of it. I only vaguely remember the image of that dude in the bondage getup. I think there's a few good sized Xover fics involving it, actually. But I've never read them.

Da fuq was that? Buncha girls in swimsuits with airplane legs? With magic?
Every time I think I hit the weirdness limit, I find something new.

Oh gods, please don't tempt people to one-up Strike Witches. It's not a difficult task but the further people go along those lines the closer the thread gets to being locked.

I forget if SW had any redeeming aspects, t'be honest. Mostly yuri-flavored fanservice/fetish appeasement was my initial appraisal, but I never really watched much so... maybe it got better. The world's made worse base material worthwhile, so... I'unno.

... honestly, I could kinda' see those two chillin' together or something. They're both actually pretty darn smart (from what I recall) and, despite some impressive cultural differences, more or less agreeable on a lot of points. Then again, slide some highlander into that and bam, modern day conan meets conan. What the deus happens from there I have no damned idea, but...

Alternately, just do a cross-temporal/dimensional changling swap and see what sort of thing nurture does to their natures, huhuhu...

There's also the problem of things like insurance benefits. There's no reason not to extend filing jointly, but you don't want five people marrying someone for the health insurance.

Why... why not? If a group wants to join together legally for financial benefits, I don't necessarily see an issue with that. Plenty of people today still marry (or stay married) largely because of the economic aspect... and as long as the economic and legal parts are so tightly (and exclusively, in areas with asymmetric civil unions) entwined with marriage, I don't see that changing.

I actually know a few people that have married basically strictly because of health benefits -- hell, if it wasn't because of that and a few related things, my mother and current step-father would have never married. He didn't want to remarry out of respect to his previous [deceased] wife, she was cool with it. Outside of the legal aspects, their relationship didn't change a damn bit because of the existence of a piece of toilet paper legally recognizing their relationship. Seen plenty of cases where people stayed married (often despite pursuing relationships outside of the marriage and/or ceasing to cohabit) for the legal or economic benefits, especially when there's children involved.

Well, some rights have to be doled out (child raising, visit right in hospitals, that kind of things.)

Revised guardianship/dependence laws would cover the former, formally and fully implementing living wills would cover the latter. From what I've seen, marriage on the legal side actually complicates things more than a more modular, if you will, set of systems would. Redistributing the legal aspects of marriage is a solvable problem. Not trivially solvable, because the legal aspect is a bit of a mess from what I understand (due largely to square peg-round hole things related to the issues of attaching so many legal riders to a social status), but solvable.

From my mothers experiences, i can second that polygamy rarely works in practice. It doesn't help that it rarely works both ways either, at least so far.

*scratches head* From what I've seen, you could replace poly- with mono- in that sentence and still have an accurate statement (possibly even a more accurate one). Depends to a degree as to what heuristic you use to measure a relationship, though.

About the only remotely genuine argument I've seen related to opposition of polyamorous marriages has been legal. It's true that adding additional variables would make the legal aspect of marriage that much more complicated. It's a issue that could be solved, methinks, but it'd take a lot of work and further complicate an already annoyingly complicated process.

Now, t'me that just means it's probably a good idea to get around to reworking our legal concept of marriage, but eh.