Bay 12 Games Forum

The obvious solution is to sell your soul to whatever higher beings you can find, in exchange for the ability to create and manipulate napalm.

You, uh. You mean, like. Fingers? And your brain? Because we totally create and manipulate napalm now. With like, tools and chemistry and shit. I'm not sure we'd need to sell our soul to continue being able to do so?

Unless you're saying our primordial ancestors cut a deal with Baalzeebub or YWHW whatever for the ability to have their ancestors manufacture a better fire, and our entire civilization is now a souless pyromanic husk?

[snip]

Yeah, that bit at the bottom was why I mentioned text macros. Press a button, pop out pre-typed message -- and if the game's actually worth a flip insofar as keyboard support goes, it'll have multiple variables you can fit in that fill out the information you need to get across as necessary.

I mentioned Infantry, which I played for quite a few years strictly without microphones; its macro system was pretty robust, so you could do something like "%N is at %C, assaulting the enemy position. I %O see the enemy objective carrier" where %N would fill in your name, %C would give the coordinates you're at, and %O would spit out a yes/no (can/cannot) response to a objective in line of sight query. You'd have a handful of macros like that based on different situations, and likely multiple sets of macros you could load depending on class or role you were filling. Took a lil'bit of setting up, but it was very effective and fluid once you got it going.

There was a decently long list of stuff like that, and I'd call it nearing inexcusable (if not entirely so, but it'd certainly be highly disappointing) if PS2 -- or any modern multiplayer game, really -- doesn't have something similar. Game design has been such that including stuff like that has been a known good thing for quite a while; Infantry came out in '99, and I'm quite sure it's not the earliest to use such things (Earliest was probably MUDs of some sort, really.). General point being it's quite possible, maybe even easy (in a relative sense) to facilitate fast communication without needing a mike, providing the game itself provides the tools to do so... and even if it doesn't, to a degree, but an in-game system that's built to take advantage of it can massively improve functionality.

Frumple wouldn't mind attempting a cross-timezone tea drinking. I don't think I have any mint tea, though.*

I do think we've got a couple of mint plants somewhere in the yard, but I've never actually tried brewing straight from the plant, so to speak. Have access to another pantry that's fond of fancy tea, as it's sometimes referred to in this area, who might have some mint tea, thinking on it.

*Actually, I'm pretty sure I've never even had mint tea before. I'm only so-so fond of mint, so the thought of trying the tea never really crossed the mind.

Keyed by this:

Okay, fine. I guess I'm back where I started then.

The following applies to the general discussion so far, though.

Possibly the worser part of the yin/yang thing presented is that from what I've seen mentioned in here, so far, it's been pretty much completely ignoring the fact that the concept system in question thoroughly asserts that everyone is thoroughly mixed in terms of their yin/yang balance, and having an excess of either (Such as a highly or entirely yang focused male) makes you an unbalanced (which is a negative thing) individual, and that the most optimal or desired mix of energies isn't actually that different between the physical sexes in any fundamental way. Seeking to be strongly aligned with either side is generally seen as either undesirable or somewhat strongly unusual.

From what I understand of th'philosophy, such as it is, it's not quite so one-dimensional as Trollestia's been presenting. It definitely has some issues when it interacts with western viewpoints, though, as they tend to have strong negative connotations in regard to yin energy that is either much weaker or outright nonexistent in the actual concept system. A yin male isn't a bad thing, nor is a yang female; at most they're slightly unusual. E: Got one of the terms reversed. Damned western linguistic bias making me have trouble remembering yang is male

Though that's within the systems themselves, mind. I'd still happily say that assigning gender leaning to either side is basically bullshit, mostly because of the whole "gender is a cultural construct" thing. At most, particular culture's gender roles would have yin or yang leanings, but the physiological aspects just don't really have enough influence to necessitate a strong yang or yin presence across individuals.

Iirc, you need the colonization tech or whatev' (you get to it via the moon exploitation line or whatever), then something that can build (a different colony) within the 30 day supply limit of your warp tech. Yes, that means you can't colonize anything except the moon until you've got warp.

Once you've got all that, you build the colony on one of your existence production-capable colonies/outposts (like Earth), target what you want to colonize in the lil'pop up thing that pops up, and it'll mostly do the rest.

Can you melt anything with said mint tea?

... might depend on the time frame you're talking about. Given enough time, most liquids can eventually break down solids, from what I understand.

But, yeah, tea stains. That kinda' indicates it's doing some not-quite-benign things on the chemical level

"Florida happily displays its proclivity toward being full of racist fucks, again" was my initial reaction, though that's obviously influenced by being in the part of the state that really is full of racist fucks (especially in the town I'm currently mostly stuck in, which on last census -- or possibly the one before that, so it might have like... quintupled* since then -- had an african american population of one. Not one percent. One.).

Actually reading through the article, my reaction is still mostly that, but there's some weird stuff going on too, apparently, such as the decision being influenced by provisions of the no-child-left-behind act and the apparent fact that other groupings (such as socioeconomic factors, or at least poverty) is also included (leading to the question of why the hell you need the racial profiling, then?). Still pretty damned reprehensible, but at least there's some nominal other factors involved.

*Which would still leave that demographic in the single digits.

E: Also, the florida numbers appear to be considerably less racist (if that's even a sliding scale thing at all, and not just binary) than the virginia one. Congratulations, Virginia! You've achieved the accomplishment no one actually wants: Out bigoting Florida.