The Old Hack

Okay, I admit that 'Battleship Top' has 'tank top' beat hollow. Now I wonder about the possibilities in a Baby Flat Top shirt.

Actually I think that if you refitted an actual tank engine to haul a train, it would do a pretty good job. And if you kept the turret and the main armament, it would be at least a little bit intimidating for potential train robbers.

It has 2 move a turn at basic level. 3 if you have completed Magellan's Expedition. 4 if you have invented Nuclear Power. (Don't ask me how this works. When you reach Nuclear Power, all your ships get 1 extra move. I do not know how you install a nuclear power plant on a trireme, I just know it gets the extra move.) In Civilisation 2, Range is a moot point because it assumes the strategic level, which is to say that each unit actually represents several of the vessel in question and that when you move to attack, you are engaged in combat. Certain weapons have First Strike, which is to say they are allowed to strike and do damage before the enemy can strike back. The equivalent of a PT would be able to carry up to 3 Cruise Missiles. These have First Strike and each will be guaranteed to eliminate one Trireme unit before it would even get to attack. A PT unit would be Modern and would therefore have either 30 or 40 HP. A Trireme is Ancient and would only have 10. Even when engaged in combat, a Trireme with its minimal attack power would only be able to do 1 point of damage if it hit, which would be a tall assumption. The PT unit, on the other hand, would do from 12 to 18 damage with each hit and would hit nearly every time, eliminating one trireme per hit. Given enough Triremes and time, the PT unit would still sink in the end. But it would be a tall assumption. It would presuppose a PT unit willing to hold still while it was surrounded by Triremes (stacking them would be a really bad idea as this would allow the PT to spread its damage over multiple Triremes, potentially sinking a dozen or more of them per hit). And in the end, they could win only by wearing it down. The RL equivalent would be that it continued to fight until it had run out of fuel and ammunition, which just doesn't strike me as the ideal naval combat tactic. ETA: This was a rather heavily modded version of Civ 2 and I am reconstructing this from memory. Any deviations from vanilla Civ 2 are entirely on my head and I apologise in advance if I have made egregious mistakes in that direction. Thank you.

Whenever I see 'tank top', I keep thinking of tank turrets. It makes me envision girls and women wearing the turret of an Abrams tank complete with cannon. I guess it could reduce catcalling if the catcaller had to live in fear of getting hit with APERS ammunition once the victim got tired of him.

Even so, I am glad to hear it has cleared up for now. I don't know, maybe you are allergic to Election Days :/

That sounds depressingly like I am supposed to act like an adult. Could I take a rain check, please?

Nonsense. Name even one other Pharaoh who used a laser pointer.

Yeah. I hope you recover from it soon.

Oh what lovely havoc would ensue. Mind you, their weaponised 'Dew already successfully turned poor Jinx into the Hulk, so they are probably headed in that direction.

On a sidenote, your avatar just made me realise that Doc and Roger have yet to invent a shrinking ray. About jinks level: maybe EGS needs a jinks warning level. Sort of like that national alert level with the weird colours, divided into Low, Low to Medium, Mid, Mid to High, and Hijinks.

Not until you pointed it out. Maybe he is contemplating trying to convince the grandparents of the advantages of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations?

It doesn't really sound strange to me. I strongly suspect that depression may be linked to other problems and interact with them synergistically. For example, I also suffer from SAD (season-affective disorder) which means I tend to feel drained of energy in the darker half of the year. Relatedly, my late mother was an alcoholic on top of being depressive, which certainly wouldn't have helped her depression any. Add the fact that I am all but certain that she also suffered from undiagnosed Diabetes 2 and it is not surprising that she died at a rather early age.

As a depressive I can say that this is true. Unfortunately, a deep depressive episode also all too often saps one of the will and energy one needs to get moving. It may readily turn into a can opener-inside-the-can kind of problem where moving yourself around would help but you simply cannot make yourself move. I try to compensate by making a point of getting at least some exercise when I have the surplus for it, but I still experience times where I can barely make myself leave my bed and where anything beyond that is simply out of the question.

The Moderator: That is because I stated I would take it up in a separate thread elsewhere when I have had the time to create the initial post. Please drop the topic for now, it is not appropriate for this thread.

Back to the movies. As far as innocuous movies go, isn't there something like sequences of kittens and puppies playing with one another around? I am not saying that it would be impossible to find someone who wouldn't be offended by that, you probably could, but at least this would be in the category of 'most likely to just be ignored and outvoted by everybody else.' Also, the age factor might not be as important. I would watch the crap out of a movie like that, at least. Then again, I have often been called a big kid.

Remember that in both above cases, either insanity or a low artificial measure of intelligence may once again be tarring with too wide a brush. (Come to think of it, the societal measure of 'sanity' is artificial, too. It is not too long ago that homosexuality was judged a form of insanity.) Let us say that one is outraged by some particular politician. By implying that the politician in question is of low intelligence or questionable sanity, one is also effectively saying that ALL others who fail to live up to society's not always reasonable standards of intelligence or sanity are similarly worthy of scorn and contempt. Instead, one might call said politician 'corrupt', 'heedless', 'uncaring', 'vile', 'driven by greed and malice', 'narrow-minded' or even 'a contemptible and disgusting heap of mouldering taurine refuse that spreads its repellent and poisonous fumes everywhere it happens to leave its trail of slime in its heedless search for adulation and self-affirmation' and not have implicated anyone innocent at all, with the possible exception of perfectly innocuous bulls who after all cannot help what they produce from their rear ends.

The Moderator: Please reserve any debate for the upcoming discussion thread. I will attempt to clarify the reasons for forum policy there.

The Moderator: I'll give a brief discussion of the problem here and will later on make a longer post discussing the issues in a separate thread. The issues will be up for good-faith debate there. In general, it is a bad thing to call someone 'crazy', 'retarded', 'mentally ill' and the like simply because it carries too far ranging implications. As an example, criminals such as mass shooters are often dismissed as 'crazy' or 'mentally ill.' One problem is that such language tars the subject with far too wide a brush. There are many mentally ill people who suffers from illnesses that, while impairing, nonetheless do not make them prone to take up a gun and commit spree killings. In fact, I am one such. I suffer from clinical depression and anxiety disorder. However, neither condition impels me towards violence. In spite of this, referring to shooters as 'mentally ill' nonetheless conflates me and several other friends of mine with such criminals. This is not merely unfair but also dangerously inaccurate as it causes fear of and distrust against a large number of harmless or even vulnerable people. A similar misuse might be to refer to hit-and-run drivers as 'motorists' -- they might fit into the category but it would be massively unfair to the very large majority of innocuous drivers on roads across the world.1 In short, it's safer and politer just not to impute people you don't like with mental illness. There are numerous ways to express dislike that do not implicate vulnerable and innocent groups of people. In fact, it can be a good creative exercise to try to come up with some new and different ones. 1(With the possible exception of rush hour drivers in central Copenhagen. Pedestrians take their lives in their hands near these.)

The Moderator: CritterKeeper is correct. Please don't use that word here. Strive to be as civil as possible during discussion here. Good intentions count for much but they cannot cover it all.

Certain sorts of economical decisions. Here's a couple from Danish health services: Hospitals need to be very clean. This is expensive. So, ways to save money on hygiene have been implemented. One, by having cleaning done by lowest bidder, which inevitably results in corners being cut. Two, if you pack patients more tightly together, there are fewer rooms to keep clean. Of course, the implementation of these two 'fixes' results in more frequent contagions and infections that have a much easier time of jumping from patient to patient (who definitionally already have lowered or overworked immune systems), which means recovery times have gone through the roof, more patients die and increasing risk of the appearance of superimmune strains of infection that our antibiotics cannot cope with. The amount of extra money spent or lost because of this exceeds the amount of money 'saved' on hygiene by so many factors that it isn't even funny. Another good one: the epidemics section on the biggest hospital in Copenhagen. It was once set up to handle up to two hundred patients at a time and keep them all in isolation. This was judged too expensive for something that was essentially 'only a precaution'. It was successively cut to a hundred beds, fifty, twenty-five and then eight. It should be noted that expanding the epidemics section again in case of need will be quite time consuming due to not only the special equipment required but also the training of personnel involved. Therefore, our biggest hospital is quite well set up to handle epidemics as long as it will only involve very small epidemics. Epidemics are small, right?

Well, to be fair to Dan's universe, its time setting is nebulous and uncertain both as far as date and technology go. It is a little amusing how the series in the space of in-story months have advanced from land line phones through mobile phones with rather expensive SMS plans to smartphones. But if we can swallow that, we can probably also swallow a video store surviving past the heyday of its medium.

*groans* *snatches list away from JML's evil twin /me* *makes addition to list, muttering and growling* *passes list back to /melooney*

This is not an insignificant problem. Psychiatric medication can be extremely chancy at times, after all. Do you have no-one to consult with who could help find alternatives to the Zoloft? Or is it that you do not wish to resume medication after your experiences with the Zoloft?

I am compelled to say that I feel Ranma got precisely what they deserved for doing something this idiotic and egotistical.

Well I am the moderator here so I declare that all health issues are welcome to be discussed here. So there. Also, it is not a 'versus'. This is not a competition or a one-downsmanship exercise. It is about people who want to destress themselves by sharing their concerns, giving advice to one another, expressing sympathy and occasionally venting about incompetent medical care and personnel. All of which is helpful for everyone here as it lets them let out steam. Anyway, I hope your headache gets better soon. Take care.