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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

The Old Hack

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Posts posted by The Old Hack


  1. On 4/3/2016 at 6:45 PM, Scotty said:

    I meant being in the process of resetting made them vulnerable, like they're gathering up all their knowledge and undoing any magic stuff they'd done over the years, their guard would be likely be down during this time, and even at the minimum of 500 years, Pandora would be more powerful and quite possibly capable of messing up their reset.

    Personally I favour the notion of a distraction. They set up their deaths, then discover or are told that someone important to them is in dire trouble. Do nothing or die improperly... the Devil and the deep blue sea...


  2. 1 hour ago, Sweveham said:

    Becoming more persuasive through drinking alcohol is really silly, I really don't understand what the devs where thinking there. As anybody knows, you tend to get less persuasive when drunk. Usually when you are trying to persuade someone through alcohol it's by getting them drunk, not yourself.

    This is one of my strong personal dislikes: when alcohol is somehow made out to be something funny or positive without bad effects. I am not commenting on Dan here -- he is merely portraying an element of the game -- but it is a trope that never fails to irritate me.


  3. 1 hour ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Flurries this morning, heavy enough to reduce visibility.  There was still some snow lying in the shade of my building when I came home in the early evening, and a few little pockets of blowing snow flurries during the drive.  Going back out now, to come home late, so no idea what to expect weather-wise.

    If the snowfall gets too heavy, look for a nice blue phone booth to take cover in!


  4. 11 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    As a general rule never trust any spellchecker with any name. Every time I've done that I've had to go back and fix it later.

    Oh my God yes. I still remember an infamous annual report from the Danish nuclear test station at Risoe. At the time it was led by a physicist named Dr. Hiller.

    Due to incautious use of the spell checker, his name was spelled 'Hitler' throughout the entire report. I am morally certain that the poor man did not deserve that.


  5. 9 minutes ago, SeriousJupiter said:

    Very well. I was only trying to amuse you all with something only the readers of EGS would get, and I trust you understand that I would never have done that on any other day of the year. I apologize, and I will edit my post at once.

    Thank you. I may have come across too harshly, and if so, I sincerely apologise myself. Unfortunately, I have poor experiences that make me take a dim view of April Fools pranks. Moreover, as moderator it is my duty to read all posts made simply to keep track of what is going on, and that can be a bit overwhelming at times. If some of these posts suddenly appear in gibberish, it makes my job harder, humorous intent or not. *sigh* And just today, I wasn't in the best shape to handle that. Once again, I am sorry, too.


  6. 1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    Really?  I thought wasteland justice was more like "I've done wrong, but I'm going to shoot you and tell people I shot you because you were the one doing wrong."

    No no no no no. Wasteland justice is, "We've all done wrong, but the special effects team and the director is on my side, so I am gonna kick your behinds."


  7. So, my friend Jens is still struggling with terminal cancer in his liver. After fighting it for almost two years now with various ups and downs -- and incidentally now being in a very very small group of 5% that has survived that kind of cancer for that long -- his doctor basically hands him his death sentence based on a telephone diagnosis and two months old tests that the doctor has apparently extrapolated from. Or possibly extracted from his rectum.

    After spending days in misery he gets in touch with his other physician who strenuously disagrees with the diagnosis. Yes, Jens has a new problem. But no, the other doctor has trouble seeing how it is related to his cancer. Impending liver failure carries certain symptoms such as jaundice, black rimmed eyes, digestive issues -- none of which Jens currently shows. Unless it is possible for these symptoms to take a holiday to the Bermudas or something, his diagnosis is at best incomplete or at worst totally screwed up. AND YET THE MORON WHO MADE IT STILL GAVE IT TO JENS WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST HESITATION OR AWARENESS OF FALLIBILITY.

    Excuse me a minute. I need to go check if murder is still illegal in Denmark even if it is a quack who really really deserves it.

    ...it is. Darn. *sighs*


  8. 2 hours ago, SeriousJupiter said:

    U quelrja quyuch tulyuhhyumc, jlutemc umja amyuselmc? Yu ryupo cho ceamja eh chug. :D

    Vag colyueacri, quo sum'g pmequ hel calo chug choi fubom'g byucyugoja cho EGS furh eh cho quelrja hel somgalyuoc. Choi nui meg fubo u reg eh loucemc geh byucyug, vag choi coon geh pmequ ceno chotc uveag chyuc cyujo (cho nutoc fubot ckoraveepc, yunnelgurc fubot jyuhholomg laroc hlen Umsyuomgc) umja Yu vog choi seno geh byucyug oboli mequ umja chom geh roulm nelo, oyuchol vi wyuogri evcolbot el semgusgot DGB. Chug yuc, yuh DGB obom pmequc uveag cho echol cyujo eh choyul quelrja.

    The Moderator: Humorous though the intent here may have been, there will be no further postings in Uryumoco, Klingon, Bocce or any other made up languages here. These forums are made for posts in English. Further such 'pranks' as these will be treated as spam and will be deleted without notice and the user warned.

    ~tOH.


  9. I have always had an odd love-hate relationship with Karma meters. I like the idea and it does add variation to the games, but sometimes the choices are so STUPID. For example, in classic KotOR where you play a force sensitive character you keep getting choices between Light and Dark Side. In one situation you meet a man being mugged by gangsters. You can elect to save the man (Light Side), ignore the event (Dark Side) or kill the muggers because they irritate you (Dark Side.) Okay, no problem. But afterwards you can either help the man a bit more (Light Side) or extort all his money from him (Dark Side.) Er, what?

    Let's say you were trying for a Darth Vader style character feel. I can totally see him kill some muggers because they irritated him. But can I see him taking the victim's money afterwards? No. Why not? Because it is TOO SODDING PETTY. It is so much beneath Vader's dignity that it is ridiculous. And that is the problem with Karma meters. They all too often oversimplify, or worse yet, do evil for evil's own sake, purely for the muhahahaaa of it. If I play a villain, I'd like my evil to at least make sense.

    This can also be a problem with Good, but in my experience Evil tends to be the more egregious of the two. (Or Light and Dark Side, or in the case of Mass Effect, Blue and Red.) Sigh.


  10. 6 hours ago, Aura Guardian said:

    That just summed up my concerns with True Pacifist runs in games not built to accommodate them.

    Sadly, Aliens: Colonial Marines had a Pacifist mode. Now, you may reasonably ask what a Pacifist mode is doing in a sodding FIRST PERSON SHOOTER. I would like to know, too. The sad fact is that if you set the game to lowest difficulty you could just run through all the levels. The aliens and other enemies would all be so sluggish that they didn't react to you unless you actually shot them.


  11. On 3/28/2016 at 7:15 PM, Jaynomer said:

    I doubt your everyday Iron Age Italian had many rules regarding grammar.

    Trust me, they had lots of rules regarding grammar or their language just wouldn't work. The problem is that formal grammatical rules are an attempt to describe how a given language works, not actual rules for how it works -- and too many people put the cart in front of the horse and think that they are the latter.

    Since language is constantly and extensively mutable, it follows that grammar must be as well. The trouble arises when people treat grammatical rules as ironclad, which they really aren't. The best metaphor I can think of is to compare grammar to a map of a language. But the 'landscape' the map depicts is one subject to constant change and prominent features keep appearing, vanishing or shifting about. And if there is conflict between map and reality, grammaticians who insist that it is reality that is wrong will all too often find themselves walking off metaphorical cliffs.


  12. On 3/26/2016 at 5:57 AM, hkmaly said:

    In most human societies, the rules are NOT followed to the letter either, especially in the "Nemo iudex sine actor" cases (there is no judge without the prosecutor - or how you translate it).

    That is precisely my point. If there is no formal Immortal judicial system and most Immortals can only be arsed to act when there is a clear violation of the rules, what, then, is there to stop Pandora? Certainly no judge, prosecutor or jury.


  13. 1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

    Yes.

    Jerry doesn't consider the immortal rules to be sufficient to judge behaviour. He don't think that just because Helena and Demetrius didn't broke the rules they behaved correctly.

    It is so in every human society I have ever heard of. They all have rules and these may all too often be treated in a manner that follows them to the letter while utterly breaking them in spirit.


  14. 22 hours ago, Arcanimus said:

    Unless the bullet was made of pitifully soft material, that is.

    EAT .44 MAGNUM MARSHMALLOWS! :demonicduck:

    Regardless, the plot in a first person shooter is almost always laughable, even when roleplaying elements are added to the point of over-saturation.

    Such as the plot of the first Half-Life game. Extremely popular FPS, but the plot is somewhat... incoherent at best. Ross Scott's excellent serial Freeman's Mind spends a good deal of time making fun of some of its worst inconsistencies. (If you should happen to try it, the first three episodes are the slowest due to basically being the very long trailer of the game, but after that it speeds up and never slows down till the end. Be warned: it is LONG. Also, you may risk laughing. A lot.)


  15. 2 hours ago, Scotty said:

    That's one of those things that only Dan can be sure of. As it is, we know the high magic levels in Moperville is capable of drawing in those sensitive to magic, so really Sirleck wouldn't have to do anything to bring vampires in, the high ambient energy is doing that for him.

    A completely random thought of mine. I have for a while been wondering if Sirleck has a disgruntled ex out there named Madamleck.