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I really do fail to see how white people voting for the BNP or UKIP is any different from black people voting for Obama.

Good gravy, Boyd, this really takes the prize

I actually saw this!

Me and a friend decided to see a movie, since nothing else was going on that particular day, and I go to the movies like once a year or something. I'm such an anti-cineaste.

Anyhow, I've always looked down on Trekkies as the geekiest of the geeky, and what I know of Star Trek is confined to a couple of names and phrases.

This being said, I kind of enjoyed the movie
Of course, I first had to discard all hopes and ambitions of actually seeing a decent, serious, plot-driven movie; and instead quickly accept the fact that this was just a big heap of pompous, patriotic, self-satisfied clichées and random special effects.   
The plot-holes were so grand in their absurdity that it actually amused me. All-in-all, a worthwhile experience

Nacho, amigo, he just wrote he's been to a doctor several times!

I doubt it's an allergy, as that wouldn't be affected at all by antibiotics. You probably had some sort of infection, and the antibiotics got rid of that particular one, but also weakened your immune system enough to allow for a new infection at the same spot.

Some people tend to be sickly for months and months.
If your doctor has done all the usual tests and they came back negative, all you can do is ingest loads and loads of c-vitamins, and drink water.

I'm very convinced that we will have severe problems with AI-robots in the future.

I know that this is a very unoriginal concept, and one that is featured in most of the sci-fi movies and novels since the sixties, but nevertheless I think it's inevitable.  
We strive to make creatures in our image, just like God did with us. Sooner or later, our creations will cause problems, just like we've done.

Oh and please join my sect.

Right wing extremists has advanced throughout Europe, along with Christian parties and, thankfully, Green parties (although to a lesser degree).

It's very sad to see nationalist parties gain popularity, when the majority of their members are pure racists and often sentenced for hate-related crimes.

I'm getting gradually less intrigued by the brand new communication/networking systems. It's like everyone has this urge to be online everywhere, all the time, to read and share everything at once, to be in perpetual contact with everyone you know, and everyone they know, and get updated in real time about everyone's opinions and moods and states and emoticons or whatnot.

Is it really our ambition to develop a hive mind? Is that our destiny as humans?

Leave your laptop at home, turn off your mobile phone and go for a long solitary walk. It's bound to do you good.

I think your background works pretty well. It has a very clean and functional retro-style, even though it's not very realistic. I would certainly accept it as a shop, albeit a rather sparsely stocked one.

Darth's ol' curiosity shop is definitely one of the better shop interiors I've ever seen pixelated for a game background. I also think it's one of your finest pieces, Darth.

It always struck me as odd that Sonny started out with black hair, then bleached it for his undercover work at the end of PQ1 and never returned to his original hair color. I don't remember any of his colleagues ever mentioning it in the later games, though I couldn't imagine something as metrosexual as bleaching your hair passing without remark in a macho cop environment.

That's a hilarious observation, GarageGothic.

I've had some unanswered questions floating in my mind lately, but now I can only come up with two of them.

The first one is:
In the Simpsons Episode Lisa the beauty queen, Bart (who is, for some reason, supposed to be an expert on beauty and make-overs) confidently offers his advice on how to turn Lisa into a potential winner of the beauty pageant. He finishes off with something like "and then I will teach her the ancient art of petting".
Is this a joke that doesn't translate well, or am I just hearing wrong, but to me it sounds really disturbing that Bart would teach his sister the art of petting. I guess this incestuous concept would be funny in a South Park kind of way, but in a Simpsons episode it doesn't really make any sense to me.

The other one is:
In Led Zeppelin's All of my love, Robert Plant sings "Proud Aryan one word, my will to sustain". What is this supposed to mean? To my knowledge, Plant isn't a racist, or a neo-nazi for that matter, and I doubt he had the original Indo-Iranian meaning in mind. A weird place to find the word "Aryan" either way.

Any thoughts?

I've actually already changed to an unlimited (and significantly faster) cable subscription, and cancelled my mobile internet before the 14-days trial period.
Not that I'm a downloading freak, or much of an online player, I just don't enjoy the restrictions.
Thanks for your input everyone!

So I've lacked Internet for the last month or so (hence my low activity here) but last week I ordered mobile internet, so now I'm fit for fight again. It's the kind of connection you get with a USB stick, and then you can be online virtually everywhere.

But now I'm having second thoughts, as I read the small print under the terms and conditions. It said that I have a 5gb downloading allowance. Now, I don't download very much, so at first I didn't consider it a problem. I also don't play any games at the moment, but if I were, would that be possible? How much does playing online count in terms of downloading?
I've searched the web for information on this, and so far I've understood that basically everything, even streaming, counts as downloading, even if you're not saving it anywhere. But what about MMORPG's and stuff?

Has anybody tried this kind of mobile Internet?
Thanks for advice!

Andail, care to tell me what's with the hostility? Had a bad week? Got fired?

Hm? I must have missed something

Read somewhere that when aliens find our long lost civilzation one day and they look through all the files, they'll find it strange that every person in the world thought he/she was important...it's funny but also kinda proves a point. 

It's enough of a fun thought just to imagine the reactions of coming generations.

I mean, when we take part of the textual output of past generations, it is by lovely, handwritten letters, or passionate diaries with perfume and seals and whatnot.

When people in the future research on our culture, they'll stand before a flood of texted "whereu at??"
If anything is saved at all, that is.

This has been discussed so many times before, but I think one important aspect is the way we perceive and value time. With so many games available today, they must be rewarding and entertaining every single minute, right from the start, to get attention.
Back in the eighties people had fewer games to choose from, and wouldn't mind spending months and even years on solving just a few puzzles.

The early Sierra titles were groundbreaking in how they combined graphics, plot and puzzle-solving, and deserve a ton of credit for it, but the games were pretty short and in order to present a decent playing time they relied on plenty of trial-and-error, unexpected deaths and walking deads. Today we frown on that kind of game-play, but then again, today entire nations aren't involved in solving the Fifteen-puzzle as was the case back in the late 19th century.

The thing is, most people think that "pandemic" means deadly, when it actually just means "everywhere".

I doubt you will find historical records of proper pandemics that didn't kill anyone.

A pandemic by definition is a serious infectious disease. Not 100% deadly of course, nothing is.

Dualnames, can you ever not post?

I agree with the general sentiment here, which is that she deserves a very severe punishment for what she's done, but not death penalty, which I think nobody deserves.

I think that at 20 you should be responsible for your actions. In most countries the age of discretion is several years below that. It doesn't really help that she's from a "deprived" background; to claim so is almost a bit condescending towards young working class people.

I find it hilarious that this "pandemic" is called "pandemic" and that it has reached level 5 out of 6 on the pandemic scale.
So far, it has killed fewer people than what a typical winter flu results in. Actually, I think more people die from falling through open manholes every month.

I'm not at all a fan of online riddles; in fact I've only tried a few, and only the first couple of levels. I simply don't have that kind of intelligence, or patience.

Years ago I came across one that was based on pencil-drawn backgrounds and some very obscure hints. I don't think it involved any external research, nor any of the typical adjusting-your-monitor-to-see-the-hidden-text kind of tricks.
It looked pretty intriguing, and I bookmarked it to return to it later. Although I never did, and then I lost it.

Apparently, there's been a veritable boom of online riddles lately, and after some pretty extensive googling I haven't found the one I was looking for. Instead I've come across a gazillion pretty stereotypical goth-horror-themed "adventures" with lots of random facts and math puzzles and other silly riddles.

My recollection is very vague, and all I can give you now is that it was based on drawings, and that it seemed to be set in a medieval or at least old fashioned time, and there'd be mostly a room with some minor objects and maybe some characters, among them a tortoise if I'm not mistaken.

Any bells ringing?

If not, feel free to discuss online riddles (although it's been done before) and maybe recommend a good one.

Depends on the light source

If it's moonlight, any cast shadow regardless of distance would be of the same size as its object, since the light is virtually parallel. (It's the same with the sun, obviously; the shadow of an airplane is never bigger than the plane itself, regardless of its altitude; the sun beams hit the plane parallel and won't project the plane any differently on the ground).
If there's a lamp post right behind the tree, it would indeed be much bigger and furthermore much more diffuse.

I think the shadow needs more blur to it, as it looks like an exact projection right now.

Apart from that, the room is too equally lit, in my opinion. If the window is the only light source, why not make the corners and walls to the right a bit darker? Don't use gradients, just add more shadows the farther you get from the window. Remember that the reasons for shadows being blue is that the blue sky becomes the prime light source. It doesn't mean everything that isn't hit by any other light automatically becomes painted clear blue. You should probably add more black as you move away from the window.

I'm also not so fond of the cast light patches.
Basically they're executed too generically, like a cheap effect.
Some light would work, if you'd apply it more sporadically and more diffused.

I'd also consider lowering the overall saturation, as I find it a tad too blue at the moment.