Messages

I don't think many people are still interested in solving puzzles - just for the experience of it. It takes some experience and a frustration-resistant personality to really start to like them. I don't see any "newbie" adventure gamers tolerating being stuck very long.

The thing that drew me into adventure games, and makes it still be my favourite genre, was the plot and dialogue. It had lots more of that than any other genre. Hell - besides adventure games, there was no other kind of game which has a story.

Nowadays, even FPS games sport lots of cutscenes and dialogue and a nice story arc (blame half-life). I think this is the place where we're lose ground.

There is some hope, though. Very few non-adventure games manage to be genuinely funny. And sooner or later, once this whole hardcore FPS gamer/violence fad is over - people are no doubt going to want to play a game that makes them laugh again. I think this is where adventure games will make their glorious comeback.

We will need our own "Diablo" though. We can't do it on our own. Once a truly ground-breaking adventure game has been made, and it sells really sweet - capitalism will do the rest.

Guitarman is great. I enjoy reading comics with an extreme amount of jokes in each and every sentence. I'd prefer reading one of these in my morning paper over a garfield any day. They're funnier on many deep levels.

I loved the dog joke, and I still love that "the fat moon" description. Goodness.

Also, don't feel like you have to hurry up your game on my account.

Gratulations!

I hope you'll stay with the community for many, many years to come.

I can only laugh at things that made the person who came up with it laugh. With monty python, you could see that they did what they thought was genuinely funny, and amused them immensely. That sort of thing always makes me laugh.

With "the fresh prince", good as all the punchlines may be, they're fabricated. It's a technique. I can't imagine the writers laughin at their own jokes. I've gotten good enough at spotting the "tricks" behind those jokes to not laugh at them anymore as well. I easily see the punchlines coming.

That is, to me, the difference between humor and jokes. Jokes are not funny - they're clever. Humor is funny - and how clever it is doesn't make any difference to me. The most I ever laughed at something in my entire life was when me and a friend drew a stupid penis on a piece of paper, and then put that on a desk in school, or our pencil, so as to make it seem as though it belonged to the object. Very tasteless, very immature... incredibly funny. To us.

The bottom line being: if something is meanth to be funny, but the person who came up with it - because of his longtime experience with humor, feels it's not longer funny - I feel cheated.

The best jokes I put in crime time are, invariably, the ones that made me laugh. All the other ones, which I've put in just because there had to be one joke there, don't amuse me. And - as I've grown to discover - also don't work on the player.

Back when corporal punishment was the only way to raise children:

- children would often get hurt, by their parents, for wrong reasons, resulting in traumatic experiences.
- children would fight each other more often on the playgrounds because they associated power with violence.
- children were often punished for having a different opinion than their parents had. The parents often 'beat it out of them'. These children later became docile workers who would get exploited by rich patrons in factories their entire lives.

The right way to teach anything, is by giving the right example. Parents who beat their children, even if it is for a good reason and in the interest of the child, and yet persistantly tell the child never to hurt others, are hypocrites. Children are not stupid. They will pick up on this sooner or later, and it will usually results in a bad relationship between the child and the parents later on.

If children don't respect their teacher, it's often because he's a bad teacher, who doesn't respect the opinions of his pupils. It has nothing to do with corporal punishment.

Good story. I like it.

What I think you mean to say is that children no longer respect adults like they did 40 years ago. And that's true. But let me ask you this: what good is respect if there is no basis on which it is earned.

Children should respect their parents - not because they'll beat them up if they don't - but because those parents have sacrificed many things in order to raise them. And they should respect their teachers because they put in a lot of effort and time to teach them new skills.

But this is the bottom line: Respect should always be earned. Never be forced by violence. And never be taken for granted.

Another thing. When you say that the reason why children do bad things is because they no longer get in serious trouble when they do, you pretty much say that every human being is evil. I refuse to believe this.

We have all been children, and since - as by what you said - children not being punished when they do bad things is the only reason for them to do it, that makes us all spineless dangerous psychopaths. I think you're forgetting that everybody, even a baby, has the choice to do, or not do, something bad. And I think it's a parents task to teach them to make the right choice, rather than beat them up every time they make a wrong one.

Now I'm not so naive as to say that a child should not, sometimes, be punished for doing something wrong. Sometimes words and logic fail on children. But in this case, once all the other options have been tried, I beg you to remember that there is also such a thing as a punishment where a child is shown the consequences of it's actions. There are other methods to teach with besides the cane.

Why are we, the round 2 people, discriminated by not having a vote and discuss thread?

This is favoritism, and I intend to follow it through to the full extend of the law.

First, I would like to congratulate Barcik on bringing up some excellent points. I'm sure it won't be easy for the opposition to disprove them.

As Barcik has said in the post above, corporal punishment doesn't teach children anything. It only makes them afraid to be hurt by the people it wants to be loved by the most. This has some very bad consequences.

a) If the parents don't really love the child, the child will stop caring about their opinions, and will in fact start making those very mistakes it was taught not to make in order to hurt it's parents back. Think puberty. Or for some more dangerous examples, think serial killers.

b) Corporal punishment takes away somebodies freedom to decide, for themself, that they don't want to do make the wrong choices. This freedom is fundamental! Everybody should be able to decide, for theirselves what choices they make, based on what the consequences of them will be.

Now, because children who have been punished can never see (and feel) anything BUT the trauma they received when they were punished, they become blind to those consequences. They turn into little versions of pavlov's dogs. And all of this misery and torture happens because the parents were raised in this way too, and have also been turned blind to the consequences of corporal punishment. All of this because it's human nature to be lazy and take shortcuts. Why teach a child the consequences of it's actions when you can, instead of taking time out of your busy schedule to explain exactly what it should know, just kick it around the block a few times and get the same results?

Many people don't see the damage they cause to children this way, and I do believe they should be made aware of what they are doing.

c) You can only love somebody as much as you've been loved yourself. This is an universal truth. Again, look at some of the worst examples the human race has brought forward. They've all been devoid of love. Corporal punishment effectively lessens the amount of love a person reveices from his parents, and can in turn give to others in his life. This will make their lives, and those of their companions, worse.

I do not think we still have to raise our children the same way they used to be raised, back when the human race was unable to communicate. At one time, it may have been a necesary evil - because there simply was no alternative (think cavemen, for example). There is a better alternative nowadays, and whilst it may be hard to raise a child to be completely free and able to see the truth instead of painful memories - it is definately something parents should strive to do. Banning corporal punishment from the education of your children is the necesary first step to do this.

Looks like he finally found a date to the prom. He could work on his dancing, though.

The messages thing sounds good. Maybe you could have a random file stored online somewhere too, which holds all sorts of funny things roger could say. And everybody could add to that file by teaching their own roger new funny stuff to say. Kind of like what the IRC roger now has.

The macro system could be made kind of like DOS batch files with all sorts of useful commands such as running a program, saying something, starting internet explorer and loading google with a search string... useful stuff.

A macro system, where you can teach desktop roger to do a bunch of things for you. Like, if I tell Roger to start IRC, he opens my mIRC. It would probably only work with a type-based interface, like those old AGI games. But it sure would be sweet.

Happy birthday!!

Sacrificing things for each other is where it's at. That could either be something very small, such as spending some time with her when you'd rather do something else - or something big and heroic, such as choosing to save her first, even if there's a timebomb about to go off.

Of course, these are very stupid examples. You really shouldn't want to be doing something else, in the first example. And the second example is just plain stupid because it's so unrealistic.

A better example would be if you were in a fight with your girlfriend, and you know you're right. Yet she continues to argue, and eventually begins to cry. Now instead of trying to explain the situation, you comfort her first - showing that you care about her feelings and sorrow, rather than trying to prove your point.

I think a practical way for your character to show he cares about his girldfriend would be to mention her once in a while when he narrates. Such as "I remember when me an Natalia first went to this bar. We got thrown out because we threw peanuts at the waiter. We made things up later, though and now the owner is a good friend." or "Natalia would love this painting. Personally, I think it's a bit over the top, but I can understand why she likes it." - Don't do it too often, though, or your character will appear settled. And that's not good either.

So... how drunk are you exactly, Ryan?

Very cool. I always test these things after having read a book about anything paranormal too, but I've never been so lucky as to actually get a result.

I can do this really strange thing with my mind, which I've never read about. I can control my level of consciousness up until the part where I almost fall asleep, or where I get naturally high for a few seconds. I once got this blast of energy from doing that, where I had what I could only describe as a short mind-orgasm. It felt like this blast of lightening which seemed to go through my skull, and that felt really great. Maybe that was my soul bumping into my skull as it was trying to escape

I know it's nothing special. If I can do it, everybody surely can. But it is my private 'paranormal' trick.

Good luck exploring yours

It's so scary if you think about how fast virusses can spread around the world today. If there was an airborne virus with an incubation time of 1 month, the whole world could be infected and die without anybody ever surviving long enough to find out what hit us.

The only animal that is really safe when it comes to contracting a deadly disease, is the virus itself. Kind of teaches one a thing or two about who the real dominant species on the planet is.

(it's ants, by the way. But the virus comes close)

It's not fun if you can see how they wrote the show. In the old episodes, everything fit together so well you'd almost forget there was a technique they used to make their show. They fleshed everything out really well.

Whereas nowadays, you don't just know there has to be a certain trick to making simpsons episodes, you can see it in action. And I don't like that at all. I want all that stuff to remain a mystery.

It has become too generic. And also futurama rocks. Way more than the simpsons ever did.

[STR: 6]

What do you think your stats will be when you've grown old and warts?

Personally, I think, leading a rather non-active life, I'll be something along the lines of (maximum being 18/99):

STR: 6
INT: 14 (intellectual labor. It'll preserve my thinking skillz)
WIS: 4 (I'll remain naive as long as I can. It's the best!)
DEX: 3 (I'll be mostly doing nothing, physical-wise)
MANNA: 0 (anyone who follows up this thread, and claims otherwise is a pityful fool. Or possibly Phil Reed. Because he does have a kind of magic)

Amount of children: 3
Married: Yes. Once. To the love of my life.
Time spent defending country: 0 seconds.

Class: Useless old fart!

Even I would do Andail in a moment of temporary insanity. (as opposed to my other, long-term insanity, in which I'm slightly less impulsive)