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I dig the multiple side quests and endings most of all.

Excellent work.

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What's the deal with the cave in the land of the Fair Folk?  The Unseelie just tells me no mortals come out alive, I can't figure out how to get in.  If there's no way in, why's it there?

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We're now also hosting this on the Crystal Shard site, and have expanded it slightly to cover a few missing details.

Perhaps we can add a section on easter eggs or deaths at some point.

http://crystalshard.net/atotk.php?page=atotk_wt

Spoiler

I've found the gold coin west of the goblin scouts.  How come you didn't fill in the extras here?

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So I think your sarcasm is a bit misdirected.

I think it isn't, but who needs another gun debate.

(obviously, that their kid never turns in homework or studies for tests has nothing to do with low grades)

Respectfully, a lot of times this can be attributed to bad teaching.  You're probably aware that people have different learning methods that are better suited to them and some can't learn from book reading due to hyperactivity or whatever.  So if your teacher is a bad lecturer and/or the kid is afraid to speak up in class then he/she has no idea how to do homework and studying is a futile effort that he/she gives up.

For example I had a chem teacher who simply wrote on the board what chapter to read and what problems to do, he had no idea how to do any of the problems so he'd just give us the correct answer and tell us to work toward that if we asked for help.  So how, under these circumstances, was I supposed to do well in the class unless I was especially adept at teaching myself?

Of course, my teacher was quickly found out and replaced at first semesters end, but it doesn't always work that way.  It didn't work that way with my equally incompetent Spanish teacher.

I'm not saying that you're a bad teacher, just that you shouldn't use that as an excuse for a students poor grades.  Sometimes a change in tactics is in order, and sometimes they'll be better off dropping out and going to trade school or a farm, IMHO.

I know what will fix it!

Take away the guns.

Oh wait..

Extra reading:
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=701388

Speaking as someone who really wanted to kill a bunch of morons in high school it's a general feeling of hopelessness with their situation.

Here are the basics:

1. You are required by law to go to public school until a certain age

2. A lot of teachers, obviously not all of them, are complete morons and will try to indoctrinate you with all kinds of obviously false history for the purpose of patriotism, which makes you hate your country and the people in it in general instead.  These are the people in control of your life for 8 hours a day every weekday, and you grow to hate them for their stupidity but can do absolutely nothing about it, they have absolute control over you.  Anything you say to contradict them is wrong, they will tell you so, and they will not hesitate to embarrass you for your grasp of reality in front of everyone in your class.

3. High school has a dog-eat-dog mentality for males.  The "different" ones are picked on mercilessly, both physically and mentally.  They're not really weak, just different, and they know this.  They feel increasingly driven to prove it the more the attacks continue, and if they can't do anything about it physically through fighting (which will draw the wrath of the administration, who have a blind eye to the dog-eat-dog attitude, that's just "the way kids are") then they turn to sometimes drastic measures.

4. Even though you can get out or pass a GED once you're in High School everyone, and I do mean everyone, tells you that you'll be a complete moron and loser for the rest of your life, make no money, and get no women if you drop out, which is simply not true and creates a pit of disparity. Matt Stone was interviewed for Bowling for Columbine and he said he would've told the kids if he could (roughly), "High school isn't everything. You get into honors math in the seventh grade, and if you don't do good in that then you can't get into honors math in the eighth grade, and ninth grade, and so on, and your life is over.  They create this atmosphere of disparity and high school really isn't everything, it'll be over in like, four years, but it seems like an eternity."

5. [from a Columbine student video]
Student #1: What's your views on high school?
Student #2: Uh, I love it. I learn, I get picked on by bastards who hate me, and the principal's a dick.


Don't get me wrong, I had some very very good friends in school from an early age, and I still hang out with them all the time now.  It's just that ALL of us had the same feeling about high school, and without each other for support there's no telling what we could've done.  You know what?  Probably a massive number of kids have had the intense urge to shoot up their school.  The only thing that we can do about it is reform the goddamn public education system, which is a massive cesspool anyway.  It's come to the point where they are far more concerned with getting everyone to pass than actually holding a high standard.  This is why athletics are God and everyone comes out with a dazed expression and a vague grasp for the basics of what they were supposed to know intimately by the end.

I also know that there will be no education reform.  At a local political debate a couple of years ago there was an old lady and former teacher running for re-election in a state congressional seat.  The speaker kept saying, "You know, some of these people don't have opponents and don't deserve opponents.  Especially this woman, who is a lifetime educator and cares deeply for our schools."  A man stands up, "Excuse me, I'm her opponent."  He later gets the mic for his few minutes to talk about his concerns and he goes on a diatribe about what's wrong with the education system and how poor the funding and pay are, how this woman hasn't done anything to improve it, he even cited bills that would've passed but she had lobbied down with her standing in the congress as a former educator, then the old lady totally shut him down to massive applause.  Way to go, one more for the team.

Aww, thanks guys!! I don't want anymore though, giving birth two times waaaay enough for me. 

That's what my mom said.  Then she had two accidents.

P.S. Don't ever tell your kids they were accidents, I didn't care but my little brother was crushed, haha.

I'm not a strict moralist, religious, or any of the other things you might associate with someone who would say this, but stealing money from someones wallet, lost or not, is really really shitty.  I've had times when that might mean I don't get to eat that week without begging someone for money.

One of my teachers had a Masters degree and made $23k a year.. and it definitely wasn't because he was a bad teacher, he made more than any of the other teachers.

Just saying, because teacher pay strongly varies by state in the US.

In that particular post I was talkind percicely about income tax in USA, which is a fraud.

I quite agree. I'd much rather employ my own security guard, fireman and doctor than contribute to a shared system through taxes.

We do employ our own doctors, half our taxes go to "defense," which is a fraud and massive waste.  Not just because of superfluous wars but because of overspending, no-bid contracts to cronies, etc.  We can just help each other out and have socialized medicine, instead the president vetoes a bill that would give lower class children medical insurance because, "Some of the parents can afford to pay for a medical insurance plan."

You should watch "Sicko," Micheal Moore's latest.

A lot of people are going to buy the box set just because of sheer respect for releasing the album at name-your-own-price.

Another minor band, Harvey Danger, released an album for free and got tons of good press for it.  Otherwise it would have been a barely (if) noticed album.

IMO, it's about time bands started stepping up to the plate and embracing a new marketing strategy, one that ditches the record labels.  They're superfluous now.

I don't know about violins though, why they should sound better after many many years, but people tend to think so. I guess it's like the difference between a clay disk and a cd

The cellular structure of the wood morphs with time, but mostly the change in tone is attributed to the aging of the lacquer.  Over time it micro-fractures, which allows the wood to resonate more freely.  Modern nitrocellulose finishes don't have this quality, you'll find most of the high priced vintage items are lacquered.

A lot of the quality in older guitars is due to the shape of the neck and the pickups.  AlNiCo magnets used to be the cheap choice, so that's what they used.  Later ceramics took the market when metal prices went up, but guitar players like the tone of AlNiCo better.  Most modern guitars use ceramics anyway.  The tone change is attributed to the conductivity of the magnets, some people claim the induced current in the coils, which induces a magnetic field which induces a current within the magnet itself (whoo!) but only if it's a metal, has an effect.  Neodymium magnets should do this too, and I wanna try it in a low profile pickup I'm winding for my acoustic.

I'm a student working in pre-fabricated lumber construction.  We build roof trusses.  I make 5.3 Euros an hour, or 7.5 USD.  When I worked full time I brought less than $1000 USD a month, now that I'm part time it's more like $650.  Barely scraping by, more or less.

For a manual labor job it has really bad pay, should be getting about 30-50% more in my part of the US, but I don't know of anyone else around that will work around school scheduling and I don't want to work in fast food for the same money.

Our teachers make only about twice as much as me btw, but this varies by state and my state is one of the worst offenders.  Most of the people I know who are becoming teachers are leaving this state for others simply because of pay.  The claim is that our teachers are the most dedicated because they're willing to suffer this bad pay for their passion of teaching, but my high school education begs to differ.

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As for the Tesla Roadster it's a really cool car design and functionality-wise, but a 2 cent per mile cost is not something I think is going to fly with big business.  We've seen businesses squelch technology before that they didn't think we were ready for -- primarily because they had yet to fully exhaust the potential of its predecessor -- so I will be very surprised indeed (though happy) if products like the Roadster see mass production soon.

Yeah right, kind of like how GM, Ford, and Chrysler decided that they weren't going to let those little gas saving Japanese cars take the market.

Again, it isn't big business that's the problem, its economics.  The fact that the mass consumer makes economic, not environmental, choices.

Sorry for another long post but it's not easy to refute these arguments in a short concise manner.  I know you won't believe me unless I'm thorough.

It's about greed in the sense that I am not willing to buy a car for the price of a house.  I'm sure you've heard that it's proven the fuel savings from a Prius are not worth the extra cost, so the US government subsidized the purchase of one and it still doesn't break even.  The Prius is cheap compared to what we're talking about (Solar and now hydrogen).

It's just not true that these things aren't being developed, I posted two links to two cars which are WAY more efficient than anything on the road today, the first was the VW car (235 mpg) and the second was a link to a thread I posted at the auto X-prize forums about a Stirling engine car NASA developed (60 mpg, but an everyday mid-sized car with no special materials and without hybrid regenerative braking which could pump that up to 100 mpg).  The Stirling engine is externally heated like a steam engine, so you can burn anything in it with almost no special apparatus required.  The downside is that it has about 1/3 more parts than a standard Otto cycle engine and many of them are rare metals, so it's expensive.  In my opinion it should be manufactured right now, but it's just out of the reach of the consumer.  Check out the most efficient EV on the market today, the Tesla Roadster.  It gets 135 mpg(equivalent) and costs only $80,000.  On the front page their range is extended again, I suspect their model in the US only had to be modified for safety which reduced it to 200.

Hydrogen is a media pet and nothing more.  This is universally recognized by all engineers and scientists I've come into contact with that weren't seeking funding for the research.  It can be converted to electricity in a fuel cell at ~80% efficiency or burned at ~20% efficiency in an Otto cycle engine.  It can be extracted from natural gas but it's way way more efficient to just burn the natural gas (this is where almost all of the worlds hydrogen production comes from).  It can be created by electrolysis from water but you lose half of the energy in heat while you're creating it, a battery charges at ~80% efficiency (depending on charge time and heat) so what good does the expensive hydrogen fuel cell system which will need an electric motor and battery backup do?  Well, it does make for a good story.  Just look through Google New results and find a story that doesn't vaguely mention "In ten years" or "This would be perfect if only there was the support infrastructure."  It's just plain rubbish but people love the cozy things-are-going-to-get-better-cheaply feeling.  The EV used to be all over the news but people got tired of it and wised up - the battery technology has only just arrived and it's still only barely affordable.  The EV is a far better wheel-to-well candidate than the hydrogen car.  I calculated it once and if I remember right the overall energy use for a hydrogen car ends up being about three times higher than an EV.

The reality is that we're not going to run out of fuel, we're going to run out of cheap fuel.  Synthetic fuels have been developed from coal and methane gas since WWII.  Methane gas is produced all over the world by hundreds of different types of bacteria and coal (or rather, charcoal) can be manufactured from wood or all sorts of other things while producing combustible gasses.  Previously un-harvestable Shale oil from the Rocky Mountains is economical right now, but Shell Oil is afraid to exploit it too early because a surplus in supply means a drop in price which might make it suddenly un-economical (many other cases are similar).  Look at this, your t-shirt can be cultured into ethanol by a genetically altered yeast.  This means pastures of weeds growing unmonitored and uncontrolled, harvested five or more times a year on poor soil, can provide fuel.  There are other weeds with high oil content (I'm looking at you, industrial hemp) that grow wild with no oversight.  Most organic matter, including the aforementioned weeds, food waste and your own poo can be turned to oil using thermal depolymerization.

So look, if we can come up with just half of what we use now by other methods, and it's renewable, and we can use it three times more efficiently than we're using it now in a hybrid car that gives similar performance to what we have now, what's wrong with that?  To me it means an easy transition, the eco-friendly people won't be subsidizing the SUV people by using less gas and making the supply more abundant, and the gas cheaper.  Instead the SUV will get 80 mpg the mid sized car will get 120 mpg and the super-eco-car will get 200 mpg.  Watch the auto X-prize close over the next couple of years.  Electric cars and Electric hybrids are the way of the future.

And what technology would that be?

It's this new fangled creation called ... Electricity!!!

There is an inventor (and his company) who have created an all new form of automobile (I'm trying to find a link ... I saw this on a show on TV).  The car has no engine ... it runs on a "sled" type chassis.  This makes the car about 10 times lighter.  They are using all composite materials (thus reducing the weight even further).  The car has it's own batteries that are charged not only by the sun, but uses some kind of generator to create electricity that is generated by the very motion of the vehicle's wheels.  The car, essentially, doesn't require fuel.  They claim that the energy consumption/creation is so good that you can plug the car in when you get home and give electricity BACK to the grid ... the power company would pay you to drive your car.

Whoa, no.  You can make any car on a composite light frame and get super good gas mileage, VW has done it and proved 235 mpg in a street model.  A guy named Jory from Camden, Maine built a 100+ mpg one seater from an old scooter, but he can't travel faster than 45 mph I think.

Cellulosic ethanol production (not corn ethanol) can replace gasoline and probably will.  Ethanol from weeds, no pesticides/herbicides/fungicides necessary.

Here are some engineering facts to quickly discourage you from believing green propaganda.  A square yard (roughly 1 m^2) on a sunny American day gets about 1-1.5 kW of heat from sunlight.  The most efficient solar cell on a purely theoretical level is 50% efficient, the highest practical and manufactured model I can remember was 18% and designed for NASA.  Let's just assume 500 watts per square yard, which on a small lightweight car might max out at less than 5 hP (700 W = 1 hP).  This is on a sunny perfect day, assuming an efficiency that we're not even close to in the real world yet.  It takes about 7 hp or so for my car to combat road friction and fluid drag on a flat level road going 55 mph, that can drop to as low as 4 hP if the body were very aerodynamic and there was a smaller frontal surface area.  Remember, weight is not an issue unless you're accelerating or going uphill.

Suppose you can drop the weight of a car to 1000 lbs including the driver, passenger and cargo, which is possible but very very difficult even with composites.  There is a huge safety/crash hazard involved in this.  To have a maximum output of 5 hP while fighting road friction and constantly increasing fluid drag means you'll start out with about 3.5 available hP for acceleration which drops until you hit 50 mph or so twenty minutes later.  This is a rough guess, but it's consistent with what I've seen from other lightweight low-power vehicles.  There will be very little excess energy, if any, if you travel at 20 mph or slower.

Now, the "energy from the wheels" that you're talking about is called regenerative braking, the electric motor starts acting as a generator and brings the car to a stop.  Every modern hybrid on the road does this right now, and I'm sorry to say it does not provide an energy surplus and cannot provide that.  There is an inefficiency involved with this also because the motor gets hot during the process that should be between 60-80% efficient.  The energy used fighting wind and friction is gone forever, the energy used to accelerate the mass of the vehicle to the speed it was at before braking is at least 20% gone every time you need to stop.

Otherwise we're looking at hybrids, because electric range is not sufficient.  This is a fact, the best electric vehicle I know of on the market today got 250 miles before they had to make safety modifications, which then dropped the range to 200 miles.  The Prius is (rightly so) switching from an electric assist gas platform to a gas assist electric platform, meaning the new hybrid will use gas only as a last resort, finally.  I am absolutely aware that very few people travel more than 150 miles in any given day, but everyone I know occasionally needs to go further than 250 miles.  I did it this weekend, wouldn't have had a chance to recharge batteries anywhere.

I could talk about it all day too, but I'll stop here with this:  every week for the past four years I've seen a new story about battery technology that can charge faster, last longer, and explode less.  There still aren't any research models, nevermind real world proven models, that work as described in the clean energy hyped stories.  Don't believe everything you read, we all want a clean future so bad that a lot of people (read: reporters and people who've read their already stretched stories) are willing to stretch the truth way beyond reality just for the purpose of saying oil companies are evil and we're all being screwed.  I'm trying very hard to personally develop a very efficient vehicle, I've read hundreds of patents, hundreds of websites, thousands of forum posts in engineering and alt fuels boards, and NASA papers along with dozens of books from my University library on the subject matter.  The verdict is that what's holding us back is cost and practicality, not oil companies.  If I drive 55 mph instead of the US standard of 65 mph highway my gas mileage increases from 32 mpg to 38 mpg.  Why aren't we doing that?  Because people aren't willing to give up their space, power or size, nevermind their ability to get ten miles further in an hour for an efficiency loss.  What's that say for a hopelessly slow 5 hP micro-car that will be pancaked in any accident even with a Honda Civic?

2) hybrids are a huge waste of time/money and are a step in the wrong direction

We put men on the moon 40 YEARS ago ... and we can't make a car that doesn't burn a fossil fuel?  It's so ... stupid.  We have the technology to create vehicles that, through their motion and use, can generate the very power they need to continue functioning.  But ... but ... then we won't have billionaire oil tycoons!!!

Because I've made it one of my primary objectives over the past four years to learn as much as possible about alternative energies and efficient automotives, I wonder if you could justify #2.  Not that I don't think it's possible to continue without hybrids, but every bit of evidence I can scrape up indicates that its the way to go, if nothing else for brake regeneration.

It's not just grammar that's a problem these days, though. Employers are complaining that British kids are lazier and stupider than ever before, and a large proportion of people leaving school are not able to fit into a working environment because they don't have the skills to do so, for example thinking that's it's perfectly ok to write a report in txt-speak.

The future of society is doomed .... doomed, I tells ya.

There's a documentary about this called "Idiocracy."  You should give it a watch if you can find it, it's an American film.