Forum posts

If a man with a split personality tries to kill himself, is that a hostage situation???

That's "Fight Club".

He's the reason why I left SnarkPit.

Yeah, it occurred to me after I posted the story that the scenario sounds like a questionable one. :

Even energy has mass (i.e. photon).

Energy and mass are two different manifestations of the same thing.

The fallacy in the scenario is that nothing is unstoppable and nothing is unmovable.

The car columnist of the LA Times newspaper made someone very happy:

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So, Ben, are those wheels hot or what?
By Dan Neil
Times Staff Writer

June 6, 2007

The 2007 Lamborghini Murcielago LP 640 Roadster goes right past Ridiculous, ignores the exit for Silly, and blows by the "Turn Here for Stupid" sign at 205 mph before finally taking the offramp ? in a screaming, smoking, three-digit, four-wheel drift of the I-see-Vishnu variety ? for Crazy.

Snake-belly low and reverse-cowgirl sexy, this car ? the chop-top version of the not-altogether-understated Murcielago Coupe ? is the most heinously irresponsible, developmentally arrested, awesomely cool sports car the world has ever known. This $405,000 hypercar is, in short, a great big booger flicked in the face of respectability.

The trouble is, I'm too old, too wise and too attached to my driver's license to really appreciate this car in all its 640-horsepower, 0-to-60-in-first-gear glory. I need someone utterly smitten with the gall of the thing, someone unacquainted with the misery of city traffic in a nose-scraping Italian exotic. Someone for whom the Lambo is a treasured dream, not a nightmare date.

That brings me to Ben Gallinson. Ben is an eighth-grader at Palms Middle School, which is a gifted/high ability magnet school near Culver City. Ben, clearly, is in the right place. He wrote to me in March ? an actual letter, no less ? for help on his English class project about the history and development of car design. Would I sit for an interview? Sure, kid, whatever.

Well, time passed, and we had trouble getting together. I felt bad about it, so one day ? when I had the stupendous Creamsicle-orange Lambo ? I thought it would be fun to drive by his house. I recruited his mother's help to surprise him.

Out Ben came, wearing baggy basketball shorts, a Yosemite T-shirt and the awed expression of a teenager who has just met his first Lambo. Ben, usually quite articulate, was reduced to, "Aww man!"

You know, it's easy to forget in my job how unspeakably dope a pair of scissor doors are, but with Ben there I saw the Lambo all over again for the first time. These cars really are majestic creatures, the only sincere embrace of European futurism in current car design. And audacious. The rear tires are over 13 inches wide; the front carbon-ceramic brakes are nearly 15 inches in diameter. The detailing is exquisite, from the carbon-fiber binnacle over the instruments to the beveled-glass edge on the side windows, worthy of Baccarat. In our test car, the orange stitching matched the seat insets, which matched the exterior paint. And when the ferocious 6.5-liter V12 gets hot, the car's radiator cooling ducts rise out of the bodywork with robotic malevolence, like a stealth fighter deploying its armaments.All of this Ben took in with various expressions of manic glee. Wanna go for a ride?

Ben strapped in, fumbling to find the inboard-mounted seat belts that I had become accustomed to, and we took off with his mother snapping pictures behind us. In a couple of blocks, I found a spot to punch the throttle. The four wheels tensed as the thrust of 478 pound-feet of torque came online. The car stuffed us back in the seat with a violent lunge and the engine emitted a great whacking snarl to make the angels weep.

I pulled the e-gear lever for second at 8,000 rpm. BANG! The car lit up the afterburners. Ben and I both laughed.

Nice car. Nice kid.

What happened to Orpheus anyway?

It seems like he has stopped coming here.

Oh noes. Orpheus has stalked me to the home improvement forum!

Zombie's photographic scenary is most stunning.

Mine:

And yes, I am in love with my maps.

Man, Strider, that's a good find!

Xen was hardest when I had to jump from one of those flying alien rays to a platform.

I think it took me more than ten tries. It was getting a bit frustrating.

But I like the training session for Half-Life 2. It's seamlessly incorporated into the game itself (i.e. the train station to Eli's lab).

To Zombieloffe's post:

Hey, I actually grew up watching music videos like that.

Remember, I was born in 1972.

I finished playing all the games I've ever owned, except for "No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in HARM's Way".

The gameplay got really reptitive, and I hate the infinite re-spawning of enemies once the alarm is triggered type of gameplay.

Damn it! Once I killed someone, that should be the last I heard from the guy. No more re-spawning.

Not trying to tote my own horn, but my sp_justice was inspired by the real-world county courthouse in Santa Barbara, California.

Bigger isn't necessarily better.

1. Half-Life
2. Half-Life 2
3. Deus Ex
4. Unreal II
5. Jedi Knights series

4: MSPaint

Quote:
Satchmo! How would the wife feel?

I imagine she'd feel like she'd married a normal guy.

Oh yeah, I surf p0rn sites with her in the room. She doesn't mind me looking at nude girls.

I can't resist.

I must contribute:

Ahh...this thread brings back memories.

When I was a newbie, I was greeted with encouragement and useful advice.

Just look at one of the first maps I made.

If you put in real effort into your work, it shows. And if you're willing to accept constructive criticisms, you'll become better.

I have to thank ZombieLoffe for one of the most uplifting feedbacks I've ever gotten as a new mapper.

Is it just me, or did anyone else enjoy the under-the-bridge segment in Half-Life 2?

Oh yeah, when I first saw the Team Fortress 2 trailer, I must have watched it twenty times in a row.

Finding the BFG1000 in Doom II, and firing it for the first time.

We were all newbies at one time.

Some of them just stay that way...permanently.

Wow, impressive.

This is HL1, correct?

How about having a horde of zombies chase the player into the mansion (when the player isn't equipped with any weapon), then the player has to right his/her way out of hte mansion with a simple melee weapon or a shotgun?

That way, you get the best bang for your existing architecture, and it also creates circular gameplay (instead of linear).

I played Unreal II on my old computer (many, many years ago), and when I played it again on my current computer, it looks utterly amazing.

Playing a game at maximum setting (and being the right person at the wrong time) can make all the difference in the world.

Adoption is one of the most noble things humans do.

No HL2? That's seriously screwed up man.

In a world of suicide bombing and school massacre, there are always those who help me renew my faith in humanity.

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You're adopting who?
A couple's decision to take in an autistic child draws callous reactions.
By Ralph James Savarese

'WHY WOULD anyone adopt a badly abused, autistic 6-year-old from foster care?"

So my wife and I were asked at the outset of our adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. It was a reasonable question in this age of narrow self-concern ? far more reasonable, or at least more reasonably put, than many of the other questions we fielded.

For example, "Why don't you have your own children?" a wealthy relative inquired, as if natural family-making were a kind of gated community it was best never to abandon. "You two have such good genes," she added. "Why waste them?"

A colleague at work confronted me in the mailroom with this memorable gem: "Have you tried in-vitro?" She feared that we hadn't availed ourselves of the many wondrous technologies that rescue infertile couples. "Wouldn't that be better than adopting a child with a disability?" she asked, drawing out the word "disability." "God knows what that kid's parents were doing when they conceived him."

"We're not infertile," I barked. "We have a relationship with the boy."

My wife, an autism expert, had offered his mother services, but as the woman found it increasingly difficult to care for her son and then dropped out of the picture altogether, we'd started spending time with him. His first communicative act with language, at age 3 ? the sign for "more" ? we'd taught him while tickling his belly.

He later made that sign in the emergency room of a hospital where he was brought after being beaten in foster care. Upon seeing us ? we'd been called in to try to calm him ? he stopped in his tracks, paused (as if to allow some associative chain to complete itself) and demanded obsessively to be tickled. I remember searching on his chest for unbruised patches among the purple, blue and black. He was that frantic in his quest for the familiar and, dare I say, for love.

To this day, I can't believe how callous people were; the strange anxiety that adopting a child with a disability provoked. And the anxiety just kept coming. "Healthy white infants must be tough to get," a neighbor commented. No paragons of racial sensitivity, we were nevertheless appalled by the idea that we'd do anything to avoid adopting, say, a black child or a Latino one.

As offensive was the assumption that we must be devout Christians: hyperbolic, designated do-gooders with a joint eye firmly on some final prize. "God's reserving a special place for you," we heard on more than one occasion, as if our son deserved pity and we were allowed neither our flaws nor a different understanding of social commitment. The journalist Adam Pertman, in his otherwise excellent book, "Adoption Nation," reproduces this logic exactly when he speaks of "children so challenging that only the most saintly among us would think [my italics] of tackling their behavioral and physical problems."

Despite the stigma attached to "special-needs children," people do adopt these kids. And yet, many more Americans spend gobs of money on fertility treatments or travel to foreign countries to find their perfect little bundles. I'm haunted by something my son wrote after we taught him how to read and type on a computer: "I want you to be proud of me. I dream of that because in foster care I had no one." How many kids lie in bed at night and think something similar?

The physical and behavioral problems have been significant, at times even crushing. The last eight years have been devoted almost exclusively to my son's welfare: literacy training, occupational therapy, relationship building, counseling for post-traumatic stress ? the list goes on and on. But what strides he has made.

The boy who was still in diapers and said to be retarded when he came to live with us is now a straight-A student at our local middle school. He's literally rewriting the common scripts of autism and "attachment disorder" (the broad diagnosis for the problems of abandoned and traumatized kids). These are hopeless scripts, unforgiving scripts in which the child can't give back.

My son does, and others can as well. Recently, in response to my hip replacement, he typed on his computer, "I'm nervous because Dad has not brought me braces [his word for crutches]." I was just home from the hospital ? wobbly, a bit depressed, in pain. To my question, "Why do you need crutches?" he responded endearingly, "You know how I like to be just like you." My son was trying to make me feel better, taking on my impairment, limping with me.

You can have plenty of sex during pregnancy. It's not medically contraindicated.

Whether women want to or not is another matter.

A lot of people congregate on the internet in general, good and bad.

Some of them are just really bad.

A jack costs less than $5.

If someone really wants to steal the phone service, it's pretty easy and cheap to do so.

Not installing jacks is just an inconvenience to new home owners.

I don't care about cultural learnings of america for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan

I can't resist posting it again, because I got kicked out again.

And this time, the women were screaming "get the fuck out" at me.

I guess they thought I didn't hear them the first time.

By the way, my wife is pregnant, and she's not vicious.

I think some people are just born fucked up.

Some women at the pregnancy forum (which I belong to because my wife is pregnant) refuse to believe that I am a doctor and that I have a wife.

They think it's impossible that a husband could possibly be interested enough in his wife's pregnancy to join a forum.

They think I am a troll.

Well, fuck them, I won't be going back.

P.S. I just need to vent, and not to those bitches.

What was she really holding in that modified avatar?

Yeah, I found that already.And the problem has been solved.

My wife bought a new jack plate, and after hooking up the same way, it works now.

The jack was just too old.

Crysis.

BioShock.

New computer time.

I can't use wireless, because I need that jack for DSL.

And no, I don't have filters yet, but I will. The priority is to get a dial tone first from that jack.

Here is the picture:Rabid, you could be right. I'll have to check all the wire connections in the upstream jacks in the series to make sure that the connection isn't broken in the previous links.

Tried calling (no pun intended) the phone company?

Yeah, but after I found out that they charge $90 per hour to send a service person out, I have second thoughts.

I want to see whether I can fix it myself, and possibly save a few hundred dollars.

In the off chance that one of you may be an expert on phone jacks, you might be able to help me out.

We just activated our phone service at the new condo, but only two of the four phone jacks have a dial tone.

How do I go about troubleshooting and fixing this?

I Googled already, but I didn't find any useful tips.

Anyone?

After reading through the whole thread, I still have no idea what it is.

I am hesitant, because I am afraid that the file is a sly prank.

Spore smile -

yes, a little childish and silly, but absolutely amazing!

Definitely not childish.

I am 35 years old, and I'll be playing it.

I just hope that it gets released before my wife goes into labor.

Well, Kasperg was right.

There was a leak in dm_detritus.

I have fixed it already.

The water did render, but in a strange way.

I did not build cubemaps for this map, because it doesn't enhance the aesthetics that much for this map. The only thing it'll do is jack up the rendering burden.

The framerate was surprisingly unaffected by the leak. But the lighting (with light bounce) looks a great deal better with a properly compiled version.

I do glance at the screen during the compile process.

If I see that it skips through light bounce calculation, I know something's wrong.

If the compile time and the BSP are reasonable, plus there's no error message at the end of the log, I assume all is well.

I don't read through the compile log every time I compile.

I compile several times a day when I map. That'd take forever.

I think that's a bad idea.

It doesn't alert the mapper of the presence of a leak.