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Subjective Effect

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Everything posted by Subjective Effect

  1. The Thief story arc is certainly about balance, and whilst not exactly cliched it is fairly predictable. At it's core it's also very anti-establishment; Garrett works for no-one and whilst not explicit in his expressions of distaste for establishment per se he is critical of each one (of which there are many). This is a full cycle for him though - he IS the only balanced one because he has no ties and so paradoxically is suitably placed to become a Keeper, and thus part of arguably the most important (by virtue of it's governing role) establishment. Now I don't expect these themes to exist in the TDM world in any mirrored fashion but the heavy doses of cynicism that Garrett drops all over the place because of them should exist in some tangible fashion because that flavour is suitable and imho integral to being a Thief.
  2. Just to let people know about this TTLG thread which has information and links to what appears to be evidence of Thief 4 being in development. http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120596
  3. There is some dynamic shadowing in the games but is seems pretty limited spar.
  4. I certainly hope so. I stopped playing early on as I found it dull. I'll have to go back someday.
  5. I can see why people might choose to use Linux if they had a bad time with Windows and I rarely hear complaints about Linux. But that might be due to fanboidom, and in any case you won't hear me or many others moaning about Windows. Office perhaps, but not Windows. oDD is right in that I often see Linux users boasting about it and looking down on Windows users.
  6. Ha ha. You're so funny. This says more about you than me and is why I'm a doctor and you're not.
  7. Something else most probably. And this proves what? People are often restricted by lack of opportunity, and I've agreed to that. But no one HAS to do what his or her parents do. I think that you and oDD are making excuses for lazy people. Sure, some people can not help it no matter how hard they try - they are hardwired that way. But once you start making excuses for behaviour like that where does it end? Do we not punish criminals because their criminal thinking is a "disability"? Do we accept it as just part of their personality? Come on. People have to be accountable for their actions. If someone has a problem beyond their control we should recognise that but not putting in effort is not a disability, it's just poor behaviour.
  8. You may not be able to run as fast as some other guy now, but if you train for it you may. But your analogy is a pretty good one. Look at all the unfit people out there. Now, fitness being what it is, you have to compare yourself to people of the same age or there abouts. In the age bracket 30-35 there are X number of unfit people. If everyone in that age bracket did more exercise the average group fitness would increase and there would no longer be any people in the lower fitness bracket. As to a world champion - yes, there are people who you will never beat, people who are born with superior potential. But a. you may be that person - if you never try you'll never know and b. you don't NEED to be the best, just better than you are now. Of course if you are born with no legs you'll never be a runner. But people who have disabilities like that are equivalent, in this example, to people born with brain damage, learning disabilities etc.
  9. And here's the rub. For many people it is true, and well you know it.
  10. Oh, you presume so much. I got the graphs through google image searching and they are not there to prove a point but to demonstrate my theory. I certainly don't think my theory is watertight - it's just my opinion. I agree that people with certain very low levels of intelligence are disabled, but where are you drawing the line? If you are talking about people without diagnosable and demonstrable problems that place them outside the normal ranges then the very unintelligent may be socially disabled - in that they will never improve their standing in life - but I think that perhaps you and I have a different take on what the word disabled means. To further my point about Asians in the UK, and in conjunction with your "double whammy" suggestion - which I kind of agree with, it's not unfeasible after all - there are kids in these families with low intelligence who suffer from lack of motivation and, as you describe, poor decision making ability. But if they are made to work hard by their families they will slowly learn, yes? And they could reach that intelligence threshold that allows for increased motivation or decision making (whatever "threshold" that is). I just don't think you should write anyone off as a lost cause which is what you are seeming to suggest. --------------------------------- In my job I do not pass any such judgments as you suggest. Of course if there is clear cause/contributer for an illness or something that will make an illness worse in someone's lifestyle I'll let that person know, but that is only because it is in the best interests of that person and it's my job to act in their best interests. If people who've had a heart attack choose to continue smoking that's entirely up to them. Lifestyle choices are hard to change, for anyone, and of course I recognise that. In fact, and you may surprised to hear this, neither I nor any of my colleagues pass judgement on even the drug addicts and drunks that roll into A&E and are violent or abusive. We just deal with it, even though we recognise that the high levels of drug and alcohol related A&E attendances are a drain on resources. I actually have a lot of sympathy for people with bad starts in life who end up wasting away (that's why I think that the situation here is akin to that in Africa, as I mentioned in a previous post). People are free to make mistakes - utilitarianism in health care only extends to specialist stuff like expensive cancer treatments and the like, people with sporting injuries - which can logically be thought of as self-inflicted - aren't treated any differently to the spontaneous heart attack where there is a strong family history/genetic pre-disposition. People aren't born with medical degrees and even things YOU might consider common sense, like regular exercise and a healthy diet, aren't apparent to everyone and they may just be ignorant. But, like I said, I don't like to write anyone off as a lost cause. Why you suggest I have any "attitude" at all is odd. I've not used an insult when referring to the unintelligent, so why should you suggest I do it with patients? Anyway, you're going down a needlessly inflammatory route, once again. Yawn. It's a little immature tbh and if you wish us to continue discussing anything, at all, I suggest you think about growing up a bit or I'm just going to essentially put you on my ignore list. That would be a shame because you often seem to discuss things I'm interested in, but you know what? - the choice is yours.
  11. Accidents happen to everyone. These guys just had the means to go out in a very particular style. Why do you want to see it Komag? Youtube or somewhere like ebaums has loads of this stuff already.
  12. What I mean oDD is that for these Asians the bell shaped curve is skewed to the right because of the motivating factors. Their average is around 120, whereas everyone elses is 100. It's still a bell-shaped curve though so there are still people in the high achieving group who are ranked towards the bottom of that scale. This is still higher than the bottom end of the typical scale though. Ignore the values on this: Look at the colours. The RED curve is the norm (the average of averages if you like), the Asians I'm talking about are represented by the BLUE curve, and people in deprived situations are the GREEN. But, and you've hit on this with the Bethoven comment, there is a group of people that are just naturally more intelligent regardless of social group, opportunity, etc (Good Will Hunting types) and they are on the BLUE curve anyway. I'd argue that Bethoven was one of them and he would have been at the upper end of the scale. What I'm saying is those people on the GREEN curve have the ability to move to the top of their scale (towards the 1 on that graph) if they put the effort in. And if ALL people who would otherwise naturally by on the GREEN curve put in effort that curve would cease to exist and everyone would be on the red, or a new curve between green and red. Either way hard work will get you places. Imagine if all the wasters at school and in life just decided they were going to really give everything their best shot. As to lack of motivation being a disability - I don't consider it a disability on it's own. If there is an underlying cause, depression for example, then I can understand that the underlying cause is a disability. But lack of motivation and laziness on it's own is just plain old chosen laziness. Ha ha. At least HalfWit realises that his comments were (and here's a tip - they continue to be) pointless.
  13. What about a zombie raven for the Revenant? I seeeeeee you.
  14. I'm not so sure I'd link low intelligence with lack of motivation. Certainly there is a cycle where the poorly educated end up sending their kids to worse schools and those kids end up as poorly educated as the parents. But that still doesn't tarry up with your initial statements about low intelligence being a disability. If those kids don't care why the hell should anybody else? That's not a disability, that's a chosen path. Are you suggesting that "poor motivation" be classed as a disability now? People find the situation that kids in Africa are in tragic. What I find tragic are the drongos in this country that have all the opportunity to be whatever they want in the world, don't bother and then begrudge other people for setting their goals higher and achieving it. There is a really idiotic anti-intellectualism here. And what do you mean by "you'd also see a disproportionate number of Polish immigrants who are builders/plumbers etc, but statistics like that don't really show anything, and are related to circumstances"? There are easily fathomable reasons that there are many Polish builders and plumbers here - there is a workforce deficit and the cash they earn here goes further in Poland. What have the Asian kids who fail have to do with it? The whole point of the example is that there are proportionally more success stories amongst Asians as compared to their non-Asian British countrymen. The vast majority of Asians that came to this county in the last century were uneducated and did low paid work. They and their offspring are far better off on the whole than the equivalent white population now - they are far more upwardly socialy mobile and it is due to hard work. I didn't miss the point of Trading Places - it was the same as what you described, about opportunity.
  15. Ravens to scare and alert guards would be great! Imagine climbing a tower and edging along a sill and oops, just disturbed that raven and so alerted the guard with the crossbow in the other tower!
  16. I think it's pretty interesting too oDD. But the reason I do is because I think that unless you have a sub-normal capacity that is easily demonstrable it's really down to learning that makes anyone "stupid". In the film Trading Places a bum and a trader swap places. The point of the film isn't idiocy per se but I think that anyone, given the motivation and the opportunity, can be as "intelligent" as anyone else. Of course there is the bell-shaped curve/Gaussian distribution but let me put it this way: For my example I'm going to use, instead of the questionable IQ scale, a theoretical Definitive Quotient scale that I just made up. The DQ is not testable since it is only theoretical but it is Gods Own Truth in terms of someone's "intelligence" at that moment in time. At present we have a bell shape with 100 DQ as the mean and 50 DQ just at the bottom, 150 DQ at the top. The curve looks like this: Most people have DQ around the mean, but the people you are talking about oDD are towards the bottom of the scale, getting to around 50 DQ. We are not including people who are born with chromosome disorders, brain damage, developmental problems etc. Now I think that the people with under 100 DQ have the potential to increase their DQ (as does everyone else) but they either don't have the chance or don't want to. People cannot be bothered. People have all sorts of "reasons" for not trying. In my highschool we had "sets" for Math, 1 as highest to 5 as lowest. 1, 2 and 3 had the people who would be allowed to take Math at 'A' level, 4 and 5 were essentially remedial classes. The people in set 1 were those that would probably take higher A level Math (called S level I think). I was in set 3. I worked hard and became top of set 3 and was "promoted" to set 2. I never made to set 1 though. I believe that most people in sets 4 and 5 could make it to the higher sets but I remember those kids and they were all the laziest kids, the ones who messed around all the time, never played sports at all and were generally just unmotivated. The ones who would copy homework off the next one and so never learn what was right or wrong about it. These are the guys who had DQs closer to 50. I was slap bang on 100 to start with and pushed myself up to the 120s. I'm not the golden example though. There were kids in my school who were chronic underachievers who came back from summer holiday with a different attitude and excelled from then on. And there were some guys who were in the top sets up to 15 and then just dropped because they were too busy being "cool", smoking pot and partying. Alot of this is to do with family, encouragement and culture. In the UK there are a disproportionate number of people of Asian origin, relative to the population makeup, in Medical School which, in the UK, is notoriously difficult to get into. Why do these kids get in? Is it because as a race they are brighter than us white Britishers? I don't think so. It's because they have the drive and the encouragement at home. Most degrees are not hard, they just require hard work. If you put in the effort you will most certainly increase your DQ, and I think that if everyone put in the effort the lower end of the DQ scale would by more like 85 or 90 with no-one scoring less than 75. Sure, there are those that innately learn better, but mostly it's down to hard work.
  17. Ha ha. Harsh NH, harsh. But seriously, that Halfdude is undeniably an idiot.
  18. So what the hell is going on in here and guys I think we need to have an age limit for membership - no 12 year old idiots please.
  19. Har! One more person recruited/radicalised!
  20. jdude - come play Insurgency and tell me that you give a crap about all that. If your machine can run HL2:EP2 then it will be fine. The only issue at all for me is lag, but that is rare and a different issue entirely. I had an awesome run yesterday, street battling in doorways and behind cars. The AK47 is a bad mofo.
  21. Dude, forget this mod. Come over to insurgency.
  22. This is off-topic - can't we post on any subject? Having said that I think changelogs for mods is unnecessary.
  23. I was wondering when some quality HL2 mods would arrive and now it seems that there are a bunch of them. Insurgency is just up my street though - one bullet, one kill. Blam! Heavy machine guns set up in a good position actually mean something in this game.
  24. It's got a realistic approach to damage and accuracy. No wonder - early after development started one of the Red Orchestra team took over as head! Stick with it - it, like RO, reward tactical play. No twitch shooting here.
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