demagogue

Yeah, that was the issue. I had it backwards ... not whether the Americas got it from Europe but whether Europe got it from the Americas or not. Thanks for keeping me honest. I always find these kind of documentaries a little humbling in that a few pieces of evidence have the potential to overthrow very old "established" ideas, and suddenly it's a different world (maybe not the history of siphilis as much as stufff like the big bang and plate tectonics, but you get my meaning.)

To demonstrate just how out of the circle I personally was, I can honestly say I don't remember offhand; I'd have to look it up again. It wasn't really *my* schtick (except for BASIC programming, lol, and breaking games, I liked trying that). I was just fortunate enough to have some friends in that world. I remembered while I was reading that book that one of the stories sounded familiar, and the town where it happened was very close to where I grew up, so I asked some old friends and they were like "Oh, yeah ... that guy. I knew him." It's not really as impressive as I made it sound. In the book, there were three hacker "gangs", one in NYC (MoD), a German one, and a North Texas one. It's the Texas one I'm talking about; the main Texas guy they talk about in that book is the one I mean. Of the people I knew, one guy, Chris Kao, was a Laotian immigrant building/selling computers out of his garage by 16, and he had a friend that seemed to be part of that circle - where I picked up all my game-breaking info, and another guy Drew Subke did a lot of cool stuff with phones and routing and digging around offsites. I gather they themselves weren't all that notorious, but enough in the circle to know others in town that were.

I read a fun book recently about that time called "Masters of Deception: the Gang That Ruled Cyberspace", and was surprised to see some people I knew of (friends of friends, anyway) made it into the book as legendary '80s hackers!

I saw a documentary on the history of siphilis that was related to what you guys were talking about. Apparently the traditional story about Europeans bringing it to America, and when they brought it, was wrong on a lot of points. Let me see if I can find a link; it was interesting. I recall that strained race-relations was part of the story.

I have an uneasy feeling remaining, though. I don't know if I'll express it well, but I'll try. Sorry if it's long. I feel uneasy when so-called skeptics take a position of enlightenment just because they've been able to transcend religion or whatever that they feel safe in concluding there's no bigger picture to even try to figure out ... in a sense it's like they let themselves off the hook too easily. I happen to think that the phenomenon of "faith" is deeper in humans than just what we traditionally consider "religious" thinking. To my mind, people and societies are still grasping towards the bigger picture in uncertainty; it's part of being human whether you call it religion or not. So a lot of people have a kind of faith in capitalism, or technology, or technocracy/bureacracy, or social planning ... that advancing these projects really will make all our collective lives better. Most politics comes across like based on a kind of "faith" to me, there's reasons to think that the brain treats both in similar ways, grasping towards some "end" to the world, the most recent one maybe "free-market globalization". So that's one issue. I think some skeptics are either too quick to think that (what they consider) "faith" doesn't have a role in human affairs outside of religion. Or they go too far the other way and conclude that because there is no ultimate end to the world, so there's no real need to contribute to these kinds of big projects; like there's no reason to take a stand on whether globalization is the "right" end for us to push towards, and what kind of globalization, or some alternative. I'm not saying anyone here is doing that; it just makes me feel uneasy that some skeptics let themselves off the hook too easily in thinking because there is no "meaning" to it all, they don't need to take a stand on what kind of values we should promote, not just for ourselves, but for everybody. Another issue, the deeper one, is the existentalist/Sartre schtick of *really* taking human "freedom" seriously; that we've been "abandoned" in this world and we really have to make our own values, but are also totally responsible for them. It's easy to say, maybe, but how many people really act as if they are absolutely responsible for what their values stand for and who they become. Oh, also, on science... that's actually a good example of my uneasiness. The problem with science is that, in the end, it doesn't really give any normative guidance at all. It just tells us what possibilities are available to us, but not which possibilities are better than others. It really doesn't contribute any set of values for one way of life over another. That's why nobody has ever died for a scientific principle. But of course, we appeal to values all the time when integrating science and technology into our lives. We think it's a better life when we can communicate and travel faster and more efficiently. But these values are actually outside of science, and we appeal to them often like a kind of faith; thinking if everyone could only communicate and travel faster it will make life better for everybody. A better example is what I study, risk regulation. We have to draw a line whether a 1:1 million risk is acceptable for the water utility bill we want to pay. Science can only give us a risk/price graph, but it can't tell us which point is "best". To do that, we need to appeal to values. I think it's good people can make stands like that, but I think people should be clear that that's a value they are positing without full certainty of it's truth, and science isn't really offering any guidance on that answer, so it isn't fully rational. it has to do with the kind of people we want to be, and the kind of way of life we want to lead and promote. One can say this isn't anything like religion, but to my mind there's a lot of crossover if you are looking at the situation honestly. It seems we would be too quick to think our "tough decisionmaking" is over now that we don't have to read the mind of God. I think we *still* have a duty to figure out what's the best way of life for ourselves and society. And a lot of that is just choosing way X because that's the kind of people we want to be, or values we want to represent. But if pushed to say why it's a better value, people's answers start looking quite "faith" like, whether they want to admit it or not. Anyway, too much to say on this topic; it's not even all my thinking. It's a classical Continental take on it, at least until the postmodernists came and really made a mess of everything. I just wanted to get the perspective on the table as part of the discussion ... just as an alternative to all the back-patting going on.

In the pre-Internet days, I remember friends of mine pulling off War Games schticks all the time, breaking C64 games, breaking into phone companies, way before information security meant anything. It was sort of funny at the time for what it was. They'd call up two people at the same time and connect them to each other, as if one called the other, "hello?" "Hello?" "who is this?" "Joe, who is this?" And then my friend would join in "Hello?" and 14-year-old hilarity insued. It all seems pretty tame by today's sandards, although in some respects more hard-core when you figured out how laughably easy it was to break into people's phone records and company's financial records.

On that last point, I like the quote "Nobody ever lost money on underestimating the public's intellegence." (PT Barnam, I think?). TGGP, a user at ttlg, used to quote it.

Sorry if I misread your thinking. I wonder if we actually disagree about something, or if we just have different ways of saying the same thing but are just interested in different parts of it. I'm thinking its the latter. So I don't want to sound confrontational since I think I agree with the basics of what you are thinking, but I don't want to put words in your mouth either. Well, human minds are nothing more than patterns of networked charged ions, although cognitive science doesn't have to care what the wetware is. The great brilliance of Turing was to come up with a theory that allowed the study of patterns of thought (which matured into computer science) that could become uncoupled from the underlying physics manifesting it in the real world (within certain boundaries). So in that sense, there are two independent sciences, the physical sciences and the computational cognitive sciences. This is how I read your "I think there is a difference", but anyway I think that's the right way to think about it. First, is it just me, or does this quote seem to contradict the spirit of the first thing I quoted from you? If there is a difference between the rules explaining "meaning in people's head" and "meaning as it might exist as part of fundamental physics", then it just means that it's a question you can usefully ask under one domain (cognitive science/phenomenology, where it does seem to exist) and not usefully in the other (where it doesn't exist). If this is what you mean, then I can agree, and then maybe you are just saying the questions that you really care about are in the "physics" box and not the "cog sci" box, when I care about what's in both boxes, which is a difference in preference. But I don't see it as any special problem to asking the question at all, as long as one keeps one's boxes straight. If it helps, substitute "meaning" with "our experience of meaning", and then you have a different question from "what is the ultimate meaning of life" maybe, but still a live one it seems to me, and the one I'm interested in. I don't have any reason to think the sun has conscious experience so I don't care about what it's favorite color is either. But I do think that normal humans can and do understand/experience certain values of life all the time -- that a good life is better than a miserable life, etc -- even if they might disagree on the details, which just makes the puzzle of value more interesting. This by itself seems to demand some kind of explanation. I still feel like I'm misrepresenting my thinking. To the extent I think the "answer" to this kind of "puzzle" is a final "meaning of everything", it is far from something like some new particle you can find in the universe. It's more like a theory of computational semantics/neuroeconomics that explains how humans (brains) experience value and meaning in the world, something you could use to model/predict human experience of value and the meaning (from "what ice cream do I buy?" to important "spiritual" or existential decisions like "who do I marry?" or "what is life worth to me?", it should all fit into the same thoery) in the same way General Relativity could let you model/predict particles moving in a gravitational field. A lot of religious people probably won't recognize it as relevant to their concerns, but they should be able to if they were being honest with themselves and their experience. I'm not saying everyone should care about such a theory; maybe some people would be horrified to have such a theory; others just won't care. I just say that *I* care about it. But I also tend to think that when a lot of people talk about religious or spiritual values, they are actually talking in terms of such a theory, probably without realizing it. But if they really cared about these values, they *should* care about how such a theory turns out (again, whether they ever realize it or not). That's why I keep feeling like these kinds of debates are missing an opportunity to get at what's really going on at the heart of their own debate. Anyway, again, I don't think I'm actually disagreeing with anything you are saying, though. Just seems like a difference in what questions interest us.

Yes ... in a sense you have put your finger on exactly what I was thinking about, although I realize that my last post is misleading since I wrote it quickly and with a slightly different point in mind. But instead of taking your point as an ending point to debate, I'd take it as a starting point. I wouldn't assume the meaning of "meaning". I feel like it has to be found the hard way like any of the deep concepts of life, and that's exactly what I feel like is missing in these kinds of debates. Trying to explain meaning and value as it actually exists -- at the same time personally for me but also here in this universe we all share -- is exactly what I think we should be spending our energy trying to do. --------------------- As a sort of taste of what I'm thinking about, you say that "meaning" is an entirely "human" concept, as if it were "outside" the rest of the universe, but of course humans are a part of the universe like everything else. The question for me precisely would be, how do we get human concepts of and, more importantly, the conscious, very personal experience of things like meaning and value out of a universe that doesn't seem to care (or even if it did care), and then how do we reconcile our experience the fact that we know our experience is nothing more than our brains, a physical system playing by the same rules as the rest of the universe (in that sense, the rest of the universe, even back the near beginning when all forces were unifed *does* have to "care" something about human meaning, because those same rules will have to be able to support our experience of it later on, although maybe in a similar way that natural selection "cares".) Some try to reduce such talk totally, folk psychological concepts are physical concepts, like the elimativist materialists a la Churchlands. The phenomenologists took value as a given in conscious experience with the concept of "throwness" and the existentalists took it the next step to "abandonment"; we have been abandoned into an indifferent universe so create our own meaning. Their motto is "being precedes essence". First we and the universe are here, then we posit reasons and values into it after the fact. But even that doesn't seem entirely adequate because our experience of values isn't that we're all just "making them up". They seem to have an essence outside of ourselves we can in part agree on. And another perspective that could get at this is from the cognitive sciences, including economics (neuroeconomics), semantics, evolutionary psychology, within a cultural context, which you might study by macro economics, sociology, politics, anthropology. For me, each discipline adds a piece to the grander puzzle about what "meaning" and "value", very personally, for me trying to live a good life and make sense of the world around me, mean ... and the great religions and literature also seem to add pieces to the puzzle, which is why I like to study them even though I am basically on board with the metaphysics and cosmology that modern physics fought so hard to give us. Sorry, that's a long response for a simple point, lol, but I hope you get the idea. For me, we're all in this quest together ... even if some, like fundamentalists, don't realize it; I'm still curious to see their spin on the world because part of that may be part of the puzzle, too. But it seems like a story that's really converging somewhere. Something about our brains really lets us have an experience of value and meaning in life, and the classical virtues like reverence and courage and "spiritual" values seem something of which we have a real experience, and I want to know how, and just what kind of meaning is it. At the same time, I won't care much about pieces that don't seem to get me any closer to understanding how it all fits together, and so many of these debates seem completely beside the point, getting bogged down by what should be the little stuff for humanists and believers both.

Is it fair to call a book on a topic like the Arthur myth "historical"? I'm not attacking the idea, I'm just curious. Most every country has its foundationaly myths which probably stretch historical reality under scrutiny. But there's always a question about how to treat such stories. Is the idea here that it tries to jam the story into a historically plausible scenario? I remember the movie First Knight doing that with the Arthur myth and, in one sense, it's kind of cool to imagine how such a story might really have some basis in the actual period, but in another sense it was sort of a downer, since it guts some of the magic of the story and makes it seem a little smaller. These are just pretty normal Joes on the utter peripherial end of the Empire. How does this series deal with all of this? As for recommendations, sticking with my theme of pushing what is "historical", I'd recommend Harry Turtledove who does a lot of alternative-history stuff, like if the South had won the US Civil War and the US breaks into fascist and socialist parts going into WWI ... or if a key technology had been invented earlier. It's fun because you get to think about history from a fresh perspective. Sometimes he mixes fantasy elements into real history too, which can be fun and thought-provoking, too, in its own way (the same historical dynamics going on; he just changes the basic variables). The books come in period-specific (usually that means war-specific) series, so it depends on what period you like. I liked the alternative US history stuff (e.g., Southern Victory Series), but he's got stuff on Rome, Byzantine, WWI, WWII, etc. All the one's I've read are good fun (if you're into the alternative idea at all). Better just go through the list (at the bottom of the wiki-entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Turtledove) and find a series that looks interesting.

What I find funny about these sorts of religious debates is that they rarely seem to cover the issues for which people find it so important to have religion. Things like cosmology, evolution, political dynamics (maybe it's just my narrow perspective, but to me radical fundamentalists blowing things up looks a lot more like politics-by-another-name than serious theology) ... such debates don't seem to me to really getting to the heart of what's at issue with religion, which is how we ought to live good, fulfilling lives and find meaning in what we do and where we find ourselves in the universe. In that respect, I respect groups like the existentialists, because they seemed to take more seriously that arguing religion is a lot more than just quibbling how old the earth really is or how to reconcile aberrant social behavior with religions doctrines. Get rid of religion and you still have the tough job of explaining why any of this means anything and what our little lives has to do any of it; or actually, even keep religion and you still have the same problem, IMO. That's the part that I want to know, and these debates never really seem to get seriously near to an adequate reply for me. This isn't to disparage this interesting debate for what it is, but it doesn't do much for me personally because of that.

My first reaction to the Neandrethal possibility was like oDDity's ... but I saw some ethicist give some impassioned case for bringing them back, and I thought I'd try to reflect some of it just to get it out there. I'm not sure I can believe what I said, though. To give some perspective, I think human clones, as long as some very important details about identity and health issues could be taken care of, could get along ok. I think Neandrethal clones have the capacity to get along; I mean, considering the bell-curve mental capacity of most humans they don't seem that far down. But I can't help think that, if they became a community, they would be increasingly isolated from the economy around them -- they can only breed with one another. And as we all know, any time a community isolates itself from the global economy around it, it's in for pretty a wretched living standard ... but this time without much hope for later integration. This is even putting aside where they could even live as a community (to stick with the racially charged speculating, we could give them a slice of Palestine or West Africa, a little money, and a pat on the back: Good Luck; or we could try to integrate them into a developed State and jam them right into the social security network). Most of our historical experience and intuition says any way we'd try to fix it would be trouble. This is still somewhat in the realm of speculation though. The counter-story would be something like Alien Nation, where an alien slave ship lands on earth and the alien community becomes integrated into earth political economies. It seems like it's possible in a modern society to pull something like that off. 150 years ago people questioned whether other races (by which they meant Italians and Irish) could ever integrate into American society, much less Africans (where people questioned it less than 40 years ago), but today it's not a problem. We might be surprised how it could work. I'm willing to think about at good arguments for it, but in the end like most everyone else I'm skeptical. What's still kind of hardcore about it is that ... there's lots of reasons *not* to bring them back, but if they ever were we might be in a can of shit because we couldn't treat them like just any other animal. Some maverick geneticist could pull it off and a lot of people would probably feel compelled to do something. And I still don't doubt that it would have a pretty big effect on how humans think about their place in the universe. It reminds me of a story about how Carl Sagan wanted to pull off an alien signal hoax just to enlighten people, but knew that too many smart people would figure out the hoax. I think Neandrethal could have a similar effect, but the price, or at least the risk, is too great to actually pull it off. By the way, as an aside, I was interested to learn that they recently discovered a non-human homonid that lived on the earth as recently as 12,000 years ago in Paupa New Guinea, Homo Floresiensis, alongside human communities (and if you believe local folk lore, which tells about the hobbit like community, they were last seen less than 300 years ago when Europeans arrived; also, confirmation of a "discovery" is apparently still pending). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis

On the topic at hand, if I were to speculate why European societies have fared better than African societies, I think the best theory I've read is that it isn't a biological story about race but a political-economic story about different ecological zones. Technological-progress and industry develop faster among societies in temparate climates and are consistently stunted in tropical climates ... practically as a rule with few exceptions. That some racial features also vary by tropical vs. temparate environment (skin color being an obvious one) is then something of an incidental side-effect and not helpful to understanding what's really going on. Rather than risk messing up the argument by trying to recall it myself, I'll just post the paper where I read it (a .pdf file): www.proses.sciences-po.fr/documents/Sachs_Tropical_Underdevelopment.pdf --------------------------------------- Why *wouldn't* they want to bring them back? Man, if I were a geneticist I would try it. I think it's nice karma for humans to start bringing species back from extinction now that they've effectively instigated the latest mass extinction event, and I feel like we have a particular debt to owe in whiping out neandrethal, not just some random species but an intellegent, communicating social animal like ourselves. Also, I think it would help give people a perspective on what humanity really means in the grand scheme of things, to finally have a non-human, intelligent species we can communicate with. It might help us not be so anthropocentric with everything and keep making the mistake that we are the center of the universe or something, sort of in the same line as discovering intellegent alien life. I think it would have a pretty immediate and big impact on how humans think about themselves for the better.

I'm curious about what might happen if scientists decide to clone another homonid species. Apparently, they will have enough of Neandrethal DNA preserved in bones, etc, to do it someday soon (if not now). Now we are talking about another walking, thinking, talking hominid that quite clearly has a different brain structure ("inferior" maybe only in the sense that they were selected against while competing against humans in a very specific environment that no longer remains). I was trying to think about the problem as a lawyer thinking about anti-discrimination law... because one of the foundations of that law (and constitutional law generally) is that many distinctions behind discriminatory behavior are not relevant to the actual cognitive capacity of the discriminated person to perform (leaving slightly harder cases where it might be an issue, like pregnancy, but then only to the extent it affects capacity). But if suddenly we had another hominid species walking around, we'd have to really think about how "human rights" might apply to them.

I just checked. Some of Faust is up at Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1HJcijYmFk And some of Alice is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5wHMgTPF-s There's bits and pieces of a lot of his stuff actually, http://www.youtube.com/results?search_quer...p;search=Search I would probably never have checked...

I think I recall seeing this, although it's been a while. Funny enough, I had once dreamt of making an animated version of Faust myself; I think after watching the Batman animated series and another series I can't remember the name right now, but really dark, I wanted to make something dark and classic (not really seriously). But when I saw that Faust had been done before, I was interested. It was quirky, that's for sure. Not quite the same (more somber) aesthetic I had in mind, but I liked it.

I wasn't going to use the "cash cow" term, but then I thought ... well, if you come right down to it, the basic motivation for keeping the sequals going was the astonding box office returns from Star Wars; and I'm not sure Lucas had much of the same "pure" experimental motivation he had with Star Wars, which was thought of at the time as really a niche piece, almost an academic excercise to cross Kurosawa and cold war scifi. It just goes to show that money doesn't always corrupt, and in fact can lead to real masterpieces (esp for Empire). Another good example was Casablanca, even though it was written committee style, subject to the "worst" sort of bureacratic oversight, and a genre movie through and through that dogmatically followed about every rule in the book. And after all of that it was STILL a masterpiece! All of this has me suspecting whether there are any hard rules. Oh, why do I keep this OT topic going?

This is exactly the trap I was thinking about in talking about how single-shot movies get revamped to support series. Star Wars did not become Episode IV until years after its completion. From the beginning, it was meant to be a more-or-less close approximation remake of Kurosawa's Fortress, except set in outerspace rather than feudal Japan. The story was no bigger in scope than Kurosawa's. After its commercial success, Lucas was persuaded to create a series, and it was only then, in 1979 (or whenever), that he created the 9-part story we know now (6 of which were filmed; the last three were published in book form), fitting Star Wars into Episode IV. This is clear from his interviews. The "Episode IV: A New Hope" we now see at the top didn't get added until the rerelease of Star Wars shortly before The Empire Strikes Back release, in like 1981. In the 1978 original, it wasn't there. Star Wars is like *the* paradigm case of a single-shot story that suddenly, unexpectedly gets revamped to support a whole series to keep the cash cows coming home. They pulled it off so well most people don't even recognize the fact. As for the difference in quality, there I can take your "Not really" more seriously. What is remarkable about the Star Wars case is how seamless he made the original trilogy after the fact; I thought Empire was excellent, and Jedi got hokey at parts, but I still loved it. In that sense, it's sort of the exception that proves the rule. The main problem I saw with the Ep. I-III was that the story was too diffuse; they had to retroactively set up the conditions for the original 3, so had to get into big dynamics like the civil war and political intrigue and factions, etc, all at the expense of more interpersonal dynamics and good characterization. This is much closer to the big problem with post hoc story writing, and I thought they fell victims to it. As for Thief 2, come on, you have to admit that Karras and the whole art deco look is a little campy. I liked the game a lot, too, of course. Inferior quality wasn't exactly the point I was thinking about. When I wrote that I was thinking about one of the developers that posted on TTLG, when asked where the T2 story came from or something. He said that when they made the Dark Project, they didn't have a sequal in mind, and were really being driven by pure inspiration. Then he said when they started 2, they had in their minds to make it more gameplay oriented, since on reflection TDP missed a lot of opportunities to really take advantage of what the game was about, so they wanted to add more "pure" thieving, and set up interesting gameplay situations, etc. Then he said, while he thinks they succeeded, it was at the expense of some of the "magic" of the original, which was more bred on inspiration and an encapsulated story, wheve everything sort of comes together. T2 was more wooden, more "gamey", where more rooms were set up more apparently with gameplay design in mind than the more aesthetic ideas driving the original. I thought both T1 and T2 were great; I just had his comments in mind when I was thinking about the subject of sequals. What I said in my above post was much too simplifying, of course, but I still think it captures a general theme that comes up a lot of times. I don't think it always applies, and obviously there are plenty of sequals as good or better than their originals (System Shock, Star Trek 2). It's just a kind of theme about the economics and egos of movie/game making that makes it persist.

It seems typical that sequals always tend to be more campy than great originals, and lose a lot of the magic as the writers start fishing for some way to keep the story going. Star Wars, Raiders, Thief, Deus Ex ... were all written as one-shot stories that suddenly found themselves as unplanned preludes to something bigger and a little dumber.

Bwahaha... nice.

I haven't read the thread that this is from (yet; maybe a good thing?), but I don't think it should stop me from replying. I would just point out to Orbweaver that the kinds of experiments he suggested are actually done all the time. The context I've seen this happening is legal cases for gender discrimination (or racial, etc...). Say a prospective employer denies a job to a woman or an apartment owner denies an apartment lease to a woman (or black or gay or whatever; we'll stick with woman) without reason and she suspects it's because of sexist reasons. She goes to a lawyer, and the first thing the lawyer will want to do is get in touch with a research agency that specializes in this sort of thing. They will start sending control and variable subjects (men and women, across a wide range of traits) to call in about renting the room. They are all very carefully scripted to ask for the same things, and react in the same ways. And very quickly the agency can see whether the owner has a double standard across, e.g., a gender line. I don't think it is as difficult as you think. I've read some of these transcripts, and very often it's obvious because if an owner is really sexist, he is really going to use much different language between male and female applicants that stands out when the exact same questions are met with very different responses. And when this same pattern shows up over 20+ subjects -- every time the same double-standard in the same way across 10 men and 10 women -- this kind of evidence is so powerful in court because it is so damning. This applies to overt sexism in a more "scripted" sort of situation (like renting an apartment or getting a job). I'm not sure if here you guys are talking about this or maybe something which is more like passive/non-overt sexism in more "open" situations, where it might be harder to decide whether sexism is really driving the negative response. This is probably a harder question (although you might be surprised how a creative experiment could really separate discriminatory behavior from non-discriminatory once you read the transcripts). But, one thing to say, that difficulty shouldn't detract from being able to notice clear, overt sexism when it occurs. Maybe a general observation I've made is that context matters; very often the more obvious the discrimination it is, the more ethically wrong it seems it will be to the victim. And discrimination seems much worse in government or market transactions than just day-to-day banter (the kind of wrong we should probably be taking more seriously, IMO; more legally wrong, e.g., in terms of what relief they can expect, from expecting an apology up to compensation). At the same time, even in day-to-day banter, some people might not realize what they're saying hurts the victim a lot more than they might expect because of history and prior experiences of the victim, etc., (of course, it's much worse when they *do* realize how much it will emotionally hurt the victim). Anyway, the point is, one should always try to keep this sort of context in mind, IMO, in any discussion about whether a behavior seemed discriminatory and how morally wrong we can say that that discrimination was in the larger picture, as well as when thinking about what we might do to make the world a more pleasant place for everybody.

Pagans were in T2. They were distinguished basically by appearing to be covered in animal skins, and a gruffer look (dark stubble for men; muffed hair for women). There's really only so much you can do with those blocky models. I don't recall anything specially distinguishing about the pagan models themselves.

Not to mention way over-used. Man, one of the backdoor best things about TDM is that we get fresh assets, because even if the gameplay might not get old, hearing m03chimes and seeing victwal1 for the gazillionth time sure as hell can.

I like the screenshots, Bob. The only comment is maybe the ceiling panels; if they are going to have that amount of apparent depth for the flat texture, it might look better if the texture were higher up (further from the PC's fov), so the actual flatness isn't so obvious and deflate the effect a little, or maybe use panels without as much apparent depth (i.e., shallower) if you want to keep the lower ceiling. But that's just a minor quib since even that probably looks good enough in-game. Generally speaking I really like the look and feel of it all. Good work. As an aside to the on-going discussion, I was working in dromed recently making a Romanesque fountain on the side of a wall, with jetted water particle beams up-front, and rows of ivy objects against the back wall. I was annoyed that the up-front jets of water, except from one narrow angle out of the way, kept getting rendered *behind* the walls of ivy, although the brushwork from which they spurt was in front. Everything else can look great (by dromed standards), but as soon as something like that happens it manages to shatter the whole area because it's such an egregious violation of expectations.

That would be cool. It'd be a really good way to quickly see some ways how TDM adds to D3 by itself.