Steampunk

I'm sure they'll try to bring it back in the future. I hope this pissed off enough people that they start supporting alternatives like GOG. I don't think any company should own a market, and Steam really is the only sheriff in town when it comes to PC gaming. Hopefully some healthy competition springs up from this.

Welcome to the site. There's plenty of things to discuss and tons of resources to help you through any other FE games you choose to take up.

You sir win a free internet. This is the crux of the issue with regards to terror. Our policies against terrorist organizations fail because we try to engage them in conventional wars where American technological superiority, combat training, and aerial warfare can be leveraged to our advantage. Being radical, decentralized, asymmetrical actors, the best that the US military (and those of other Western powers) has to offer, conventional "drop troops, caputure cities" approach that seems to dominate strategic thought throughout the West, is completely ineffective against these groups. Countries that try get sucked into a no-win situation. Terrorist plans are such that, even if attacks fail, the terrorists still win. With the United States (or other countries), every time we don't win we lose. After we lose enough, people begin to wonder why we're bothering with such nonsense, and some pressure is taken off of terrorists as the public morale no longer supports overt military action against terrorists. Counterterrorist operations are rather hit or miss simply because no government agency has a crystal ball, I don't care how much leaders boast about their intelligence capabilities. What Americans (and other countries) need to do is abandon any notion that this problem can be blown away with air strikes and focus on the common motivations behind terrorist group support. We don't even have to defeat the terrorists themselves; merely invalidate the cause they sell to certain consitutents. and demographics. In both my under grad and grad research in this issue, I've found that these groups draw support from local poplations with certain political needs that the established regime does not satisfy. Things like good roads to travel across, easy access to water, stability so that the population's economy can grow: basic facets of what we call "National Security," in other words. Places like Afghanistan serves as a haven for many terrorist organizations because the population supports them. The population supports them because they believe these organizations are the answer to their problems. Think of this in terms of the Tea Party. When the Tea Party started, they promised to make certain things better and improve the quality of life, and some people actually believed it. It's no different with terrorists, insurgents, or Fourth Generation Wars: only in these cases, people are led to believe that killing members of a certain commuity or nationality will make their lives better. To defeat such an enemy, you must remove his support. To do this, you must address the domestic crises that compel people to put their faith in such violent organizations. Someone, whether it is the United States, the UN, Bengion or Ylisse, must help develop the infrastructure and public works projects to show supporters of these organizations that they don't need to kill people to make their lives better. They just need help setting up a framework that will satisfy their political needs. I think it would also be beneficial if people abandoned the idea that the United States should never experience another terrorist attack. I understand 9/11 was a traumatic experience that still hurts for many throughout this nation, but no intelligence agency or national defense program is capable of the flawless powers of prediction that is necessary to intercept every attack that could ever happen. Pressuring the government to do so may dramatically reduce its capacity to identify credible threats and act upon those threats quickly, as policymakers, in response to the public's need for a guarantee of perfect safety, pushes an overencumbered intelligence community to identfy and prevent every possible bump in the road of life. My opinion, for what its worth.

Been a member since 2013, lurked before then, and have gone back to lurking. So far, I've loved the site. People made me feel welcome from day one, and I've never gotten a circle jerk vibe from this site like many other gaming communities.

Steam has recently offered paid mods for Skyrim in the Workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent/%C2%A0. As one may expect, this has caused a serious shit storm. Personally, I don't see a problem with modders getting paid, though the payment is a bit slanted: 25% for modders, 75% for Valve and Bethesda, and payment is withheld until the modder makes $100. If this is a long-term change, I sincerely hope this changes to benefit the modder (who actually did the work) more than the two companies (who had minimal involvement in making the mod itself) At any rate, my biggest concern with this is that Steam may implement DRM protections on Workshop mods and participating developers will start engineering their games to only run Steam mods. This will make community modding much harder and more sketchy as people will have to find non-Steam versions of the games (assuming one is released) or crack their Steam games to use non-Steam mods. I also worry about how the money will trickle down to each modder involved in collaborative projects. will SKSE devs get anything for paid mods that require script extender functionality? How will Steam ensure that all participants in a group project will get compensated as opposed to the single uploader? Will modders continue to work together or will they hoard their ideas to maximize their own gain? There are a lot of tough questions that I don't believe Steam asked when implementing this idea that the modding community will be left to figure out for itself. What are your thoughts? Will this destroy modding? Wil this make it better? Will this even last long enough to have any long term effects in PC modding or will the overwhelming negative backlash kill this before it really takes off?

Humans are only as good or bad as the choices they make. You really cannot call all of humanity one or the other. Experience tells me most people are generally good, but there are a lot of bad ones too.

I loved Disney's Robin Hood as a child. That movies intro song also gave us Hampsterdance

Nobody's giving thanks? Oh yeah, I forgot Thanksgiving is a Christmas dinner rehearsal.

If only SF could be...

Why do today what you can leave for tomorrow?

It's a shame people feel a need to have things like this. It's just begging to be abused by angry, spiteful exes.

I would probably spend most of my time in the metal shop class. There's nothing better than getting a grade for playing with flammable gases and powerful electric current.

Not sure if this belongs here or the other thread, but here's a picture of two horses I had when I was in high school. The black one is Buttons (I think 1-2 y/o at the time) and the sorrel is Dollar (20 y/o iirc). I had to replace the bedding in the barn stalls, so they had to stay out for an afternoon. It was pretty cold that day. Here's a closeup of Buttons w/ Dollar in the background.