Native Jovian

Buy it and see! I'LL NEVER TELL! But yeah, there totally is.

So, I've never actually played Diablo, but I'd totally be down with dropping some money on a copy if I had a group of people to play with. Question is, how hard is it to get into? Is a total newb going to be useless in a party of veterans, or is it possible to contribute even if you have no idea what you're doing? The sum total of my knowledge of Diablo is my RA freshman year of college playing on nothing but the hardest difficulty and using nothing but the most basic necromancer spell that threw teeth at you or something. For the whole damn game. Apparently this is hilarious. Also, there's an expansion pack for Diablo 2, right? Would this be playing with or without it? Also, someone explain this ladder nonsense to me. I play Starcraft on b.net with my friends all the time, but I've never messed with the ladder games or anything. Also, is there any point in getting the game and starting a character before the patch comes out, or will they all get erased or something? The way people are talking in this thread it sounds like the patch kills everything.

So, I'm sure some of you saw me on the server this weekend. The $10 Orange Box sale this weekend eroded my crotchety old man "I'm not buying the same game twice goddamnit" willpower. I'm somewhat ashamed to find that I seem to be better at the PC version despite the fact that I prefer the gamepad controller to the mouse/keyboard setup. Maybe it's just because there's not nearly as much lag on a dedicated server than there is on someone's 360... Anyway, the moral of the story is that I motherfucking hate spies so goddamn much. Expect to face my poorly-executed wrath at every possible opportunity.

This. This is the one and only reason why anyone should play games. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong.

Did you just never have an SNES or what?

That's not the question here. Obviously it's the business owner's choice. The question is whether or not it's a legitimate one. We're saying no, it's not fair, and the only thing that should determine one's value as an employee is one's performance in the job you were hired to do. Say someone's considering you for a job. They Google you and end up on OCR. They decide "wow, this guy is way into video games. He's obviously childish and immature, definitely not hiring him". Is that fair to you?

This. This this this. Not trying to say that these things don't have an effect, just saying that they shouldn't. Things that have no bearing on your performance are not legitimate reasons to not hire/fire someone.

Did you miss the big post I made replying to you and Audix? The one before Zircon's? This one? I'm not trying to be a jackass here, but you quoted the one post where I was being sarcastic like it was the only reply I made in the thread. That's fine. I'm not telling you that it's not how it works, I'm saying that it's not fair and I don't like it. That is the point of the thread, isn't it? The results of social networks and what we think of them? If anyone who does dumb things with their friends on occasion is lacking in maturity and judgment, then there's no such thing as a mature person with good judgment on the planet. The only difference is that some people are better at hiding it than others. Explain to me what the relevance between Playboy and cheerleading is. If a person is a really good cheerleading coach who happened to work for Playboy in the past, does discovering that they worked for Playboy suddenly make them a less capable coach? Obviously no, it doesn't; nothing about them has changed, the only thing that's different is the way that you perceive them. They're still doing the exact same job that they did before, so how is it legitimate to fire them?

Explain to me how this is true, because I'm not seeing it. Either you're assuming that it's inherently irresponsible to not act with professional decorum at all times (which is patently ridiculous) or you're using circular logic (posting pictures of your off-duty activities online is irresponsible -> if employers see you doing irresponsible things online they'll react negatively -> employers react negatively to posting pictures of yourself online -> therefore posting pictures of your off-duty activities online is irresponsible).

So I guess that means that everyone who goes out and has a night on the town with their friends on the weekends is automatically a terrible, lazy, irresponsible, untrustworthy person in all aspects of their life. But only if they post pictures of it on the internet.

What's the difference? (I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the "not my blood" thing isn't actually a case of him going out and assaulting someone, but rather part of his "hey I'm a vampire lulz" fantasy land.) The fact that you're more comfortable with drinking than you are with pretending to be a vampire? Again, what he does in his personal life has nothing to do with how he performs his job. You already said that they weren't particularly noticeable when he wasn't showing them off, so what's the different? Are you going to not hire someone because they have a tattoo that's usually covered by their sleeves? Or how about a guy with pierced ears? Who cares? How is it relevant? Suppose I'm a hardcore teatotaling prohibitionist, and instead of Joe-Vampire I find Joe-Binge Drinker? Would that make it any better? Pedophilia is illegal -- pretending to be a vampire is not. Having images of yourself pretending to be a vampire on your MySpace or whatever is fine; having images of yourself being a pedophile is a completely different thing. Comparing the two is like comparing someone who likes to play paintball with someone who likes to shoot people just to watch them die. Firing (or not hiring) someone because of poor job performance (eg they're lazy) is a completely different thing than firing/not hiring someone because you saw pictures of them doing unprofessional things during their free time. Then you must not like anyone because literally everyone does this. People act different in different situations. This is a fact. It's not a matter of people being "fake" or "two-faced" or "dishonest" or anything like that -- it's just that different situations call for different behavior. Do you act the same around your mother as you do around your friends? Is that also the way you act at work? In church? At school? I seriously, seriously doubt it. Let me give you an extreme example because I think that's the only way I'm going to be able to make my point. Say you want to have sex with your wife. Hey, awesome. You head to your bedroom, lock the door behind you, and do the nasty. Perfectly fine. Now, what if you suddenly get the urge, say, in a bar. Is it acceptable to just start humping her right then and there? No, of course not, because you're in a different situation. Things that are acceptable in one place (in your home, behind closed doors) are not acceptable in another place (in public, in full view of others). What is wrong with this? Does it "heavily impair" your ability to trust someone because they won't have sex with their significant other in front of you? If it sounds stupid, good, because the whole idea is absurd. To expect anyone to act the same in different situations is absurd.

characters, there must be ten of them

Well, when he says "cow" you can.... uh... go eat a hamburger?

How about we throw the pirates in jail, and fine them on top of that? Oh wait. That's what they're doing to TPB.

You know, once I decided to go and actually look up what the "best" order to beat the bosses in Mega Man 2 was, because I recalled from the NES-playing days of yore that there was supposed to be one, but I couldn't remember what it was. THERE ARE AS MANY ANSWERS AS THERE ARE PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET.

I have issues with this. People present themselves differently in different situations. It's entirely possible to be a professional and dedicated individual at work and a lazy drunken asshole when you're out with your friends. There's nothing wrong with this. When you're at a job interview, you're presenting the professional side of yourself to a potential employer in the hopes that they'll hire you so that you can continue to display the professional side of yourself by working there. How does what you do with your leisure time affect your job qualifications? Who cares if you have a crazy vampire fetish? As long as it doesn't affect the job you do, it has no business affecting your career. I have a computer science degree. Right now I'm working IT, but eventually I'd like to get a proper programming job. I use "Native Jovian" for more-or-less everything I do online, including my gmail address that I put on my resume. Now, what if a potential programming employer decides to Google "native jovian" and ends up here at OCR, and decides "hey, he plays way to many video games, he would probably goof off instead of working hard!" and didn't hire me because of that? Is that fair? Hell no -- what I do with my free time has no bearing whatsoever on my job. That said, it's pretty easy to keep stuff like that from getting into the hands of potential employers. Don't friend people you don't know and set your profile information and the like to friends-only. But it still annoys me that it happens to people anyway. (For the record, I just checked out of curiosity -- the first two Google hits for "Native Jovian" actually are on the OCR forums, with the third being a link to a Gundam wiki I signed up for like a year ago and promptly forgot about. Huh.)

Best line in the song was Heatman's "I've got more hot than a cow has moo!".

I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that the EU is pretty internally consistent regarding itself, but doesn't do too great when you compare it with the movies. Even ignoring the Clone Wars thing, Revenge of the Sith more or less shows the Jedi being wiped out entirely but for Yoda and Obi Wan, while the EU has ten thousand and one Jedi that all mysteriously survived. (I understand why, and I'm not complaining -- Jedi are pretty awesome, after all -- but it doesn't exactly jive with the movies.) The EU has become its own thing, based-on-but-separate-from the films themselves. ... ...I guess that's why it has its own level of canon.

That's sort of funny, because if you read much of the pre-Episode I (speaking in real-life terms, not in-universe terms) EU, you get the impression that the Clone Wars was the Republic fighting against the clone armies. And that it was a lot longer ago than 30 years or so.

That implies that it's not a nightmare to follow now. Seriously. Once I tried to figure out how many times Scooby and the gang had saved the Alliance/New Republic/Galaxy/Universe/whatever. I gave up after about twenty. (Scientific fact: the X-Wing novels are the best part of the EU. Specifically the Wraith Squadron half, because Corran Horn is such a Mary Sue that it causes me physical pain.)

There are three ways to interpret the "balance" thing as far as I know. 1) What Darkesword said. Sith are "unbalancing", so "bringing balance to the Force" means killing all the Sith. Vader turned away from the Dark Side and killed Palpatine (thus destroying the last of the Sith), thus bringing balance. IIRC this is the official Lucas-approved interpretation. 2) Anakin/Vader enabled Palpatine to kill (almost) all the Jedi, which ended up with two Jedi (Obi Wan and Yoda) and two Sith (Vader and Palpatine). Balance. All the various side stories where gobs of Jedi survive the purge sort of screws this one up, but using just the movies as evidence, I actually like this one best. 3) Luke was actually the object of the prophecy, because he was the one who turned Vader back to the Light Side and motivated him to kill the Emperor. So while Vader did the actual deed, Luke was the one who really brought balance to the Force, because without him Vader would have never done what he did.

If they were sentenced (as the first post indicates), then they were convicted. They can appeal the conviction, and it may be overturned in a higher court, but it's not incorrect to say that they were convicted.

"If you want to enjoy the soup, stay out of the kitchen."

http://www.google.com/search?q=simcity+3000+soundtrack

Why would you ever want to turn video games into a job.